I thought about it. What did I think about folding two details together while two lines of investigation merged? I knew nothingabout the protection on the other side, and I always worked alone.
Best to fake it. “Yeah. I’m good.”
We started walking again. He fell into step beside me. The city went on around us, ordinary in every direction, except it didn’t feel ordinary anymore.
There were a finite number of people in Boston theGlobewould trust with a reporter assigned to a story that would cross with Wiley’s work. I knew most of them by name.
Chapter three
Dane
Isteered Cabot past the elevator bank without breaking stride.
He caught the redirect a second late, but he didn’t argue. He never would. Men raised the way Cabot was learned early that visible irritation was a working-class indulgence. He just adjusted his grip on his messenger bag and followed me into the stairwell.
“Two flights,” I said.
“I gathered.”
“You’ll live.”
“I’m less worried about the stairs than about whatever’s waiting at the top of them.”
Eamon had called me last night. He launched into details without an introduction.Stanley Cabot. Society reporter at the Globe. He’s had Harcourt family access for the last fourteen years. Threats started two weeks ago, and the pattern’s wrong. I want you on him.I’m already in Boston.
I’d asked if Cabot knew.He’ll know in the morning. I’m telling him at seven. You pick him up at his home at nine.
Eamon didn’t fly out from Seattle or move that fast unless he had solid reasons. He was trying to get ahead of a running clock by hours, if not days. I didn’t ask. He’d tell me when it mattered.
I’d done what I could with the hours I had. I pulled Cabot’s bylines and read the last year of his work on the Harcourts. Checked his apartment building on Marlborough on a late drive past, the side entrance at theGlobe, and the routes between. The rest I’d put together on the fly.
The Guardians took clients who could be told the truth. It was Eamon’s rule, which made it mine. Cabot had been told the truth at seven this morning and had two hours to adjust.
TheGlobe’sstairwell smelled of old paint. It had concrete steps and steel rails. I listened on the way up. No sounds but our steps.
I pushed through onto the second floor and was hit by a wall of sound. Forty different conversations mingled in an open floor plan. It was a mid-morning newsroom in motion.
Cabot’s frame loosened by half an inch the moment we crossed the threshold. He wasn’t looking for sightlines. He was looking for who was at their desk and who wasn’t.
A copy editor lifted her hand in a brief wave without looking up from her screen. He returned it.
“Sixty seconds at your desk,” I said. “Whatever you need for the next eight hours. Then we’re out.”
“I thought we were meeting here.”
“We’re not.”
He didn’t ask any additional questions. He led me down a row of desks instead, past a cluster of empty chairs to a spot near the window. There, he tucked a notebook into his bag and picked up a coat from the back of the chair.
A man in a Sox cap two desks over was eating a bagel and watching the elevator bank. Two interns by the printer werehaving a quiet, vicious argument about a byline. Cabot didn’t look at any of them.
He shouldered the bag. “Where, then?”
“Walk with me.”
“I’m walking.”
His voice dropped a register to a tone meant only for me. “Wiley Priest covers militias and money laundering. I cover charity galas. I’m trying to work out what kind of situation this is.”