He sat at his table with the napkin beside his water glass. He hadn’t picked it up, and he was waiting for me to release him.
I tapped the comm.
“Dane. Should Cabot read?”
“Wait thirty seconds. He leaves first. Then you.”
I counted thirty in my head.
Cabot picked up the napkin. He didn’t unfold it at the table. Instead, he set it inside the slim notebook between two blank pages and closed the cover on it. He paid in cash, left a generous tip on top of the bill, and stood.
On his way to the door, he glanced across the room at me. I gave him a single nod.
I waited for two minutes. I closedNaked Lunchon a page I had not read and left a five and a ten on the table.
Reed and Cabot were already gone. Collins had his SUV idling at the cross street. I climbed in and pulled the door shut.
Dane was in my ear. “I did not write the letters.”
“Did I—“
“The napkin. It’s written on it in black ink, in Henry’s hand. Cabot’s rattled.”
I watched Collins take a corner without signaling.
Dane was in my ear again. “Eamon called. Henry didn’t go home.”
“Where did he go?”
“The Park Plaza Hotel. He checked in under his own name ten minutes ago.”
“He’s burning the cover,” I said.
“He’s burning the cover,” Dane agreed.
Henry had spent eighteen months pretending nothing had changed. Going home from the café meant going back to whatever Onyx Bay had on him—the phone they monitored, the watcher on his block, and anyone who’d been told to flag any deviation. He couldn’t go home and act normal, not after the napkin. So he’d checked into a hotel under his own name and made himself findable.
Findable by us. Findable by them.
“He thinks he has hours,” I said.
“He probably thinks he has less than that.”
“We can’t wait for the wedding. We have to get him out now.”
The line went quiet. Collins caught my eye in the rearview and changed lanes without being asked, cutting east toward Brookline.
“Eamon’s calling everyone in,” Dane said. “Be at the carriage house in twelve minutes .”
Seven minutes later, Dane came back on the line.
“Farrow, Eamon just got a call from a contact at Park Plaza security. Shots were fired on the eighth floor. Three minutes ago.”
I gripped the seat beneath me and watched the rain on the windshield. The streetlight reflected off Collins’s hands at the wheel.
“Confirmed?” I asked.
“Shots, yes.”