The RV swung off the expressway in my neighborhood and headed for St. Bart’s Church, where Bolton was holding his morning debriefing.

“Your father, Mr. Kenzie, runs for city council in seventy-eight. The only thing he seems to do while in office is aquire a reputation for ruthlessness and power-craving which would have made Lyndon Johnson blush. He is, by all accounts, a negligible public servant, but a ferocious politician. Again, we have an obscure person—a fire fighter, for Christ’s sake—who rises far beyond any normal expectations one would hold for him.”

“What about Climstich?” Angie said. “Burns killed himself, but did Climstich show signs of a transformation?”

“Mr. Climstich became something of a hermit. His wife left him in the fall of seventy-five. Divorce affidavits attest that Mrs. Climstich cited irreconcilable diffeRenees after twenty-eight years of marriage. She stated that her husband had become withdrawn, morbid, and addicted to pornography. She further stated that said pornography was particularly vile in nature and that Mr. Climstich seemed obsessed with bestiality.”

“Where are you going with all this, Agent Bolton?” Angie asked.

“I’m saying something very strange happened to these people. They either became successful—rose beyond any reasonable expectation of their stations in life, or”—he ran his index finger over Emma Hurlihy and Paul Burns—“their lives fell apart and they imploded.” He looked at Angie as if she held the answer. “Something altered these people, Ms. Gennaro. Something transformed them.”

The RV pulled up behind the church and Angie looked down at the photograph and said it again:

“What did these people do?”

“I don’t know,” Bolton said and shot a wry smile my way. “But as Alec Hardiman would say, it definitely had impact.”

29

Angie and I walked to a donut shop on Boston Street with Devin and Oscar following at a discreet distance.

We were both well beyond tired and the air danced with transparent bubbles which popped before my eyes.

We barely spoke as we sipped our coffee by the window and stared out at the gray morning. All the pieces seemed to be falling together in our puzzle, but somehow, the puzzle itself still refused to take on a recognizable image.

EEPA, I had to assume, had had some sort of encounter with either Hardiman, Rugglestone, or potentially, the third mystery killer. But what kind of encounter? Did they see something that Hardiman or the mystery killer believed compromised them? If so, what could that have been? And why not just knock off the original members of the EEPA back in the mid-seventies? Why wait twenty years to go after their descendants, or the loved ones of their descendants?

“You look beat, Patrick.”

I gave her a weary smile. “You too.”

She sipped her coffee. “After this debriefing, let’s go home to bed.”

“That didn’t sound right.”

She chuckled. “No, it didn’t. You know what I mean.”

I nodded. “Still trying to get me in the sack after all these years.”

“You wish, slick.”

“Back in seventy-four,” I said, “what possible reasons could a man have for wearing makeup?”