I looked at the photo again. Classic Mafia warning—you may think you know something about us, but we know everything about you.

“I haven’t seen Moira Kenzie since that first day. She isn’t enrolled at Bryce, the phone number she gave me is for a Chinese restaurant, and she’s not listed in any local phone directories. But yet she came to me. And now I have this in my life. And I don’t know why. Christ.” She slapped both palms down into her thighs and closed her eyes. When she opened them, all the courage she’d presumably been sucking out of the thin air for the last three weeks was gone. She looked terrified and suddenly aware of how weak the walls we erect around our lives truly are.

I looked at Eric, his hand on Diandra’s, and tried to gauge their relationship. I’d never known him to date a woman and always assumed he was gay. Whether true or not, I’d known him for ten years and he’d never mentioned a son.

“Who’s Jason’s father?” I said.

“What? Why?”

“When a child’s involved in a threat,” Angie said, “we have to consider custody issues.”

Diandra and Eric shook their heads simultaneously.

“Diandra’s been divorced almost twenty years,” Eric said. “Her ex-husband is friendly but distant with Jason.”

“I need his name,” I said.

“Stanley Timpson,” Diandra said.

“Suffolk County District Attorney Stan Timpson?”

She nodded.

“Doctor Warren,” Angie said, “since your ex-husband is the most powerful law enforcement officer in the Commonwealth, we’d have to assume that—”

“No.” Diandra shook her head. “Most people don’t even know we were married. He has a second wife, three other children, and his contact with Jason and me is minimal. Believe me, this has nothing to do with Stan.”

I looked at Eric.

“I’d have to agree,” he said. “Jason has taken Diandra’s name, not Stan’s, and he has almost no contact with his father outside of a birthday phone call or Christmas card.”

“Will you help me?” Diandra said.

Angie and I looked at each other. Hanging out in the same zip code as people like Kevin Hurlihy and his boss, Jack Rouse, isn’t something either Angie or I consider healthy. Now we were being asked to cruise right up to their dinner tables and ask them to stop bothering our client. What fun. If we took Diandra Warren’s case, it would go down as one of the more patently suicidal decisions we’d ever made.

Angie read my mind. “What,” she said, “you want to live forever?”

2

As we left Lewis Wharf and walked up Commercial, the schizophrenic New England autumn had turned an ugly morning into a glorious afternoon. When I woke up, a breeze so chilly and mean it seemed the exhalation of a Puritan god was hissing through the cracks under my windows. The sky was hard and pale as baseball leather, and people walking to their cars on the avenue were hunched into thick jackets and oversized sweaters, breath steaming around their faces.