Free Next of Kin by David Hosp Page B

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angry letter back in the nineties, but there’s no indication she ever responded. I can’t find anything that ties them together other than the birth itself.’
    ‘Nothing else?’
    ‘Not really. There’s a bar nearby where she worked, she used to go there a lot. Not the happy-go-lucky drinking type. More hardcore. Word is she had a little bit of a rep when she
was younger, but that was a long time ago.’
    ‘Explains how she ended up with a kid.’
    ‘It does,’ Long agreed. ‘I’ve run her records and I haven’t come up with anything solid to suggest she was a pro, but it wouldn’t surprise me if she was a
hell of an amateur for a while when she was young. There are a few phone numbers that I have to chase down, but I don’t expect to find much. Chances are it’s just a random
robbery.’
    ‘What’s with the picture?’ Townsend asked, looking at the sketch.
    ‘Probably nothing,’ Long replied. ‘When I was outside Connor’s apartment the other day I saw a man in the crowd who looked like this guy. Same hair, same eyes, same scar.
I pulled this off the board this morning just to look at it more closely.’
    The captain picked up the picture, laughed in a short, clipped grunt. ‘He’s not real,’ he said. ‘He’s a ghost.’
    ‘A ghost?’
    ‘That’s what we used to call him. This is a description given by a witness to four murders back in the nineties, before you were on the force. Ugly business, after the Winter Hill
gang collapsed, and people were trying to fill the vacuum. There was a group run out of New York that was trying to move in. Some of the more established local players decided to send a clear
message, so four guys from the New York contingent were targeted. They were picked off one by one in some of the grimmest murders we’d seen around here in a long time. The New York guys
stayed away after that.’
    ‘And this guy was behind it?’
    ‘It was never clear. A snitch named Toby Shilow claimed he’d seen the guy who did it. He’s the one who gave us the description. Said the guy was a freelancer hired by some of
Whitey Bulger’s crew. To hear Toby tell it, he was the coldest killer anyone had ever seen. The kind of a guy no one would fuck with. He did piecework as a cleaner and a button pusher. We
looked hard into it, though, and we came up with nothing.’
    ‘You think the snitch was trying to throw you off the real killers?’
    ‘That’s what we figured,’ Townsend said. ‘We’ll never know for sure, though. A couple weeks later we found Toby in a suitcase. He’d been cut into about ten
pieces. His eyes and tongue were missing. Doc was pretty sure they’d been cut out before Toby was killed.’
    ‘Nasty.’
    ‘Yeah, it was. We went back to looking for this guy, but we never found anything. If he ever existed, he disappeared. We started calling him the Ghost. For a while, whenever we came across
a murder we couldn’t solve, we blamed it on the Ghost.’
    ‘Sounds melodramatic.’
    ‘It was. He’s more of a myth than an actual suspect in anything. Like Keyser Söze or Bigfoot. We only keep the picture up for our own amusement.’
    ‘Well, like I said, it’s probably nothing. Just my imagination.’ Long’s neck was starting to ache from looking behind him, so he turned back to his desk. He expected
Townsend to leave, but it didn’t happen. He turned around again. ‘Something else, Captain?’
    ‘Yeah,’ Townsend said. He wouldn’t meet Long’s eyes. ‘In my office.’
    Long looked down at the papers strewn across his desk. There was a flask in the drawer; he was tempted to pull it out and have a drink. He could feel his arm reach in that direction, but
reconsidered. No point in making matters worse. Not yet, at least. ‘Sure, Captain,’ Long replied. He’d known this meeting was coming at some point.
    Tom Kozlowski listened as Finn described his meeting with Long from the night before. When Finn finished, Kozlowski sat back and thought