Free Fixer by Gene Doucette Page A

taken her only a few seconds to locate her remaining articles of clothing because a moment later he heard his front door slam.
    He lay in bed for a while, wondering when he’d get around to really explaining his problem to Maggie. The truth was, a long time ago he made a promise to someone. That someone had been dead at the time the pact was transacted, but as far as he was concerned that didn’t change the nature of said pact. It just made it more difficult to get out of. And, of course, there were the nightmares.
    “She wouldn’t understand,” he insisted to himself.
    *  *  *
    Maggie rode the elevator down to the garage and the car she’d left in the guest parking, and tried not to get angry enough to swear out loud, or failing that, to at least wait until she’d gotten into the car.
    Doing anything with Corrigan Bain was complicated—business or otherwise—and she’d already just doubled down on the complexity by hopping into his bed on the night she was supposed to be hiring him professionally as a consultant. And on top of that, she had to bring up The Topic. Again. 
    She chirped the car alarm off, slid into the driver’s seat, slammed the door, and sat in the car and screamed for a few seconds, and when that didn’t help, she started the car and decided to take out her anger on the road instead.
    Spending the night was never part of the plan. The plan was supposed to include a statement like, “I know we have this past and all, but I need to hire you as a consultant, so let’s shake hands and go to our respective homes.” She’d even practiced versions of it. 
    And if it had been a part of the plan, she would have had a change of clothing in the car.
    She maneuvered the sedan up the narrow exit ramp and into the bright early-morning sun and squinted as her eyes adjusted. For some reason that was the part that always made her feel like she’d done something wrong, that flare of sunlight she had to cope with when coming out of Corrigan’s garage. It was as though she was being interrogated by the entire world. 
    Left onto Mem, onto Storrow and Soldier’s Field, and you’re good, she reminded herself. It was the shortest path between him and her Newton apartment, the path that ran against inbound traffic. She would still be late, but not so late she couldn’t blame it on fieldwork.
    Her hand fell on the shoulder bag in the passenger seat, and her mind landed on the file in the bag she didn’t show Corrigan. Calvin, she thought. I could go see him on my way, write it up as a follow-up interview, and still walk in late.
    It was a decent plan . . . except she had no new questions for Archie Calvin. 
    “You could ask him about Kilroy,” she said to herself. “Maybe he knows who the hell that is.”
    *  *  *
    Four Months Past
    The sheet in Maggie’s hand was copied from the guest list at the wake for Professor Michael Offey. The list was huge. He was popular, and seemingly half the university had been at the service. Tracking down all the names and figuring out who needed to be talked to had taken much longer than it should have, but since she hadn’t been at the service, it was the only way to approach the matter.
    She hadn’t been at the service because the FBI wasn’t involved, yet, when Mike Offey was buried. And that involvement was turning out to be a disaster. Hicks was already suggesting she backlog the case, and it had only been a few weeks, but she couldn’t blame him. The university was proving far more truculent than one might expect of an institution whose best and brightest were dying so regularly, and nobody could prove anything that had happened was more than an accident.
    It would have been easier with some help, but nobody in the office was interested in doing that either, and Hicks wasn’t in any kind of mood to volunteer somebody. 
    The door to the small office was opened by the MIT administrator whose desk Maggie had co-opted for the day. The administrator was a