Vanish: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

said quickly, “None for me, thank you.”
    He poured a cup for himself and sat back down. “So what’s with the reluctance to discuss this over the phone?”
    “Things have been . . . happening.”
    “Things? Are you telling me you don’t even trust your own telephone?”
    “As I told you, the case is complicated.”
    “Federal intervention. Confiscated ballistics evidence. FBI in a tug-of-war with the Pentagon. A hostage taker who still remains unidentified.” He laughed. “Yeah, I’d say it’s gotten
very
complicated.”
    “You know all this.”
    “That’s why they call us reporters.”
    “Who have you been talking to?”
    “Do you really think I’m going to answer that question? Let’s just say I have friends in law enforcement. And I have theories.”
    “About what?”
    “Joseph Roke and Olena. And what that hostage taking was really all about.”
    “No one really knows that answer.”
    “But I know what law enforcement is thinking. I know what
their
theories are.” He set down his coffee cup. “John Barsanti spent about three hours with me, did you know that? Picking and probing, trying to find out why I was the only reporter Joseph Roke wanted to talk to. Funny thing about interrogations. The person being interrogated can glean a lot of information just by the questions they ask you. I know that two months ago, Olena and Joe were together in New Haven, where he killed a cop. Maybe they were lovers, maybe just fellow delusionals, but after an incident like that, they’d want to split up. At least, they would if they were smart, and I don’t think these were dumb people. But they must have had a way to stay in contact. A way to regroup if they needed to. And they chose Boston as the place to meet.”
    “Why Boston?”
    His gaze was so direct she could not avoid it. “You’re looking at the reason.”
    “You?”
    “I’m not being egotistical here. I’m just telling you what Barsanti seems to think. That Joe and Olena somehow identified me as their crusading hero. That they came to Boston to see me.”
    “And that leads to the question I came here to ask.” She leaned toward him. “Why you? They didn’t pick your name out of a hat. Joe may have been mentally unstable, but he was intelligent. An obsessive reader of newspapers and magazines. Something you wrote must have caught his eye.”
    “I know the answer to that one. Barsanti essentially spilled the beans when he asked about a column I wrote back in early June. About the Ballentree Company.”
    They both fell silent as another reporter walked past, on her way to the coffeepot. While they waited for her to pour her cup, their gazes remained locked on each other. Only when the woman was once again out of earshot did Maura say: “Show me the column.”
    “It’ll be on LexisNexis. Let me call it up.” He swiveled around to his computer and called up the LexisNexis news search engine, typed in his name, and hit search.
    The screen filled with entries.
    “Let me find the right date,” he said, scrolling down the page.
    “This is everything you’ve ever written?”
    “Yeah, probably going all the way back to my Bigfoot days.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “When I got out of journalism school, I had a ton of student loans to pay off. Took every writing gig I could get, including an assignment to cover a Bigfoot convention out in California.” He looked at her. “I admit it, I was a news whore. But I had bills to pay.”
    “And now you’re respectable?”
    “Well, I wouldn’t go
that
far . . .” He paused, clicked on an entry. “Okay, here’s the column,” he said and rose to his feet, offering her his chair. “That’s what I wrote back in June, about Ballentree.”
    She settled into his just-vacated seat and focused on the text now glowing on the screen.
    War is Profit: Business Booming for Ballentree
    While the US economy sags, there’s one sector that’s still raking in big profits. Mega defense contractor Ballentree is reeling in new deals like fish from their private trout pond . . .
    “Needless to say,” said Lukas, “Ballentree was none too happy about that piece. But I’m not the only one who’s writing these things. The same criticism has been leveled by other reporters.”
    “Yet Joe chose you.”
    “Maybe it was the timing. Maybe he just happened to pick up a
Tribune
that day, and there was my column about big bad Ballentree.”
    “Can I look at what else you’ve written?”
    “Be my