Going out battling

He had just finished what may well have been the last major news conference of his long public-service career, just finished highlighting his big-money lawsuit against the Big Dig contractors who built a project forever tainted by death.

And after the reporters had all gone, after his aides had all retreated to their offices, Thomas F. Reilly sat in his conference room 20 floors above Boston by no means ready to let the issue go.

"A collapsed ceiling panel is a pain," he was saying to a visitor. "A leaky wall is a pain. But those things can be fixed." He paused, his face growing stern in the way it often does when he talks about victims. "I meant what I said out there. You cannot replace a life."

Last anyone had seen of Reilly was on the night of Sept. 19, when he gave a short but nice concession speech after losing the Democratic gubernatorial primary that he had once been an overwhelming favorite to win. It was anyone's guess what he's been doing ever since, maybe moping or loafing or spending his last weeks as attorney general dialing around town for a new job.

Try none of the above. Instead, Reilly has been putting together a painstaking case against Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff and a raft of other contractors, manufacturers, designers, and distributors that is to be filed in US District Court today. The very things that made him such an exquisitely mediocre gubernatorial candidate -- his refusal to use a broad brush, his inability to let things go, the quietude of his determination -- are what have always made him the kind of prosecutor you want on your side.

Sitting in his conference room, he was asked why he's kept plugging away after voters rejected his bid for higher office. After all, most politicians who couldn't successfully use the Big Dig tragedy in their campaigns wouldn't have much use for it at all.

"They're going to get everything I have," he replied. "I got hired to do a job, and I'm going to do that job until the last day I'm here. I'm never going to look back and have to say that I didn't give it my all."

"Look," Reilly said, leaning across the drab table. "I lost an election. I didn't lose someone I love.

"That could have been any one of us on our way to the airport. Any family has a right to expect that I'd get some degree of justice, that somebody would care, that we'd get to the truth of what happened."

Reilly will undoubtedly be criticized for doing too little too late on the Big Dig, for not being a more effective watchdog as the project unfolded, and for not seeking more money in reimbursements once it was nearly done. The critics won't necessarily be wrong.

But Reilly, as empathic a politician as ever climbed Beacon Hill, works bestin the name of a victim. When Milena Del Valle died, that's exactly what he got to motivate his cause. He saw the collapsed concrete, the crushed car, the sobbing relatives at the July funeral. And now Bechtel /Parsons Brinckerhoff executives in San Francisco would be wise to realize that even with one foot out the door, the departing attorney general in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts may be just angry enough to file criminal charges.

As he keeps repeating, in private and in public, "You can't replace a life."

Reilly was asked what he'll miss the most about the attorney general's job he has held for eight years, and he replied, "The opportunity to help people, to make a difference -- but it's also time to move on."

Of his dismal gubernatorial campaign, he said: "I'm better for it. It reinforces everything that I believe is important in life, family and friends."

Finally, when he was asked whether his civil case against Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff and the others is solid, Reilly leaned back in his chair, stretched his arms over his head, and allowed a smile to spread across his face. "Oh, yeah," he said.

It's the parting gift of a good man to the state he loves.

McGrory is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at mcgrory@globe.com.