A Murder of Justice (19 page)

Walsh shook her head.

“Because a my boy.” Her jaw tightened and lines hardened around her mouth. “I’m gonna shut the door on all that shit his daddy got into and didn’t know how to get out of. That shit’s gonna kill his daddy. It’s not gonna kill Samuel.”

She checked her watch. “I gotta be back.”

“Where’s that?” José asked.

She pointed to the tall, silvery airfoil-shaped building that was the home of
USA Today
.

“I’m the senior receptionist,” she said proudly. “I got benefits and they’re payin’ for school.”

“School?”

“American University,” she said, the tilt of pride still in her voice. “Finish up in June. Gonna be a paralegal.”

Frank and José watched her walk away.

“Good luck, lady,” José breathed. “You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”

I
n high heels and carrying two-year-old Samuel, Alta Rae Walsh managed to stay on the treadmill until the man in the suit threw a massive switch and the treadmill picked up speed and Alta Rae stumbled once, then twice, and holding her son with one hand reached out for support and came up with empty air and the treadmill sped on. . . .

“No!”

Frank bolted upright.

The telephone was ringing and Monty was looking up from the pillow beside him and the clock was saying two-seventeen a.m.

 TWENTY-SIX

I
came up here to smoke,” the slender nut-brown man named Alem said.

“Up here” was the rooftop of McKinney’s Auto Storage, a grim four-story garage of time-stained raw concrete on Half Street, just down from the DMV inspection station.

“You see, the manager will not let us smoke in the office.” Alem said it almost apologetically. “So I came up here to smoke, and then I notice . . .” The man paused delicately, as though worried he might offend. “I notice,” he repeated, “the odor.”

A dust-covered Trans Am squatted in the headlights of a squad car. Off to the side, a Forensics van and a meat wagon from the M.E.’s Office. The slightest wisp of breeze carried a pungent rotten sweetness to Frank and he noticed that the techs and the uniformed officers were standing upwind from the car.

“I then call nine-one-one.” Alem looked at Frank and José anxiously. “I hope I do the right thing.”

José took a breath and exhaled loudly. “You did, Mr. Alem. How long’s the car been here?”

“It will be on the ticket . . . under the windshield wiper. I smell
that
”—he pointed to the Trans Am—“I do not touch the car. I do not touch it anywhere.” His anxious look returned. “I do right? Yes?”

“Yes,” José said. “Nobody notice it before? Anybody say anything? About the smell?”

Alem shook his head. “Up here is long-term storage. There is no elevator, so . . .”

“Thank you, Mr. Alem,” José said.

“Blessingame answered the nine-one-one,” Frank explained to José as the two walked toward the Trans Am, “ran the tag through DMV.”

Two forensic techs were going over a checklist on a clipboard placed on the hood of the Trans Am. The older of the two looked up as Frank and José approached.

“We’ve done the outside,” the tech said. “Considerable latents. Picked up soil samples out of the fenders, off the tires. Tread casts made.”

“You satisfied?” Frank asked, knowing what was next and not really wanting to know.

“I said we’re done,” the tech answered crossly.

“Okay,” Frank told Blessingame, “open it up.”

With screeching sideways motions, Blessingame worked the edge of the pry bar deep under the trunk lid. He paused to gather strength, then with a massive effort heaved downward on the pry bar.

With a metallic protest, the trunk popped open.

The death smell rolled across the rooftop—thick and putrid, violating the night air, instantaneously filling the lungs with dread.

A collective gasp from the techs and the cops. Mixed curses . . . “Jesus Christ” along with “motherfucker.”

It was the smell of just beyond. Of that which waited around the corner. You came on it, you knew it. Even the first time, you knew it for what it was. The inevitable. The end.

The Trans Am’s alarm warbled, then climbed into a satanic screeching.

“Mornin’, Pencil,” Frank heard José saying.

Crawfurd lay faceup, legs drawn up, knees to chest. His throat had been cut ear to ear. His tongue had been pulled through the opening, and it hung obscenely down his chest.

T
he digital clock in the autopsy suite said four forty-seven a.m. when Tony Upton snapped off his latex gloves and tossed them into the waste receptacle. Pencil Crawfurd lay on a stainless-steel table. The noisy overhead hood was working hard, but it failed to pull the odor away. Frank found himself wishing he hadn’t given up cigarettes.

“Time of death?” Upton surveyed the corpse before him. “Preliminary estimate based on putrefaction, blowfly larvae, staphylinidae . . . I’d say about three days. Looks like somebody worked him over before. Be able to give you a better fix after the examination. You staying?”

Frank exchanged glances with José. He turned back to Upton. “No. Hoser and I are going to check out his place.”

“I could send out for ribs after,” Upton offered, a damper of disappointment in his voice.

José shook his head disbelievingly. “Don’t see how it is—”

“How it is I can be hungry?” Upton interrupted.

José laughed.

“How it is, Tony, you always ordering ribs. Never any pizza?”

T
he sky hinted dawn soon, with rain later. A breeze had blown advertising flyers, scraps of paper, and miscellaneous bits of street trash against the front door. A dim light came from a second-floor window.

José knocked, waited, then knocked again. Several blocks away, a truck ground through its gears. Down the darkened street, a dog barked once, twice, then fell silent.

“Look around back?” José asked.

Accompanied by sounds of scratchy scurrying and
glimpses of retreating rats, Frank and José made their way down the litter-strewn alley behind the row of houses.

Crawfurd’s back door opened onto a small porch on which stood two plastic garbage cans and a plastic carton emblazoned “DC Recycles!” Frank climbed the three steps. He stopped right before knocking and played his flashlight on the door.

“Hoser.”

José joined him.

“Window.”

Frank’s flashlight beam focused on a missing pane in the door, the pane nearest the deadbolt. Stepping forward, he angled the light through the opening.

The broken pane lay inside on the floor. Duct tape held the glass shards together.

As the two detectives slipped on latex gloves, José said the necessary words. “Indications of felony breaking and entering.”

Before José finished, Frank had turned the knob and swung the door open. He eased his pistol out of its shoulder holster. Without looking, he knew that José had switched his flashlight to his left hand and had his Glock in his right. Frank stepped through, into the kitchen.

Drawers had been dumped, cabinet shelves swept clean. Scattered across the floor were knives, forks, and spoons, pots, pans, and broken crockery.

The wreckage conveyed a savage intensity, not the mindless, universal destructive energy of a tornado, but the focused precision of a human hunter.

Avoiding as much of the debris as possible, Frank and José picked their way across the kitchen. Near the doorway into the hall, they switched off their flashlights and stood stone still.

Frank felt his pulse beating in his throat, then his stomach contracting.

At first he thought it might be something off his clothes, a leftover from the garage rooftop or Upton’s autopsy
suite. Then he knew it wasn’t. Leaning close to José, he whispered, “Smell that?”

In the dimness he saw José nod. The two stood quietly another few seconds, then switched on their flashlights. Down the hallway toward the stairs, they passed the living room, with its furniture turned over, upholstery slit, stuffings spilling like the intestines of some gutted animal. At the end of the hallway, Frank ran his flashlight beam up the stairs.

Again the scratching sounds of small scurrying feet. The flashlight stopped on a hand frozen in the act of reaching out over the top of the stairway.

 TWENTY-SEVEN

F
rank watched as Randolph Emerson, nose wrinkled in distaste, looked around the upstairs room. Along one wall, a neatly kept workbench with speakers, wiring, and circuit boards. In contrast to the orderly workbench, an adjacent wall cabinet had been ripped apart: expensive sound and video components hung by their wire guts and lay strewn across the floor.

Past Emerson, through the open doorway, in the hall, the woman’s body lay sprawled on the landing.

“Jesus . . . two in one night.”

“Tony Upton says it was about the same time somebody did Pencil, two, maybe three days after he’d gotten back on the street,” Frank said.

“All this . . . that . . . that
mess
downstairs . . .” Emerson began, “who . . .”

“Skeeter left a big business,” Frank said. “Maybe somebody didn’t want Pencil to inherit it.”

“Or maybe somebody thought that Pencil had something they wanted,” José added.

“Or both,” Frank said.

“Okay,” Emerson said impatiently. “So we got two rotting bodies and a tossed house. You got me out of bed and down here for that?”

“We got you out of bed,” Frank said calmly, “so you could call Renfro Calkins and put him back to work.”

“What?”
Emerson looked as if someone had waved a snake in his face.
“What?”
he repeated.

“We need him,” José said. “We need him now . . . here.”

Emerson’s anger was edging out his incredulity.

“Calkins was put on suspension because . . .”

“Because, Randolph,” Frank finished quietly, “you were covering your ass.”

Emerson’s eyes narrowed. He worked his mouth but then stopped, as though something inside him had sounded a warning.

“We had a heart-to-heart with Milton,” José explained.

Frank bore in. “You pressured him into making that admin closure on Gentry.”

“You can’t prove that.”

Emerson said it coolly, but Frank detected a deep uncertainty beneath.

“If IAD squeezes Milton,” Frank said, “he’ll recite chapter and verse.” He saw in Emerson’s eyes that he knew it was so.

“Look, Randolph,” Frank continued reasonably, “these two on top of Skeeter and Gentry are gonna cause all kinds of shit to roll downhill. You know how good Renfro is. We can’t afford to keep him out of this.”

Emerson shut his eyes as though to blank out what was around him. He opened them and everything was still there.

“And if you don’t get him back,” he said bitterly, “you two will make sure the shit ends up on me.”

Frank and José said nothing; both gave Emerson a poker player’s “Don’t call my hand” look.

Emerson surrendered. His shoulders sagged and his mouth drew up in a grimace.

“You two are bastards, you know,” he gritted, “real bastards.”

José teased him with a smile. “Aw, but we’re
your
bastards, Randolph.”

Frank had his cell phone out. He punched in some numbers and waited until someone answered.

“R.C.?” he said. “Wake up. Captain Emerson wants to talk with you.”

And he handed the phone to Emerson.

T
wo hours later, Renfro Calkins told Frank and José, “I’m releasing the body.”

Nobody had said anything when Calkins walked in. But Frank had sensed a ripple of discipline that spread among the techs, notes on a piano striking now with more authority, with greater certainty.

José motioned up the stairs with his chin. Toward where the woman’s body lay and where the room had been ripped apart.

“How long’s it gonna take to get through this?”

Calkins gave José a disapproving look. “Long’s it takes, Hoser. Long’s it takes.”

“Nice havin’ you back, R.C.,” José said.

Calkins shot José another shaft of disapproval, then turned and made for the stairs. At the same time, the front door swung open. Blessingame stuck his head through.

“Frank, Hoser, you got a visitor.”

At the police line set up across the front walk, Brian Atkins chatted easily with one of the uniformed patrol officers. Atkins wore a raincoat against a mist that was off and on turning into real rain. He saw Frank and José, and half waved, half saluted.

“Crappy morning,” he said, glancing skyward. “Robin called. Said you’d found Pencil and this . . .” he gestured toward the house.

Frank waved him in.

Atkins took in the destroyed living room.

“Guy did a job.”

José pointed to the stairs. “If you want to see, M.E.’s gonna take the body away.”

The three men climbed the stairs in single file, watching their footing, keeping to one side.

At the top of the stairs, the stench hovered over the corpse like an invisible predator guarding its kill. Frank had been in the house for hours now, but the odor still caused a trembling in the back of his throat.

“Shot twice,” José said. “Once through the shoulder, in the room back there. She makes it out here. Shooter follows. Hits her in the back of the head before she gets to the stairs.”

“Any idea about the weapon?” Atkins asked.

Frank shook his head. “Have to wait for the M.E. report.”

“No cartridge cases?”

“Nothing yet.”

Frank led the way into the room.

“Combination office and electronics hobby shop,” Atkins observed, looking around, stepping carefully to avoid a patch of dried blood.

Frank nodded.

“Think whoever it was found what he was looking for?”

“No way of telling, but I’ve got a hunch he didn’t.”

“Why?”

“The mess downstairs,” Frank said. “If he was looking for something, he started here.”

Following Frank’s logic, Atkins nodded. “So if he’d found it up here—”

“He wouldn’t have tossed downstairs,” José finished.

Calkins appeared in the doorway with one of his crew. When he saw Atkins, Frank, and José, he frowned.

“R.C.,” José said, “this’s Brian Atkins from the Bureau.”

Calkins nodded curtly and scanned the room as if to assure himself it hadn’t been disturbed.

“Good to know you’re back,” Atkins said.

“Thank you,” Calkins replied perfunctorily. “You goin’ to be up here long?” he asked Frank and José, obviously anxious to have them gone.

Frank suppressed a smile. “Just leaving.”

At the foot of the stairs, Atkins paused. Up above, the indistinct sound of Calkins and his tech talking.

“Never knew a good forensics man who didn’t think he owned the crime scene,” Atkins said, looking back in the direction of the body.

“You’ll never know a better one than R.C.,” José said.

The front door was open, and Frank gratefully pulled in the fresh air. A spitting rain was falling outside. At the curb, a government black Mercury Grand Marquis waited, its windshield wipers flapping a metronome beat. Atkins looked past Frank and José, back into the house, then focused on the two men.

“I hear somebody put a Colombian necktie on Pencil.”

“Yeah,” Frank said, and he took another breath, as if it would flush away the image of what had been done to Pencil before he’d been stuffed in the trunk of his car.

“Filthy bastards,” Atkins muttered. “Fits,” he said.

“Fits?” Frank asked. “Fits what?”

“We finally broke the code at State.”

Frank had trouble connecting. He glanced at José, who was also running slow this morning.

“State?”

Atkins looked at Frank, then at José. “Kevin Gentry,” he said. Seeing he’d gotten the detectives’ attention, he continued. “That State Department job of his was a cover.”

“Cover?” Frank said, irritated at himself for not catching on and at Atkins for making it more difficult than it had to be.

Atkins nodded. “Kevin Gentry was CIA. State Department had him listed as a political officer, but actually he was the deputy chief of station in Bogotá.”

A
Colombian connection?” Kate asked.

Frank felt his bullshit detector twitch and didn’t know why, but registered it anyway.

“Gentry’s time in the agency . . . the way somebody did Pencil. Not much there.”

After dinner at Tahoga, they’d walked down Thirtieth Street to the river and found a bench along the walk in front of Harbor Place. A 737, landing lights on, wheels and flaps down, passed overhead, then banked to starboard to line up its approach to Reagan National. At the same time, a cabin cruiser, steering between the red and green buoy lights, made its way up the Potomac.

“There’s the time gap,” Kate said uncertainly, as though the thought had suddenly appeared.

Frank shifted on the bench, bringing his shoulder and thigh into contact with her. Dragging itself through the long day’s fatigue from door-to-door canvassing, the thought unreeled slowly, then more rapidly.
Yes, the time gap. If there was a connection, why did the person who did Gentry wait two years to do Skeeter and Pencil?

Kate continued circling the riddle. “Maybe the Agency,” she mused to herself as much as to him, “maybe Gentry was still Agency and they had him working the Hill undercover.”

The cabin cruiser had now cleared Roosevelt Bridge, and the 737 had disappeared behind the finger of trees, marking its last turn into Reagan.

Frank added another “What if?” to the conjecture pile. “Or did he use his old Agency connections to go into business with Skeeter and Pencil?”

“You mean Gentry was their ‘insurance’?”

“Skeeter met with somebody in June ’ninety-two. Gentry was working on the Hill at that time for the New York senator. He quit to move to Rhinelander’s subcommittee in January ’ninety-eight.”

“Which could have put him in a better position to be Skeeter’s insurance,” Kate finished.

Frank’s mind replayed the garage rooftop, the Trans Am and the Ethiopian attendant, then Pencil’s house and the dead woman at the top of the stairs. And that brought him to something he’d said to Emerson.

“What?” Kate’s voice seemed to come from a long way off.

“What?” Frank echoed.

“What you just said,” Kate persisted, “quote, Skeeter left a big business, unquote.”

“Oh.” It took him a moment to register. He shrugged, too tired to follow further. “Just something that came back to me from this morning.” He felt himself drop into mental overload. He reached for Kate’s hand.

They sat without talking. Music, soft and indistinct, carried across the water from the cabin cruiser. Finally Kate squeezed his hand. “You’re down.”

“Just tired.”

“It’s more than that.”

He started to shake his head but then realized she was right. He probed, trying to sense the outlines of something lying hidden in the underbrush.

“It’s a feeling. A feeling more than a thought.”

“And the feeling’s like . . . ?”

He probed some more. “It’s like the dropping feeling in your gut,” he added slowly, “like when you sense you’re on a losing team.”

“Losing? Why?”

“Emerson’s face this morning . . . He sees all this as something he just wants to go away. He tried to sweep it under the carpet once. He’d try again, if he got the chance.”

Kate thought about that, then shook her head. “But he can’t,” she said, “it’s gotten too big.”

Frank drew in the night air and exhaled in a sigh. “Yes, he can. For precisely that reason . . . that it’s gotten too big. He can pass it off to the Bureau.”

“What makes you think that’s probable?”

“Knowing Emerson for twenty-five years.”

“In a perfect world,” Kate challenged, “why’d it make any difference? If the Bureau could solve it, or the department?”

“In a perfect world it wouldn’t make any difference. In the real world it does. It makes a real difference, who closes the case.”

“Why?”

“If the Bureau takes this over, it sends a message to everybody on the street. It tells them DCMPD can’t do its job. We’re already catching a load of crap because of the cold cases. Now we throw our hands up because this’s just too hard?”