A Murder of Justice (6 page)

 SEVEN

A
t six twenty-five, Frank pulled into the C terminal parking garage at Reagan National, and found a slot on the third level. An arrival screen showed Kate’s flight due to arrive at seven-ten.

Getting to appointments early. A security compulsion, a shrink once told him.

He locked the car and found the elevators to the pedestrian walkway.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Hadn’t Freud said that? And it might be that you get to airports early because you don’t want to risk getting tied up in traffic and miss your plane.

But tonight Kate was the reason. It was like one of those “If you do this, that’ll happen” things you made up as kid—if he got there early, she’d walk through the passageway door sooner. Or at least on time, which was getting to be a minor damn miracle.

Getting through security with his pistol ate up several minutes. A manager had to be sent for. The man had
checked Frank’s badge and credentials with anxious uncertainty, then sent for
his
manager.

Taking a back-row seat opposite Kate’s arrival gate, Frank eyed the crowd. He always found people-watching more interesting at National than at Dulles. He thought it might be that people making the relatively short hops out of National to Orlando, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland carried themselves with more energy than those anticipating the long-leg runs out of Dulles to Berlin, Tokyo, and Buenos Aires.

Fifteen hundred cold cases. Fifteen hundred dead people. How many living relatives of those cold-case victims? Say five? Okay, five per. That’s . . .

Now, only partially aware of the airport crowd, Frank worked on the mental arithmetic.

An airline ground agent opened the gate door, and travelers began rounding a corner in the passageway.

Kate’s smile caught him while she was still down the passageway. Frank got up to meet her. The arithmetic faded into the shadows.

A tweed jacket and pale-blue silk blouse highlighted short blond hair and blue eyes. Before they touched, he felt the warmth between them. They came together and kissed briefly. His hand at the small of her back, he felt the firm, assertive curve of her hip.

“Long time,” he said, feeling his chest tighten.

“Six days?”

“It’s all relative. You hungry?”

“Understatement.”

“It’s warm enough to sit outside.”

“La Brasserie?”

L
a Brasserie’s terrace faces Massachusetts Avenue, a few blocks east of Union Station. Schneider’s Liquors sits across the avenue, along with a bagel bakery and the offices of a conservative think tank funded by a Colorado
beer baron. But despite the view, there was something about the place that was truly French.

“Okay,” Kate said as the waiter left. “You’ve heard all you want to about a city lawyers’ conference at Harvard. Your turn.”

“Hoser and I got the call just before eight, Friday night. . . .” Over his roast veal and her sole meunière, he filled in the details: Teasdale’s discovery, the murder scene, Skeeter Hodges’s history.

A tarte Tatin arrived for dessert, its apples bubbling in caramel under a puffed dome of pastry crust. The waiter punctured the crust. Like a balloon with the air let out, the tarte collapsed. A tendril of warm cinnamon teased Frank’s nose. As the waiter did the dissection, scooping thin-sliced apples, crust, and sauce onto two plates, Frank pulled a single folded sheet of paper from his coat jacket and handed it to Kate.

“Your boss’s press release,” Frank said.

She unfolded it and glanced at the banner across the top. “Two months ago.” She read the brief statement, then looked at him questioningly.

Frank pointed to the sheet of paper at Kate’s elbow. “The mayor of the District of Columbia says the homicide closure rate is sixty percent.”

She nodded.

Frank speared a bit of apple and pastry and brought it cautiously to his lips. It was still hot. He put the fork down to let it cool.

“It’s not. I’ve done some back-of-the-envelope figuring. My grocery-store arithmetic puts
solved
cases down around thirty–forty percent. You only get to the mayor’s numbers if you add in the cases closed administratively. And what that release ignores is the impact of the cold cases.”

He tried the tarte. It had cooled just enough. The first taste made you listen for angels singing.

“What about them?”

Kate was giving him an impatient look. He thought better about going for another forkful.

“Over fifteen hundred in ten years.” Frank went back to the mental math he’d cranked out while waiting at National. “So you’re a citizen of the District. You live east of the river”—Kate understood he meant the Anacostia, not the Potomac—“maybe in the projects, maybe in a little house on what used to be a nice street but now’s a shooting gallery.”

He paused to retrieve more of the airport math. “East of the river, most of those fifteen hundred cold cases probably come within a five- or six-mile radius of your house. Now think about it. . . . Each of those people might have five relatives. Maybe three or four friends. Multiply the eight or nine people who knew the victim by the number of cold cases. Now we have almost fifteen thousand people who see that people they know get killed and other people they know get away with it. Fifteen thousand people learn that lesson in their personal lives.”

“Something else.”

“Oh?”

“Enemies of the victim,” Kate said. “Even if they didn’t do the deed, they also learned that they can get away with murder.”

“Nobody pays.”

“What you mean is, nobody gets
revenge
.” Kate’s eyes narrowed. “That what you’re saying? How about justice?”

Frank thought about that. “Revenge? . . . Justice? You’re a lawyer, I’m a cop, we see them differently.”

“Tell me.”

“I think you see revenge and justice as distinct things.”

“And you don’t.”

“
Different
, but not distinct.”

“I thought lawyers had cornered the market on wordsmithing,” Kate said. “How’s different different?”

“Revenge is different from justice, but it’s
related
, not distinct.”

“How?”

“Revenge and justice are yin and yang. Always together, always in a dynamic . . . push-pull.” Frank hooked his index fingers together and pulled them against each other. “Government doesn’t work when people gun each other down in the streets to settle scores. Government says, ‘We will settle your scores. You people stop shooting each other. . . . Pay taxes . . . obey laws . . . serve on juries.’ ”

Kate nodded. “Be nice and we’ll take care of the bad guys.”

“That’s the deal . . . the contract. Government serves up justice as a substitute for revenge.”

“And when government doesn’t serve up the justice?”

Frank cocked his hand up, then down in a seesaw motion. “Balance swings toward revenge. I’m not so sure people in Skeeter Hodges country think much about justice in the abstract. Not when they’re worried about getting shot in the street. Most of them just want the shooting to stop. But if they’ve lost a friend or relative, they want somebody to pay.”

“And if government doesn’t make somebody pay through justice—”

“Friends or relatives will take out the payment themselves.”

Kate put one hand on the press release. “You think the department’s drawing attention away from the cold cases by talking about closure rates?”

“About inflated closure rates,” Frank corrected. “You’re reading my mind again.”

She tilted her head slightly to one side. “And how long have you been on the force, Lieutenant Kearney?”

Frank didn’t say anything. A challenging, professional edge had crept into Kate’s voice.

“Well?”

He sat without speaking. His eyes fastened on the press release. Days, months, years on the force—the credit scrabbling, the blame-gaming, the sucking up and the
kicking down. A twinge of loss, dark and draining, made him wince. He put his napkin on the table beside his plate, took a moment or two to smooth out the wrinkled linen.

“Terry Quinn”—he said the name and saw Quinn’s face, how Quinn would squint, looking through cigarette smoke—“Quinn took José and me out for drinks the night we transferred to Homicide. ‘A good detective may be disappointed,’ he said, ‘but he’s never surprised.’ ”

Kate handed the press release back to him. “And this surprises you?”

He held the paper out and looked at it before folding it and putting it back in his pocket. “Yeah,” he said, feeling angry with himself, “it does. When Eleanor came up with those numbers, I felt everything . . . just . . . just stop.”

Flashing images:

Eleanor’s printout of fifteen hundred unaccounted-for deadly sins.

The M.E. tech wrenching Skeeter Hodges’s broken-headed body out of the car.

“Every so often something happens that holds up a mirror that you see yourself in.”

“What do you see?”

“A guy who thinks he’s a professional, who wasn’t paying attention to what was going on in the rest of the department.”

“You’re being hard on yourself.” Kate leaned forward, her voice now softer.

“No. Just realistic.”

She shook her head. “You aren’t a realist, Frank. You and José—two peas in a pod. Two idealists. Two crusaders out for cosmic justice.”

“Cosmic justice?”

“Something that will make everything right for everybody all the time.”

Frank laughed. “You are absolutely full of shit.”

“Am I?” She leaned further forward. She put a hand on Frank’s forearm. “Why’d you become a cop?”

She has a way of bringing you face to face with truth, he’d told his father once.

And that’s why she’s a good lawyer, his father had said.

“Why’d you become a cop?” she repeated.

“I told you before.”

“Once more, come on.”

“Kate—”

“Once more, Frank. Say it.”

“To keep bad things from happening to good people,” he recited.

It was something he had said to himself coming back from Vietnam. That’d been a long time ago. Some things change as you get older. This hadn’t been one of them. Once he’d said it, he couldn’t get away from it. It had stayed with him all that time. And with any luck, it would probably last out his run.

Kate studied him thoughtfully for several moments, then: “Why?” She asked tentatively. As though it had come from a partially formed thought.

“Why?” Frank felt that she had opened a door into darkness.

She nodded. “Yes,” she said, now sounding more certain of herself. “
Why
do you care?”

Frank’s eyes drifted out to Massachusetts Avenue and Third Street. A bicycle messenger weaved his way through cars stopped at the traffic light. Over at Schneider’s, a truck driver loaded cases of beer onto a handcart. The bicycle messenger ran the red light, crossed Mass Avenue, and disappeared up Third, ignoring the “Do Not Enter” sign.

Frank realized Kate was watching him, waiting. Part of him stayed with her, while another part went off searching for something coherent. Anything that’d make sense to Kate and to him.

Images—

Slapping sounds of bullets hitting flesh. . .bodies ripped apart . . . muddy boots protruding from ponchos . . . the putrid odor of death . . .

He zoomed in across Mass Avenue. The beer guy
unloaded the last case, cocked the handcart back, and wheeled it into Schneider’s.

“You see how little it takes to kill somebody. How one instant, life is there. The next, it’s gone. Just . . .
gone . . .
” Frank snapped his fingers. “Life shouldn’t go away like that. It oughtn’t be there for the taking.”

Kate sat silently. “You’re in homicide,” she finally said. “When you go to work, the bad thing has already happened. Somebody’s been killed.”

“You can’t stop the
last
bad thing. But maybe you can the
next
bad thing.”

He put his hand to work straightening the napkin beside his plate. “And there’s this indictment sitting in our office. Fifteen hundred cases where we haven’t caught somebody. We’ve been hiding the truth. Hiding it from the public, hiding it from the mayor, hiding it from ourselves.”