A Murder of Justice (9 page)

Calkins looked up from the clipboard. “Grounds for closing the case were Austin’s track record, and testimony from an informant.”

José nodded. “Yeah. Austin . . . one of Juan Brooks’s enforcers. When Brooks got busted, Austin stayed on with Skeeter Hodges until they fell out.”

Frank took that in, then glanced around the lab. He looked back at Calkins.

“So we have the weapon that killed Gentry showing up. Does that mean Austin didn’t kill Gentry?”

“No,” Calkins said. “All it tells us is that the weapon survived Zelmer Austin.”

José shrugged. “Austin knew the business. You make a hit, you don’t keep the weapon. You do, it’s a go-to-jail card. So what we got is a scenario where Austin pops this guy Gentry. Austin dumps the weapon. Austin gets done in with a hit-and-run. Somebody inherits the piece, maybe it changes hands a couple a times. Two years later, somebody uses it to pop Skeeter and Pencil on Bayless Place. And the piece is still out there.”

Calkins began smiling as he listened to José’s story. “A precise summary, Detective Phelps. May I help you fill it out?” he asked, the smile turning slightly mischievous.

“Please do, Dr. Calkins. Be my guest.”

“At some time or another, the weapon that killed Kevin Gentry and Skeeter Hodges was in Pencil Crawfurd’s custody.”

Calkins leaned against the edge of the lab counter and watched Frank and José exchange puzzled glances.

Frank sighed. “Okay, R.C. We give up.”

Calkins motioned to another microscope, down the counter from the comparison instrument.

“Shell casing from Bayless Place. It had a print on it. A partial, but enough.” He stopped.

“Damn it, R.C., you’re gonna find your car towed, you keep this shit up,” José said.

“The print, gentlemen,” Calkins said archly, “is none other than that of Pencil Crawfurd.”

“Pencil . . .” Frank said, trying to make sense of it.

“Pencil,” Calkins echoed. “Unless he was a contortionist or a magician, he didn’t do the shooting on Bayless Place, but he damn sure loaded the weapon that did the shooting.”

José got a grip on it first. “Weapon kills Gentry, shows up two years later, kills Skeeter and wounds Pencil.”

“And Pencil loaded it,” Frank tagged on.

“Obviously,” Calkins said, “the weapon got out of Pencil’s possession sometime after he loaded it.”

“So when’d Pencil load it?” José asked.

“Yes,” Frank said, his voice on automatic while his mind tried to make sense of the ballistics. “If Pencil got the weapon after Gentry was killed and loaded it then, that’s one thing. But if he loaded it before Gentry was killed . . .”

“Just might be,” José finished, “that Pencil killed Gentry, then got shot two years later with his own weapon.”

Over Calkins’s shoulder, Frank contemplated the microscope, black and silver and mechanical, crouched smugly on the lab counter, silently mocking him with its riddle.

 TEN

Y
ou two have a reverse Midas touch—everything you lay a finger on turns to shit.”

Before the three men, on Emerson’s desk, Kevin Walker Gentry’s file.

Gentry’s death had been one of those nightmare events every bureaucrat dreads: the murder of a politically connected victim in a politically symbolic setting. The staff director of the District of Columbia Appropriations Subcommittee, Gentry, had been gunned down virtually on the steps of the House of Representatives. For months, the heat had been intense, unrelenting: the
Post,
the
Times,
the
Blade
, and the
City Paper
had hounded Mayor Malcolm Burridge, the city council, and the department. Congress had held televised hearings. Clint Eastwood and Martin Sheen had come to town to testify.

“Milton saved Burridge and Emerson’s asses,” José was fond of saying. The Gentry flap had vanished overnight, when Milton had finally come up with Zelmer Austin.

Emerson scrubbed his face with both hands. He had the crestfallen expression of a bone-weary man who’d found
out he had another hundred miles of rough going in front of him.

“So the Gentry case’s biting us in the ass again.” Emerson’s lips pressed together into a tight, bloodless line. Viciously he slapped the desktop.
“Okay! Okay!”
He threw himself back into his chair.

For a long time, nobody spoke. Frank and José stood in front of the desk. Emerson sat in his chair in an angry, almost catatonic state, staring at the Gentry case jacket.

Frank took in Emerson’s intense glare.

That case jacket’s going to break into flame.

Finally Emerson took a deep breath and brought his hand up to massage the back of his neck. “We had that case closed.”

“Yes.” Frank shook his head, and spoke softly, as though saying it any other way might cause Emerson to shatter. “But . . . what’s going to be in the papers—”

“What’s that?” Emerson asked, a tight frown signaling that he knew what it was.

“—is that we may not have gotten the person who killed Kevin Gentry.”

“It could still be that Austin killed Gentry.” The hollow, mechanical way Emerson said it didn’t sound like a man convinced. He pointed to Frank and José.

“Set up a task force.”

“What?” Frank asked.

“Set up a task force,” Emerson repeated, his voice suddenly brisk, energy returning with the prospect of bureaucratic ass-covering.

When in worry or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.

“Not us,” Frank said.

“What?”

“He said, ‘Not us,’ ” José repeated. “You get a crowd running all over the place, crossing each other’s tracks. Contradicting each other in public. A real cluster-fuck.”

“But the media . . .”

“Media’s going to be on this any way you cut it,” Frank
said. “You form a task force and you just give the media a bigger target to home in on.”

Clearly unhappy, Emerson shook his head and sat seeing nothing ahead but trouble.

Frank interrupted. “We got to look into the Gentry case.”

“Yes.”

“We could use some help . . . some manageable help.”

“Bodies?”

“One’ll do.”

“Who? You want Milton?”

Frank and José shook their heads in unison.

“Rather have a fresh look,” José said.

“Then who?”

“Janowitz isn’t real busy.”

A
man thinking about the heat this’s going to bring,” José said outside Emerson’s office.

“And thinking,” Frank came back, “about how to pass the heat on down to us.”

José shrugged. “What’s new? How about call Bouchard? Give him a heads-up.”

U
gly, ugly, ugly.” Frank looked at the building.

FBI headquarters hulked over Pennsylvania Avenue, taking up the block between Ninth and Tenth Streets. Like dresser drawers left carelessly open, the top floors jutted out over the nine stories below. In a snit over the naming of the building after J. Edgar Hoover, Congress had refused to pay for the granite facing called for in the original design. And so, precise rows of anchor points punctuated the dirty yellow poured-concrete walls, looking like bullet holes from the machine gun of a drive-by shooter.

“You should have gone into architecture,” José said.

“Rather be in demolition.”

R
obin Bouchard stood just inside the Tenth Street entrance, near the visitor sign-in desk. He was a stocky, muscular man, and his Mediterranean heritage was marked by an olive complexion and coal-black hair nicely silvering at the temples.

“Welcome to the Ministry of Truth, Justice, and the American Way.” Bouchard rolled it out in a baritone mellowed with traces of Cajun. He handed Frank and José visitor badges and escorted them past the sign-in desk toward an escalator bank.

“I feel like a priest or a proctologist. Only time you guys come through the door, you’re bringing trouble.”

José grunted. “Didn’t want to come empty-handed.”

The short escalator ride to the third floor gave them a look into the fishbowl that was the lab for DNA and materials. Bouchard led them down a long corridor decorated with movie posters from 1950s G-men films, charts and maps, and large iconic photographs of the FBI director, Louis Freeh, and the attorney general, John Ashcroft.

“You guys don’t mind . . . when you said it was the Gentry case, I passed it upstairs.” Bouchard said. “Brian Atkins wants to see you.”

“
The
Brian Atkins?” José asked. “We’re honored.”

“He want to offer us a job?” Frank asked. “We’ll take the Honolulu Field Office.”

“He didn’t tell me. I sent him an e-mail, said you’d be coming over for a fill-in on Hodges and Gentry. His secretary called down with a ‘Be there.’ I don’t ask questions.” Bouchard motioned to the elevators.

B
rian Atkins’s corner office was only four floors above the DNA lab, but another world away. Large windows framed views of the Capitol, the old post office, and, in the distance, the Potomac and the control tower at Reagan
National. The deep-pile blue carpeting, the mahogany desk and bookcases, the antique conference table with its chairs upholstered in silk brocade—all put the office near the top of the heap. A place where voices were always subdued and neckties carefully dimpled and pulled snug against starched white collars.

Atkins, a man in his late fifties, had the casual grace and slender build of a sailor. A bachelor, he frequently showed up in the style-section coverage of Washington’s black-tie galas. Silver hair, square jaw, and windburnt tan face.

He sat at the head of the conference table, Frank and Bouchard to his left, José to his right.

“Robin tells me Gentry’s open again.”

It came with a hint of Down East to it, a John Kennedy brogue—something to do with sea, sails, and salt air.

An assistant in a tailored dark blue suit brought in coffee. Atkins poured and passed around cups that Frank thought were Limoges or a pretty good imitation.

“How’d we get so lucky?” Atkins asked.

He sat silently, attentive, sipping coffee as Frank and José summarized Calkins’s findings. When they were finished he smiled a thank you.

“I wanted to hear this from you. I’ve got a personal interest in the Gentry case. Kevin Gentry was a great help to us when I was at WFO.” Atkins pronounced it “wif-oh”—Washington Field Office, the separate and subordinate FBI unit that did the Bureau’s work in the District of Columbia.

“Juan Brooks.” José filled in the silence.

Atkins got a tight, modest smile, the way a classy quarterback might smile when reminded of a winning touchdown pass in the last minutes of the Super Bowl.

“
We
busted Juan Brooks,” he said. “It was a team effort. While Malcolm Burridge was mayor, he did everything he could to keep the Bureau off Brooks’s back.”

“There were family connections,” José said. “Burridge’s daddy and Brooks’s daddy.”

Atkins’s brow furrowed. “I didn’t know that,” he said
with a nod of appreciation. “Burridge was a problem. But then, Congressman Rhinelander and Kevin Gentry, who was his staff director at the time, came on the scene. Rhinelander had just taken over as subcommittee chairman and was looking for an issue.”

“Crime in the District,” Frank said.

Atkins smiled. “A rich social laboratory for any brave or foolish reformer, the District is. Anyway, Rhinelander and Gentry put the squeeze on Burridge. Burridge folded, and we finally bagged Brooks.”

Frank and José exchanged glances.

“Were you working with Mr. Gentry when he was killed?” José asked.

“No,” Atkins said regretfully. “By that time, they’d moved me up here”—he waved a hand to take in the office—“where I spend most of my time flying that desk. I’ve stayed in contact with Rhinelander. We talk occasionally. Kevin’s death hit him hard. I’d hoped that Frederick could put this behind him when the case was closed. Now . . .” Atkins let it trail off.

“And now Skeeter Hodges,” Frank said.

“Ah, yes,” Atkins said. “Same weapon, two years apart. Maybe the same shooter. Maybe not.” He looked at José and Frank. “You guys worked out a road map?”

Frank shook his head. “No maps yet. More like a compass direction.”

Atkins nodded. Something on his desk gave a chirping sound. He listened, and when the sound came again, he stood, signaling an end to the session. He offered his hand to José, then to Frank. “Keep me in the loop,” he told them, “anything we can do . . .” He smiled wistfully. “We all have our jobs to do in this, but I envy you two. Happiest years of my life were working the street.”

N
ever fails, does it?” José asked as he started the car.

“What?”

“Oh, guys who’ve worked their butts off to get off the street and get into a big office telling you how much they miss the street.”

T
hat evening, Frank had a message on his answering machine from John McDonnell at Olsson’s. The message, like McDonnell, was spare and abrupt. A book had come in, McDonnell was holding it for him.

J
ohn McDonnell, round-faced and in his seventies, leaned forward in the scarred wooden chair. His deep blue eyes and rimless bifocals gave him a priestly, bemused look—a beneficence conferred by a lifetime spent with books. Peering into the tiny green screen of an ancient Kaypro computer, he pecked at the keyboard.

Frank saw the screen flicker, but McDonnell’s somber expression didn’t change. Books surrounded him: books stacked on either side of the Kaypro, books on floor-to-ceiling shelves around him, three books in his lap.

Olsson’s Books & Records, like McDonnell, was a cherished Georgetown landmark. A place where little old ladies could bring their dogs in. Only two windows wide, it had fronted Wisconsin Avenue for at least twenty years. Inside, the store extended back beyond sight. Immediately through the narrow door, an island of literary trade paperbacks. To the right of the island, a Ritz camera booth; to the left, three registers framed by racks of mass-market paperbacks. Farther on, the music section, with CDs, cassettes, and a curling black-and-white poster of Johnny Cash. The serious books were at the rear, where McDonnell and his Kaypro constantly inventoried the shop’s backlist.

Foreclosure was in the air. Taxes go up. Leases run out. The chains open on every corner. An end of what had been. And what would be no more.

“Evening, John.”

McDonnell didn’t look up right away. He glanced at the computer screen, then opened a book in his lap and began easing an art gum eraser over the price penciled inside. That done, he closed the cover and looked up at Frank. The book, Frank saw, was Lartéguy’s
The Centurions
.

“First British edition, the Xan Fielding translation,” McDonnell said, fingertips caressing the dust jacket. He lifted the book, and the way he did it made Frank think of a priest offering the cup in communion. McDonnell held out the book, looking at it sadly.

“Here.”