Bodily Harm (26 page)

And that was part of the thrill.

He signaled to his waiter, paid his bill, and walked as if to leave, stopping at her booth, which she had selected in a discreet area of the lounge. She looked up at him with bored indifference, but he could see the hint of a smile curl the corner of her lips.

“How does a beautiful young lady such as yourself end up alone?” he asked.

She shrugged, her cleavage heaving gently. “I have bad taste in men,” she said.

“And what type of men is that?” he asked.

She ran a painted fingernail across her chin. “Bad men.”

TEN MINUTES LATER, he walked through the ornate lobby past the registration desk to the elevators, fidgeting like a schoolboy on his first date, almost unable to wait for those in the elevator to get out before he stepped in. He hit the close button three times. On the eighth floor he followed the arrows on the wall to room 827 and considered the hallway in each direction. Seeing no one, he removed the breath mint from his tongue and tossed it aside, then knocked three times. Seconds passed and he panicked, thinking perhaps he’d gotten the room number wrong, but then he heard the latch turn and the door pulled open. She was even more beautiful standing, tall and elegant. He couldn’t wait to see what she looked like on her back.

“No trouble finding me?” she asked.

He smiled. “I could find you anywhere.”

He moved forward and she let him in, pushing the door shut behind them and tilting back her head to allow his lips to slide past her cheek to her neck. He grabbed her hard about the waist, his lips moving down the contours of her dress to her breasts. He slid one strap off a shoulder. She shrugged her arm free. The other strap followed. His hands moved lower, gripping her below the waist. He felt no panty lines.

She pushed him back. “It’s a thousand,” she said. “I pay for the room. You pay for the room service.”

He liked this one. She had spirit. He pulled his billfold from his jacket pocket, counting out ten hundred-dollar bills, letting each flutter to the bed. “I hope you take cash,” he said.

She smiled. “Doesn’t everyone.”

She unbuttoned his shirt, somehow managing to remove it without removing the tie, which she tugged playfully, pulling him toward the windows. In the near distance shined the dome of the Capitol Building.

“So you’re a bad boy,” she said.

“Very bad,” he said.

She undid the buckle of his pants, then the button, and let her hand slide down his hairless flesh.

“I thought you might like a view,” she said, lowering to her knees.

Screw the view, he saw it every day. He closed his eyes. After a moment, when he had felt nothing, he opened them. She had pulled the straps of her dress back onto her shoulders.

“Hey, what gives?” he asked.

The answer came from behind him. “You, apparently.”

APPALACHIAN MOUNTAINS
VIRGINIA

HE CROSSED INTO Virginia driving exactly five miles over the speed limit. With the bars closing, officers looked for cars driving suspiciously slow, as well as those maneuvering erratically. Driving the speed limit could attract police attention as much as speeding. A full moon and a blanket of stars painted the two-lane interstate a bleak white, only the shadows of the dense trees and foliage along each side visible. But for an occasional car passing in
the opposite direction, the road was deserted.

After thirty minutes he exited the interstate, continuing southwest, through a thick forest. Another twenty minutes passed before he approached the unmarked turnoff. Unless a driver were searching for it, they would not likely detect it. He checked his rearview mirror for headlights. Seeing none, he killed the lights and turned, driving blind until certain he was clear of the road, then switched the lights back on. The pavement ascended a gradual slope for another mile and a quarter before coming to a rusted metal bar and, attached to it, a white sign, rusted around the edges and where the two bolts held it in place.

NO TRESPASSING

PRIVATE PROPERTY

He exited the rental car, not bothering to turn off the headlights. There was no longer a need. The property had been abandoned for more than twenty years, since the discovery that asbestos could be fatal to one’s health. The acreage surrounding the mine had been contaminated with tons of asbestos particulates and would remain that way for many decades. The cost to remediate was exorbitant, and the company had long since filed for bankruptcy. The good people of Virginia weren’t about to spend their hard-earned tax dollars to do it, and the government had dozens of other Superfund sites of higher priority.

Stenopolis had been to the property before. On the first occasion he had considered the heavy lock that secured a chain to a post cemented into the ground. From the rust he could tell that it had not been opened in years. On his second visit he had snapped the lock with a pair of bolt cutters and replaced it with an identical, though brand-new, lock and set it to his personal combination.

He now entered the four digits and pulled the heavy chain
from the gate. After driving through he stopped just clear of the gate’s swing and resecured the lock.

The sagebrush continued to intrude upon the road, branches brushing against the car’s side mirrors and windows. Heavy rains had washed out the untended road, and snow and freezing temperatures left deep potholes that caused the tires to pitch and bounce. Stenopolis took his time, in no hurry and not wanting to get stuck, though he had rented a four-wheel-drive vehicle and had bought a winch with a fifty-foot steel cable. He couldn’t very well call AAA for roadside assistance.

A quarter of a mile up the unpaved road the headlights shone upon the weathered metal siding of one of the abandoned structures and reflected in windowpanes that had been cracked and broken. He drove into a dirt area that had, at one time, served as the mining company’s parking lot. The beams revealed a white, snowlike material that carpeted the soil and clung to the rusted metal piping and the equipment like Spanish moss hanging from the branches in a Louisiana bayou. In the foreground sat a large metal Quonset hut. Pipes and troughs pierced its sides, entering and exiting at odd angles. Rail spurs behind the building continued past mounds of dirt that nearly reached the roofline, and rusted metal drums, some cut in half, littered the ground. Stenopolis drove slowly up another slope and entered the facade of a metal building at the top of the ascent into the mine. Boxcars sat idly on tracks that led from the headlights’ beams into darkness. The cars had at one time carried the dirt out of the mine and dumped it into the Quonset hut for processing of the vermiculite from the stone.

Stenopolis turned off the headlights and the engine and enjoyed the utter darkness and silence. He could see nothing in front of him or behind; even the reflection of the moon stopped at the mine entrance, as if fearful to enter.

He grabbed the flashlight from the seat as he stepped out and used it to find the metal bar he had left on a prior visit. When he opened the trunk the man inside moaned, but the cloth in his mouth, secured with duct tape, prevented him from speaking or shouting for help. Not that it was needed any longer. Several additional strands of the tape wrapped around the man’s head prevented him from seeing. Stenopolis had read somewhere that enough duct tape was sold every year to circumnavigate Earth several times. He didn’t doubt it. He had found it to be a product he could put to any number of uses.

He pulled the six-inch serrated blade from its sheath and with a single flick cut through the cord that secured the man’s bound wrists to his ankles, grabbed his hostage under the arms, and pulled him from the trunk. The man continued to thrash but was more than manageable.

Stenopolis shoved the metal bar beneath the man’s left armpit and pushed it through the other side. Grabbing the pole on each extended end, he kicked the man’s legs out from underneath him, and he fell back. The man groaned in pain as the metal bar caught his body weight beneath his armpits. Stenopolis dragged him deeper into the mine, like pulling a wheelbarrow backward, the heels of the man’s shoes carving a path in the dirt that Stenopolis would erase when he had finished.

Twenty feet farther down the shaft he came to the snap hook that extended from the metal chain he had secured to a ceiling beam. He fastened the hook to the bar in the center of the man’s back, pulled the chain through the eye hook in the ceiling beam until taut, then hooked a link of the chain on one of the teeth of a gear train attached to a crank handle. He turned the handle until the chain lifted the man onto his toes and the teeth of the gear train caught, locking it in place and freeing Stenopolis to use his hands for other tasks.

The man swayed, as if pushed by a light breeze, the creaking chain against the wood beam and the wind whistling deep within the mine shaft the only sounds. The man turned his head, moaning, but this time it had less to do with the pain and more to do with his confusion as to his captor, and his fate.

Stenopolis stepped forward and used the knife to cut the tape across the man’s mouth, drawing a line of blood. He pulled the tape free and yanked the rag from the man’s mouth.

Gasping, the man desperately tried to lift his chest to suck oxygen into his lungs.

“You might not want to breathe too deeply,” Stenopolis said. “They say the stuff around here can kill you.”

“Who are you?” the man asked between gasps for air.

Stenopolis had once watched a special on the Discovery Channel about the ancient practice of crucifixions and was fascinated to learn that the victims usually did not die from their wounds or beatings. They suffocated. Their bound or pierced arms weakened until they were no longer strong enough to lift their bodies to allow their chest to expand and bring oxygen into their lungs.

“Who are you?” his guest asked again. “What do you want?”

Stenopolis flicked the knife again and pulled free the tape across the man’s eyes as he placed the stream of light beneath his chin. “Boo.”

The man jerked away. “What the . . . ?”

“Good evening, Mr. Wade.”

“Who are you?”

“I believe you already know my name, which is why we’re here.”

“I don’t know you.”

“Oh, but you do. You pulled my file just the other day.”

Curley Wade’s brow furrowed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What file?”

“Mr. Wade, I assure you that this will go a lot more efficiently
if you don’t play games with me. I’m not a patient man. It’s late and I would still like to get a few hours of sleep tonight.”

“Maybe there was a mistake. I work in Human Resources. Maybe your file was pulled by someone else.”

Stenopolis cranked the handle half a turn. The chain raised Wade another inch, enough so that his toes no longer reached the ground and the muscles of his shoulders and chest now bore his full weight. Wade grimaced.

“For an Agency man, you are not a convincing liar, but then I always did think your training lacking. I never felt you pushed your candidates far enough to find out if they would break. I’m betting you will. Now, tell me why you pulled my file.”

“Go to hell.”

Stenopolis stepped forward and put the beam of light back beneath his chin. “I’m about to show you why you can be very certain of that.”

THE RENAISSANCE MAYFLOWER HOTEL
DUPONT CIRCLE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

THE MAN SPUN. “What the hell? Who are you?”

Charles Jenkins emerged from the bathroom holding the small portable video camera that, as the salesclerk had promised, had no problem filming in the room’s limited lighting.

“Who I am is irrelevant. Who you are, Mr. Secretary of Labor, is very, very relevant.” He nodded to the woman. “You can go.”

She grabbed her jacket and small purse from the bed, along with the hundred-dollar bills.

The man stepped forward, but Jenkins stepped between them. “Hey, that’s my money.”

Amazing, Jenkins thought, but then, like many politicians, it
was Hotchkin’s arrogance that had got him in trouble in the first place.

“Here’s the problem, Ed. I promised the young lady fifteen hundred dollars and I’m about a thousand short.”

Hotchkin fumed as the woman retrieved the money and continued to the door, looking back over her shoulder with a smile before stepping out.

“Who do you work for?” Hotchkin asked.

“Again, not relevant. Who
you
work for, very relevant. You work for the people of the United States of America. That makes you a public figure. I’m not sure the new administration needs this embarrassment, do you?”

Hotchkin sighed. “What is it you want? Money? I can get you some.”

“If I had wanted any more of your wife’s money, Ed, I would have taken the grand off the bed. Does she know how you spend her inheritance? I guess the fact that you managed to get your current appointment, despite your past indiscretions, makes that doubtful.”

Hotchkin stewed but did not respond.

Jenkins sat in the chair by the window. “Now, I’m not looking to break up a happy home or even to embarrass you, so neither your wife nor anybody else needs to know anything about what happened tonight.”

Hotchkin continued to sound skeptical. “Then what do you want?”

“I want to know how I can get in touch with Anthony Stenopolis.”

“Who?”

Jenkins took out the photograph taken by the security camera at Kyle Horgan’s apartment building and showed it to Hotchkin. In the dim light it took Hotchkin a moment for his
eyes to adjust.

“I don’t know him,” he said.

Jenkins smiled. “Then tell me how you got in touch with him.”

“Are you with the FBI?”

“I’m an independent contractor with independent business with Mr. Stenopolis.”

“I don’t know how to get in touch with him.”

“About a year ago he took care of a messy problem for you. I believe you were caught in similar circumstances but the individuals involved that night weren’t as reasonable as I am. You got in touch with Stenopolis and the problem disappeared, along with the prostitute and lowlife trying to blackmail you. So did someone arrange a meeting? How did it happen?”