Damage Control (13 page)

Chapter Thirty-four

Had a little bounce in my step as Seamus and I headed back to the office. Partly fantasies of A Star is Born with yours truly playing the lead, but mostly just TGIF. Main item on Friday night's agenda was pizza and beer with Rafe and Theo McAbbott, and I was flat looking forward to it.

Then just as I got to my office a call from Rafe snagged things up.

“You'll have to solo with McAbbott, babe.”

“Why?”

“Matt Crisscuts is having a crisis of conscience.”

“He has one of those about every six months, doesn't he?”

“Roughly. If he changes his position on abortion, his cable show will no longer be viable outside the womb. Or inside it, for that matter. So he's convinced himself that he can square the position with his religious faith. Then he sees a picture of himself as an altar boy or smells some incense or accidentally looks at a Planned Parenthood sting video, and he spirals downward. Bottom line, he needs an old buddy to listen to him while we drink all night.”

Couldn't argue with any of that. As Papa used to say, pangs of conscience mean you still have a conscience, and that's good. Besides, when a friend needs you, that trumps everything else.

“Maybe we should just reschedule,” I said.

“Can't see it. We need to feel out Theo about that picture before you debrief your Uncle Darius.”

“True.” Chewed on my lower lip for a second while I tried to figure out how to square the circle. Failed. “Okay, then. You and Matt have yourselves a good night. I'll tackle Theo all by myself.”

***

Wonder if he's gay
. I know it makes me sound full of myself, but that thought actually crossed my mind near the end of my first half-hour on Theo's screened-in back porch Friday night. We'd eaten six slices of not-bad thin-crust cheese pizza between us. We'd had a Miller Lite each. And Theo McAbbott had not come on to me. Not even the first little off-color joke to get the ball rolling. Theo's only wife had divorced him more than ten years ago, and most of the time an unmarried straight male who isn't in holy orders will put some kind of a move on me if we're alone together for more than ten minutes.

Not Theo. So:
Wonder if he's gay?

I had gone over the DeHoic/Dierdorf picture while we were noshing, getting non-committal nods and “uh-huhs” in response. With no intention of nibbling at either of the two remaining pizza slices, it seemed like as good a time as any to circle around to the excellent nerd's story about getting the picture from Theo. So I did. Theo took it totally in stride.

“That boy was telling the God's honest truth.” Theo nodded emphatically. “I took the picture, and I'm the one gave it to him. And I'll tell you what: he made it worth my while.”

“How in the world did he do that?”

“Oh, come on now.” Theo's chuckle made the sides of his mouth and the outside corners of his eyes crinkle in a way that reminded me of Papa. “You're way too smart to think I can answer that question. Anything I'd tell you would have to be a flat-out lie. So why don't we just mark it as a no-comment and move on?”

“Fair enough. And you sure aren't going to tell me whom you were working for when you did the surveillance.”

“Amen, sister!” Huge grin, punctuated by a hallelujah clap with his arms stretched way out, like you might see at a tent-revival.

“So, is there anything you can tell me?”

Theo did your basic U-turn and he did it in a big hurry. Face got serious, almost solemn. For two or three seconds I couldn't hear anything but the rotating fan behind me blowing evening air around, and frustrated flies bouncing off gray mesh screens. When Theo spoke he'd dropped the bantering salesman schtick and talked to me like I was just a buddy on the receiving end of an intervention.

“There is one thing I can tell you. One pretty important thing.” He took a deep breath. “Sanford Dierdorf is your basic twenty-four-carat bastard. Bad guy. Any crime that pays well and doesn't require physical courage, he's game for it. He's fleeced taxpayers
and
investors fourteen ways from Sunday on at least three different projects. That solar power start-up that he's skimmed several million from is the least of his frauds—practically a sideshow.”

“Sounds like someone your former colleagues at the Bureau might like to get their hands on.”

“No inside information, you understand”—he winked—“but I will guarantee you that a task force of blue suits has had him on its to-do list for at least a year. Hasn't gotten any traction, though.”

“Why not?”

“My guess is that he has friends with Schedule C appointments who see to it that requests for information about him from other federal agencies get slow-walked.”

Whoa!

Schedule C appointments are senior positions in agencies made on political bases. Jerzy had wanted to get an investigation of Dierdorf's company going. But if the FBI couldn't get the responsible agency to take an investigation seriously, how could Jerzy have hoped to do it? So…what? So whoever hired Theo had leaked the picture to us through Theo, expecting us to get it to Jerzy without the fingerprints of Theo or his client on it. Why? So Jerzy could put it together with dope he already had—dope about Ann DeHoic, for example—and use it to motivate a GS 15 or two at Commerce or Energy or Interior or maybe even Homeland Security. That meant Jerzy hadn't hired Theo. So who had? And why was he—or she—so bashful?

“You look like you're getting a headache,” Theo said as he stood and started picking up the pizza and paper plates.

Grabbing the beer bottles, I followed him through the back door into the kitchen. Typical bachelor kitchen: almost spotless, because it seldom gets used. Harvest gold. Really. There was something almost violent about the way Theo forced the pizza box's thick cardboard into folds and bent it over itself until it was compact enough to stuff in his recycling sack. Then he wrapped the two surviving pizza slices in aluminum foil—no Baggie; no wax paper;
guys!
—and tossed them in his refrigerator.

For the first time since he'd shown me in, I started getting an intriguing vibe from Theo, a little whiff of bad-boy/danger, sort of like the one I'd picked up from Jerzy, except dialed back about six clicks. Here was a guy who'd carried a gun on the job, put people in cuffs, maybe been shot at, probably roughed some folks up, or even shot someone himself. A little chill and a little thrill arm-wrestled to a draw in my belly.

“What I hear you saying,” I told him as he rinsed out the beer bottles, “is that Dierdorf probably had Jerzy killed and wouldn't be shy about doing the same to me if I got in his way.”

“Or if you started playing footsie with him.”

Red flag. Chill just kicked thrill's butt. Theo was showing me a replay of DeHoic's warning/threat. If they were working together, this thing just got
way
more complicated. On the other hand, if they
weren't
working together and I'd been independently warned off by two pretty smart people, I'd better pay attention.

“Just out of curiosity,” I asked, “where did ‘playing footsie' come from? The only dog I have in this fight is my husband who has had cops crawling up his rectum since the day Jerzy went to Heaven.”

“Or the other place.” Theo did his aw-shucks grin one more time. “This might sound like a frat-boy line, but it's not. Would you mind coming down to my workshop in the basement? Something I'd like to show you.”

Red flag
and
alarm bells. Looked in Theo's eyes. Question answered:
Not
gay. Tinge of lust in those shifty gray peepers for sure. Involuntary reflex; guys can't control it. Didn't mean he'd stop being a gentleman when we got downstairs, but…I took a breath.

“Sure, let's go.”

Chapter Thirty-five

I expected to walk into a man cave with a wet bar and carefully positioned horizontal surfaces. Nope. Theo actually led me into an honest-to-Pete workshop. Dark gray concrete floor—clean, I noticed, which meant Theo thought this room was important. Weight bench and free weights against the far wall. A rig with a big round saw and other manly power tools that I didn't recognize dominated the room's center. And, over by the wall to my right, an oil-cloth-covered table with a rifle resting just above the table's surface on a couple of braces.

Near the rifle lay a scope, a set of mounting rings, and enough implements to fill up a standing tool box: a box of Q-Tips; what looked like a very long, very thin screwdriver; two silver-colored cylinders; a bottle of oil; a couple of miniature wrenches; one of those frames holding a transparent tube with liquid inside it that you use to see if something is level; a long, fist-sized pencil with an ultra-thin white lead point; and, just to top everything off, a small bathroom scale.

“Please tell me that rifle isn't a Winchester three-oh-eight,” I said.

“It's not.” Theo pulled a wooden, ladder-back chair up to the table and looked over his right shoulder to catch my eye. “Remington two twenty-four. Much higher muzzle velocity. Varmint gun. Prairie dogs, rabbits. Small things that are quick but don't need all that much killing.”

“Okay.” I parked my fanny on a red-lacquered stool against the near wall.

“What I want to show you is me mounting that scope there on this rifle.”

“I'm watching.”

“Get comfortable.”

I am
not
going to lay out a blow-by-blow description of the mounting process, which went on for almost thirty solid minutes. Loosening and removing the eight screws in the mounting rings the first time he did it—three turns on one screw, then three on the one diagonally across from it, then three on the one directly across from that one, then three on the fourth screw, directly across from the first, then back to the first screw and so forth—took two minutes all by itself. And that was after putting his fingers on the scale to remind himself of what two pounds of pressure felt like, as he explained to me, so that he wouldn't over-tax the screws.

“These puppies are more delicate than a senator's ego,” he muttered. “You can strip the threads on the suckers just by looking at them sideways.”

He asked me to hand him a dowel, which I took to be the guy-term for what looked like one-third of a broom handle in the corner. I did. He fussed with that thing and the two rings a bit, then used the two metal cylinders to make sure he'd gotten the rings lined up right, and finally laid the scope gently in the cradles formed by the lower halves of the two rings.

But he wasn't anything like almost through. Used the Q-Tip to oil the screws before delicately screwing the top halves of the rings on over the scope, alternating among screws again, making the process look like open-heart surgery. When he finally set the screwdriver back down on the work bench, I exhaled.

“Done,” I whispered, provoking a gently patronizing smile from him.

“Nowhere near done.” He stepped back. “Come on over here and take a look through the sight.”

I obeyed. Saw nothing but a blur at first. Then he turned a knob near the rear lens, and the paneled wall twenty-five feet away come into focus.

“You see that strip of Day-glo orange tape running down one of the grooves in that section of panel?”

“Yep,” I said.

“Is the vertical bar on the cross-hairs lined up on it?”

“Pretty much.”

“‘Pretty much' won't cut it.”

I got out of the way. He gazed through the scope. Grunted. Stood up straight. Drew diagonal lines across the mounting ring halves with the pencil, did some more open-heart surgery with the screwdriver, backed the scope up by imperceptible millimeters until the diagonal line on the top half matched perfectly with the diagonal line on the bottom half, then tightened the screws—again.

He looked through the scope again. He stood up and gestured toward the sight.

“Tell me what you see now.”

I squinted through the coated glass.

“The vertical bar is lined up exactly on the tape, but they look like they're slanted just a little.”

“It's your head that's slanted, not the bar. ‘Canted,' the gravel guts call it. We know the tape isn't slanted, and therefore we know the bar isn't slanted. That's the important thing.”

I stood up. He put the spirit-level—the frame with the tube of liquid in it—on top of the sight.

“Dead level,” he said. “We won't need the wrenches. Thank God for that.”

“That looked like a lot more trouble than I would have thought it was.”

“Yep. Older weapons like Rafe's or this one, that's the way you have to do it. At least if you want it done right—and if it's not done right, what's the point?”

“Can't think of one, I guess.”

He turned toward me. I could see sweat that had beaded across his forehead while he concentrated on mounting the scope.

“Someone who just wants to go out there on the first weekend of deer season and blow away Bambi's dad from a hundred yards, that's one thing. He can slop the thing together. Miss the first shot, he'll probably get at least two more.”

“I'll have to take your word for that.”

“But a single kill-shot for a human target at long range—different story, sister. That scope has to be in place
exactly
, without a speck of wobble to it. Has to be tighter than a…uh, well, tight as it can be. Say it like that.”

I would have given anything to know what was supposed to come after ‘tighter than a' before Theo remembered he was talking to a lady. At the moment, though, I had a more important question to ask.

“Point being—what?”

“Point being this: having a subscription to
Field & Stream
when you were a kid
and going hunting with your drinking buddies once a year doesn't qualify someone for this gig. Mounting the scope right would be the easiest part of a professional hit, and
that
was plenty hard enough, as you just saw. Not the kind of thing someone takes care of during commercial breaks on
Meet the Press
.”

Got it. No need to draw me a picture.

“In other words,” I said, “Rafe didn't do it.”

“Not without professional help, he didn't.”

“Right.” I managed a look of wide-eyed innocence straight from
The Sound of Music
. “Well that is a
big
relief. Because where in the
world
could Rafe have gotten professional help?”