Multiple Exposure A Sophie Medina Mystery (16 page)

Eric Nettle hadn’t been the American I’d heard talking to the Russian. Not with an accent like that. “What about David Epps?”

She shot me a curious look. “David looks like a teddy bear or a hairy Pillsbury Doughboy. Round glasses like Harry Potter, round face. Spends a lot of time at the track at Charles Town betting on the horses. Supposedly he wins a lot. He’s smart as a whip.”

“Oh.” In other words, someone with an expensive gambling habit—though it didn’t sound like he had a money problem, or at least one that he admitted. “Also from Boston?”

“No,” she said. “I forget where he’s from. Why do you want to know about them? Are you thinking about . . . getting out again?”

“Oh, God, no. I mean,
no
.” I turned bright red.

Grace licked mayonnaise off her thumb. “Ben knows where all the bodies are buried, Soph. You can ask him about Eric and David tomorrow night. Eric’s married, by the way. David is . . . between wives.”

“I’m more interested in their boss,” I said.

“He’s married, too.”

“I
know
. Give me a break, okay? What I mean is, after last night, I’m curious about Hathaway’s friendship with Taras Attar. Hathaway really fought for him and told Orlov to take a hike. I wondered why.”

“You can ask Ben about that, too,” she said. “The committee has been holding hearings on ethnic conflicts and human rights abuses, focusing on places that aren’t often in the spotlight. There was one on Abadistan last spring.”

She crumpled her sandwich wrapper and held her hand out for mine. I gave it to her and she got up, dumping our trash in a nearby rubbish bin.

“By the way, I called Johnny B. Good yesterday to catch up. He happened to mention that he hasn’t seen you since you got back.”

She didn’t say it, but she didn’t need to: I was avoiding Jack O’Hara, too. Johnny B. Good was Grace’s nickname for Jack, the first boy who ever kissed me, my first love. The romance was never destined to be—we were fifteen—but what came out of that relationship was a friendship that had become very dear to me. And later, it all made sense when Jack told me after he finished undergraduate school that he had decided to become a priest, to move to Rome and enter the Jesuit order. Now he was a professor of ethics at Georgetown Law School.

“I’ve called him,” I said to Grace. “We’ve talked. I’m not a total recluse, you know. He’s been busy with the start of classes, plus he was on a retreat.”

Grace gave me a pointed look. “You ought to see him, Soph.”

“I will.”

But the first time I saw Jack, I knew his eyes would fasten on mine and he’d bore holes right through my carefully constructed facade until he got to the walled-off place I’d been able to keep hidden from Grace. He wouldn’t settle for being pushed away, put off, or deflected by promises of honesty and truthfulness down the road.

“. . . whether you’d be interested and I told her I’d ask,” Grace was saying. “So what do you think?”

“About what?”

She flashed me a martyred look. “I
asked
if you were looking for a place to live because a good friend of my mother’s owns two Victorian row houses on S Street.” She waved a hand behind us. “Up that way, between Seventeenth and Eighteenth.”

“I wasn’t going to look until I found a job,” I said. “But my lease is running out at the Roosevelt, so I ought to start trying to find something soon.”

“This place is supposed to be gorgeous.”

“I’m sure it is, but I can’t afford a Victorian row house off Dupont Circle. I’m not that rich.”

“I’ll bet you can afford this one. It’s not the whole house, just the top two floors. India lives in one of the houses. Years ago she and her husband converted the other one into duplex apartments. An antiques dealer rents the lower levels and India kept the upstairs place for out-of-town friends and family. My mom said she’s finally decided the antiques dealer travels so much she’d like to find someone to move into the upstairs apartment. She’s looking for a person who’ll be around on a more regular basis.” Grace pulled her phone out of her purse, tapped the screen, and began scrolling. “Mom sent me all the information last week, asked if I knew anyone. Here, I’m forwarding you her e-mail now.”

I pulled out my phone as my mail beeped and read the e-mail. “India Ferrer? Unusual name.”

I also had missed four calls while we’d been having lunch. All of them from Luke, practically one right after the other.

“She’s an unusual woman,” Grace said. “Oh, damn, damn, damn . . . I’ve got a meeting in fifteen minutes.” She stood up. “Do you mind—?”

“Of course not,” I said. “Go ahead and go. I’ll see you.”

“You’ll see me tomorrow at seven. Right?”

I nodded. “Tomorrow at seven.”

We exchanged kisses and she ran off to hail a cab as I hit Redial, calling Luke back.

He answered on the first ring, his voice harsh as though he’d been running or was out of breath.

“I think they found Ali.”

“Who found her? Where is she?” My heart began slamming slow and hard against my chest.

“The Fourteenth Street Bridge down by the Jefferson Memorial.”

I swallowed and said, “What was she doing there?”

“I have no idea. But they just pulled her body out of the Potomac.”

10

Half a dozen electric blue paddleboats whose occupants were outfitted in orange life vests churned across the wind-riffed Tidal Basin as I turned onto the Outlet Bridge at Maine Avenue twenty minutes later, heading toward the Jefferson Memorial and East Potomac Park. I spotted Luke’s Jeep at the curb near the concession stand by the memorial and angled the Vespa so I could park behind him. He was standing at the edge of the Tidal Basin with his back to me, staring across the water. A plane landing at National Airport roared overhead, skimming the Rosslyn skyline. Across from us the two enormous white granite stones of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial gleamed like beacons, and behind them the frieze of the Lincoln Memorial was just visible above the tree line.

I touched Luke’s elbow. “Are you all right?”

He looked down at me and it nearly broke my heart to see the anguish in his eyes. “I should have driven her home.”

“Don’t,” I said. “You would have had to throw her over your shoulder and carry her off kicking and screaming. You couldn’t have stopped her, Luke.”

He nodded, but it felt more like a tremor of anger, and laced his fingers through mine.

“We’re meeting the detective who called me at the George Mason Memorial across the street,” he said as we walked toward the Inlet Bridge still holding hands.

“I never knew there was a memorial to George Mason down here.”

“According to the detective who called, a lot of people don’t know about it. It’s behind that grove of trees and it’s pretty secluded.”

Beyond the Tidal Basin I could see the shimmer of the gunmetal Potomac River and, above it, the huge green-and-white highway signs spanning the traffic lanes of the 14th Street Bridge, indicating the turnoff for Alexandria and the airport. A big arrow pointed south to Richmond.

The George Mason Memorial, directly across from the Inlet Bridge, where the river and the Tidal Basin met, was a tribute to one of the lesser-known Founding Fathers. Mason wrote Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, a document that profoundly influenced two other Virginians: Thomas Jefferson when he wrote the first part of the Declaration of Independence and James Madison when he drafted the Bill of Rights. But Mason never signed the Constitution and that decision destroyed his friendship with George Washington. Luke and I walked into what looked like a small park and I wondered if its scruffy appearance and dilapidated state was a metaphor for the deterioration of that relationship and his decision.

Patches of weedy grass, concentric gardens of mostly hard-packed dirt planted with tired-looking purple and yellow coneflowers, and a pollen-coated pool with a tiny fountain that was doing a poor job of circulating water—that was it. At the far end, under a bare trellis that looked like climbing roses or wisteria should have been gracefully twining through it, was a larger-than-life bronze statue of George Mason. Seated on a marble bench, one leg thrown casually over the other, head tilted back, a faint smile on his face, and a finger marking his place in a thick tome, Mason looked as though he’d come to while away a pleasant afternoon, instead of watching over the grim-faced metropolitan police officers wearing grape-colored gloves who were now searching the area in front of where he sat.

“Folks, the memorial is closed.” A female African-American officer in a light blue shirt and dark trousers stopped us. “Police investigation.”

“We’re supposed to meet Detective Bolton here,” Luke said. “He called me. I’m Luke Santangelo. This is Sophie Medina. I believe we know the, ah . . . person you found.”

“Stay here,” she said. “I’ll get Detective Bolton.”

Bolton was compact, ruddy faced, and stubble haired, and had a jutting jaw that reminded me of a bulldog.

“Thanks for coming by, folks,” he said. “We got a purse one of our officers found under a bench near that statue. Only ID was your business card, sir. Could either of you tell us if you recognize the purse or any of the contents?”

Bolton was looking at me, more so than Luke, and I nodded. “Follow me.”

Someone had left Ali’s black patent leather evening bag on the seat next to Mason’s bronze tricorn hat and walking stick. Laid out alongside it in separate plastic bags were her zebra-striped makeup bag, a small hairbrush with a sparkly handle, breath mints, a pretty packet of tissues with butterflies on them, and three keys on a heart-shaped key ring. All on its own: Luke’s business card. Ali had colored a smiley face on the
O
in
Focus,
where the camera lens was.

I swallowed hard and said, “It’s Ali’s purse. That’s her makeup bag and key ring. She joked that it was the key to her heart.”

“Where’s her phone?” Luke asked. “And her wallet?”

“We’re still looking,” Bolton said. “If they’re around here, we’ll find them. The K9 guys are on their way. Did you bring that photograph with you, Mr. Santangelo?”

Luke pulled a snapshot out of his shirt pocket and handed it to Bolton, who took it and pressed his lips together. A candid shot of Ali taken only last night in front of the Firebird ice sculpture, her head thrown back, laughing, dark eyes flashing as if she’d just accepted a dare. The deep red spotlights cast a glow like a fire spreading around her, turning her jet-black hair copper colored and making the sequins on her evening dress glitter like hundreds of rubies.

Bolton stared at Ali’s picture for a long time. Finally he raised his head and said, “She was lovely. Mind if I keep this?”

“It’s for you,” Luke said.

Bolton looked hard at me. “You related to her, by any chance? Cousins, maybe?”

“No. No relation,” I said. “Do you know what happened to her?”

“We have to wait for the medical examiner to determine the cause of death. Drownings are always tricky, especially figuring out whether the victims were alive or dead before they went in the water.” He unclipped a silver pen from the breast pocket of his shirt and pulled out a small spiral notebook.

“Are you saying Ali might have been murdered before someone dumped her body in the Potomac?” Luke looked stunned. “She was just a sweet kid.”

Bolton’s eyes softened. “I’m sorry. We don’t know. But the both of you can help by telling us what she did last night, and that includes accounting for your own whereabouts. Also whether she seemed depressed, upset, any strange or unusual behavior.”

Luke gave Bolton a detailed chronology right up until Ali left the National Gallery, including her teasing hint that she might have met a rich Russian who was taking her out after the reception. Then we each filled in our own time line, ending with Luke leaving my place around two in the morning after we’d finished editing. Bolton wrote it all down.

“So neither one of you actually saw her leave the National Gallery with anyone?” he said. “She didn’t say who the guy was, didn’t give a name?”

“No.” Luke shook his head. “Her car was in the shop so I drove her to the reception last night. She said she didn’t need a ride home so I figured whoever it was, he had wheels.”

“Then we’re not looking for her car, at least.” Bolton chewed on the end of his pen and glanced over at me. “You got anything to add, Ms. Medina?”

I did. Something that had been forming into a small knot in my stomach and was now gnawing at me: the conversation Ali overheard between Arkady Vasiliev and me. But I wasn’t going to tell Bolton about it right now with Luke standing there.

“No,” I said.

Bolton gave me a look indicating he didn’t believe me, but didn’t push it. “One final thing,” he said. “Would you mind taking a look at her so we’ve got a definite ID? It can be real quick.”

“Of course,” Luke said, his voice catching in his throat.

We left the park and the road curved around so it now paralleled the Potomac. The lane nearest the river had been blocked off to accommodate the line of police and emergency vehicles spread out under the two spans of the 14th Street Bridge: red, white, and blue MPD cruisers and a fire truck. An ambulance pulled up, and a fire and rescue boat hovered offshore.

The noise of the overhead traffic reverberated as we walked under the first bridge, echoing inside my head until I felt like it would explode. A freight train traveling south across the railroad bridge farther downstream made a steady
chunka-chunka
sound.

“What in the hell was Ali doing here at night with some guy she didn’t know?” Luke asked.

“I could see her coming here,” I said. “It’s romantic, the kind of edgy danger that she would go for. Maybe he took her to the Jefferson Memorial first and then they headed over to the George Mason Memorial.”

“Which is,” Bolton said, “a more private place for making out or going all the way if you get your thrills from doing it in a national park. The park police guard Jefferson all night. Mason just gets a drive-by every now and then. It could work except for her purse getting knocked to the ground and her leaving without it. That just doesn’t fly.”