To Kill a Man - Maggie Costello Series 05 (2020)

by Bourne, Sam

  The woman smiled and was beginning to explain that it was not that kind of place when the customer took her wrist and said quietly, ‘I want to talk to you about him,’ and with the subtlest tilt of her head indicated the man drinking Johnnie Walker, his face alight with the glow of his phone.

  Involuntarily, the woman’s eyes darted left and right, checking that no one was watching. To be on the safe side, she relaxed her face into one that suggested a meaningless, ordinary customer transaction. She didn’t want her brow to furrow, lest it convey either curiosity or fear, anything that might catch the man’s attention. As subtly as she could, she withdrew her arm from the customer’s touch, pretending to reach for her own hair.

  The customer read her accurately. ‘Don’t be frightened. This is a trip down memory lane for me. I used to work here myself. More than ten years ago now.’

  The woman struggled to believe it. The customer was dressed like a doctor or university professor; maybe a businesswoman.

  ‘I was a student. I had bills to pay. Like you.’ She paused. ‘So.’ Another tilt of the head in his direction. ‘Is he still trouble?’

  The woman gave a tight smile and a quick nod, an expression that from a distance would look like nothing more than confirmation of a drinks order.

  The customer reached towards her again and, just as the woman was about to pull back, the customer placed something in her hand. She did it the way the woman’s grandmother used to give her a coin on her birthday, furtively pushing it into her palm: their little secret. She didn’t look down, but, through touch alone, the woman could tell she had just been handed a necklace, with a heavy, oval pendant.

  ‘Make sure whoever’s “dancing” for him in one of the booths wears this. Then, if anything happens, you call me. OK?’

  The woman did not move, so the woman said it again. ‘OK?’

  Another nod, prompting the customer to give a wide smile of her own. ‘Now about that vodka.’ From nowhere, she produced a fifty-dollar bill and handed it over. When she saw the woman stash it away, the customer said – in a voice that was friendly but firm – ‘In my day, we used to check the bills. To make sure we weren’t getting stiffed.’

  The woman did as she was told, holding it up to the light. Only then did she see that there was a phone number written on it, in faint pencil strokes. Hurriedly, she put it back, making a mental note to keep it separate from the others.

  She went to the bar to retrieve the vodka and tonic, scanning the performance area. She could see that the man was paying attention now, off his phone and staring at the new recruit as she bent and turned her teenage body before him.

  The woman wondered if she was meant to do it right now, somehow getting the necklace around the girl’s neck this very moment. She looked towards the customer, seeking guidance. But the space where she had been sitting was now empty. She had gone, as silently and as invisibly as she had arrived.

  Chapter 26

  Washington, DC

  Maggie stood up, stretched, then worked her fingers, like a pianist after a strenuous performance. She had been at this keyboard in Natasha Winthrop’s office for three hours straight, failing so much as to nod at best ergonomic practice. If she had been the type to exercise, pounding along the trails at Rock Creek Park or lifting weights with Dom, the go-to personal trainer among Washington women of her demographic – his client list bulging with journalists, lobbyists and State Department high-ups – now would be the moment to do it. But she couldn’t be bothered with any of it: not the Lycra tops and yoga pants, not the little white pods in the ears, not the mind-bending tedium of ‘Guess how many steps I did today?’ Oh, that’s hard. Let me guess: I couldn’t give a flying fuck. No, as far as Maggie Costello was concerned, she had made her concession to health and fitness. She had given up the fags. Several times, in fact. Surely that was enough?

  She went over to the window, thinking she could murder a cigarette right now. She could see the lights of the convenience store on the corner opposite: it would only take five minutes. And with Uri away, there’d be no lecture about her health.

  No, she would not succumb. Instead she would force herself to think through what she had seen in her online exploration of the life of Natasha Winthrop. She had been searching for anything that might explain the events of the last few days – or, if there were no hidden explanation, if Winthrop’s account were the beginning and end of it, then who it was that was actively seeking to maximize her pain, not least via the contents of that package postmarked Langley, Virginia. To answer that, Maggie needed to know all she could about the woman who had hired her.

  To that end, she had put aside Natasha’s files and folders and taken to the internet, working backwards. She re-read the profiles that had rapidly appeared once Natasha had become the stand-out performer in the House hearings: Washington Post style section, Vanity Fair, Esquire and an especially glowing number from the Boston Globe. They offered the same outline of the résumé, retold some of the same anecdotes, quoted some of the same friends.

  Then she worked her way through every mention she could find before the hearings, reports of cases Natasha had fought, statements delivered on the steps of the Supreme Court, the odd scholarly article in a legal journal or paper presented at a conference. So far, so familiar.

  When she went further back, the supply began to dry. She could find only four references to Winthrop’s first job, as a criminal prosecutor in New York. Twice she was merely namechecked in a court report of a murder trial; the third included a quotation from her closing argument in an armed robbery case. ‘The accused showed a callous, wanton disregard for the value of human life. He poses a threat to every last one of us.’ The last announced that this period in Natasha’s career was over: an item on a website for the legal profession, noting that Winthrop was leaving the office of the District Attorney and entering private practice.

  What was left was a gazetted note of her appointment to a highly prized clerkship at the Supreme Court and assorted bits from her time at Harvard. A story in the Crimson, reporting her election to the editorship of the Law Review, and a couple of academic articles in that journal where her name had appeared, either alone or with a co-author. (Maggie skim-read those. One was on the legal obstacles to a wealth tax and how those could be overcome, another was on – ironically enough – the pattern of sexual and racial discrimination visible in the appointment of clerks to the Supreme Court.) It was almost a relief when Maggie found a gossip item about the college ball committee, which had included among that year’s raffle prizes ‘a fully functioning vibrator’:

  Asked for comment, committee member Tasha Winthrop said, ‘Don’t worry, there are plenty of toys for the boys in there too.’

  (Maggie imagined Stuart’s reaction to that one. He’d have wanted the candidate to issue a statement: ‘When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible.’ Maggie would have suggested a tweet, featuring no more than a blushing emoji.)

  Finally, she was in Natasha’s teenage years. There was a picture story in the Cape Cod Times, proudly breaking the news that a local girl had won a scholarship to Harvard:

  Winthrop is the sole surviving daughter of Aldrich and Tilly Winthrop of Pilgrim’s Cove, and a boarder at St Hugh’s Academy in Andover.

  Maggie looked hard at the eighteen-year-old Natasha, clutching her letter from Harvard, smiling broadly. Yet her eyes were doing something else, fixing the camera with an expression that was both sad and – what was it? The best Maggie could come up with was . . . defiant.

  Beyond that, her birth certificate was visible online, along with a birth announcement in the Boston Globe. And there was plenty on the death of her parents, along with her two sisters, in a car accident in the Rhineland, where Reed Aldrich Winthrop had been serving as a senior officer with the US Air Force on the base at Ramstein. Natasha had been in the car at the time and was described in the first re
ports as being in a ‘critical’ condition. There was an account of the funeral on the Cape, held while the fifteen-year-old Natasha remained in hospital in Germany.

  Maggie had gone back to the picture in the local paper, Natasha clutching her Harvard admission letter three years later. The sadness was obvious enough but the defiance made sense too: she had come through, despite everything.

  There was nothing else that Maggie could see, which was hardly a surprise. Aldrich Winthrop had been posted to Ramstein well over a decade earlier; he was a colonel, holding a senior position within NATO Allied Air Command, when he died. Until her family had been wiped out, a US airbase in Germany was where Natasha had grown up.

  She concluded that nothing in the public record about Natasha Winthrop shed any light whatsoever on the current situation. She had found no clear enemy, no obvious grievance. Nor had her searches illuminated in any way the Russian riddle that had been contained inside those computer files. To Maggie, it was now obvious: she would have to go back to the seam she had already mined, though this time she would be even more meticulous. Somewhere, surely, in those work files lay the answer.

  The Russia file remained top of her mental list, but now she compiled a roll-call of all those who might feel wronged by Natasha and her legal prowess. It included individual CIA operatives at multiple black sites around the world, each accused of human rights abuses including torture; a group of Navy aviators charged with sexual assault; the board of a fossil-fuel company exposed as having falsified test results; a tech company that had not yet been sued by Natasha, but on whom Winthrop had already collected a voluminous body of evidence. Maggie wrote it all down: names, dates, places. (Though, in the tech case, Maggie could not quite grasp what the company was alleged to have done, let alone whether they’d done it: she would need to get Liz to give her the dummies’ guide on that one.)

  She worked backwards in time, tunnelling through Natasha’s career as she got closer to the start of the century. When she had exhausted all the digital records, she moved to the filing cabinet – locked, but Natasha had told her where she could find the key – thumbing through hard, paper files that looked as if they’d barely been touched in more than a decade. Towards the back were records of the very first cases Winthrop had fought as a defence attorney, soon after joining this very firm.

  Maggie was turning the pages – the memos to the DA, the sworn depositions, the police reports – when she came to one case that instantly stood out.

  THE PEOPLE VS NANCY JIMENEZ

  It stood out not because a woman was involved. On the contrary, women appeared repeatedly throughout the files, paper and electronic. But as she rushed through the document, establishing the basic facts, Maggie could see that this was the first case in which a woman appeared not as the victim of a hideous crime, nor even as a witness, but as its alleged perpetrator.

  Jimenez was a single mother from the Brentwood neighbourhood of DC. She worked as a cleaner in various office buildings in northwest Washington. One Sunday night she had dialled 911 and, in a calm voice, told the operator there was a dead man in her house, lying on the kitchen floor. The operator had asked Jimenez how she knew that the man was dead. ‘I just know,’ she had said. ‘How do you know?’ the operator asked, insistent. ‘I know, because I killed him.’ When the police arrived, Jimenez was still standing over the man, apparently in a state of frozen shock. In her right hand was the brass candlestick she had used to bludgeon him over the head.

  Natasha had argued that the man had attempted to rape Jimenez moments earlier. That he had forced her to the ground and begun ‘an act of forced penetration’, as the court documents put it. Jimenez said that the man had put his hands around her throat and that she believed she was going to die. She fought back and, in the struggle, reached for the candlestick. ‘I didn’t mean to kill him. I just wanted to make him stop,’ Jimenez told police when they questioned her.

  Nancy Jimenez was acquitted on all charges. The court accepted that she had killed while acting in her own defence, that her use of force had been reasonable and proportionate to the threat she faced. She walked free from the court and the first person she thanked, according to the report in the Washington Post – clipped and preserved in this file – was her attorney, Natasha Winthrop, then aged just twenty-four. ‘This woman saved my life,’ Jimenez told reporters. ‘She saved me.’

  Chapter 27

  Washington, DC

  Marcia Chester could taste her own coffee breath. If it offended her, it must have positively repelled her partner. But Allen was a subordinate sort and had never mentioned it, so Chester decided to let it slide. She could dig into her bag and find some gum, but who needed the hassle? Besides, gum made her hungry, and once the juices got moving her stomach would start to rumble. Loudly. Which was also disgusting in its own way. Best leave well alone.

  Allen parked the car in one of the ‘POLICE ONLY’ bays outside the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner on E Street, Southwest: one of the very few perks of the job, Marcia mused. Not that anyone else was here at this godforsaken hour of the night. As she unbuckled the seat belt to get out, she considered leaving her coffee cup behind. Maybe she’d had enough for one day, given the coffee breath and all. On second thoughts, nah: in for a penny, in for a pound. She grabbed the cup and slammed the door behind her.

  Inside, and to her great relief, she saw a familiar face: Dr Amy Fong. Relief because Chester didn’t feel like meeting a new person and making nice, and because she knew that Fong was good and, better still, fast. There’d be no need to give her the spiel about how this was a priority of the Chief of Police and all that bullcrap: Fong would be on it.

  The pathologist greeted the pair of detectives with what Chester took to be reciprocal relief: no small talk, no introductions. Woman after my own heart.

  The familiar walk down one deserted corridor, through a set of double doors, then another and finally into an examination suite. As they walked, Dr Fong explained that the information they had had in the initial report was all accurate.

  Allen seemed to take that as a rebuke. ‘Sure, but we always want to see the body for ourselves.’

  Chester gave Fong a brief eye-roll in solidarity. Don’t get me started.

  The corpse of Jeffrey Todd was on a gurney, suggesting it had been brought here especially for this visit. ‘Talk us through it, Doctor,’ Chester said.

  ‘As you can see,’ she began, pointing at the skull whose left side had collapsed, like a deflated football, ‘the victim suffered a high-impact blow to the head, leading to severe contusions, shattered bone and major, fatal brain damage.’

  ‘How many times do you think he was hit?’

  ‘Once.’

  ‘And with the object you’ve been shown by my colleagues?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. The weight and shape of that object are entirely consistent with these injuries.’

  ‘Anything else about the body? You know, the accused’s testimony is that he had performed an act of sexual assault in the seconds before she struck him.’

  ‘Well, as you know, there was clear evidence of ejaculation on both the victim and the perpetrator which—’

  ‘Excuse me.’ It was Allen, taking detailed notes. ‘When you say perpetrator—’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Fong. ‘Perpetrator of this attack. The woman. Victim, meaning this man.’

  ‘Right. So there was semen on her clothes and on his. Is that right?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘And I know this sounds obvious, but that semen was his? No doubt about it?’

  ‘We’ve tested it, Detective,’ Fong said, failing to conceal her exasperation. She glanced over at Chester who closed and opened her eyelids at half-speed: not quite as obvious as an eye-roll, but a comradely expression of shared irritation all the same. Allen was always a stickler, but he’d got even worse since the CCTV footage fiasco. After that su
pposed ‘indistinct outline of a person opening the door’ turned out to be nothing more than a shadow, he’d been double- and triple-checking every damn thing.

  ‘So any other physical evidence on this corpse that either confirms or contradicts Ms Winthrop’s account? Anything we need to know?’

  ‘There is some of her DNA under his fingernails and some of his under hers, too, according to the police report compiled by your team. Scratches on his face, neck and hands. All consistent with a struggle. Just like she said.’

  Allen took a moment to read through his notes, then looked back at Chester, signalling that he felt they’d covered the ground.

  Chester too moved, as if heading for the door. Then, out of habit rather than any hunch, she asked one last question. ‘Dr Fong, is there anything else you can see about this body, or about the injuries that led to his death, that might be useful to our inquiry? Anything at all?’

  The pathologist paused and then said, ‘I’m not sure we are talking about injuries, plural.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I think he died from a single injury.’

  Allen showed Chester a crinkled brow, then turned back to Fong. ‘I don’t follow, Doctor.’

  ‘The fatal blow was precise. It was done very cleanly.’

  ‘Precise?’ said Chester.

  ‘Yes. It was the right amount of force, applied to the right part of the brain.’ Seeing the detectives’ reaction, Fong held up her hands. ‘I don’t know anything more than I can see on the table. But what I can see is that whoever killed this man knew exactly what they wanted to do.’

  Chapter 28

  Washington, DC

  Maggie put the file down and suddenly heard the silence of the office. The hum of the computers, even those that were officially asleep, the mute vibration of the electricity ready to light up the corridors should it sense the slightest motion. In the silence, she could hear her own heart which, she now understood, was thumping.