Man in the Middle

by Brian Haig

  She looked at me. “Also like you, he doesn’t know when to keep his mouth shut, he has no sense of self-preservation, and—”

  “Excuse me—weren’t we talking about a crime reconstruction?”

  She smiled, sort of.

  Back to the matter of how Daniels died, I said, “Fact two. The man was dead on his own bed with the gun in his hand.”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “He either put it there himself, or it was placed there. If you’re building a mental flowchart, this one’s fifty-fifty.”

  “All right. Fact three. He was naked with a hard-on. What do you deduce from that?”

  I stared at her.

  She asked, “Should I rephrase that?”

  “Too late.” I suggested to her, “The most innocent explanation is that he was enjoying a moment of sexual solitude before he killed himself. We already discussed this.”

  She did not ask me to review that discussion, but instead wisely suggested, “But there are also less innocent explanations, right?”

  “Apparently. He had company, and the company did not behave the way he anticipated.”

  “Female company.”

  “Well . . . don’t discount the possibility that Mr. Daniels’s taste ran the other way, or that he was a switch-hitter. But we’ll work with that assumption until we know otherwise.” I said, “And here’s where it gets interesting. Why would he have a dirty video in the machine?”

  “You tell me.”

  “This is beyond my experience or imagination.”

  “And you think I know something about this?”

  I smiled.

  She smiled back, a little coolly. She decided to be a good sport, though, and said, “All right, I’ll take a stab. Some people use pornographic images to create a romantic or sensual mood, a prelude or warm-up before they get into the real article. In fact, it’s not unhealthy . . . not even aberrant. A lot of sexual therapists actually recommend it.” She looked at me and noted, “Also, the video wasn’t necessarily his idea—maybe it was hers.”

  “Okay, his or hers. That’s still a little hard to explain to a first date. Some women or men might find it a little bizarre and respond negatively.”

  “Yes, I think that would be a little awkward.”

  “So this suggests somebody he knew fairly well. This wasn’t the first time they were together, was it?” She nodded, and I continued, “So that’s where we start: a woman, someone he had already . . . somebody he already had intimate relations with.”

  “That was nicely put.”

  “I’m working on cleaning up my act.”

  “Keep working on it.”

  “Good point. Bear in mind, though, it’s still possible a person he did not know entered the apartment, Cliff was asleep, they blew out his brains and planted the gun in his hand. Don’t get hung up on opening assumptions.”

  “I’m not. But it helps to have something to work with.” Bian crossed her legs and went back to sipping her coffee. I put Daniels’s address book in my lap and began leafing through the pages.

  The book was thick and organized alphabetically, and I noted that Cliff’s handwriting was surprisingly neat, with a light touch and precisely formed and uniformly sized letters. I’m no expert in handwriting analysis, but with males such orthographic neatness is often a sign of a Catholic-based education, or a school experience dominated by bossy women who care about such things. My own handwriting has never been mistaken for having a light touch.

  Bian, watching me, observed, “You know what? I’ve never actually seen a crime solved through an address book.”

  I made no response to that observation.

  “It’s odd,” she continued. “Something like 90 precent of murders are committed by people the victim knew.”

  “I’m aware of the statistics.”

  “Good. So you would think an address book would be like a road map from the victim to the killer. In fact, often, the killer was in the victim’s address book . . . unfortunately you don’t know that until you’ve already ID’d the killer through other means.” She concluded, “A very low percentage of crimes have been solved through address books.”

  “Am I wasting my time?”

  “Well . . . I thought you should know.”

  “Now I know. Thank you.”

  “Statistics can be useful criminological tools.”

  I looked at her.

  “Are you sensitive to criticism?” she asked.

  “Me? . . . No. Would you like a punch in the nose?” I explained, “I’m not looking for the killer, Bian. I’m trying to see who this guy associated with, get an idea of his life.”

  “I see.” She pointed at a name and asked me, “And what does that name tell you?”

  I looked at the name Albert Tigerman. “It’s a statistical fact that only .0001 percent of killers are named Albert, and less than .0001 percent of those have the surname Tigerman. Ergo, Albert moves to the bottom of our suspect pool.” I smiled at her. “I love statistics.”

  She smiled back tightly. “Try again.”

  “Should I know Albert?”

  “Were you a Pentagon insider . . . yes, you would instantly recognize the name.”

  “That’s why I have you.”

  “Tigerman was Daniels’s boss, a very powerful and influential man. He’s the deputy to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Thomas Hirschfield—roughly the third-highest-ranking official in the Pentagon.”

  “Is there a point to this?”

  “You catch on quick. Why don’t I leaf through the address book and you look over my shoulder? I might recognize some of these people.”

  I tossed her the book. She started with the A’s and ran her finger down the pages quickly, moving on to the B’s, and down the line. Occasionally she used a pen and stabbed a checkmark or slashed an X beside a name. I had not a clue what significance was attached to those names or to these symbols.

  As you might expect, the majority of names in Cliff’s book were males, some with military ranks, most not. From what I could discern, Cliff’s world was the usual amalgam of work colleagues, professional contacts, and people who were important or relevant to him personally; a few doctors, his dry cleaner, and presumably some friends and social acquaintances. Less than a third were women. Also, only about a third had listed addresses, the majority limited to phone numbers, predominately from area codes 202—Washington—and 703—northern Virginia.

  A few names were recognizable to me, however—several well-known members of the National Security Council staff, some senior CIA officials, assorted Pentagon muckety-mucks, and General Nicholas Westfall, commander of the Defense Intelligence Agency. For a midlevel bureaucrat, Clifford was surprisingly well connected and inside the beltway loop.

  Bian was now on the T’s, and she flipped back to the D’s and pointed to several people with the surname Daniels she had put X’s next to—a Theresa with a northern Virginia area code and a South Arlington address; a Matthew with a Manhattan address; and a Marilyn in Plano, Texas.

  Bian placed her right forefinger on Theresa from South Arlington. “What do you want to bet that’s his ex? This address is only a few blocks from his apartment. The other two could be his parents, siblings, or maybe cousins.”

  At that moment Will popped his head around the corner. In a shrill and exhilarated voice, he reported, “We broke his code word. We’re diddling his hard drive.”

  This sounded either vulgar or ridiculous, but Bian diplomatically asked Will, “And what are you finding?”

  “Well . . . it’s quite intriguing. Mr. Daniels stored a lot of personal materials on his computer. Financial information. Checkbook. He did his taxes on the computer. Lots of personal correspondence, too.” He added, with fraternal approval, “He was very computer-savvy . . .” then added, “but it’s really weird.”

  Will was really weird. I kept that thought to myself, however, and asked, very sweetly, “What’s weird?”

  “The three enc
rypted folders.”

  “Folders?”

  “Yeah . . . folders . . .” He stared at me through his thick spectacles before concluding, accurately, that his interrogator was a technological dimwit. “Like a dresser drawer in the hard drive, where you store common items . . . say, socks or underwear. Judging by the large amount of storage space, they must contain multiple files. But as I said, they’re encoded. Indecipherable.”

  I asked, “Are we talking socks or underwear?” Actually, I’m not that much of a dimwit—I knew what folders were—but this was my way of getting him to tone down the cyber gibberish. He stared back, I’m sure wishing he, or I, were someplace else, but I’m sure he got the point.

  Bian decided to be helpful and asked Will, “Can you describe the code?”

  “Well . . . it looks like a commercial version. The FBI and CIA tried to get Congress to ban these commercial codes, but that hasn’t worked. So now there are a number of these applications out there.” He looked thoughtful and added, “Mostly, though, they’re employed by businesses, not individuals.”

  Bian and I traded glances. The obvious question was: Why would a Defense Department official suspected of espionage have a private code installed on his personal computer? Then again, the obvious is sometimes the enemy of the truth.

  Will, sort of verbally rubbing his hands together, informed us, “Wow . . . I’d love to take a whack at those codes myself.”

  Being an idiot, I asked, “So why don’t you?”

  “Frankly, that could take months, particularly if it’s a VPN version. That ISP protocol is . . . well, with all those symmetric ciphers . . .” He shook his head. “Now, if it’s SSL, that would be better luck.”

  Bian was nodding. I had not a clue what Will was whining about, nor was I about to ask another stupid question and risk another stream of what passes for technical jargon with these people and actually is alphabet diarrhea. Bian, ever the diplomat, suggested to Will, “Thank you. But wouldn’t it make better sense to bring these encrypted files to the National Security Agency? They have a lot of expertise in codes and codebreaking.”

  This was not what Will hoped to hear, and he made a mopey little nod.

  “How long will that take?” I asked Will.

  “Maybe they already have experience with this code. If they have to break it from scratch, depending on the sophistication . . . a day . . . two days . . . three months. How badly do you want it?”

  “Yesterday sounds about right. Tell Phyllis. She’ll know whose ass to kiss or kick.”

  “Sure.” He started to walk away, then slapped his forehead and spun around. “Oh . . . there’re some letters John thinks you should see.”

  Carrying our coffee, Bian and I got up and followed Will back to the office, where John had his nose pressed against the computer screen.

  I said to John, “Will mentioned letters.”

  “Uh . . . yeah. I thought you should see these,” John replied. “Hold on.” Without looking up, he manipulated the little cursor as though it was connected to his fingertip and quickly brought a Microsoft Word file up on the screen. He said, “There are a number of these. This one’s a little nastier . . . yet generally representative of what we’re seeing.”

  Bian and I leaned over his left shoulder. I read out loud:

  You Bitch, Your bloodsucking fuck of a lawyer called me again today. At work!

  Wow. I stopped reading out loud, and we both read to ourselves:

  I’m tired of your bullshit threats about taking me back to court, and I’m REALLY tired of your efforts to destroy my career. I will not put up with it. You tell your hired asshole not to call me at the office any-more or he’ll regret it. I’ll take care of him myself.

  Get it through your thick, bitchy brain: I have no more money to give. You have sucked me dry, you contemptible leech. So Lizzie has college bills— Whoopty Doo. Tell her to get off her ass and get a job. I’ve got to eat, live, get on with my life.

  Sell the goddamn house that’s too big for you anyway. I don’t live there anymore. By the way I drove by the house the other day. The lawn looks like shit. The car looks like shit. And what happened to the money I gave you to repair the roof? You ob-viously spent it on something else, you bitch. On what? It’s my right to know. It was MY money.

  I would ask you to pass my love to the kids . . . of course, you won’t. Anyway, you’ve already poi-soned their minds and hearts against me. I rue the day I ever met you. What in the hell was I thinking when I married you? Just don’t forget, if your law-yer calls me at work again, I’ll make him regret it. You too. Don’t underestimate me. Cliff.

  I looked up from the screen. Bian and I exchanged glances. My goodness. Clearly theirs had not been a divorce on amicable terms.

  Fortunately, JAG officers don’t go near divorces—just wars, which generally suck, though they have one saving grace: When they’re over, usually they’re over.

  Bian turned to John and asked, “There are more letters like this?”

  “Yeah. I’m still browsing . . . but the titles don’t tell if it’s hate mail to his ex-wife.”

  I asked, “Anything else?”

  “One thing. It’s interesting, I guess. Mr. Daniels belonged to several online dating clubs and chat rooms.”

  “Tell us about that.”

  “Oh . . . well, he tried to erase the entries and e-mails. Everything on a hard drive is recoverable, of course. But you know how you can meet people online?”

  I suppose I looked confused, because he explained, “It’s more efficient. Easier.”

  “What is?”

  “Meeting women on the computer. No need to hang around bars trying to think up clever things to say to real women.”

  I could see where that might be a problem for John.

  Bian looked at me and remarked to him, “I’ve heard Drummond’s best line.” She suggested, “Why don’t you do him a big favor and explain how this works?”

  I smiled back. Bitch.

  John said, “With online services you pay a fee and fill out a questionnaire. It’s very convenient—you answer a few questions about your likes, dislikes, hobbies, the type of person you’d prefer to date. The service culls through similar profiles filled out by women, looks for commonalities, and hooks you up electronically. Chat rooms are a free-for-all. Log in to the conversation, and maybe another member likes your style and becomes interested in you.”

  “You’re telling me my computer’s a pimp?”

  “No . . . I—”

  “What happens if you both lie?”

  “Well . . . that can happen but—”

  “And you get together and it turns out you’re both stupider and ickier-looking than you said?”

  Bian was stifling a laugh.

  John was now staring at me like I was weird. Truly, it’s a whole new world. I’m part of the older world; I don’t really like being reminded of it. However, I said to John, “You’ve done great work. Thank you.” I asked Bian, “Who notifies his ex he’s dead?”

  “The Arlington police.”

  “You know this for a fact?”

  “I do. I checked before I left the office. I hate notification detail.” She added, “The obligation for a military notification pertains only to uniformed military.”

  “Not this time. Call your pal Detective Enders. Tell him he’s off the hook.”

  “You think that’s a good idea?”

  “Is it ever a bad idea to observe a suspect’s expression at the instant she learns the body was discovered?”

  She paused for a moment, then said, “I should’ve thought of that.”

  “Yes, you should have.”

  Bian made the call, and I stood looking over John’s shoulder and read more letters from Cliff to his ex, and about his ex. All were post-divorce, uniformly bitter, angry, insulting, and frequently they were threatening. On a hunch, I mentioned to Bian, who was still talking with Enders, “Tell him to check for past reports of domestic violence. Restrain
ing orders, protection orders, whatever.”

  That Cliff was corresponding by mail with his ex suggested, at the very least, a geographic restraining order, perhaps extending to a telephonic order. Or alternatively, this physical excommunication may have been self-imposed. When it comes to divorce, nothing ever makes sense, and you never know. It was too early to jump to conclusions, but based on the tenor of that note, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she wanted to put a bullet through his brain.

  And for sure it would be easy for us, and convenient for many, were it to turn out Cliff was popped by a pissed-off ex. Frankly, I would be a little disappointed; also, a lot relieved.

  Well, we would see.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The house was on South 28th Street, a winding lane of small, double-storied, red-brick colonial homes that looked like two long lines of red-coated soldiers. The lots were tiny quarter-acre jobs, with mature oaks and elms; everything looked tidy and well-kept. The street held an old-fashioned charm; the homes were uniformly older, constructed in the late forties or the early fifties, a middle-class enclave for men who had just survived and returned from a world war, relieved to be in one piece, ready to enjoy peacetime employment, build families, and get on with their lives. It still looked wholesome, yet dated enough that any second I expected to see Wally Cleaver come dashing around a corner chasing the Beav.

  I parked the Crown Vic directly in front of Theresa’s house and Bian and I got out. Cliff was right; Theresa’s yard was unkempt and overgrown with weeds, a swath of tiles was missing from the roof, and the Chrysler minivan in the driveway was long overdue for a paint job, probably an oil change, a tire rotation, or better yet, a complete replacement.

  Bian and I proceeded to the front stoop. I pushed the bell and we waited. After a few seconds, a woman opened the door, dressed casually in dark sweatpants and a ratty T-shirt festooned with a snarling Georgetown University bulldog and the words “Up Yours.” Bian handled the introductions, remaining deliberately vague about our purpose, and very politely asked if we could step inside.

  It took a stretch, yet from the photograph in Clifford’s apartment, I recognized the lady. She had aged considerably, or, more charitably, her face had acquired a new character since the photograph. It was Winston Churchill who said that by the time a person reaches fifty, the story of their life is written on their face. Apparently not always, because the smiling Theresa Daniels I had observed in the photo was about fifty then; somehow, in a few intervening years, a whole new story had been etched on her face.