Calkins motioned to another microscope, down the counter from the comparison instrument.
“Shell casing from Bayless Place. It had a print on it. A partial, but enough.” He stopped.
“Damn it, R.C., you’re gonna find your car towed, you keep this shit up,” Jose said.
“The print, gentlemen,” Calkins said archly, “is none other than that of Pencil Crawfurd.”
“Pencil…” Frank said, trying to make sense of it.
“Pencil,” Calkins echoed. “Unless he was a contortionist or a magician, he didn’t do the shooting on Bayless Place, but he damn sure loaded the weapon that did the shooting.”
Jose got a grip on it first. “Weapon kills Gentry, shows up two years later, kills Skeeter and wounds Pencil.”
“And Pencil loaded it,” Frank tagged on.
“Obviously,” Calkins said, “the weapon got out of Pencil’s possession sometime after he loaded it.”
“So when’d Pencil load it?” Jose asked.
“Yes,” Frank said, his voice on automatic while his mind tried to make sense of the ballistics. “If Pencil got the weapon after Gentry was killed and loaded it then, that’s one thing. But if he loaded it before Gentry was killed…”
“Just might be,” Jose finished, “that Pencil killed Gentry, then got shot two years later with his own weapon.”
Over Calkins’s shoulder, Frank contemplated the microscope, black and silver and mechanical, crouched smugly on the lab counter, silently mocking him with its riddle.
TEN
You two have a reverse Midas touch-everything you lay a finger on turns to shit.”
Before the three men, on Emerson’s desk, Kevin Walker Gentry’s file.
Gentry’s death had been one of those nightmare events every bureaucrat dreads: the murder of a politically connected victim in a politically symbolic setting. The staff director of the District of Columbia Appropriations Subcommittee, Gentry, had been gunned down virtually on the steps of the House of Representatives. For months, the heat had been intense, unrelenting: the Post, the Times, the Blade, and the City Paper had hounded Mayor Malcolm Burridge, the city council, and the department. Congress had held televised hearings. Clint Eastwood and Martin Sheen had come to town to testify.
“Milton saved Burridge and Emerson’s asses,” Jose was fond of saying. The Gentry flap had vanished overnight, when Milton had finally come up with Zelmer Austin.
Emerson scrubbed his face with both hands. He had the crestfallen expression of a bone-weary man who’d found out he had another hundred miles of rough going in front of him.
“So the Gentry case’s biting us in the ass again.” Emerson’s lips pressed together into a tight, bloodless line. Viciously he slapped the desktop. “Okay! Okay!” He threw himself back into his chair.
For a long time, nobody spoke. Frank and Jose stood in front of the desk. Emerson sat in his chair in an angry, almost catatonic state, staring at the Gentry case jacket.
Frank took in Emerson’s intense glare.
That case jacket’s going to break into flame.
Finally Emerson took a deep breath and brought his hand up to massage the back of his neck. “We had that case closed.”
“Yes.” Frank shook his head, and spoke softly, as though saying it any other way might cause Emerson to shatter. “But… what’s going to be in the papers-”
“What’s that?” Emerson asked, a tight frown signaling that he knew what it was.
“-is that we may not have gotten the person who killed Kevin Gentry.”
“It could still be that Austin killed Gentry.” The hollow, mechanical way Emerson said it didn’t sound like a man convinced. He pointed to Frank and Jose.
“Set up a task force.”
“What?” Frank asked.
“Set up a task force,” Emerson repeated, his voice suddenly brisk, energy returning with the prospect of bureaucratic ass-covering.
When in worry or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.
“Not us,” Frank said.
“What?”
“He said, ‘Not us,’ ” Jose repeated. “You get a crowd running all over the place, crossing each other’s tracks. Contradicting each other in public. A real cluster-fuck.”
“But the media…”
“Media’s going to be on this any way you cut it,” Frank said. “You form a task force and you just give the media a bigger target to home in on.”
Clearly unhappy, Emerson shook his head and sat seeing nothing ahead but trouble.
Frank interrupted. “We got to look into the Gentry case.”
“Yes.”
“We could use some help… some manageable help.”
“Bodies?”
“One’ll do.”
“Who? You want Milton?”
Frank and Jose shook their heads in unison.
“Rather have a fresh look,” Jose said.
“Then who?”
“Janowitz isn’t real busy.”
A man thinking about the heat this’s going to bring,” Jose said outside Emerson’s office.
“And thinking,” Frank came back, “about how to pass the heat on down to us.”
Jose shrugged. “What’s new? How about call Bouchard? Give him a heads-up.”
Ugly, ugly, ugly.” Frank looked at the building.
FBI headquarters hulked over Pennsylvania Avenue, taking up the block between Ninth and Tenth Streets. Like dresser drawers left carelessly open, the top floors jutted out over the nine stories below. In a snit over the naming of the building after J. Edgar Hoover, Congress had refused to pay for the granite facing called for in the original design. And so, precise rows of anchor points punctuated the dirty yellow poured-concrete walls, looking like bullet holes from the machine gun of a drive-by shooter.
“You should have gone into architecture,” Jose said.
“Rather be in demolition.”
Robin Bouchard stood just inside the Tenth Street entrance, near the visitor sign-in desk. He was a stocky, muscular man, and his Mediterranean heritage was marked by an olive complexion and coal-black hair nicely silvering at the temples.
“Welcome to the Ministry of Truth, Justice, and the American Way.” Bouchard rolled it out in a baritone mellowed with traces of Cajun. He handed Frank and Jose visitor badges and escorted them past the sign-in desk toward an escalator bank.
“I feel like a priest or a proctologist. Only time you guys come through the door, you’re bringing trouble.”
Jose grunted. “Didn’t want to come empty-handed.”
The short escalator ride to the third floor gave them a look into the fishbowl that was the lab for DNA and materials. Bouchard led them down a long corridor decorated with movie posters from 1950s G-men films, charts and maps, and large iconic photographs of the FBI director, Louis Freeh, and the attorney general, John Ashcroft.
“You guys don’t mind… when you said it was the Gentry case, I passed it upstairs.” Bouchard said. “Brian Atkins wants to see you.”
“The Brian Atkins?” Jose asked. “We’re honored.”
“He want to offer us a job?” Frank asked. “We’ll take the Honolulu Field Office.”
“He didn’t tell me. I sent him an e-mail, said you’d be coming over for a fill-in on Hodges and Gentry. His secretary called down with a ‘Be there.’ I don’t ask questions.” Bouchard motioned to the elevators.
Brian Atkins’s corner office was only four floors above the DNA lab, but another world away. Large windows framed views of the Capitol, the old post office, and, in the distance, the Potomac and the control tower at Reagan National. The deep-pile blue carpeting, the mahogany desk and bookcases, the antique conference table with its chairs upholstered in silk brocade-all put the office near the top of the heap. A place where voices were always subdued and neckties carefully dimpled and pulled snug against starched white collars.
Atkins, a man in his late fifties, had the casual grace and slender build of a sailor. A
bachelor, he frequently showed up in the style-section coverage of Washington’s black-tie galas. Silver hair, square jaw, and windburnt tan face.
He sat at the head of the conference table, Frank and Bouchard to his left, Jose to his right.
“Robin tells me Gentry’s open again.”
It came with a hint of Down East to it, a John Kennedy brogue-something to do with sea, sails, and salt air.
An assistant in a tailored dark blue suit brought in coffee. Atkins poured and passed around cups that Frank thought were Limoges or a pretty good imitation.
“How’d we get so lucky?” Atkins asked.
He sat silently, attentive, sipping coffee as Frank and Jose summarized Calkins’s findings. When they were finished he smiled a thank you.
“I wanted to hear this from you. I’ve got a personal interest in the Gentry case. Kevin Gentry was a great help to us when I was at WFO.” Atkins pronounced it “wif-oh”-Washington Field Office, the separate and subordinate FBI unit that did the Bureau’s work in the District of Columbia.
“Juan Brooks.” Jose filled in the silence.
Atkins got a tight, modest smile, the way a classy quarterback might smile when reminded of a winning touchdown pass in the last minutes of the Super Bowl.
“We busted Juan Brooks,” he said. “It was a team effort. While Malcolm Burridge was mayor, he did everything he could to keep the Bureau off Brooks’s back.”
“There were family connections,” Jose said. “Burridge’s daddy and Brooks’s daddy.”
Atkins’s brow furrowed. “I didn’t know that,” he said with a nod of appreciation. “Burridge was a problem. But then, Congressman Rhinelander and Kevin Gentry, who was his staff director at the time, came on the scene. Rhinelander had just taken over as subcommittee chairman and was looking for an issue.”
“Crime in the District,” Frank said.
Atkins smiled. “A rich social laboratory for any brave or foolish reformer, the District is. Anyway, Rhinelander and Gentry put the squeeze on Burridge. Burridge folded, and we finally bagged Brooks.”
Frank and Jose exchanged glances.
“Were you working with Mr. Gentry when he was killed?” Jose asked.
“No,” Atkins said regretfully. “By that time, they’d moved me up here”-he waved a hand to take in the office-“where I spend most of my time flying that desk. I’ve stayed in contact with Rhinelander. We talk occasionally. Kevin’s death hit him hard. I’d hoped that Frederick could put this behind him when the case was closed. Now…” Atkins let it trail off.
“And now Skeeter Hodges,” Frank said.
“Ah, yes,” Atkins said. “Same weapon, two years apart. Maybe the same shooter. Maybe not.” He looked at Jose and Frank. “You guys worked out a road map?”
Frank shook his head. “No maps yet. More like a compass direction.”
Atkins nodded. Something on his desk gave a chirping sound. He listened, and when the sound came again, he stood, signaling an end to the session. He offered his hand to Jose, then to Frank. “Keep me in the loop,” he told them, “anything we can do…” He smiled wistfully. “We all have our jobs to do in this, but I envy you two. Happiest years of my life were working the street.”
Never fails, does it?” Jose asked as he started the car.
“What?”
“Oh, guys who’ve worked their butts off to get off the street and get into a big office telling you how much they miss the street.”
That evening, Frank had a message on his answering machine from John McDonnell at Olsson’s. The message, like McDonnell, was spare and abrupt. A book had come in, McDonnell was holding it for him.
John McDonnell, round-faced and in his seventies, leaned forward in the scarred wooden chair. His deep blue eyes and rimless bifocals gave him a priestly, bemused look-a beneficence conferred by a lifetime spent with books. Peering into the tiny green screen of an ancient Kaypro computer, he pecked at the keyboard.
Frank saw the screen flicker, but McDonnell’s somber expression didn’t change. Books surrounded him: books stacked on either side of the Kaypro, books on floor-to-ceiling shelves around him, three books in his lap.
Olsson’s Books amp; Records, like McDonnell, was a cherished Georgetown landmark. A place where little old ladies could bring their dogs in. Only two windows wide, it had fronted Wisconsin Avenue for at least twenty years. Inside, the store extended back beyond sight. Immediately through the narrow door, an island of literary trade paperbacks. To the right of the island, a Ritz camera booth; to the left, three registers framed by racks of mass-market paperbacks. Farther on, the music section, with CDs, cassettes, and a curling black-and-white poster of Johnny Cash. The serious books were at the rear, where McDonnell and his Kaypro constantly inventoried the shop’s backlist.
Foreclosure was in the air. Taxes go up. Leases run out. The chains open on every corner. An end of what had been. And what would be no more.
“Evening, John.”
McDonnell didn’t look up right away. He glanced at the computer screen, then opened a book in his lap and began easing an art gum eraser over the price penciled inside. That done, he closed the cover and looked up at Frank. The book, Frank saw, was Larteguy’s The Centurions.
“First British edition, the Xan Fielding translation,” McDonnell said, fingertips caressing the dust jacket. He lifted the book, and the way he did it made Frank think of a priest offering the cup in communion. McDonnell held out the book, looking at it sadly.
“Here.”
“How much?”
McDonnell shook his head. “Here. Take it.”
“I can’t. How much?”
McDonnell looked at Frank, then at the book, then back to Frank.
“You already have The Praetorians.” McDonnell thrust the book closer to Frank. “Please.”
Frank took it. Tight binding. Only the slightest shelf wear at the jacket edges.
“I can’t.”
McDonnell had dropped his hand back into his lap. “Make a donation to the Salvation Army.”
Frank thought about putting the book down on the stack by the Kaypro, then thought better of it.
“Thanks,” he said. He felt uncomfortable. As if he’d witnessed a personal tragedy and knew he ought to say something comforting but couldn’t find the words.
McDonnell broke the silence. “Haven’t seen your dad.”
“Moved back to the country.”
McDonnell nodded approvingly.
On impulse, Frank asked, “What’s the deal on Frederick Rhinelander?”
A woman came by, paused to browse over the books by the computer, and moved on. McDonnell watched her walk away, then looked up at Frank.
“Three-term congressman. Republican. New Hampshire.” McDonnell recited the basics.
Like somebody had flipped a memory switch.
“Personals?”
“Personal?… A piss-ant.” McDonnell said it dispassionately, without a trace of rancor. “All the nightmare insecurities of a little man who’s got a lot of money he didn’t earn.”
“Piss-ant? A member of Congress?”
McDonnell smiled, shrugged, and went back to his inventory.
Frank held up The Centurions. “Thanks.”
“You’re still missing Yellow Fever,” McDonnell said, eyes on the computer screen.
“You look for it?”
“Yes. But time’s running out.”
“And I pay.”
“Sure.”
“Closing a bookstore must be a lot like going to the gallows,” Frank said. It had popped into his head and out of his mouth.
McDonnell, eyes still on the computer screen, gave no sign he’d heard.
Frank hesitated, and turned to leave. Then he heard McDonnell behind him.
“Life’s pleasant, Frank. Death’s peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.”
Frank turned back.
McDonnell looked up from the computer and smiled a benediction.
&
nbsp; ELEVEN
Milton, a white guy with a graying brush-cut, wore jeans and a khaki shirt. Yellow-lens shooting glasses and a pair of sound-suppressing earmuffs around his neck accented his high cheekbones and gave him the lean look of a hunter, which he had been once.
He sat on the bench between Frank and Jose, the Gentry case folder open in his lap. On the firing line, ten or so feet away, a single plainclothes-a female officer-practiced slow fire at a silhouette target. The peppery nitro odor of gunpowder hung in the air.
Milton ran his hand over the jacket. He looked at Jose, then Frank. “You say ballistics connect Gentry and Skeeter?”
Frank nodded.
“And Calkins did the analysis?”
“Yes.”
Milton’s eyes shifted into the distance, as he worked to pull together the implications of what Frank and Jose were saying.
“Tell us about your snitch, Milt.”
“In so many words, the guy told me that Zelmer Austin got his head fucked up and decided to bag a honkie. He came back that night and told his woman he’d done it. Shot a guy at the Capitol South station.”
“That’s it?”
“Look,” Milton said. “You guys know how it is… It’s a cold day in hell when a snitch comes to you with the whole story. All’s you get are little pieces. This was this asshole’s little piece. It wasn’t the only piece.”
“He say how he knew?”
“Said he got it from Austin’s woman.”
“You check?”
“We couldn’t find her. You know how these bitches are…” Milton turned to Frank, then Jose, seeking agreement.
Milton got a look as if things were crumbling inside him. He was silent for a long time, staring at the jacket. “I got a goddamn ulcer from that case. Everybody from the mayor on down was on my ass. Fucking Emerson was over me like flies on a manure pile.”
“We remember,” Frank said.
Milton looked at Frank. “I guess it’s open again.”
“Yeah,” Jose said.
Giving no sign he’d heard Jose, Milton watched the shooter on the firing line squeeze off another round. “Same gun…” he whispered to himself. “Gentry and Skeeter Hodges.”
A Murder of Justice Page 8
