The Survivors

by Robert Palmer

  “Scott Glass was with me.”

  “All night?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  I noticed a tick of hesitation as she wondered if I was telling the truth. “Why the hotel instead of going home?”

  “When we left Bowles’s place, somebody tried to run us off the road. We got away, but I didn’t want them tracking us down.”

  The tick had grown to open skepticism. “Look,” I said, “if you want proof, check out the missing bumper on my car. I can take you to it in a field outside Middleburg.”

  “All right. Don’t blow a gasket. So why would somebody try to run you off the road?”

  “We’ve been asking a lot of questions, and people haven’t been happy about that. But it’s more than that, real facts now. I went through a procedure to help with my memory. Eye movement therapy. Scottie did the same thing. We both started to remember things about the night he got shot. There was somebody else in the house. Whoever it was went outside with my mother when she shot herself, and I’m certain that person shot Scottie and my brothers.”

  “An unknown killer?” she said. “That idea just comes to you after so long?”

  “The way everyone assumed it happened—that never seemed right. Now I remember enough to say so. Scottie told Bowles and Markaris some of what we’d figured out. I don’t know who else they might have told.”

  She chewed her lip. “This is quite a detour. And of course there’s no way to check these magical memories of yours.”

  I knew the sarcasm was just her way of probing, but it still made me angry. “You can talk to the psychologist we worked with, Dr. Evelyn Rubin from Baltimore. Beyond that, if you don’t want to believe me, that’s your problem.”

  She glanced over my shoulder and stiffened. “I think you ought to keep the whole memory thing quiet for now.” She smiled, way too cheerfully. “Sir, this is Doctor Henderson.”

  I turned and almost bumped into Sheldon Arles. “Anything?” he said to Weston, not acknowledging me at all.

  “He claims he and Scott Glass were together last night.”

  “That’s convenient,” Arles said.

  “I’ll check it out,” Weston replied.

  “Where is Glass now?” Arles said.

  “Dr. Henderson’s not sure. I’ll run Glass down by the end of the day,” Weston said.

  Cade was standing beside Arles with the same right-leg-forward, hip-thrust-out posture. Modeling. Children often mimic their parents that way. “You haven’t done much good finding Glass yet,” he said.

  Don’t take the bait, Jamie, I thought.

  “That’s as much your fault as mine,” she said.

  “Dammit, both of you be quiet,” Arles cut in.

  For the first time, he looked at me. His eyes were empty, as if I wasn’t important enough to generate any emotion. “Why did you go see Ned Bowles last night?”

  “You know about my family?” I said.

  He gave Weston a cold glance. “As of this morning, I do.”

  “I talked to Bowles about my mother’s work for Braeder, and why she lost her job.”

  “Did you get the answers you were after?” Arles said.

  “Some of them.”

  His lip curled; so did Cade’s. They thought I was being cute.

  “What about Markaris?” Cade said.

  “He was there when Bowles talked to us, but Markaris was just the facilitator. He came down to the road to see us off. Then he headed for the party.”

  Arles’s lip curled again, this time closer to a smile. “Only Markaris never made it back to the party. That means you and Glass were the last people to see him alive.”

  “No, sir. That would be the person who killed him.”

  His eyebrows lifted a millimeter. “Ned Bowles said you had a smart mouth.” Cade was the only one who laughed.

  Down the way, the boat had pulled up to the edge of the Basin. Arles twitched his head. “Cade, with me. Weston, we’ll need you too.” He started to walk away, with Cade matching him stride for stride.

  “Can I leave?” I called.

  Arles waved as if he were flicking away a bug. “Let Weston know where you’ll be.”

  Jamie came with me back up the slope to the visitors’ center. “You think you can try to track down the SUV that took a run at us last night?” I said. “It was a Ford—Explorer or maybe bigger, an Expedition. Black or dark gray. There was a six and an eight in the license.”

  She took out a pad and made a few notes. “State?”

  I hadn’t thought about that. “Virginia, probably.”

  “Probably? Try harder.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not sure.”

  “I’ll have them run Virginia, Maryland, and DC, but I won’t promise much. There could be ten names on the list or a thousand.”

  “Weston, hurry it up!” Cade yelled.

  “Pathetic little mama’s boy,” she muttered. To me she said, “Keep your phone on, OK?”

  “I’ll do that. And thanks for keeping quiet about me knowing where Scottie is.”

  “Things are moving fast now, and that’s good unless somebody gets steamrolled along the way.” All the banter was gone from her voice. “Anyway, I’m counting on you to bring him to me if it’s necessary.”

  Arles was waving to her. She gave a harried sigh and jogged toward where he and Cade were waiting.

  I walked slowly back to my car. Markaris hadn’t come here in the middle of the night for a stroll. He must have been meeting someone. South across the Potomac I could see the hotel towers of Crystal City. It was no more than two miles. Could Scottie have gotten here, met Markaris, and gotten back in time to catch me in my swan dive off the Metro platform? Easily. And Scottie had Markaris’s phone number, courtesy of the business cards he’d given us.

  I looked back at Weston. She stood in a tight huddle with the two men, watching as Markaris’s body was lifted out of the boat. They all knelt around it.

  If I were an FBI agent, one thing I’d be sure to do is run a check on Markaris’s phone records to see if anyone called him last night. If Weston hadn’t ordered that already, she would. I hoped she wouldn’t turn up a call from the Castle Inn or any phone in Crystal City. And I hoped to hell Scottie remembered every step he’d taken last night when he went out.

  My phone buzzed. It was a text from Weston. I could see her through the trees, alone with the body. I didn’t know where Cade and Arles had gone. The message was long for a text:

  Arles gave Cade and me the go-ahead to look into your mother’s death. Any connection with Markaris we can find. Sit by your phone. Lucky you—got the whole FBI behind you now.

  Fabulous, I thought. Just what I need.

  FORTY

  After I left the Tidal Basin, I stopped at a deli near Farragut Square for a sandwich. Then I went home. With a shower and change of clothes, I felt more like myself. I sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and sorting the facts. Time and again I thought of Howard Markaris’s body flopping into the boat like the catch of the day. How much of that was my fault? I tried not to brood about it, without much luck.

  My phone rang at a quarter to five. It was Weston. “I need to see you and Glass. I’ve got some things I want you to look over. Can you come to my office?”

  “I don’t want to be a pain, but—”

  “Of course you don’t,” she said.

  “Scottie’s in one of his moods today. Could we make it a neutral spot?”

  She groaned. “Sure—and you are a pain. How about the coffee shop where we met the other day? That way I won’t have to lug this stuff so far.”

  I agreed, and we set a time of five thirty.

  Mrs. Rogansky answered the phone at Scottie’s place. She had to coax him to get on the line. “What?” was all he said.

  He sounded so grouchy, I decided not to tell him about Weston. “There’s something I need to show you. I’ll pick you up in a few minutes.” I clicked my phone off before he could start an argument.
>
  He was waiting outside when I pulled up. He’d changed into jeans and a white T-shirt and had a fresh baseball cap—Toronto Blue Jays—pulled low over his eyes. For once, he didn’t have his backpack. “Mrs. Rogansky’s really mad at me,” he said. “I left a mess of papers in the living room. What do you need to show me?”

  “First, Markaris.” I told him about my meeting with Weston at the Tidal Basin, and I watched him to see if there was any indication this wasn’t all news to him. He just listened quietly.

  “There’s nobody around that part of town late at night,” he said. “It’s a good spot not to be seen.”

  “It was nice out last evening. Some tourist might have been out for a walk; homeless people sometimes camp out around there.”

  He nodded, not showing a flicker of nervousness.

  The coffee shop was up ahead. Since it was Sunday, there was plenty of parking. I could see Weston through the front window. Scottie was already out of the car before he spotted her. He backpedaled up the sidewalk. “What the hell is going on?”

  I blocked his way. “You have to meet her sometime, and she agreed to come here, not her office. She says she’s got something to show us.” He tried to edge around me. “You can take the chair by the door. Quick getaway.”

  Weston saw us and gave one of her high-beam smiles. “Come on,” I said. “How can you resist that?”

  “Very easily,” he muttered, but he came along anyway.

  Weston stood up to shake his hand. “Mr. Glass, were you anywhere near the Tidal Basin early this morning, say around one o’clock?”

  “No,” he said with a mix of fear and defiance.

  “Great. Then it’s good to finally meet you—without a gun in your hand.”

  He shrugged. “I guess so. What’s all this stuff?” There were three thick binders on the table and a file box.

  Weston said, “I phoned the Montgomery County Police Department, and they tracked down one of the detectives who worked the shootings—your shooting. His name’s Quintero. He’s head of some gang task force now, a lieutenant, and he wasn’t too happy to hear from me on a holiday weekend. But I charmed him into helping out. He couriered over the case files. That’s what the three binders are.”

  I looked in the box and saw some foolscap pads and packets of index cards. “Those are Quintero’s personal notes from the case,” she said.

  “They kept all this for twenty-five years?” I said.

  “We got lucky there,” she said. “When they closed the case, Quintero had all the files put in permanent storage so they wouldn’t be destroyed. He remembered the investigation. There was no suicide note; a mother shot her own kids in the face. It never sat right with him. Some of the witnesses felt the same way. One in particular. She swore Denise Oakes never would have harmed her own children.”

  “Who was that?” Scottie said.

  “Your mother,” Weston answered levelly. “She made quite an impression on Quintero.”

  Scottie stared back at her and slipped into his chair. Weston nodded for me to sit, too.

  “I want to go over all of this with you,” she said. “We’re looking for any intersect between Markaris’s death and what happened with your family.” She lifted a folder from under her chair. “But first there’s something else. You started this whole thing by going after Eric Russo because of a phone call that was made to his house on the night of the shootings. Russo admits now that he talked to Cal’s mother that night.”

  Scottie snorted. “I knew it. He’s been lying about everything.”

  Weston was good at maintaining her calm. “Mr. Russo had no obligation to talk to you or to tell you the truth if he did.”

  “What did my mother talk to him about?” I said.

  “He can’t remember the specifics. She threatened Russo over some Bar Association complaint she’d filed. She wanted to set up a meeting with him and Ned Bowles. Russo kept on with her for a while. She was pretty upset. Eventually he’d had enough and hung up on her.”

  Scottie said, “Then he came to the house—”

  “No, he didn’t,” Weston said flatly. “After Russo got pulled from the US Attorney’s job, he did some checking in his own files. He wasn’t happy losing out on that, and he wanted to prove he hadn’t done anything wrong. He thought he had to travel that week to see a client in Atlanta. He checked his date book from that year, and he was right.”

  She flipped the folder open and set a photocopy between us. “That’s a receipt for an airline ticket. Russo flew to Georgia that night, a seven fifty flight from National Airport. He left his house in Annapolis right after talking to Cal’s mother. He couldn’t have been in Damascus.”

  “We’re supposed to believe this?” Scottie said. “A receipt just appears after twenty-five years?”

  “I work with law firms a lot, Mr. Glass,” Weston said. “Those people are the original hoarders. If it’s paper, they keep it. Especially if it involves money, and Russo got reimbursed for the cost of the ticket.”

  “You’ll check with the airlines?” I said.

  “Already on it,” she said.

  There was a handwritten note in the folder—crabbed, backhanded writing made with a black fountain pen. It explained where the receipt had come from, right down to the file cabinet and drawer.

  Scottie said, “Russo wrote this?”

  “No,” she said. “His assistant, Griffin O’Shea, dropped that off at my office a couple of hours ago.”

  “You’re fools if you believe that stuff.” Scottie tossed the note down and looked around. “I need to go to the bathroom.”

  I waited for him to walk away. “Sorry about that.”

  Weston rolled her eyes and shrugged. She was already reaching for one of the binders so she could get to work.

  “I’m going to get some coffee. Would you like a cup? Hazelnut, right?”

  “That’s sweet you remember,” she said. And she let me pay for it this time.

  I hung around the counter until Scottie came back. “Would you like something?” I said.

  “No,” he said without looking at me.

  I lightly grabbed his wrist. “You don’t have to agree with her, but arguing every step isn’t going to help. Go along, and I’ll bet we learn something.”

  He stared hard at me for about ten seconds. “Get me a Mountain Dew.”

  Back at the table, Scottie and I took the other two binders and started reading. First up in mine were my parents’ telephone and bank account records, the same things Scottie and I had already looked over. He read a few pages in his binder then flipped through randomly.

  “We’ve looked at all this before,” he said.

  “Not all of it,” I said. “The cops checked out my parent’s finances. I’ve got some things here about that lawsuit against my father.” I turned the book to show him.

  He glanced at it and thumped his own book closed. “Tell me about Markaris. What did he do between the time we left Bowles’s place and when he got killed?”

  “We don’t know yet,” Weston said.

  “Did he make any phone calls?” he said.

  “His phone wasn’t on him. We’re checking with his carrier now for any calls.”

  “Did you get anything from that partial license plate I gave you?” I said.

  She smiled pleasantly, looking from one to the other of us. “Still checking. It’s Labor Day weekend. There’s not a lot of help around.”

  “Markaris was hit with a rock?” Scottie said.

  “A rock or something like it,” she said. “We haven’t found—”

  “Hit here?” He poked her in the temple.

  If someone had done that to me, I would have been damned annoyed. Weston took it in stride. “A little farther forward.” She tapped her right eye. “We’ll know more when the autopsy is completed.”

  “Maybe,” Scottie said. “But the rest of this is stupid. I don’t have the original autopsy reports in this binder. I’ll bet you don’t either. These
files are useless. The cops never did a thing in the original investigation.”

  Weston and I flipped through our binders, and he was right about the autopsies. “I’ll ask Quintero why they’re not here,” Weston said. “He’s coming in Tuesday to meet with me. Maybe it’s something to do with their filing system.”

  “And now we’re through playing twenty questions,” I said. “Let’s get back to work.”

  That succeeded for about two minutes. Scottie opened his binder and drummed his fingers on the table and slurped his already empty Mountain Dew. He slapped the binder closed. “Talking to Quintero might help, but this is nothing more than shuffling papers.”

  “There could be some reference to Markaris,” I said.

  “Let me know if you find it,” he said. “I’m going home. At least I can use my computer there. I might turn up something on him.”

  I glanced at Weston. It was her call. “I promised my boss I’d find you today,” she said. “If I let you leave, are you going to run?”

  “I told you, I’m just going home.”

  She looked at him long enough to make him squirm. “Pick up the phone when I call. Don’t make me come looking for you.”

  “Whatever,” he said, and he headed for the door.

  I followed him outside. “Do you want a ride?”

  “I know how to take a cab.”

  “I’m sure you do,” I said. “What’s the matter with you—acting like that with Weston? She’s trying to help us.”

  “I can’t stand it anymore. Didn’t you see how she kept staring at me? And smiling?”

  “She was being polite.”

  “That’s being polite? You can have all of that you want.”

  He headed for Pennsylvania Avenue, where he’d have the best chance of catching a taxi on a Sunday evening.

  “Stay near the phone,” I yelled after him.

  “Right,” he mumbled.

  When I got back to her, Weston had dumped the box out on the table and was sifting through the pads and note cards. “Does he act that way around everybody or am I special?”

  “He forgot his happy pills today. Don’t take it personally.”

  “Personally? Never.”