Cold Frame

by P. T. Deutermann

  She blinked. “Meaning?”

  “OCME’s leaning toward poison.”

  This time she definitely reacted. Then she changed the subject. “Do you know how many federal counterterrorism offices there are here in D.C.?”

  “I’m guessing more than one?”

  “Eighty-five in the public domain, by which I mean the ones funded and authorized by the best Congress money can buy. There are some others that are neither funded nor authorized by any agency that’ll admit to it. Ever since nine-eleven, counterterrorism has come a long way from just a few offices in the Bureau, the Agency, and the Pentagon. Now every federal agency in town has a CT office. The Social Security Administration, Health and Human Services, Labor, Agriculture, the Treasury, the fucking Post Office—you name it, they’re all into the CT game, and, all of a sudden, even the meter maids are carrying.”

  “You guys must be tripping over each other,” he said.

  “Hourly,” she said.

  “Is the country that much safer?”

  “Depends on what you think the threat is,” she said. “I work for people who think the real threat has morphed.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Instead of bearded hajjis wearing bedsheet bombs, think American Muslim converts scheming on Twitter. Think a whole generation of kids who’ve been diagnosed as ADD, ADHD, OCD, LD, and chugging down Ritalin and other mind-altering substances since they were five. Kids who’ve spent more time staring at an electronic device than they have sleeping and eating. Or, on the other side of the spectrum, think strong, extremely fit and aggressive young men who have spent three tours on the moon called Afghanistan, killing men, women, and children, with robots as accomplices. Now they’re back, can’t find a job, and they’re a little twitchy. Or, try pizza-faced, gated-community nerds who stay up all night hacking into nuclear power stations and turning off the reactor-cooling water pumps—for fun, giggles, and bragging rights.”

  “I didn’t hear Al Qaeda in all that.”

  “Oh, they’re still out there and they’re still blowing shit up, but they’ve dispersed their cells to make themselves smaller targets. Makes them even more dangerous, in some people’s opinion, kind of like a cancer that’s metastasizing. They are absolutely not defeated, as some of our more disingenuous politicians would have you believe. But: they are at least being engaged by the folks at JSOC and other unconventional agencies. This new breed, the homegrown breed? We’re still circling that problem, and what we’re seeing is not comforting. Not to mention the bleeding open sore that we call our border with Mexico.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Gotta ask: who’s ‘we’?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “R-i-i-ght,” he said. “And you’re telling me all this, why, again?”

  “Basically, so that you’ll forget all about the past week. Go back to being a Weird Harold down in the Briar Patch. Do what the computer geeks call a system-restore to, oh, I don’t know, ten days ago? Resume your workouts and your dedication to not getting involved with women because they are so very dangerous.”

  “Your being in my house at two in the morning kinda proves my point, don’t you think?”

  “Your life must be very boring, Detective Sergeant, although the deeper I get into the world of CT, I can see where boring could have its appeal.”

  “Somehow I doubt that,” Av said. “Ellen Whiting. I think you’re either Bureau or Agency.”

  She gave him a speculative smile. “I’ll be going now,” she said. “We won’t meet again.”

  “Fine by me,” he said. “Leave the key, would you?”

  She fished in her pocket and put a key down on the coffee table. Then she got up and headed for the front door.

  “Hey?” he said. “What do I do with the autopsy report that OCME’s gonna send us?”

  “Nothing, because they’ll be sending it to me,” she said, as she went out the door and closed it behind her.

  He waited for a minute, then picked up the key and went to the door. He opened it and tried the key. It didn’t work. It didn’t even go into the lock.

  * * *

  On Monday he got up, put on his running gear, and went out front. He’d decided to walk today. Maybe jog a little, but mostly just get some fresh air into his system and squeeze the residual alcohol out.

  The platinum blonde wasn’t in evidence. Can’t imagine why, he thought, although he was already missing her stretching routine. He warmed up as usual and then just started walking. Bored in fifteen minutes he took it up into route pace. Much better. The serious runners still went by him with sympathetic expressions. He must be leaving an alcohol vapor trail, he thought. He kept a wary eye out for cowboy contractors in sunglasses. At one point he passed Rue Waltham, who waved delicate fingers at him as she ran by in the company of two military guys, who seemed to be competing for her attention.

  He got back an hour later. The most exciting thing he’d seen was a sideswipe collision between a marine runner and a cycling Nazi, which had resulted in the trash-talking cyclist being thrown into the canal, along with his bike. Av, who’d had his own share of near misses with tunnel-visioned cyclists coming up behind him like they owned the towpath, had thought that only fair. He showered and shaved, and then made coffee. He took it up to the roof to enjoy late sunrise and to look down with sympathy at all the commuters. At nine-thirty his cell went off. It was Precious.

  “Where are you, Detective Sergeant?”

  “Suspended, last I heard,” he said.

  “Not anymore. Right now you’re late for work. Make my day: get your average ass back in here.”

  His badge and creds were waiting for him when he got to MPD headquarters. The officers gave him a funny look when he scooped them up and then presented them so he could then go through the X-ray machine. Up in the office, Howie greeted him with undisguised glee and handed over Av’s Glock and the spare mags.

  “Welcome back, partner,” he said. “All us snuffies want to know: how’d you manage this?”

  Wong and Miz Brown were having coffee at the conference table, so Av grabbed his usual three-paper-cup rig and sat down with the rest of the crew. He told them about his midnight visitor.

  “Golly gee,” Howie declared. “Your own personal fairy godmother, complete with a happy ending.”

  “Nice and neat, isn’t it,” Av agreed. “Yesterday I was as good as fired. Today, everything’s cool; welcome back, Kotter. No hard feelings, we hope.”

  “All this from some B & E artist claiming to be a fed?” Wong said. “She good-looking?”

  They all laughed.

  “Detective Sergeant Smith?” Precious called from the doorway. “It seems we have an appointment with Assistant Chief Taylor.”

  “We do?” Av said.

  “Now would be nice,” she said. “Do not bring that coffee.”

  They went upstairs to the assistant chief’s office. Three civilian aides and one uniform occupied desks in the outer office. None of the aides would even look at them. Happy Taylor made them wait for fifteen minutes before admitting them into his presence, where he proceeded to ignore Precious and tell Av that he remained firmly on the assistant chief’s notorious list, and that no matter how he had managed to evade suspension, it was only a matter of time, et cetera, et cetera. Av took the opportunity to remain silent, especially after a gentle kick in the ankle from Precious.

  As they were leaving, Taylor put two fingers to his eyes and then pointed them at Av, which he assumed was Hollywood for: I’m watching you. Once in the outer office, with Precious walking ahead, one of the aides actually did make eye contact with Av, who put two fingers to his eyes and then pointed one of them at his own temple and made a circular motion. The aide seemed to be having trouble keeping his composure as they left the office.

  Back downstairs, Precious told him that Wong and Miz Brown had a homicide-related interview over at the Sixth and suggested that Av go along to watch. Av figured this had more to do with getting
him out of the building for a few hours than furthering his professional education. He was curious, though.

  * * *

  Carl Mandeville was fuming at his desk in the EEOB. On Saturday morning he’d been tipped off by a committee staffer friend in the Senate that three members of the DMX had gone to a meeting with Senator Harris, the chairman of the select committee on intelligence and counterterrorism. Subject unknown, principals only, no horse-holders in the room. Mandeville could guess the subject, but the surprise had been that there were more traitors on the committee than he had suspected. McGavin, Logan, and Wheatley were the three weaklings he’d known about. He’d taken care of McGavin, so why had three members of the DMX shown up to meet with his nemesis? The third man was Howard West, deputy undersecretary for counterterrorism at the Energy Department. Why the hell was Energy even on the DMX? he wondered, then remembered: DOE was responsible for the safe operation of all the nuclear power plants. The target’s rep, Mandeville thought caustically. One would think that, of anybody on the committee, the guy responsible for protecting the prime terrorist targets in the country would be in support of DMX, and yet here he was, consorting with the enemy.

  He’d always assumed he had three bad apples on the DMX, senior government officials who went through the motions and then scurried around, behind his back, trying to take down the program. Now he wondered how many more two-faced bastards there were, and, more importantly, was Senator Harris about to make a move? There were twelve statutory members of the DMX. They could not vote themselves out of existence, so a procedural mutiny wasn’t his problem. But if a third of them, or more, appeared before Harris’s committee in some prestaged hearing and declared a vote of no confidence in the entire concept, that would be fatal.

  This latest betrayal posed another problem: he had already planned out something for Hilary Logan that would be even more unconventional than McGavin. His strategy had been to take out two of them and then let the others seize upon the notion that people who screwed with the DMX could face grave consequences. He’d take care of Wheatley, too, if necessary, although knowing the man, he was pretty sure it would not be necessary. But four of them? That would be too much. That was serial-killer territory.

  He swiveled around in his chair and looked out the large window at his view down Independence Avenue. There was only one other alternative: take them all out, and then start over. He felt a rush of excitement. It could be done. Whenever the DMX met the entire floor was almost hermetically sealed for security purposes to keep everything and everybody out. Those same arrangements could be made to hold everybody in, too.

  Blame it on the terrorists. Proclaim that the DMX had been so effective and such a deterrent to the bad guys that they’d attacked it. That would neutralize Harris and his allies, and then allow him to repopulate the DMX with people he could trust to carry this mortal fight to the enemy as only the program could.

  He smiled. He amazed himself sometimes. The scale of it! Why the hell not?

  * * *

  Av and Howie took their seats in the darkened room behind a one-way glass pane. The interview room had a single, rectangular table and four chairs. One for the perp, one for his lawyer on one side, and two for the detectives on the other side. There was audiovisual equipment high up on a shelf overlooking the entire room. The interviewee in question was a gangbanger from an Anacostia neighborhood so riven with drug and gang violence that it had once been one of the unofficial no-go zones within the MPD. Anacostia had become a lot safer since those days, but the area, just east of the Anacostia River, could not shake its rep as an urban free-fire zone. The banger’s name was Lavon Jerome Tiles, otherwise known as “Gooey” Tiles. He’d been found, gun in hand, stoned out of his mind in an alley, where he was sitting on the still-warm corpse of another gangbanger. When asked why he was sitting on a dead body, Gooey stated that he’d been cold. No longer in the loving grip of his opiate of choice, Gooey now refused to say anything and was demanding his public defender.

  Said public defender had come and gone. He’d told Gooey in no uncertain terms that he was to pay strict attention to that “remain silent” part of the Miranda warning, and since he wasn’t going to say anything, the lawyer could then leave to tend to his three other charges, who were actually going to be in court. Gooey responded that he was down with that, no problem. That’s when the Seventh District guys had asked for Miz Brown.

  Wong Daddy and Miz Brown came into the interview room and shut the door behind them. Brown was wearing a sport coat, white shirt with tie, and dark slacks. Wong had a tent of some kind over his upper half, shiny black nylon warm-up suit pants, and size twenty-something sandals. Brown carried a leather folder filled with forms. Wong carried a yard-long piece of what looked like a two-by-six pine board. Gooey, maintaining his supercool pose, refused to look at either of them, and even yawned. He was wearing an orange jumpsuit and his wrists were handcuffed through a ring under the table. If he’d noticed the board, he gave no sign of it.

  Brown introduced himself, pointed out that the conversation was being filmed and recorded, and proceeded to read Gooey his Miranda, after which he attempted to get the suspect to sign forms acknowledging his Miranda and the bit about the filming.

  “Ain’t sayin’ shit, ain’t signin’ shit,” Gooey pronounced. “Thass it, yo.”

  Brown then spoke to the camera, asking that the record show the suspect refused to sign the admin forms. Back in the viewing room, two of the Seventh District detectives had come in to watch. Av asked one of them what the “Gooey” was all about. He was told he really didn’t want to know the answer to that. Av didn’t press it.

  “Will you please state your full name?” Brown asked.

  The suspect stared at the wall and said nothing, his expression saying, what part of shit don’t you understand?

  “Do you understand why you’re here for questioning?”

  No response. Brown stood up and began to pace on his side of the table. He cleared his throat and looked down at the floor for a moment.

  “Here we go,” Howie said in the darkroom. By now, two more guys had come in to watch.

  Brown turned to the camera and began to lecture it. “The problem here,” Brown began, “seems to be that the suspect does not appear to understand the significance of his current refusal to engage the police authorities in a meaningful discussion about the modalities of what certainly appears to be a murder committed by the suspect who stated that the reason he was found with and actually on top of the victim was that he was suffering from thermal exposure to cold, which, in all truth, wasn’t that extreme but which, admittedly, might induce a person of limited intellect to establish close physical proximity in order to make himself more comfortable following what was obviously a serious altercation, which, from the evidence at hand, probably involved the subject in the role of shooter, seeing as the gun used in the shooting was within physical proximity of the subject, who…”

  “Jesus,” Av whispered. “When’s he come up for air?”

  Howie just grinned. “He just getting started. Keep an eye on Gooey and Wong.”

  Gooey had been trying hard to pretend that nothing was going on, but the waterfall of sincerely concerned words coming from Miz Brown was making his eyes water.

  “… for the purposes of establishing a logical reconstruction of the events in question, it is of course necessary to have input from all parties to the incident whenever that is possible, however, with one party to the incident deceased, and the other indulging in a display of puerile intransigence because he believes that if he talks to the police, he will be branded as a snitch, even though there is no way anyone can know that he spoke with the police, unless, of course, the police decide to put that word out onto the street, in which case…”

  That last bit made Gooey turn his head, showing the observers that, despite his seeming nonchalant attitude, he had been listening to Brown’s barrage. Then Wong put the board down on the table with an audible clack an
d began to stare at it. As Brown droned on in sentences lasting five minutes each, Wong swiveled his massive head to look at Gooey, and then back to the board. Gooey was sitting up a little straighter in his chair, his professional slouch being undermined by whatever his own imagination was telling him about Wong and the possibilities presented by that board.

  “… evidence which includes but is not limited to the gun itself, fingerprints on the gun, gunshot residue on the hands of the subject here present, a ballistics match between the bullets that killed the deceased individual and the bullets in said gun, the time of day, the attendant meteorological conditions, and…”

  In the background, just below the threshold of Brown’s monologue, Av could now hear a keening sound. It wasn’t especially threatening, although he had heard a dog once make that sound just before a dogfight started. Wong was stroking the board now, inspecting it inch by inch and then looking over at Gooey for just a second before resuming his intense study of the board, its grain structure, its weight and heft, how well his hand could span it, how heavy it was, and then back at Gooey.

  That worthy had now picked up on the keening sound and deduced that it was coming from Wong’s direction. Miz Brown never once let up, not even to take a deep breath, but kept the torrent of words coming, one after another, all somewhat relevant to the issue at hand, but not necessarily following in any sort of logical order. The guys behind Av and Howie in the darkroom were laughing quietly as they watched the show through the one-way and saw Gooey’s increasing concern over Wong and his board.

  “I got a ten-spot sez Gooey sings within five minutes,” one of the detectives announced quietly.

  “I’ll cover that,” his partner said. “I say four minutes.”

  “… past behaviors are an important indication of the suspect’s predilection for violence and an even better indicator for future antisocial behaviors that fall into the category of extreme violence such as the case at hand, and…”

  “Yo,” Gooey said, raising his hand.