Cold Frame

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Colonel Steele said the DMX decides, the President signs, and then the big gray drones leave for faraway places. How do you feel about being part of something like this?”

  “When you hear the briefings, say, like when the CIA rep comes in and describes how a certain Paki colonel enjoys capturing Western journalists and personally sawing their heads off with a dull hacksaw while they’re tied to a chair? It gets easier with time.”

  “I can see that,” he said. “But the cop in me is so ingrained with defendant protection procedure, you know, Miranda stuff, that I’m not sure I could do that. So: why tell me?”

  She nodded, then looked around the bar. There were more people there now, but no one seemed to be paying them the slightest bit of attention, not even Eli.

  She sighed. “I probably shouldn’t have, but you remember I talked about Americans who go over to Al Qaeda or ISIS, guys like Anwar al-Awlaki?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Cases like that are one of the most sensitive aspects of DMX, because the guy we were looking at is an American. Our Constitution doesn’t allow our government to kill its own citizens, at least not without due process.”

  “Your meetings sound like due process, of a sort, anyway.”

  “And Awlaki was duly nominated, approved, found, and executed by a drone,” she said. “It wasn’t that hard a call, really: he looked like Bin Laden, lived in a cave very far from home, and helped the nine-eleven attackers. He fit the profile like a glove. But: lemme give you a what-if.”

  “Okay.”

  “What if an American citizen goes over to the enemy, and then comes back to the States clandestinely, for the purposes of conducting terrorist attacks here at home, say, starting forest fires, derailing oil trains, or causing explosions on a gas pipeline? Seen any news stories like that?”

  “All of the above,” Av said. “But I haven’t heard that these were terrorist attacks, just—bad shit happening. What’s your real question?”

  “If we knew where he was, using whatever assets which are available to the DMX agencies, and they are substantial, could we put his name on the list? And then have a sniper kill him in downtown Cleveland one day?”

  “I’d say no. You’d get your Cleveland field office to snatch him up, read him his rights, appoint him a shyster, haul his ass into federal court, and then prosecute him in a death penalty case. You’re obviously in a gray area killing people overseas, but here? Talk about some seriously bad optics.”

  She nodded. “I agree,” she said. Then she paused to sweep the barroom again. Av had the clear impression that there was another, even more interesting shoe about to drop.

  “Frankly, Detective Sergeant,” she said. “I’m getting scared.” She took a big breath and blew it out. “There. I’ve said it. I’m scared.”

  Av tried to make light of it for a moment. “You? A senior supervisory special agent at the FBI—scared?”

  “Listen carefully, Detective Sergeant: I think McGavin and Logan were not random events. I believe they were murdered.”

  Whoa, Av thought. Time the fuck out. Yes, McGavin’s death was possibly poison of some kind—the ME had implied as much. Logan? How could that be a homicide? Suicide, maybe, but—he’d witnessed it. Nobody pushed the dude in front of that car. He stepped out, all on his own.

  He studied her face. She was staring down at her ginger ale, her lips tight and her hands even tighter on that glass. He reached out and touched the back of her left hand. She started and then relaxed her grip on the glass.

  “Before you break that thing,” he said. “So: I’m listening. I assume you have a prime suspect?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Before you reveal that to me, understand that I’m duty bound to run with it. Sure that’s what you want?”

  “I don’t know what I want,” she said. “Because I’m tangentially involved. I simply don’t know what to do, and I always know what to do.”

  “Okay,” he said gently. “Start from the beginning. You’ve told me about the DMX, and I appreciate that that information is highly privileged and needs to be protected. You say you think McGavin and Logan were murdered. By whom?”

  “Carl Mandeville, executive director of the DMX.”

  Av was shocked. This was the guy Steele had warned Av about—leave town if you think he’s interested in you. “Holy shit” was all he could manage.

  “Amen to that,” she said. “I believe that the people he’s killing have privately come to the conclusion that the whole concept of the DMX is legally wrong and morally repugnant. There are—were—three of them: McGavin, Logan, and Wheatley. Maybe others, I don’t know. Apparently at the behest of certain U.S. senators, they’d begun within their respective agencies to lobby secretly for an internal review of the entire process. Basically, they want to kill the DMX, and they’re confident that such a review would do that. Why? Because nobody would be willing to get out on point defending it.”

  “Okay, and?”

  “And, Carl Mandeville is determined to prevent that. Now two of those three persons are dead.”

  Aw, shit, Av thought, again. Here it is: the mother of all tarbabies, sitting right across the table from him. Suddenly some of this recent hugger-mugger he’d been encountering was starting to make sense. That guy in the mask, for instance.

  She sighed again. “And you want to know why I’m telling you all this, right?”

  “I’m guessing it’s because you don’t have a rabbi in the Bureau?”

  “Did,” she replied. “I replaced him on the DMX. He got out on early retirement.”

  “From the Bureau?”

  “Let’s just say he was encouraged to pack it in.”

  “Ah,” Av said. “Didn’t care for the DMX, did he?”

  “I wasn’t privy to all that. He had a séance with the director one day and the next day we were doing his hail and farewell. I was selected as his successor to the DMX, probably because wiser heads ran like hell when they were asked to do it. I was called in the next morning to the executive deputy director’s office, read into the program, and that’s all I know. In terms of rank, I’m the least senior rep at the table.”

  “Are you qualified to be there?”

  “I have some credentials in the CT world, Detective,” she said stiffly. “I’ve been around, okay? Mandeville says he actually asked for me, which is bullshit, I suspect. But, yeah, it was a surprise. And now, I just had to talk to somebody.”

  “Jesus, Ellen,” Av said. “I’m not somebody, I’m a fucking nobody. I’m a has-been homicide dick. My previous lieutenant exiled me to the Briar Patch and since then he’s been trying to get me fired, as I think you will remember.”

  She rubbed her left temple with her left hand, as if her head hurt. “I think I’m going crazy,” she said.

  “Oh, gosh, I wonder why,” he said. “Given this alternative universe you work in, where eighty-five different government agencies compete to consign some crazed Muslim bastard to death-by-robot, for bragging rights? Let’s see, now: who the hell would you talk to?”

  “Okay, okay,” she said. “Obviously I’ve strayed a little too far off my reservation. I’ll take you back to your man cave now.”

  He smiled. “In your dreams, Supervisory Special Agent Ellen Whiting,” he said, leaning forward. “I’m speaking as the senior representative of the Briar Patch, now, and I must insist: tell me more.”

  “Senior?”

  “Okay, maybe as the only representative, present and accounted for? You need some help with a homicide? Maybe the four horsemen of the Briar Patch are just the guys to call.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Not at all,” Av said. “That’s the good news, Ellen Whiting: no one takes us seriously.”

  “Clearly. And?”

  “Who would see us coming.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, oh. And congratulations: you’ve just achieved formal tarbaby status.”

  “Ducky,” she said. �
�Why don’t you get brother Eli over there to fix me a real one.”

  “No,” he said. “Remember your Harley. In the meantime, I’ll gather the Briar Patch posse together and we’ll kick this around. Putting all the supersecret spooky shit aside, it’s a possible homicide. We don’t need to know anything about your precious DMX. Give me a contact phone number, then take me back to my place. Then you go home. Then get that drink.”

  She cocked her head. “I must be losing my touch,” she said. “Most guys would have said: take me back to my place, come on up, and I’ll get you whatever you need. In the way of booze.”

  He grinned at her. “I’m not most guys,” he said. “And, besides, you’re still scary. Even scarier, now that I think about it. Jesus, Special Agent.”

  “Jesus isn’t cleared for DMX,” she said.

  Av rolled his eyes. They finished their drinks and went back outside, both of them looking around for watchers. Seeing nobody obvious, they climbed aboard the bike and headed back down Wisconsin. They’d gone two blocks when a black Mercedes S500 in front of them slowed down for no apparent reason. Ellen slipped the Harley into the next lane to pass, but then had to brake for a red light. The Merc slid alongside a moment later and stopped for the light. Av glanced casually to the right and saw the Halloween mask looking right back at him.

  “Hey?” he said into his helmet mike. “Guy on the right is a tail.”

  Ellen didn’t hesitate for a second. She gunned the Harley into the intersection and right across it so fast that Av nearly fell off. She then went down to the next intersection, turned left in front of oncoming traffic and a cacophony of blaring horns, and then sped into a residential area with narrow streets made even narrower by parked cars. She went around several blocks until suddenly they were slanting down a winding road toward the bottom of Rock Creek Park. She pulled into a creekside parking lot and shut the bike down.

  “Okay?” she said as she took off her helmet.

  “Chee-rist, what a ride,” he said, grinning.

  “What’d you see?”

  He told her about the Halloween mask and the times he’d seen this guy before.

  She pursed her lips for a moment and then asked him to describe the man in as much detail as possible. Av did.

  She shook her head. “Guy who looks like that?” she said. “Not likely to be a professional surveillance operator—the face is too distinctive.”

  “I’m thinking that’s the point,” Av said.

  “He wants you to know you’re being stalked?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oka-a-a-y,” she said. “And who might want you to think that?”

  “You tell me, Special Agent,” he said.

  “Supervisory Special Agent,” she reminded him. “And, yes, I think I know who might be doing this.” She looked over her shoulder and then screamed: “Down!”

  Av didn’t hesitate—he dropped and rolled as fast as he could down toward the creek as an autoloading shotgun opened up, blasting tree branches and leaves all over him. As soon as he dropped off the bank and into the edges of the creek he pulled his Glock and pointed it up the hill at—nothing. He thought he could hear a powerful V-8 gunning it back up the hill, but there was no sign of a shooter except for a haze of gun smoke drifting down toward the creek.

  He looked around for Ellen Whiting. He couldn’t see her, but then he heard her cursing from around a sharp bend in the creek. He stood up, wet from the waist down but alive, and crawled up the bank. Ellen stood up some fifteen feet away, looking like a bedraggled wet hen. When the leather vest flopped open he was treated to a spectacular wet T-shirt. She saw him looking and gave him an annoyed look, but he noticed that she didn’t close up the vest.

  “Friend of yours?” he asked, wiping off the leaves and other debris.

  “Friend of yours,” she said. “God: what a face.”

  “So how the fuck did he follow us down here?” Av asked.

  “Give me your cell phone,” she said. He handed it over.

  She punched more buttons than Av knew existed on the phone, then listened.

  “Yup,” she said. “There’s a GPS tracker on your phone. Whither thou goest, he goeth, if he wants to.”

  Av sat down on a flat boulder and watched the creek flowing by so peacefully it was almost hard to remember the feel of hot steel shot passing far too close to his head as he’d dived over the bank. Then he thought about it: that car had been no more than twenty feet away in the brief, very brief glance he’d had. The guy had had an autoloader, and yet hadn’t hit him? He looked over at Ellen, who was watching him work it out.

  “That was a warning, I think,” he said. “I wouldn’t have missed at that distance.”

  “Me, neither,” she said.

  “Is this Mandeville?” he asked quietly.

  “God, I hope not,” she said. “Either way, we’ve gotta get out of here before the cops show up.”

  “I am the cops,” he said.

  “Not for this you’re not.”

  TWELVE

  Av had been noodling on his brand-new personal tarbaby all morning. Friday had turned into a perfect cluster, with Precious on a tear from the very first hour over some new and preposterous budgetary edict from “upstairs,” Wong Daddy getting served with a paternity suit, Mau-Mau getting called into the internal affairs office over an off-duty altercation that had resulted in a civilian being thrown into the Potomac, and Miz Brown announcing that he had truly found Jesus Christ and was going to put his papers in and go to divinity college.

  He told Howie that he needed to talk to Precious.

  “What about?”

  “The mother of all tarbabies?” Av said.

  “You right. Don’t wanna hear nothin’ about it. It’s Friday, so, when you get done, we’ll be havin’ lunch in Chinatown at the Dragon.”

  Av was waiting when Wong came out, looking appropriately contrite. He knocked on her door and stepped in before she had time to sink her teeth into the next problem.

  “Lemme guess,” she said, looking up at him over her reading glasses. “Dog ate your homework.”

  “I wish,” Av said. He closed the office door, prompting Precious to give him a look. “That bad, Sergeant?”

  “This’ll take a few minutes,” he began.

  When he’d finished, Precious, visibly at a loss for words, began to shake her head.

  “And this all goes back to that business with the FPS?” she said.

  He nodded. “Apparently they weren’t FPS, either. Truth be told, I’m not sure who any of these people are.”

  “And you probably don’t want to know, either,” she said. “Damn!”

  She swung her chair around to look out the window for a minute. Her office had a magnificent view of several large white courthouse buildings across the congested street, which appeared to be littered with cop cars, lawyers conferring in little knots while cadging a quick smoke, and bewildered witnesses trying to figure out which court was theirs.

  “Does this alleged supervisory special agent have any evidence that this Mandeville dude killed those two people?”

  “Evidence?” Av asked. “As in go-to-a-grand-jury evidence? I don’t think so. She’s convinced that he used her somehow to ice McGavin, and the second one, Logan, is just too much of a coincidence in her mind.”

  “Dear God, Sergeant. The National Security Council? That is so far above our pay grade as to lack breathable oxygen. Why did she come to you?”

  “Metro caught the McGavin incident,” he reminded her. “Second District handed it off to ILB. Mau-Mau and I zigged instead of zagging, thereby planting both feet in it. Ultimately, we succeeded in handing it off to the Bureau, or so I thought.”

  She nodded her head vigorously. “And that’s what we’re gonna do again,” she declared. “And right now, too.”

  She reached for the phone, then hesitated.

  “Yeah, that’s the problem, isn’t it,” Av said. “Who you gonna call…?”

  Sh
e chewed on her lower lip as she thought about that. “And this shooter down in Rock Creek?” she asked.

  “A messenger,” Av said. “As in, somebody with assets wants me, or more likely MPD, out of this business.”

  “What’d your special agent friend think?”

  “Supervisory special agent,” Av said. “She’s scared. She thinks Mandeville is the boogeyman here. But—”

  Then he had an idea. Tyree Miller. He told Precious. She wasn’t so sure. “Professional Standards is the rat squad on steroids,” she said. “You reach out to them and you are reaching into a basket of serious snakes.”

  “Yeah,” Av replied. “But he asked me to call him if there were any developments regarding Ellen Whiting. I believe this shit qualifies.”

  “If he’s Bureau and she’s Bureau, why doesn’t he just call her in?”

  “Funny you should ask that,” he said. “He said that he wasn’t positive that she was Bureau.”

  “Oh, c’mon,” Precious said. “That has to be bullshit.”

  “Or—she’s not, really,” Av pointed out.

  Precious threw up her hands. “Too many mysteries here, Sergeant,” she said. “Much too murky for me, and much too federal. The bureaucrat in me is inclined to just do the armadillo.”

  “And if the third ‘traitor’ dies under ambiguous circumstances while we were busy pretending we knew nothing about what’s going on?”

  “How could we prevent anything that’s going on behind the federal iron curtain in this town?” she asked. “That’s why Upstairs stood up ILB in the first place, because everyday cops can’t do business with all these CT people. How could we even start to mess with this?”

  “Simple,” he said. “First, warn the third guy that he’s in someone’s crosshairs. Anonymously, if we have to. Then get Second District to open a homicide investigation on McGavin. OCME thinks aconitine, and that’s a poison. Verify that’s what killed him at that restaurant. Determine that it was a homicide, and then, you know, we run it.”