All That Remains ks-3
Page 16
"I've heard the theories, and there is nothing to support them. Toxicology results were negative for drugs in the first eight deaths."
"I remember that from the reports," he said," thoughtfully. "But I also assumed this didn't necessarily mean the kids hadn't been involved in drugs. Their bodies were almost skeletonized. Doesn't seem there was much left to test."
"There was some red tissue left, muscle. That's enough for testing. Cocaine or heroin, for example. We, at least, would have expected to find their metabolites of benzoylecogonine or morphine. As for designer drugs, we tested for analogues of PCP, amphetamines."
"What about China White?"
he proposed, referring to a very potent synthetic analgesic popular in California. "From what I understand, it doesn't take much for an overdose and is difficult to detect."
"True. Less than one milligram can be fatal, meaning the concentration is too low to detect without using special analytical procedures such as RLA."
Noting the blank expression on his face, I explained, "Radioimmunoassay, a procedure based on specific drug antibody reactions. Unlike conventional screening procedures, RIA can detect small levels of drugs, so it's what we resort to when looking for China White, LSD, THC."
"None of which you found."
"That's correct."
"What about alcohol?"
"Alcohol's a problem when bodies are badly decomposed. Some of those tests were negative, others less than point oh-five, possibly the result of decomposition. Inconclusive, in other words."
"With Harvey and Cheney as well?"
"No trace of drugs so far," I told him. "What is Pat Harvey's interest in the early cases?"
"Don't get me wrong," he replied. "I'm not saying.' was a major preoccupation. But she must have gotten tips back when she was a U.S. attorney, inside information, and she asked some questions. Politics, Kay "' I suppose if it had turned out that these deaths of couples in Virginia were related to drugs - either accidental deaths or drug homicides - she would have used the information to buttress her anti-drug efforts."
That would explain why Mrs. Harvey seemed well informed when I had lunch at her house last fall I thought. No doubt she had information on file in her office because of her early interest in the cases.
"When her inquiries into this didn't go anywhere" Wesley continued, "I think she pretty much let it go until her daughter and Fred disappeared. Then it all came back to her, as you can imagine."
"Yes, I can imagine. And I can also imagine the bitter irony had it turned out that drugs killed the Drug Czar's daughter."
"Don't think that hasn't crossed Mrs. Harvey's mind, Wesley said grimly.
The reminder made me tense again. "She has a right know, Benton. I can't pend these cases forever."
He nodded to the waiter that we were ready for coffee "I need you to buy me more time, Kay."
"Because of your disinformation tactics?"
"We need to give that a shot, let the stories run without interference. The minute Mrs. Harvey gets anything from you, all hell's going to break loose. Believe me, I know how she'll react better than you do at this point. She'll go to the press, and in the process screw up everything we've been setting up to lure the killer."
"What happens when she gets her court order?"
"That will take time. It won't happen tomorrow. Will you stall a little longer, Kay?"
"You haven't finished explaining about the jack of hearts," I reminded him.
"How could a hit man have known about the cards?"
Wesley replied reluctantly, "Pat Harvey doesn't gather information or investigate situations alone. She has aides, a staff. She talks to other politicians, any number of people, including constituents. It all depends on who she divulged information to, and who out there might have wished to destroy her, assuming that's the case, and I'm not saying it is."
"A paid hit disguised to look like the early cases," I considered. "Only the hit man made a mistake. He didn't know to leave the jack of hearts in the car. He left it with Deborah's body, inside her purse. Someone perhaps involved with the fraudulent charities Pat Harvey is supposed to testify against?"
"We're talking about bad people who know other bad people. Drug dealers. Organized crime."
He idly stirred his coffee. "Mrs. Harvey's not faring too well through all this. She's very distracted. This congressional hearing isn't exactly foremost on her mind, at the moment."
"I see. And I suspect she's not exactly on friendly terms with the Justice Department, because of this hearing."
Wesley carefully set his teaspoon on the edge of his saucer. "She's not," he said, looking up at me. "What she's trying to bring about isn't going to help us. It's to put ACTMAD and other scams like it out of business but it's not enough. We want to prosecute. In the past there's been some friction between her and the DEA, also the CIA."
"And now?" I continued to probe.
"It's worse, because she's emotionally involved, has to rely on the Bureau to assist in solving her daughter's homicide. She's uncooperative, paranoid. She's trying work around us, take matters into her own hands. Sighing, he added, "She's a problem, Kay."
"She probably says the same thing about the Bureau."
He smiled wryly. "I'm sure she does."
I wanted to continue the mental poker game to see if Wesley was keeping anything else from me, so I gave him more. "It appears that Deborah received a defensive injury to her left index finger. Not a cut, but a hack inflicted by a knife with a serrated blade."
"Where on her index finger?" he asked, leaning, forward a little.
"Dorsal." I held up my hand to show him. "On top, near her first knuckle."
"Interesting. Atypical."
"Yes. Difficult to reconstruct how she got it."
"So we know he was armed with a knife," he thought out loud. "That makes me all the more suspicious that something went wrong out there. Something happened he wasn't expecting. He may have resorted to a gun to subdue the couple, but intended to kill them with the knife. Possibly by cutting their throats. But then something went haywire. Deborah somehow got away and he shot her in the back, then maybe cut her throat to finish her off."
"And then positioned their bodies to look like the others?"
I asked. "Arm in arm, facedown, and fully clothed?"
He stared at the wall above my head.
I thought of the cigarette butts left at each scene. I thought of the parallels. The fact that the playing card was a different brand and left in a different place this time proved nothing. Killers are not machines. Their rituals and habits are not an exact science or set in stone. Nothing that Wesley had divulged to me, including the absence of white cotton fibers in Deborah's Jeep, was enough to validate the theory that Fred's and Deborah's homicides were unrelated to the other cases. I was experiencing the same confusion that I felt whenever I visited Quantico, where I was never sure if guns were firing bullets or blanks, if helicopters carried marines on real business or FBI agents simulating maneuvers, or if buildings in the Academy's fictitious town of Hogan's Alley were functional or Hollywood facades.
I could push Wesley no further. He wasn't going to tell me more.
"It's getting late," he commented. "You have a long drive back."
I had one last point to make.
"I don't want friendship to interfere with all this, Benton."
"That goes without saying."
"What happened between Mark and me-" "That's not a factor," he interrupted, and his voice firm but not unkind.
"He was your best friend."
"I'd like to think he still is."
"Do you blame me for why he went to Colorado, left Quantico? " "I know why he left," he said. "I'm sorry he left. He was very good for the Academy."
The FBI's strategy of drawing out the killer by way disinformation did not materialize the following Monday. Either the Bureau had changed its mind, or it was preempted by Pat Harvey, who held a press conference the same day.
"When did these threats begin, Mrs. Harvey, and what was the nature of them?" a reporter asked.
"The first one came shortly after I began investigating the charities. And I suppose this was a little over a year ago," she said without emotion. "This was a letter mailed to my home in Richmond. I won't divulge the specific nature of what it said, but the threat was directed at family."
"And you believe this was connected to your probe into fraudulent charities like ACTMAD?"
"There's no question about that. There were other threats, the last one as recent as two months before my daughter and Fred Cheney disappeared."
Bruce Cheney's face flashed on the screen. He was pale, blinking in the blinding haze of TV lights.
"Ms. Harvey…"
"Mrs. Harvey…"
Reporters were interrupting each other, and Pat Harvey interrupted them, the camera swinging back her way.
"The FBI was aware of the situation, and it was their opinion that the threats, the letters, were originating from one source," she said.
"Mrs. Harvey…
"Ms. Harvey" - a reporter raised her voice above the commotion - "it's no secret that you and the Justice Department have different agendas, a conflict of interests arising from the investigation of the charities. Are you suggesting the FBI knew that the safety of your family was in jeopardy and didn't do anything?"
"It's more than a suggestion," she stated.
"Are you accusing the Justice Department of incompetence?"
"What I'm accusing the justice Department of is conspiracy," Pat Harvey said.
Groaning, I reached for a cigarette as the din, the interruptions reached a crescendo. You've lost it, I thought, staring in disbelief at the TV inside the small medical library in my downtown office.
It got only worse. And my heart was filled with dread as Mrs. Harvey turned her cool stare to the camera and one by one ran her sword through everyone involved is the investigation, including me. She spared no one, and there was nothing sacred, including the detail of the jack of hearts.
It had been a gross understatement when Wesley had said she was uncooperative and a problem. Beneath her armor of reason was a woman crazed by rage and grief. Numbly I listened as she plainly and without reservation indicted the police, the FBI, and the Medical Examiner', Office for complicity in a "cover-up."
"They are deliberately burying the truth about these cases," she concluded, "when the act of doing so serve only their self-interest at the unconscionable expense of human lives."
"What a lot of shit," muttered Fielding, my deputy chief, sitting nearby.
"Which cases?"
a reporter demanded loudly. "The, deaths of your daughter and her boyfriend or are you referring to the four other couples?"
"All of them," Mrs. Harvey replied. "I'm referring to all of the young men and women hunted down like animals and murdered."
"What is being covered up?"
"The identity or identities of those responsible," as if she knew. "There has been no intervention on the part of the Justice Department to stop these killings, The reasons are political. A certain federal agency is protecting its own."
"Could you please be more specific?" a voice shot back.
"When my investigation is concluded, I will make a full disclosure."
"At the hearing?" she was asked. "Are you suggesting that the murder of Deborah and her boyfriend…"
"His name is Fred. " It was Bruce Cheney who had spoken, and suddenly his livid face filled the television screen.
The room went silent.
"Fred. His name is Frederick Wilson Cheney."
The father's voice trembled with emotion. "He's not just Debbie's boyfriend He's dead, murdered, too. My son!"
Words caught in his throat, and he hung his head to hide his tears.
I turned off the television, upset and unable to sit still.
Rose had been standing in the doorway, watching. She looked at me and slowly shook her head.
Fielding got up, stretched, and tightened the drawstring of his surgical greens.
"She just screwed herself in front of the whole damn world," he announced, walking out of the library.
I realized as I was pouring myself a cup of coffee what Pat Harvey had said. I began to really hear it as it replayed inside my head.
"Hunted down like animals and murdered… " Her words had the sound of something; scripted. They did not strike me as glib, off the cuff or a figure of speech.
A federal agency protecting its own? Hunt.
A jack of hearts like a knight of cups. Someone who is perceived or perceives himself as a competitor, a defender. One who does battle, Hilda Ozimek had said to me.
A knight. A soldier.
Hunt.
Their murders were meticulously calculated, methodically planned. Bruce Phillips and Judy Robe disappeared in June. Their bodies were found in mid August, when hunting season opened.
Jim Freeman and Bonnie Smyth disappeared in July their bodies found the opening day of quail and pheasant Ben Anderson and Carolyn Bennett disappeared March, their bodies found in November during deer season.
Susan Wilcox and Mark Martin disappeared in late February, their bodies discovered in mid-May, during spring gobbler season.
Deborah Harvey and Fred Cheney vanished Labor Day weekend and were not found until months late when the woods were crowded with hunters after rabbit squirrel, fox, pheasant, and raccoon. I had not assumed the pattern meant anything because most of the badly decomposed and skeletonized bodied that end up in my office are found by hunters. When someone drops dead or is dumped in the woods, hunter is the most likely person to stumble upon the remains. But when and where the couples' bodies were discovered could have been planned.
The killer wanted his victims found, but not right away, so he killed them off season, knowing that it was probable his victims would not be discovered until hunters were out in the woods again. By then the bodies were decomposed. Gone with the tissue were the injuries he had inflicted. If rape was involved, there would be no seminal fluid. Most trace evidence would be dislodged by wind and washed away by rain. It may even be that it was important to him that the bodies be found by hunters because in his fantasies he, too, was a hunter. The greatest hunter of all.
Hunters hunted animals, I thought as I sat at my downtown desk the following afternoon. Guerrillas, military special agents, and soldiers of fortune hunted human beings.
Within the fifty-mile radius where the couples had vanished and turned up dead were Fort Eustis, Langley Field, and a number of other military installations, including the CIA's West Point, operated under the cover of a military base called Camp Peary.
"The Farm," as Camp Peary is referred to in spy novels and investigative non-fiction books about intelligence, was where officers were trained in the paramilitary activities of infiltration, exfiltration, demolitions, night-time parachute jumps, and other clandestine operations.
Abby Turnbull took a wrong turn and ended up at the entrance of Camp Peary, and days later FBI agents came looking for her.
The feds were paranoid, and I had a suspicion I might know why. After reading the newspaper accounts of Pad Harvey's press conference, I had become only morel convinced.
A number of papers, including the Post, were on my desk, and I had studied the write-ups several times The byline on the Post's story was Clifford Ring, the reporter who had been pestering the commissioner and other personnel of the Department of Health and Human Services. Mr. Ring mentioned me only passing when he implied that Pat Harvey was in-appropriately using her public office to intimidate a threaten all involved into releasing details about daughter's death. It was enough to make me wonder if Mr. Ring was Benton Wesley's media source, the FB
I conduit for planted releases, and that would not have been so bad, really. It was the point of the stories that, found disturbing.
What I had assumed would be dished out as sensational expose of the month was, instead, being bruited about as the colossal degradation of a woman who, just weeks before, had been talked of by some as-possible Vice President of the United States. I would be the first to say that Pat Harvey's diatribe at the press conference was reckless in the least, premature at best. But I found it odd that there was no evidence of a serious attempt at corroborating her accusations. Reporters in this case did not seem inclined to get the usual incriminating "no comments" and other double-talk evasions from the governmental bureaucrats that journalists typically pursue with enthusiasm.
The media's only quarry, it seemed, was Mrs. Harvey, and she was shown no pity. The headline for one editorial was SLAUGHTERGATE?
She was being ridiculed, not only in print but in political cartoons. One of the nation's most respected officials was being dismissed as a hysterical female whose "sources" included a South Carolina psychic. Even her staunchest allies were backing away, shaking their heads, her enemies subtly finishing her off with attacks softly wrapped in sympathy.
"Her reaction is certainly understandable in light of her terrible personal loss," said one Democratic detractor, adding, "I think it wise to overlook her imprudence. Consider her accusations the slings and arrows of a deeply troubled mind."
Said another, "What's happened to hat Harvey is a tragic example of self-destruction brought on by personal problems too overwhelming to endure."
Rolling Deborah Harvey's autopsy report into my typewriter, I whited out "pending" in the manner and cause of death spaces. I typed in "homicide" and "exsanguination due to gunshot wound to lower back and cutting injuries."
Amending her death certificate and CME-1 report, I went up front and made photocopies. These I enclosed with a cover letter explaining my findings and apologizing for the delay, which I attributed to the long wait for toxicology results, which were still provisional. I would give Benton Wesley that much. Pat Harvey would not hear from me that I had been strong-armed by him to indefinitely pend the results of her daughter's medicolegal examination.