Dead on Arrival

by Mike Lawson

  He was turning to leave the office, figuring the cops would be there any moment, when he noticed something lying on the floor, next to the desk, as if it might have been blown off. DeMarco picked it up. It was a four-page pamphlet, printed on glossy paper, and appeared to be some sort of right-wing rant about how whites were becoming a minority in America and how they had to fight back. He looked around the room but didn’t see any more literature like that. He thought of taking the pamphlet but then decided not to. Instead of putting it back down on the floor where he’d found it, he dropped it in the middle of Rollie’s desk.

  Netty Glenn was standing outside on Rollie’s porch, smoking a cigarette.

  ‘I don’t usually smoke,’ she said to DeMarco. ‘Horrible, nasty habit. But dead bodies – they bring back memories.’

  ‘I’ll bet,’ DeMarco said. He was thinking that this was one interesting woman; he bet she’d been a looker when she was younger, like the nurses in the movie M*A*S*H – except she’d been the real thing.

  As they were standing there, DeMarco noticed a big RV parked on the grass next to Rollie’s house, on the side of the house he hadn’t seen until now. He couldn’t help but notice it because the thing was as long as a city bus.

  ‘When did Rollie get that?’ DeMarco asked Netty.

  ‘Just last week, poor bastard. He was telling me – geez, I guess it was the last time I saw him – how he was already mapping out this trip he was gonna take out west when he retired.’

  ‘That looks like a pretty expensive rig,’ DeMarco said.

  ‘He said it cost him forty-two five. It’s used, but it’s only got a few thousand miles on it. Ain’t that life,’ Netty said, flicking her cigarette butt away. ‘A guy finally buys his dream machine, and the next thing you know …’ She concluded by just shaking her head.

  ‘Can I ask you something about Rollie?’ DeMarco said.

  ‘I guess,’ Netty said.

  ‘Was he some kind of racist?’

  ‘Why you asking? Because he shot that Muslim guy?’

  ‘No, not because of that. I saw this pamphlet on his desk from some white-power group.’ Then, because DeMarco had claimed to be Rollie’s friend, he added, ‘I just never thought he was into anything like that.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about any pamphlet,’ Netty said, ‘and I never heard him talk about stuff like that. But he was kinda scared. Every time a new family would move into the neighborhood – and if they weren’t white, which they usually weren’t – Rollie would say something to me about how he hoped we weren’t gonna start getting a lot of crime and drugs in the neighborhood. But I never heard him goin’ around sayin’ nigger, nigger. Nothing like that.’

  It took the cops about twenty minutes to get there, two cocky young guys in a patrol car. They told DeMarco and Netty to wait for them on Rollie’s porch, then walked quickly through the house. They couldn’t have spent more than five minutes inside the place. As one of the cops was calling for the medical examiner, DeMarco asked the other one, ‘Will they do an autopsy on him?’

  The cop shrugged. ‘Not my call,’ he said. ‘But what would be the point, a fat guy with his hand on his heart?’

  And rest in peace, Rollie.

  26

  Hydrofluoric acid is a chemical compound that exists as a colorless gas or as a fuming liquid. It is used to etch glass and clean brickwork and to make refriger ants and herbicides and pharmaceuticals. It’s also used, in very large quantities, to make high-octane gasoline.

  When hydrofluoric acid is released into the atmosphere, it has a propensity to form a toxic aerosol cloud that will drift for miles, and exposure to this gas can result in lethal damage to the heart, liver, kidneys, and nervous system. It blinds and it burns and it causes pulmonary edema. But the description of its effects he liked best was one he had heard on an American television show. The man on the show had said, ‘It’s a terrible death. It’s one way you don’t want to die. It just melts your lungs.’

  The refinery on Lake Erie kept as much as eight hundred thousand pounds of hydrofluoric acid on hand.

  The refinery had once been located on the outskirts of the city, but as the city grew it became surrounded by homes and schools and shopping centers and office buildings. Due to the huge lake and the thermal effects it created, there was almost always a breeze – and it blew primarily in the direction of a housing development in which mostly white people lived.

  Another television show – they learned so much from American media that they didn’t really need an intelligence-gathering apparatus – had described how vulnerable refineries and chemical plants were to attack – terrorist attack, as they put it. And they were. They were shockingly underprotected, considering what they contained, and the biggest weakness was not the physical security – the fences and cameras and alarms. The biggest weakness was the people who were paid to protect the facility.

  The guards at this refinery dressed in dark blue uniforms and wore paratrooper boots and at first glance seemed quite impressive. Automatic pistols, Mace, oversized flashlights, and batons hung from their belts. But these men – and even some women – were laughable. Most were middle-aged, few had military training, and many had been rejected by police forces in the region because they failed to meet even the minimal qualifications required by local law enforcement. But more important, they had nothing to do. They occasionally conducted drills that disrupted refinery operations, but their primary function was to annoy the people entering the plant by performing perfunctory searches of backpacks and lunchboxes. Other than that, they sat. They sat all day and all night, waiting for something to happen, and they’d been sitting for so long doing nothing that they had long ago stopped expecting anything to happen.

  ‘You see,’ he said to the boy, ‘how the guard never walks into that area. It’s dark there, and muddy too, and he doesn’t want to get mud on his boots.’

  ‘I know,’ the boy said.

  27

  Sunday morning, Mahoney sat in front of the television in his condo in an old bathrobe, drinking coffee laced with bourbon. He was watching Kevin Collier, the director of the FBI, do his best to scare the shit out of the American public.

  Collier had always reminded Mahoney of a Boston terrier he’d once owned: pudgy, bulging eyes, a pushed-in snout – and the misconception that it was a mastiff instead of a creature whose head was barely a foot off the ground. Collier was telling Tim Russert that the Bureau believed there were several al-Qaeda operatives in the United States and that those operatives were identifying disgruntled Muslim Americans and trying to convince them to commit terrorist acts.

  Collier assured the television audience, though, that as tough as his job might be, he and all his agents were doing everything they could to track these culprits down. He said his job would sure be a lot easier if the borders weren’t so long and porous, but he was confident that General Banks of Homeland Security was doing the best he could, implying, of course, that if the customs agents who worked for Banks had done their job in the first place, none of these foreign terrorists would be in the country. When Russert asked Collier if he thought that Senator Broderick’s bill would make his job easier, Collier said that indeed it would.

  Then Russert said, ‘As you know, Mr Director, Senator Broderick’s bill is currently in committee in the House. My sources have said that the House does not appear to be moving as expeditiously as it could to bring the bill to a floor vote. What’s your opinion on that?’

  When Director Collier cleverly answered Russert’s question by saying that he was just a cop and it was the speaker’s job to pass the laws, Mahoney wanted to reach into the television set and strangle the bug-eyed bastard.

  But Russert’s sources were right. Mahoney was doing everything he could to keep the bill in committee as long as possible without making it obvious that he was the one directing the slowdown. He had assigned the bill to a committee chaired by James Brice, a Massachusetts congressman so firmly under his thumb that the
man was practically flat. Mahoney’s direction to Brice was to nitpick the shit out of the bill, question the placement of every comma and period, and then call in eighty-five experts to provide their opinions. A normal bill, Mahoney could have kept in committee indefinitely, but there was too much media focus on this one. Brice would do what he was told, but Mahoney also knew he could delay things for only so long.

  The next day Mahoney arrived at the Capitol with the temperament of a scalded bear and called DeMarco up to his office to beat him up. DeMarco naturally thought this unreasonable. The FBI probably had five or six thousand agents looking into the terrorist attacks, maybe more. They had the manpower, the authority, the expertise, and all the right equipment. The Department of Homeland Security was assisting the FBI, and the NSA was probably bugging every cell phone call in America. The CIA was involved too, trying to find terrorist connections to the attacks overseas; knowing the CIA, they were most likely skulking around inside the United States as well. So if all those agencies and all their agents hadn’t turned up any evidence of a conspiracy, how in the hell was DeMarco supposed to?

  Mahoney’s response to this well-reasoned argument was that all those federal agencies were firmly convinced that al-Qaeda was behind the recent attacks. The only guy that wasn’t convinced was John Mahoney, but he wasn’t about to stick his thick political neck out and say this to anyone who might actually be able to do something. He preferred to beat on Joe DeMarco, which he did by listing all the things that DeMarco had failed to do. He hadn’t been able to show that Donny Cray had done anything more than sell Reza Zarif a gun, he hadn’t found any concrete evidence that the men who had attacked their own country had been forced to do so, and he had absolutely no proof that the late Rollie Patterson was anything other than the hero that Mahoney had personally claimed him to be when he had pinned the medal on Rollie’s chest.

  ‘So, goddammit, what are you going to do next?’ Mahoney asked.

  ‘Well,’ DeMarco said, ‘I was hoping that maybe you could get them to do an autopsy on Rollie, see if maybe they can find something to show that he died from other than natural causes.’

  Mahoney mulled that request over for a minute.

  ‘Yeah,’ he finally said. ‘I can do that. I’ll call the guy who runs the Capitol cops and tell him, Rollie bein’ one of our own and having just whacked this terrorist, that they need to cut him up to make sure some al-Qaeda loony didn’t shove a hypo into one of Rollie’s veins. He’ll keep my name out of it.’

  ‘There’s one other thing,’ DeMarco said.

  ‘What’s that?’ Mahoney asked.

  ‘I also want an autopsy performed on Donny Cray. I want to make sure his neck really snapped in a car accident.’

  ‘What do I look like, the governor of Virginia?’ Mahoney yelled. ‘An autopsy on Rollie’s one thing, but gettin’ one done on Cray is way out of my jurisdiction.’

  Nothing was out of Mahoney’s jurisdiction. He just didn’t want to do anything related to the attacks that might garner more media attention. He was getting enough bad ink for just knowing Reza Zarif and then dragging his feet on Broderick’s bill.

  ‘But,’ he said, ‘you’re right. They oughta take a closer look at how that guy died. So you go figure out some way to make it happen.’

  DeMarco didn’t bother to argue with Mahoney; he knew from past experience that arguing didn’t help. The speaker was motivated, above all else, by self-interest. The other reason he didn’t argue was that he thought it possible his new friend at the DEA, Patsy Hall, might have the clout to do what he wanted done.

  But before he saw Patsy there was something else he needed to do.

  He needed to get some help.

  DeMarco was sitting behind his desk, just about to pick up the phone to call Emma, when the phone rang. It’s spooky when that happens.

  ‘This is Mrs Drake from Senator Broderick’s office. The senator would like to see you at eleven A.M.’

  Oh, boy.

  Broderick’s office was located in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. DeMarco entered the senator’s suite and identified himself to the receptionist/executive assistant nearest the door, a young lady with strawberry-blond hair and an accent that made him think of magnolia blossoms and mint juleps and Daisy Duke. He may have been hopelessly in love with an Italian adulteress from Queens, he may have been smitten most recently by a cute schoolmarm from Iowa, but there was something about blondes with southern accents that always gave his libido a jolt. The young lady picked up the phone on her desk, punched a button, and said that a Mr DeMarco was there. Five minutes later he followed two well-oiled hips down the hallway to an office.

  The man in the office was not Senator Broderick. He was a tall slim black man in his early forties. He had a longish nose, short hair, and a goatee. His eyebrows were slightly arched and, combined with the goatee, this made him look like a handsome, dark, brooding devil.

  The man didn’t rise from his seat or shake DeMarco’s hand. He pointed to a chair in front of his desk and said, ‘Sit down, DeMarco. I’m Nick Fine, Senator Broderick’s chief of staff.’

  ‘I thought the senator wanted to see me,’ DeMarco said.

  ‘Fortunately for you, the senator doesn’t know who you are, and I think it would be in your best interest if the situation were to remain that way.’

  Now this pissed DeMarco off: getting jerked over to the Dirksen Building by a guy who had used his boss’s name to get him there. Most folks come a-runnin’ when a senator says he wants to see them, DeMarco being no exception, but he might have ignored the call from Broderick’s office if he’d known he’d been summoned by someone on Broderick’s staff.

  Before DeMarco could say anything, Fine opened a folder on his desk. ‘Your personnel file is amazingly … terse. It says you’re a lawyer, a GS-Thirteen, and have a House position called Counsel Pro Tem for Liaison Affairs. The file doesn’t identify your supervisor, and your job description is a single paragraph of absolute gibberish, which makes it impossible to tell what you do. So maybe you could clarify that for me, Mr DeMarco. Exactly what does the Counsel Pro Tem for Liaison Affairs do?’

  DeMarco’s title, the one in flaking gold paint on his office door, had been Mahoney’s invention and it was completely meaningless. In order for DeMarco to get paid by the federal government he needed to be a civil servant. But as Mahoney didn’t want it known that DeMarco worked for him, he made up an imaginary function that had nothing to do with the Speaker of the House, devised an incomprehensible title to suit the function, and then forced his will upon some minor bureaucrat who was responsible for establishing legitimate positions in the legislative branch of government. The consequence was that DeMarco received a paycheck every two weeks, but, as Nick Fine had discovered, nobody could tell exactly what he did or for whom he worked.

  In response to Fine’s perfectly logical question, DeMarco said, ‘I do exactly what my title says. I liaise for congressional affairs.’

  DeMarco didn’t think he’d ever used the word liaise in a sentence before.

  Fine stared at DeMarco for a minute, stroking his goatee. ‘Don’t try being cute with me, DeMarco.’

  DeMarco didn’t say anything. He just stared back at Fine, all the time thinking he might be in a shitload of trouble here.

  ‘I’ve heard,’ Fine said, ‘that you’ve been asking questions about the terrorist attacks that have occurred in the last few weeks. What authority do you have for asking these questions?’

  There was an old saying that Mahoney had introduced him to: Tell the truth as often as you can. That way it’s easier to keep track of all the lies you tell. In keeping with this adage, DeMarco said, ‘I’m basically an odd-jobs guy. If a member of the House wants something checked out, something he doesn’t want to assign to his staff for whatever reason, and in particular something dealing with other government agencies, he may call me. In this case, a member asked me to find out a little more about the attacks.’

  ‘Which mem
ber?’ Fine said.

  ‘I can’t tell you that. I’ll let the congressman – or congresswoman – know that you’re interested, and if he or she wants to tell you, he or she can.’

  Fine shook his head. ‘What you just told me is pure bullshit. If a member of Congress wanted to know something about the attacks, he would have called the FBI directly. The second thing is, there’s virtually nothing that Congress does that doesn’t deal with other government entities, so I find it difficult to believe they need someone like you to do their staff work for them.’

  Since the half-truth didn’t work, DeMarco decided to ask his own question. ‘Why do you care who I’m talking to?’ he said.

  Fine smiled as if amused that someone of DeMarco’s rank would be so impudent. ‘Senator Broderick, as I’m sure you know, is spearheading America’s war against radical Muslims. He’s the only person in this government who’s actually trying to do something other than lament the situation. And because the senator’s bill is so significant, it’s understandable that there’s a lot of healthy debate over the issue. But it appears to me, based on the sort of questions you’ve been asking, that what you’re trying to do is muddy the waters. It appears that you’re attempting to develop scenarios related to these attacks that don’t fit the evidence. I think your goal may be to mislead the American people regarding what really happened.’

  Mislead the American people? DeMarco didn’t have the power to mislead anybody. And who the hell had Fine been talking to? How did he know what sort of questions DeMarco had been asking?

  ‘Look,’ DeMarco started to say, but Fine didn’t let him finish.