Dead on Arrival

by Mike Lawson

  ‘It went okay,’ Danny said. ‘I thought the guy’s eyes were gonna pop out of his head when I told him we wanted a million bucks’ worth of shit every three months. So either I’ll hear from him tomorrow or I won’t, but he seemed interested.’

  Patsy Hall had told Joe that Pugh normally did business only with people he knew, and when he did hire outsiders he did an extensive background check on them. But Hall also said that if the payoff was big enough, Pugh might do just about anything. So Joe had figured that Pugh might go for a deal that was worth five million a year if the people he was dealing with were known, successful criminals – for example, a guy like Tony Benedetto. All Danny could do at this point was hope that Joe was right.

  ‘Good,’ Joe said. ‘Stay in your room tonight. If you have to eat, order a pizza. I don’t want you going out. You’ll just get drunk and in trouble.’

  ‘Hey,’ Danny said, ‘I know what’s at stake here. And I’m a pro.’

  ‘You’re a professional sleazebag. Stay in your room,’ Joe said, and hung up.

  Geez, the guy really hated him.

  50

  Emma was sitting on the couch in her living room, staring into the fire in her fireplace, feeling lonely and disgruntled. In her lap was Christine’s rat-sized canine. Christine wasn’t there because she was spending the night in Hartford with her mother, and as her mother was allergic to dogs, Emma had become involuntarily responsible for the care and feeding of the creature. Twice she’d put the animal into the toy-stuffed basket that Christine had bought for it, but it insisted on coming into the living room and jumping on her lap as if it were lonely too. It was odd, but there was something strangely comforting about holding the dog, with its warm body and its rapidly beating heart – although she imagined the same sensation could be produced by holding a fur-covered hot water bottle.

  Emma was disgruntled because she’d wasted part of the day trying to learn more about the people who had shot DeMarco. Although he didn’t seem to be worried for his own safety – which surprised her – and was satisfied that the shooters had been after the DEA agent who was killed, Emma still had her doubts. But after three hours of talking to people on the phone, in the end she learned nothing more than had been reported in the papers: Jorge Rivera, the driver who’d been executed, had been a small-time hood with links to a Hispanic gang. He certainly wasn’t a contract killer, but he did have drug connections. Regarding the second shooter, the person who had most likely shot Jorge, the police had nothing. Cameras on the outside of the DEA building didn’t get a clear shot of the person and the only fingerprints inside the car belonged to Jorge.

  The remainder of the day had been spent with Fat Neil trying to find evidence that Dobbler or Baxter were tied in some way to the terrorist attacks. After five hours with Neil – nobody should have to spend five hours with Neil – they’d discovered nothing new. She did decide by the end of the day to focus on Dobbler and forget Edith for the time being. Edith was donating money to Broderick and every other organization and politician she could find with some sort of anti-Muslim bias, and she was paying Prescott’s company to find radical Muslims around the globe, but everything she did was done openly, and nothing she was doing was illegal. She was obviously out of her mind with grief and guilt and doing everything she could to avenge her son, but Emma’s gut told her that Edith wasn’t involved in the attacks. She could only hope her gut was right. She also wished there was some way she could help Edith. It was terrible to see her in the state she was in.

  The phone rang and the dog in her lap jumped as if it had been tasered. She hoped it was Christine calling.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘This is Anisa Aziz. I’d … I’d like to talk to you.’

  ‘Where,’ Emma said.

  ‘Uh, near the Rotunda? Is that okay?’ Anisa said.

  ‘I live in McLean,’ Emma said. ‘It’ll take—’

  ‘Oh. Well …’

  ‘No, it’s okay,’ Emma said. ‘I’ll come to you. I’ll be there in four hours. I’ll meet you about ten-thirty.’

  She hoped the damn dog didn’t tear up the house while she was gone.

  ‘There were two men,’ Anisa Aziz said.

  Emma was sitting with the girl on a bench looking out at a large terraced grass common in the middle of the University of Virginia’s campus. At the northern end of the common, where they were sitting, was the Rotunda, a building designed by Thomas Jefferson that looks like the Pantheon in Rome.

  ‘I don’t know how they unlocked the door,’ Anisa said, ‘but they broke into my room after midnight and put me in the trunk of a car. We drove quite a while, maybe an hour, maybe more; then they took me into a warehouse. In the middle of the warehouse was an office with glass walls. One of the men pointed a gun at me and then showed me a note written in English that said to take off my clothes. When I didn’t right away, he slapped me. I thought they were going to rape me, but they didn’t. They just tied me to a chair. Naked.’

  The girl shuddered. It was a cold night, in the low forties, and all Anisa was wearing were sweatpants and a hooded sweatshirt that said uva soccer on the back. Emma didn’t think, however, that it was cold that had made the girl shiver.

  ‘What did they look like?’ Emma asked.

  ‘One was big, at least six-four, and heavy. The other was maybe six feet, skinny but real strong. They both wore long-sleeved shirts and had gloves on their hands and ski masks over their faces.’

  ‘What color were their eyes?’ Emma said.

  ‘Brown. Both of them.’

  Blue would have been better. ‘Could you tell if they were white? If they were American or from some other country?’

  ‘No. They never spoke, not once.’

  ‘Okay, then what happened?’

  ‘Another man – he was wearing a ski mask too – he brought my uncle into the warehouse. My uncle could see me tied up naked inside the glass office. While my uncle was watching, one of the men, not the big man, the other one, the skinny one, came and stood behind me. He was holding two sticks with a wire connecting the sticks. He put the wire around my neck and began to twist it, to choke me, and I started gagging and my neck started bleeding. He stopped before I passed out. I looked up and the man with my uncle was talking to him. Then the skinny man strangled me again and I could see my uncle crying, begging for them to stop, and then my uncle and the man with him left the warehouse.’

  Anisa stopped talking to keep herself from crying and closed her eyes for a moment.

  ‘They left me alone for a long time, maybe five or six hours; then the skinny man came back. He showed me pictures of my mother and my little brother coming out of our house, and then he held up a note for me to read. It said if I talked to the police they would kill my mother and my brother. And me. Then … then he took off one of his gloves and he – he put his finger in me. After that he untied me and let me get dressed, and then he put me back in the trunk of the car and dropped me off near the campus. When I got back to my room, I tried to call my uncle, but he wasn’t home. Then I turned the radio on and heard what he had done. And that he was dead.’

  ‘I know this is hard for you, Anisa, but when the man took off his glove, could you see his hand?’ Emma said. ‘I mean, could you tell his race from his hand?’

  The girl started to shake her head, but then she stopped. ‘Yes, his hands weren’t real dark, not like a black man’s or an Arab’s. They were tanned, but he was probably white.’

  ‘Good,’ Emma said. ‘Very good.’

  ‘And there was something else. When he first took off his glove, I saw these blue marks on his knuckles, but only for a second. I think they were tattoos but I couldn’t see a design and they might have been smudges of grease or dirt. I just don’t know.’

  ‘Can you remember anything else? The type of car they drove? If their clothes had any sort of distinc tive labels on them, anything like that?’

  ‘No. I’m sorry.’

  She and Emma sat there in s
ilence for a moment, then Anisa gestured with her head and said, ‘Did you know they only give these rooms to seniors, the ones who the professors think are going to be somebody special someday?’

  Emma nodded her head; she knew what the girl was talking about. On each side of the grass common were five ‘pavilions’ assigned to prestigious faculty members, and between the pavilions were fifty-four little student rooms called ‘lawn rooms.’ The rooms were built about the time Thomas Jefferson died and have no air-conditioning or showers. Yet in spite of their age, size, and lack of creature comforts, the lawn rooms are the most desirable dwellings on campus because only the university’s most impressive overachievers are permitted to reside in them.

  ‘What chance do you think a Muslim woman has,’ Anisa said, ‘of being picked to live in one of those crummy old rooms?’

  51

  Tim Crocker liked being a fireman.

  He liked the guys he worked with. He liked putting out fires. He liked saving people and their homes. Hell, he even liked getting cats down from trees. What he didn’t like was looking at people who’d burned to death.

  The sight of a body – or in this case four bodies – burnt black beyond recognition, their heads turned into skulls, their mouths open from their last screams, their backs arched from their final struggles … well, he just hated it. And the smell. Every time this happened, he couldn’t eat barbecue for a month.

  The fire had started in a bedroom in an apartment on the third floor. Then the ceiling above the third floor unit had collapsed and two people sleeping on the fourth floor had dropped right down into the bedroom of the two people who’d been sleeping on the third floor. So he had four bodies – two couples – and the man and woman from the fourth floor were stacked on top of the couple from the third.

  Crocker’s guys had done a good job. They’d managed to put the fire out less than an hour after they got the alarm, and although three other units in the apartment building had been heavily damaged, no one else had died and they’d managed to save the building. It was the cause of the fire that was bothering Crocker. He wasn’t the arson investigator but he’d been around a long time, and he was pretty sure that the fire hadn’t been caused by a natural gas explosion or somebody who’d fallen asleep with a cigarette burning. There had been an explosion, though – strong enough to blow out a couple windows in the building next door – and Crocker thought that whatever had exploded had been attached to a container of something flammable. In other words, a damn incendiary device had gone off in this apartment.

  So they weren’t dealing with some semi-harmless firefly, some guy who got his rocks off watching buildings burn, or some schmuck trying to collect on the insurance. No, this was something else; he didn’t know what, but whatever was going on it wasn’t his problem. The cops and the arson investigator would have to sort that out.

  ‘Hey, Chief,’ a voice said.

  Crocker turned. It was a cop, a young guy with ears like pitcher handles under his cap. Crocker wasn’t a fire chief, but there was no point telling the cop that; the cops always called the senior fireman on the scene chief.

  ‘You shouldn’t be up here,’ Crocker said. ‘That floor you’re standing on could give way.’

  ‘I talked to the manager,’ the cop said, ‘and we know who three of these people are.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Crocker said.

  ‘The couple from the fourth floor, their names were Sharon and Pat Montgomery. The gal was a teacher at some middle school and her husband worked at Macy’s over in Arlington.’

  Just a couple of ordinary people who had the bad luck to be sleeping in the wrong place at the wrong time, Crocker thought.

  ‘Who owns this apartment?’ Crocker said.

  ‘A young gal named Jennifer Talbot. She was a secretary, and that’s why I came up here. You’re never gonna guess who she worked for.’

  ‘Well, who is it?’ Crocker said. He wished the damn cop would just get to the point and get out of here. He wanted to get away from the smell.

  ‘Broderick,’ the cop said.

  ‘You mean Senator Broderick?’ Crocker said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  Oh, boy, Crocker thought, and took out his cell phone. He needed to tell his boss what the cop had just said, but before he dialed, he asked, ‘What about the fourth person, the one who was sleeping with Talbot?’

  ‘We don’t know yet,’ the cop said. ‘The manager, he said Talbot wasn’t married and he didn’t think she had a boyfriend, although he said she was one good-looking young lady.’

  ‘Well, you guys need to figure out who he is,’ Crocker said, ‘because …’

  Before Crocker could finish telling the jug-eared cop that they were most likely dealing with a homicide, another cop burst into the room, panting, like he’d just run up the stairs. His name tag said wilmont.

  ‘Artie!’ Wilmont said to the cop who’d been talking to Crocker. ‘We got … oh, man, you’re not gonna fuckin’ believe it!’

  ‘Well, what is it?’ Crocker said. What the hell was it with these cops? And what the hell were they all doing up here?

  ‘I was down in the parking lot,’ Wilmont said, ‘looking around, and there was a car parked behind the car of the gal who owns this apartment. You know, blocking her in like she let whoever it was park there. Anyway, I figured maybe I could find out who the guy was, so I slim-jimmed the door open and checked the registration.’

  ‘Well, goddammit, who is it?’ Crocker said.

  Within twenty minutes, a dozen FBI agents, two carloads of brass from the D.C. Metro Police, four guys from the Secret Service, and Tim Crocker’s boss’s boss were there.

  Somebody had assassinated Senator William Davis Broderick.

  52

  Danny was going nuts; he’d been in the motel room eighteen straight hours. There wasn’t a damn thing to watch on TV, the crummy motel didn’t have payper-view, and he didn’t even have a deck of cards so he could play solitaire. Not only was he bored, he was tired, so worried he hadn’t been able to sleep all night. Joe had said that if this thing didn’t work out he was going back to Riker’s, and he knew Joe wasn’t kidding. If Pugh didn’t call today, he was fucked.

  He turned on the television again. Something about some senator getting whacked. Who cared? He changed the channel and got Wheel of Fortune and that Vanna White broad. She’d been doing that show forever, smiling like she had lockjaw, turning over those letter blocks. She must hate those letters by now – and fuckin’ Pat Sajak too. He wondered how old she was. She had to be pushing fifty, but he had to admit she still looked damn good. And these people they got for contestants. How the hell did they find three idiots every day that would jump up and down and scream every time they—

  His cell phone rang. The phone was sitting on the nightstand next to the bed, and he grabbed for it so fast he knocked it to the floor. He rolled off the bed, landing hard on his knees, and scrambled for the phone. He answered it on the second ring.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  ‘Get on a land line. Call 540-432-2387. Got it?’

  ‘No! Wait a minute! Let me get a pen.’ Before the guy could say anything, he reached up and grabbed a pen sitting next to the motel phone. ‘Give me the number again.’ The guy repeated it, and Danny wrote the number down on his left forearm.

  The caller had sounded like Jubal Pugh’s snake, that skinny rat-bastard Randy with the prison tats on his knuckles. Thank you, Jesus. He waited a couple of minutes and then picked up the motel phone and called the number Randy had given him.

  ‘Come on back out to Jubal’s place,’ Randy said. ‘If somebody follows you, we’ll know it.’

  Shit, the guy could have told him that on the cell phone. ‘Aw, relax, Randy. I’ll be there in forty-five minutes. That’s how long it took me to get there yesterday.’

  He hung up and called his cousin. ‘Joe, it’s me. It looks like we’re on. I’m heading out to Pugh’s place right now.’

  Joe didn’t say anything fo
r a moment. Then he said, ‘You better make this work, Danny,’ and hung up.

  Jesus. Would it have killed the guy to say ‘good luck’?

  There wasn’t anything for Joe to do but wait. And while he waited, all he could do was think about his ex-wife. Every time he spoke to his goddamn cousin, every time he looked at his goddamn cousin, he thought about her. He was sick of thinking about her.

  His cell phone rang again. It was probably Danny calling back. With DeMarco’s luck, Danny had gotten a flat tire driving out to Pugh’s. But it wasn’t Danny; it was Emma.

  ‘Anisa Aziz called me late yesterday and I drove down to Charlottesville and spoke to her last night. I just got home. Anisa was abducted right before Mustafa tried to blow up the Capitol.’

  ‘Jesus. Will she tell the Bureau?’

  ‘No. I spent an hour trying to get her to change her mind, but she’s terrified. And I don’t blame her. The people who abducted her showed her pictures of her mother and her brother and said they’d kill them if she talked to the police. If the FBI gets somebody, she’ll be willing to testify, but she’s not going to go to them now.’

  ‘Well, shit,’ DeMarco said.

  ‘She did tell me a couple of things that I wanted to pass on. She couldn’t identify whoever kidnapped her and doesn’t know if they were American or foreign-born because they wore masks and never spoke to her. The only thing she saw was that both men had brown eyes, one was six-four and heavy, and the other was about six feet and skinny. The skinny one might be white and he might have had tattoos on his knuckles, but she wasn’t sure if they were tattoos or grease or dirt. When your cousin goes out to Pugh’s place, have him look for guys meeting that description.’

  ‘You’re too late,’ DeMarco said. ‘Danny’s already left for Pugh’s. I’ll ask him when—’