Rough Draft

by James W. Hall

  “Good news,” she said, shutting the door behind her, moving breezily to a chair two down from Sheffield, giving him a quick once-over as she eased into the seat. She set a file folder on the table in front of her, brushed a strand of hair from her face. “I just got off the phone with Director Kelly. And I’m happy to report that we’re fully green-lighted. It’s a go.”

  “All right!” said Andy Barth. And took a celebratory bite from a cherry Danish.

  Helen was wearing black linen slacks and a clingy white blouse. She had straight shoulder-length red hair and her tense green eyes looked out from under long bangs. The rest of her face was an odd mix of slightly oversized features that somehow looked good in photographs but seemed a little out of whack in real life. He’d heard she was a fashion model in high school, on the covers of Seventeen, and even Glamour. Graduated Columbia, then joined the G-men. God knew why. Maybe Frank would ask her about it later, take her out to lunch, maybe some of her ambition would rub off. This was, after all, the lady they said was destined to be the first female director of the FBI.

  Thirty-two, worked out of the D.C. field office, and even Frank Sheffield, who didn’t ordinarily pay attention to such matters, was fully aware of her recent successes. The latest one had gone down last August when Helen spearheaded the biohazard unit that thwarted a major smallpox virus attack. It was Helen’s team that took down the high-tech plague lab operating inside a condo only a canister toss from the White House.

  Ackerman was staring at Helen Shane. His eyes jacked up to full voltage.

  Somewhere down the hall a phone rang, and that seemed to wake him from his fierce appraisal. He leaned to the side and scooped up a slim leather briefcase and slapped it down on the conference table. He unzipped it slowly and withdrew a handful of eight-by-ten glossies. Ackerman stared down at the top photograph for a moment, his face going slack, the color draining.

  He pushed the stack to his right, directly in front of Charlie Pettigrew.

  Charlie tried to nudge the stack on to Andy Barth, but the senator shot out his hand and took hold of Charlie’s wrist.

  “Look at them,” he said.

  “I’ve already seen them, sir.”

  “Look at them again. I want you to keep these images in your mind. I want you to remember them every second of every day from now until you catch this fucking animal. Look at them, Mr. Pettigrew.”

  Charlie stared at the photographs. He went through the stack slowly. There were five. He lingered on the last one, then slid them to Andy Barth.

  Barth had a piece of Danish in his mouth when he peered at the top photograph. He flinched, didn’t swallow and didn’t chew as he suffered through the rest.

  “I’m sure you’ve all witnessed autopsies as a part of your training,” the senator said. “And you have strong stomachs for this sort of thing. But you should remember as you look at these photographs that this girl, my daughter, was alive only seconds before this was done to her. This carnage. She was laughing. She was red-cheeked and brimming with life.”

  Impassive, Helen Shane took her look and passed the photos on to Frank.

  The girl was sixteen. Though if Frank hadn’t known her age already, he wouldn’t have been able to tell from the photos. She had dark curly hair and plump cheeks with a short upturned nose. But her face was spattered with gore and whatever her final expression might have been was now concealed by the mask of blood.

  Her head was tilted back into a depression of snow. Around the rest of her body the snow was shadowed with blood. In the second and third photographs, the injuries were visible. The fourth and last were close-ups of the gaping wounds in her chest.

  “This wasn’t any skiing accident,” said Sheffield.

  “That’s right, Frank,” said Pettigrew. “That was only the cover story.”

  “Tell him,” Ackerman said. “Tell him what this animal did.”

  The light was buzzing in the senator’s eyes.

  Helen Shane leaned forward in her chair, rested her forearms on the edge of the table.

  “He was hiding in the trees on the edge of the ski slope. As Joanie passed by, he stepped out, clotheslined her, dragged her ten yards into the underbrush.”

  “My forensics are a little weak,” Frank said. “What’re these wounds?”

  “After he strangled her,” said Helen with the lilt of a schoolroom recitation, “Joanie was alive but unconscious. That’s when he tore open her parka and made a crude incision directly below the xiphoid, a triangular cartilaginous mass at the base of the sternum. Once he’d broken through the skin, he apparently widened the laceration with his fingers, and when the breach was large enough, he inserted his hand into Joanie’s chest cavity, took her heart in his fist, and crushed it.”

  Sheffield felt a light-headed swirl begin to form behind his eyes. The silence thickened, a breathless interlude.

  “This is why we’re here,” the senator said, staring at Sheffield. “Because some man in his jungle mansion was unhappy with Joanie’s father. Unhappy that I ordered a napalm strike on his coca fields. Unhappy that I approved a half-dozen separate guerrilla operations that caused him great financial losses. This unhappy man in his jungle mansion hired a monster that you people refer to as Hal to retaliate for his losses.

  “Until my daughter was slaughtered, I was not aware that such a monster existed. Nor did I know that your Bureau has been pursuing this beast for the last ten years without success. But now that I do know, now that I’ve seen what complete incompetence has been operating here, an incompetence which has led to this, this atrocity, I have made it my mission to change that. And I will not rest until this mission is complete.”

  Out in the hallway, a man laughed, and a woman’s high cackle answered back. The intrusion seemed to push Ackerman deeper into his rage.

  He raised his huge fist and hammered it against the table, then pushed his chair back a few inches from the table as if he meant to hurl himself at the whole incompetent group of them.

  Helen lifted her eyes and gave the senator a serene half smile as if the two of them shared some secret.

  “His name is Hal Bonner,” Helen announced. Then she was quiet for a moment, letting the silence dance around her.

  Frank watched as she sat, eyes lowered, running a slender finger around the rim of her mug. Then touching the edge of a black TV channel changer.

  Eyes still down, Helen said, “Bonner is twenty-nine years old, a white male. He’s approximately six feet tall. Born in Indiana, raised in foster care, no juvenile record. He was fifteen years old when he first came to the attention of the police in Indianapolis. Fourteen years ago, during a two-week period in the middle of July, Hal Bonner wiped out his former foster parents. Four women and three men ranging in age from thirty-six to sixty-seven. By the time the connection to Bonner was made, he’d vanished.”

  Helen looked up, glanced around the table. Letting a few more seconds tick off her theatrical clock. Frank was watching her. Everyone else was too.

  “He started out with simple strangulation,” she said. “The first four were killed that way. But by the time he got to number five, Hal was tearing them open, crushing their hearts. Like he did to Joanie. That’s been his MO ever since. Only for the last ten years he’s been getting paid.”

  “Not your average hitman,” Andy said.

  The senator cut his eyes to Andy, scowled, and looked back at Helen.

  “And that’s all, Mr. Sheffield. Ten years, that’s all your people have.”

  “Now he’s a hired gun for the Cali cartel,” Andy said. “They use Hal for special occasions, when they want to inspire the serious heebie-jeebies. Make an example of someone.”

  Andy looked around at the silent group, took another bite from the remaining Danish.

  “Senator Ackerman is correct,” Helen said. “Hal’s extremely slippery. Apparently he’s spotted every sting we’ve thrown at him. For ten years we’ve had him as a level-one priority and we’ve consistently bombed
. Even using our best undercover people, Oscar winners, Hal saw through them every time. Got a whiff of something wrong, stepped back into the shadows, and was gone. But we think we have a winner this time. Something Hal won’t be able to resist.”

  “All right,” Ackerman said, rapping his knuckles impatiently against the table. “Show him the photograph.”

  Helen reached below the table and came up with a file folder. She laid it on the table next to her coffee.

  “Fourteen years ago when Hal murdered his foster parents, he also was quite thorough about destroying any sign of his presence in those homes. Photo albums, schoolwork, drawings, everything. Very meticulous for a young man of only fifteen. As if he already had a life plan and knew exactly what he needed to do, obliterate any trace of his past life. But we did manage to locate one photo from a school in Evansville. A junior high school he attended for a few months.”

  She took a thumbnail photograph from the folder and slid it across the table to Frank. He picked it up, studied it for several moments.

  The boy was wearing a madras shirt buttoned to the top, and he stared grimly into the lens. A crudely handsome young man with heavy eyebrows and coarse, dark hair which was chopped and mangled as though he had been barbered by someone with failing eyesight and a palsied hand. His eyes were gray and widely spaced and protruded slightly. Already at thirteen or fourteen his cheeks were shadowed by a thick beard. As though he were cursed by a heavy flow of testosterone, launched into manhood years before he was ready.

  “We’ve aged him,” Helen Shane said. “Brought him up to date. Agent Barth directed the work, using the TS-38 software system he designed.”

  Andy showed them a gloating smile.

  Helen picked up the TV remote and aimed it at the set and it crackled to life. Slowly she clicked through four different renderings, leaving each one on the screen for half a minute. Hal Bonner as a twenty-nine-year-old, side view and front. Hal with long hair. Hal with a trimmed beard. Hal with a shaggy beard and short hair. Hal Bonner clean-shaven and bald. She left the last one on the screen.

  It was excellent work, but like every computer enhancement he’d seen, something was lost from the original photograph. Some spark in the eyes. While everyone stared at the television screen and murmured, Frank took another look at the small class photo.

  He’d never believed in reading things into people’s eyes. All that windows-of-the-soul bullshit. But Hal Bonner’s eyes were tempting. In the class photo there was a brooding defiance in them that Sheffield had seen once or twice in the eyes of torture victims. Soldiers who’d suffered excruciating ordeals in POW camps, and because they’d managed to survive the worst their captors could inflict, they no longer knew real fear or cared quite as much as they once had about the suffering of others.

  In Hal Bonner’s eyes there was also a glint of bitter humor. This was one smug little alien bastard. On the television screen, however, his eyes were flat and empty. Drained of any hint of humanity by the digital rendering.

  For several moments after Helen snapped the television off, Senator Ackerman continued to stare at the blank screen.

  Sheffield took a breath, the photos of Joanie Ackerman and Hal Bonner still burning in his head. He didn’t have a weak stomach, but just now the floor felt soft beneath him, the room expanding and contracting with each breath.

  Charlie Pettigrew pushed his chair back and stood up, trying in some measure to assume control of the proceedings. Though even a casual observer could tell poor Charlie was a distant third in this group’s pecking order.

  “So, I suppose you’re curious to know, Frank, where you fit into all this.”

  “It crossed my mind.”

  “Well, actually there are several reasons,” the senator said.

  Frank waited. This wasn’t the time for witty comebacks.

  “You worked a murder case five years ago,” Charlie Pettigrew said. “Ed Keller, Assistant U.S. Attorney.”

  “Yeah, Ed Keller and his wife, Martha. Sure I remember it. Never solved.”

  “And a certain persistent relative.”

  “You mean Hannah, their daughter.”

  “That’s right.”

  Helen Shane was studying Frank, her eyes scouring his features. It was the same way Frank’s ex-wife had looked at him most of the time. Collecting faults, adding them to the heap.

  “You think Hal Bonner was involved in the Keller murders?”

  “No, Frank,” said Helen. “We’re interested in the daughter. Hannah. Whatever you can tell us about her. We understand she made quite a fuss about the way you were handling the case. There are a dozen letters from her in our files, protesting the direction you took on the investigation.”

  “She had her own theory, yeah. There were a lot of midnight phone calls. She showed up on my front porch a few times.”

  “Is the woman unbalanced?” Ackerman asked.

  “She’d just lost her parents, Senator. She was deeply distraught.”

  Ackerman nodded. It seemed to be an emotion he vaguely understood.

  The senator fixed Sheffield with an earnest, vote-getter look.

  “I knew your father, Frank. Not well, but I knew him. I was greatly saddened by his passing. I had the utmost respect for the man.”

  Frank nodded.

  A lot of people had known Harry Sheffield. Liked him, respected him. He was that kind of man. Friends in high and low places and everywhere in between. The folks who showed up at his funeral could’ve been herded directly onto the next Noah’s Ark, diverse enough to be the complete breeding stock for a new world. Before Harry died there’d been talk of politics. Democratic nominee for Florida governor. Maybe something national. It all seemed possible for Harry Sheffield, retiring chief of police for Dade County, the most colorful, media-friendly, and well-loved cop the city had ever known. Sixty-one, still a young man. But even with all that charisma circulating in his veins he wasn’t immortal. The night of his retirement party, Harry Sheffield had returned home from the festivities at about 1 A.M. He took out the garbage, set it on the street, went back in and got a cold beer from the refrigerator, sat down in his favorite easy chair, turned on the television, and somewhere deep inside his chest, the tectonic plates shifted and Harry Sheffield had a seven-point-five heart attack. An old story. Nothing unique about it. Two hours after retiring from the job he loved, Harry lay dead in his recliner, a can of Schlitz malt liquor going flat on the table beside him.

  That was over ten years ago, and still to this day people like Ackerman were bringing it up, passing on their condolences.

  “So,” Sheffield said, “is anybody going to tell me why I’m here?”

  “You’ll be our Miami tour guide,” Helen Shane said, “and our specialist on Hannah Keller.” Helen Shane showed him a smile. Lots of teeth, not much sincerity.

  “Specialist? I barely know the lady.”

  “For someone who barely knows her, you certainly filled your reports with detailed observations about her.” Helen’s smile became demure.

  Frank had never come close to slapping a woman before, but he was picturing it now. A good rap on the cheek, just hard enough to wake Helen from her terminal smugness.

  “And what does Hannah Keller have to do with this guy Bonner?”

  “Let’s just say they share a common obsession,” Helen said.

  “And what’s that?”

  “J. J. Fielding.”

  “Largest embezzlement in U.S. history, that J. J. Fielding?”

  “That’s right, Frank. The man Hannah Keller believes murdered her parents. The same man Hal Bonner has been searching for without success for these last five years.”

  Frank looked around at the four of them. No one making eye contact.

  “Are you going to explain the operation to me or are we going to do this dance all morning?”

  Helen looked across the table at Pettigrew, a quick, wordless exchange.

  She turned to Frank, gave him a vacant smile.

/>   “For the purposes of this meeting, Frank, all you need to know is the overall shape of the plan. Actually it’s very simple. We’ll dangle Fielding in front of Hannah, then we dangle her in front of Hal Bonner. We convince Hal that the only way he’s going to locate J. J. Fielding is to follow Hannah. We send Hannah to half a dozen locations around the Miami area that we’ve preselected, our hot zones. We’ll be rigorously monitoring all traffic in and out of those locations until Hal makes his appearance. He thinks Hannah’s going to lead him to Fielding, when he sticks his nose out of the shadows, we take him down.”

  “What? You have Fielding in custody?”

  “Not exactly,” Pettigrew said.

  Helen relaxed in her chair. She reached out and touched a finger to her coffee mug, basking a little more.

  “I don’t get it,” Sheffield said. “Why bother with Hannah at all? Why not just dangle Fielding directly in front of Hal?”

  “Too obvious. He’d know it was a trap. Like I said, the man’s extremely cautious.”

  “Has Hannah agreed to all this?”

  “Let’s put it this way, Frank. Ms. Keller will be a nonvoting participant in the operation.”

  “You’re doing this without her knowledge?”

  “I can assure you, Frank, that Ms. Keller will be more than happy to play the role we’ve assigned her.”

  Helen lifted her eyes and gave Frank the full wattage of her scorn.

  “And how the hell do you know it’ll be Hal,” Frank said, “not one of the other ten thousand goons they have working for them?”

  “Hal’s their major search-and-destroy guy,” Charlie said. “He’s been working this from day one when Fielding disappeared. He has a way of getting people to talk. He’ll be the one they use.”

  Sheffield shook his head. Enough cocksure arrogance floating around that room to power Manhattan through a July heat wave.

  “And how’re the Cali people going to know J. J. Fielding’s surfaced?”

  “They’ll know.”

  “How?”

  “We have a mole, Frank. He works in the cartel’s computer division. It’s his job to alert the Cali people that Fielding has popped up.”