Haskell looked up the wall as if he couldn’t believe the command. “That’ll take some time, sir.”
“Not if you get a lot of people to help.”
“Sir, I thought you wanted to keep this secret.”
He did. But it wouldn’t remain secret for long. So he had to control when the information got out – just like he had to control the information itself.
“Get this done as quickly as possible,” he said.
Haskell nodded and turned the doorknob, but Kennedy stopped him before he went out.
“These are filed by code,” he said. “Do you know where the key is?”
“I was told that Miss Gandy had the keys to everything from codes to offices,” Haskell said.
Kennedy felt a shiver run through him. Knowing Hoover, he would have made sure he had the key to the Attorney General’s office as well.
“Do you have any idea where she might have kept the code keys?” Kennedy asked.
“No,” Haskell said. “I wasn’t part of the need-to-know group. I already knew too much.”
Kennedy nodded. He appreciated how much Haskell knew. It had gotten him this far.
“On your way out,” Kennedy said, “call building maintenance and have them change all the locks in my office.”
“Yes, sir.” Haskell kept his hand on the doorknob. “Are you sure you want to do this, sir? Couldn’t you just change the locks here? Wouldn’t that secure everything for the President?”
“Everyone in Washington wants these files,” Kennedy said. “They’re going to come to this office suite. They won’t think of mine.”
“Until they heard that you moved everything.”
Kennedy nodded. “And then they’ll know how futile their quest really is.”
The final crime scene was a mess. The bodies were already gone – probably inside the coroner’s van that blocked the alley a few blocks back. It had taken Bryce nearly a half an hour to find someone who knew what the scene had looked like when the police had first arrived.
That someone was Officer Ralph Voight. He was tall and trim, with a pristine uniform despite the fact that he’d been on duty all night.
O’Reilly was the one who convinced him to talk with Bryce. Voight was the first to show the traditional animosity between the NYPD and the FBI, but that was because Voight didn’t know who had died only a few blocks away.
Bryce had Voight walk him through the crime scene. The buildings on this street were boarded up, and the lights burned out. Broken glass littered the sidewalk – and it hadn’t come from this particular crime. Rusted beer cans, half buried in the ice piles, cluttered each stoop like passed-out drunks.
“Okay,” Voight said, using his flashlight as a pointer, “we come up on these two cars first.”
The two sedans were parked against the curb, one behind the other. The sedans were too nice for the neighbourhood – new, black, without a dent. Bryce recognized them as FBI issue – he had access to a sedan like that himself when he needed it.
He patted his pocket, was disgusted to realize he’d left his notebook at the apartment, and turned to O’Reilly. “You got paper? I need those plates.”
O’Reilly nodded. He pulled out a notebook and wrote down the plate numbers.
“They just looked wrong,” Voight was saying. “So we stopped, figuring maybe someone needed assistance.”
He pointed the flashlight across the street. The squad had stopped directly across from the two cars.
“That’s when we seen the first body.”
He walked them to the middle of the street. This part of the city hadn’t been plowed regularly and a layer of ice had built over the pavement. A large pool of blood had melted through that ice, leaving its edges reddish black and revealing the pavement below.
“The guy was face down, hands out like he’d tried to catch himself.”
“Face gone?” Bryce asked, thinking maybe it was a head shot like the others.
“No. Turns out he was shot in the back.”
Bryce glanced at O’Reilly, whose lips had thinned. This one was different. Because it was the first? Or because it was unrelated?
“We pull our weapons, scan to see if we see anyone else, which we don’t. The door’s open on the first sedan, but we didn’t see anyone in the dome light. And we didn’t see anyone obvious on the street, but it’s really dark here and the flashlights don’t reach far.” Voight turned his light toward the block with the parked limousine, but neither the car nor the sidewalk was visible from this distance.
“So we go to the cars, careful now, and find the other body right there.”
He flashed his light on the curb beside the door to the first sedan.
“This one’s on his back and the door is open. We figure he was getting out when he got plugged. Then the other guy – maybe he was outside his car trying to help this guy with I don’t know what, some car trouble or something, then his buddy gets hit, so he runs for cover across the street and gets nailed. End of story.”
“Did you check to see if the cars start?” O’Reilly asked. Bryce nodded that was going to be his next question as well.
“I’m not supposed to touch the scene, sir,” Voight said with some resentment. “We secured the area, figured everything was okay, then called it in.”
“Did you hear the other shots?”
“No,” Voight said. “I know we got three more up there, and you’d think I’d’ve heard the shooting if something happened, but I didn’t. And as you can tell, it’s damn quiet around here at night.”
Bryce could tell. He didn’t like the silence in the middle of the city. Neighborhoods that got quiet like this so close to dawn were usually among the worst. The early morning maintenance workers, and the delivery drivers stayed away whenever they could.
He peered in the sedan, then pulled the door open. The interior light went on, and there was blood all over the front seat and steering wheel. There were styrofoam coffee cups on both sides of the little rise between the seats. And the keys were in the ignition. Like all Bureau issue, the car was an automatic.
Carefully, so that he wouldn’t disturb anything important in the scene, he turned the key. The sedan purred to life, sounding well-tuned just like it was supposed to.
“Check to see if there are other problems,” Bryce said to O’Reilly. “A flat maybe.”
Although Bryce knew there wouldn’t be one. He shut off the ignition.
“You didn’t see the interior light when you pulled up?” he asked Voight.
“Yeah, but it was dim,” Voight said. “That’s why I figured there was car problems. I figured they left the lights on so they could see.”
Bryce nodded. He understood the assumption. He backed out of the sedan, then walked around it, shining his own flashlight at the hole in the ice, and then back at the first sedan.
Directly across.
He walked to the second sedan. Its interior was clean – no styrofoam cups, no wadded up food containers, no notebooks. Not even some tools hastily pulled to help the other drivers in need.
He let out a small sigh. He finally figured out what was bothering him.
“You find weapons on the two men?” he asked Voight.
“Yes, sir.”
“Holstered?”
“The guy by the car. The other one had his in his right hand. We figured we just happened on the scene or someone would have taken the weapon.”
Or not. People tended to hide for a while after shots were fired, particularly if they had nothing to do with the shootings but might get blamed anyway.
Bryce tried to open the passenger door on the second sedan, but it was locked. He walked around to the driver’s door. Locked as well.
“No one looked inside this car?”
“No, sir. We figured Crime Scene would do it.”
“But they haven’t been here yet?” Bryce asked.
“It’s the neighbourhood, sir. Right there” – Voight aimed his flashlight at stairs headin
g down to a lower level —”is one of those men-only clubs, you know? The kind that you go to when you’re . . . you know . . . looking for other men.”
Bryce felt a flash of irritation. He’d been running into this all night. “Okay. What I’m hearing in a sideways way from every representative of the NYPD on this scene is that crimes in this neighbourhood don’t get investigated.”
Voight sputtered. “They get investigated —”
“They get investigated,” O’Reilly said, “enough to tell the families they probably want to back off. You heard Brunner. That’s what most in the department call it. The rest of us, we call them lifestyle kills. And we get in trouble if we waste too many resources on them.”
“Lovely,” Bryce said dryly. His philosophy, which had gotten him in trouble with the Bureau more than once, was that all crimes deserved investigation, no matter how distasteful you found the victims. Which was why he kept getting moved, from Communists to reviewing wire-taps to digging dirt on other agents.
And that was probably why he was here. He was expendable.
“Did you find car keys on either of the victims?” Bryce asked.
“No, sir,” Voight said. “And I helped the coroner when he first arrived.”
“Then start looking. See if they got dropped in the struggle.”
Although Bryce doubted they had.
“I got something to jimmy the lock in my car,” O’Reilly said.
Bryce nodded. Then he stood back, surveying the whole thing. He didn’t like how he was thinking. It was making his heartburn grow worse.
But it was the only thing that made sense.
Agents worked HooverWatch in pairs. There were two dead agents and two cars. If the second sedan was back-up, there should have been four agents and two cars.
But it didn’t look that way. It looked like someone had pulled up behind the HooverWatch vehicle, and got out, carefully locking the door.
Then he went to the door of the HooverWatch car. The driver had got out to talk to him, and the new guy shot him.
At that point, the second HooverWatch agent was an easy target. He scrambled out of the car, grabbed his own weapon, and headed across the street – maybe shooting as he went. The shooter got him, and then casually walked up the street to the limo, which he had to know was there even though he couldn’t see it.
As he approached the limo, the limo driver lowered his window. He would have recognized the approaching man, and thought he was going to report on the danger.
Instead, the man shot him, then went to lie in wait for Hoover and Tolson.
Bryce shivered. It would have happened very fast, and long before the beat cops showed up.
The guy in the street had time to bleed out. The limo driver couldn’t warn his boss. And the beat cops hadn’t heard the shots in the alley, which they would have on such a quiet night.
O’Reilly brought the jimmy, shoved it into the space between the window and the lock, and flipped the lock up with a single movement. Then he opened the door.
No keys in the ignition.
Bryce flipped open the glovebox. Nothing inside but the vehicle registration. Which, as he expected, identified it as an FBI vehicle.
The shooter had planned to come back. He’d planned to drive away in this car. But he got delayed. And by the time he got here, the two beat cops were on scene. He couldn’t get his car.
He had to improvise. So he probably walked away or took the subway, hoping the cops would think the extra car belonged to one of the victims.
And that was his mistake.
“How come you guys were here in the middle of the night?” Bryce asked Voight.
Voight swallowed. It was the first sign of nervousness he’d shown. “This is part of our beat.”
“But?” Bryce asked.
Voight looked away. “We’re supposed to go up Central Park West.”
“And you don’t.”
“Yeah, we do. Just not every time.”
“Because?”
“Because I figure, you know, when the bars let out, we could, you know, let our presence be known.”
“Prevent a lifestyle kill.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you care about this because . . . ?”
“Everyone should,” Voight snapped. “Serve and protect, right, sir?”
Voight was touchy. He thought Bryce was accusing him of protecting the lifestyle because he lived it.
“Does your partner like this drive?” Bryce asked.
“He complains, sir, but he lets me do it.”
“Have you stopped any crimes?”
“Broken up a few fights,” Voight said.
“But not something like this.”
“No, sir.”
“You don’t patrol every night, do you, Voight?”
“No, sir. We get different regions different nights.”
“Do you think our killer would have thought that this street was unprotected?”
“It usually is, sir.”
O’Reilly was frowning, but not at Voight. At Bryce. “You think this was planned?” O’Reilly asked.
Bryce didn’t answer. This was a Bureau matter, and he wasn’t sure how the Bureau would handle it.
But he did think the killing was planned. And he had a hunch it would be easy to solve because of the abandoned sedan.
And that abandoned sedan bothered him more than he wanted to admit. Because the presence of that sedan meant only one thing: that the person who had shot all five FBI agents was – almost without a doubt – an FBI agent himself.
Kennedy looked at the bins and the filing cabinets stacked around his office and allowed himself one moment to feel overwhelmed. People ribbed him about the office; he had taken the reception area and made it his, rather than use the standard size office in the back.
As a result, his office was as long as a football field, with stunning windows along the walls. The watercolours painted by his children had been covered by the cabinets. His furniture was pushed aside to make room for the bins, and for the first time, this space felt small.
He put his hands on his hips and wondered how to begin.
Since six agents began moving the filing cabinets across the corridor more than an hour ago, Kennedy had received five phone calls from LBJ’s chief of staff. Kennedy hadn’t taken one of them. The last had been a direct order to come to the Oval Office.
Kennedy ignored it.
He also ignored the ringing telephone – the White House line – and the messages his own assistant (called in after a short night’s sleep) had been bringing to him.
Helen Gandy stood in the corridor, arms crossed, her purse hanging off her wrist, and watching with deep disapproval. Haskell was trying to find out if there were remaining files and where they were. But Kennedy had found the one thing he was looking for: the key.
It was in a large, innocuous index file box inside the lowest drawer of Helen Gandy’s desk. Kennedy had brought it into his office and was thumbing through it, hoping to understand it before he got interrupted again.
A man from building maintenance had changed the lock on the door leading into the interior offices, and was working on the main doors now that the files were all inside. Kennedy figured he’d have his own office secure by seven am.
Then he heard a rustling in the hallway, a lot of startled, “Mr President, sir!” followed by official, “Make way for the President,” and instinctively he turned toward the door. The maintenance man was leaning out of it, the doorknob loose in his hand.
“Where the fuck is that bastard?” Lyndon Baines Johnson’s voice echoed from the corridor. “Doesn’t anyone in this building have balls enough to tell him that he works for me?”
Even though the question was rhetorical, someone tried to answer. Kennedy heard something about “your orders, sir.”
“Horseshit!” Then LBJ stood in the doorway. Two secret service agents flanked him. He motioned with one hand at the maintenance man. “I suggest y
ou get out.”
The man didn’t have to be told twice. He scurried away, still carrying the doorknob. LBJ came inside alone, pushed the door closed, then grimaced as it popped back open. He grabbed a chair and set it in front of the door, then glared at Kennedy.
The glare was effective in that hang-dog face, despite LBJ’s attire. He wore a plaid silk pajama top stuffed into a pair of suitpants, finished with dress shoes and no socks. His hair – what remained of it – hadn’t been Brylcreemed down like usual, and stood up on the sides and the back.
“I get a phone call from some weasel underling of that Old Cocksucker, informing me that he’s dead, and you’re stealing from his tomb. I try to contact you, find out that you are indeed removing files from the Director’s office, and that you won’t take my calls. Now, I should’ve sent one of my boys over here, but I figured they’re still walking on tip-toe around you because you’re in fucking mourning, and this don’t require tip-toe. Especially since you got to be wondering about now what the hell you did to deserve all of this.”
“Deserve what?” Kennedy had expected LBJ’s anger, but he hadn’t expected it so soon. He also hadn’t expected it here, in his office, instead of in the Oval Office a day or so later.
“Well, there’s only two things that tie J. Edgar and your brother. The first is that someone was gunning for them and succeeded. The second is that they went after the mob on your bidding. There’s a lot of shit running around here that says your brother’s shooting was a mob hit, and I know personally that J. Edgar was doing his best to make it seem like that Oswald character acted alone. But now Edgar is dead and Jack is dead and the only tie they have is the way they kow-towed to your stupid prosecution of the men that got your brother elected.”
Kennedy felt lightheaded. He hadn’t even thought that the deaths of his brother and J. Edgar were connected. But LBJ had a point. Maybe there was a conspiracy to kill government officials. Maybe the mob was showing its power. He’d had warning.
Hell, he’d had suspicions. He hadn’t let himself look at any of the evidence in his brother’s assassination, not after he secured the body and prevented a disastrous autopsy in Texas. If those doctors at Parkland had done their job, they would’ve seen just how advanced Jack’s Addison’s disease was. The best kept secret of the Kennedy Administration – an administration full of secrets – was how close Jack was to incapacitation and death.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection Page 86
