“What the hell was that?” Portland said.
His question was answered by a ball of flame that rose into the sky from the site of the explosion.
“Jesus!” Brixton muttered as he tried the door. It was unlocked and he pushed it open. A cloud of dense black smoke rolled from inside and hit him in the face, forcing him back. The strong odor of gasoline accompanied the smoke, the combination gagging Brixton. He wiped his eyes, spit, and peered through the swirling black smoke to the rear portion of the house where he and Dimka had met in the Nigerian’s study.
Portland pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it to his face as he pushed past Brixton and entered the foyer. Brixton did the same. He saw through the smoke that the door to the study was open. He took bold steps into the living room, crossed it, his eyes stinging, his breathing labored, and reached the study. The heat from the fire was intense; Brixton and Portland felt as though their faces were on fire.
“It’s him!” Brixton shouted, pointing to the prone body of Ammon Dimka on the floor in front of his desk. Sheets of yellow-and-red flames rising up from the rear of the room now ignited the ceiling tiles.
“Come on,” Brixton said.
They entered the room, coughing, tearing up, and cursing under their breaths. The house’s smoke alarms went off and emitted a constant beeping as Portland bent over Dimka.
“Let’s get him out of here,” Brixton said.
Portland grabbed Dimka beneath his arms and Brixton started to lift him by his legs. As he did his attention went to the desk on which a package rested. He could barely make out what was written on it through the smoke but managed to see that someone, presumably Dimka, had written in bold strokes with a marker: For Mr. Brixton.
Brixton released his grip on Dimka’s legs and grabbed the package. Portland dragged Dimka from the study and across the living room. Brixton followed, stumbling blindly through the room and out the front door, where Portland fell to his knees next to Dimka’s body. Brixton drew deep breaths, his lungs threatening to burst. Portland grabbed Dimka’s wrist and felt for a pulse. He looked up at Brixton and shook his head. Brixton placed his ear to Dimka’s chest. He heard nothing. His eyes went to the side of Dimka’s head. “Look!” he said. Dimka’s skull was caved in, his hair matted with blood.
“He fall and hit his head?” Portland conjectured.
Before Brixton could reply their attention was diverted by the sound of a siren and the voices of neighbors who’d rushed from their homes and gathered across the street. Brixton looked back at the house, now engulfed in flames.
A marked patrol car screeched to a halt at the foot of the driveway. Two uniformed officers jumped out and joined Brixton and Portland, who hovered over Ammon Dimka’s lifeless body.
“What happened?” one of the officers asked.
“I don’t know,” Brixton managed. “The place blew up.”
With that another explosion occurred, the house’s natural gas supply igniting, the force of it sending everyone stumbling back onto the front lawn.
“Get Dimka!” Brixton shouted.
He and Portland dragged the Nigerian expat away from the building and down to the lawn. Other sirens were now heard in the distance, the local fire department responding to a 911 call. Another police car arrived, joined by a Fire Department ambulance manned by two EMTs who immediately tended to Dimka. But it took only a few seconds for them to announce that he was dead.
As firemen set about fighting the flames—“The place is a goner!” one yelled—a police officer beckoned for Portland and Brixton to follow him to his patrol car. Portland obliged, but Brixton, bent over, hands on his hips, his breath coming in spurts, broke off and made his way through the crowd to a neighbor’s driveway from where he could see beyond the burning house and into the backyard and wooded area that separated the Dimka property from another house and suburban street. A flash of yellow in the trees caught his attention. A man wearing a yellow shirt stood on the perimeter of the trees watching the inferno. It meant nothing to Brixton at first. Many people stood gaping at the scene. But something caused him—call it intuition honed by years of police work—to start toward the man. As he did, the individual in the yellow shirt turned and ran through the trees to the street.
There was no confusion now for Brixton, no second-guessing. Despite his chronically painful right knee that throbbed, he hobbled off after him, swearing as he went. The yellow shirt emerged from the woods and got into a car parked at the curb. Brixton reached the street just as the man started the engine and pulled away, tires squealing and kicking up smoke. Brixton’s training took hold. He focused on the car, a two-door black Mercedes sedan with a license plate whose last two numbers were 64 and that had the word “Representation” on the lower right portion.
“Hey, you!”
Two uniformed police officers headed in his direction.
“Don’t move,” one commanded.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Brixton said.
“Why did you run?”
“Run? I wasn’t running, at least not from anything. I saw this man—”
“Come with us,” a cop said.
“Sure,” said Brixton, accompanying them to where two other officers stood with Portland. The cacophony around them made conversation difficult, and they had to raise their voices to be heard.
“He’s the one was with you?” Portland was asked.
“Yes. That’s what I said. We came here to meet with the owner of the house and—”
“Why?”
“Why what?” Brixton said. “Like my friend said, we—”
“Why were you meeting with him?”
Brixton started to reach for his wallet to withdraw his P.I. license, but one of the officers stopped him.
“I’m a private investigator,” Brixton said. “I have my I.D.”
“You’re armed?”
“Yeah.” Brixton raised his arms to allow the officer to remove his handgun from its hip holster.
“Show me your I.D.”
Brixton did.
“What about you?” Portland was asked.
“I already told you that I work in security for the British Embassy here in Washington.”
“You were meeting with the homeowner because of your job?”
“No. You see—”
Brixton interrupted. “Look, Officer,” he said. “Mr. Portland and I had an appointment to see the homeowner—his name is Dimka, Ammon Dimka—to discuss something having to do with his knowledge of Nigeria. What about his family? He has a wife and two kids. Has somebody contacted her so she doesn’t come home to this?” He pointed to the house, which by now was almost totally destroyed despite the firefighters’ efforts. The fire had reached the garage, where a single vehicle was now engulfed in flames and threatening to explode at any minute.
A woman with a youngster in tow came to them. “Oh, my God,” she said, “this is terrible. Is Abi all right, her children? Is Ammon—?”
Brixton waited for the officers to reply. When they didn’t, Brixton said, “We’re sure that Mrs. Dimka and the children weren’t here when it happened.”
“Ammon?”
“I’m afraid that—”
She broke down and wept. “I can’t believe this,” she said. “They’re such nice people, good neighbors, kind and considerate, and—”
Brixton remembered the package he’d taken from Dimka’s desk and dropped on the front lawn. It was still there.
“You want anything else from us?” he asked the officers.
“We want your statements. We’ll take them at headquarters. You were here when the fire started.”
“When somebody torched the place, you mean,” Brixton said.
“How do you know that?” asked a cop.
Brixton decided that he’d said enough. The officer started to repeat his question when a car pulled up with ARSON on its doors. Another officer announced that the owner’s wife had been notified at her place of business an
d was on her way.
“Come with us to headquarters,” a cop said.
“We’ll follow you in our car,” Portland said.
The two officers agreed. “That’s your car at the curb?” one asked.
“Right,” Brixton said. “Don’t worry, we won’t try to take off.”
Brixton and Portland started toward the Subaru. They’d almost reached it when Brixton remembered the package on the lawn. “Give me a minute,” he told Portland, and went to retrieve it, glancing back to be sure that he wasn’t being observed. He picked up the package, secured it under his arm, and watched as Ammon Dimka’s body, covered with a sheet, was carried to the ambulance and placed inside.
“How much do you want to tell them about Dimka and the reason we’re here?” Portland asked.
“As little as possible,” Brixton said, looking back at what was once the Dimka family home. “I never met Dimka’s wife, but I feel like I should be here when she arrives.”
“Maybe it’s better that you aren’t,” Portland said.
They got in the car and waited for a patrol vehicle to lead them to police headquarters.
“That fire was deliberately set,” Brixton said. “Did you smell the gas?”
“Couldn’t miss it,” said Portland.
“An arson investigation will confirm it. The question for me is whether whoever did it knew that I was coming to meet with Dimka. If that’s the case, how would anyone know that we were scheduled to meet? Did that same person know about my first get-together with Dimka? What did they do, tap his phone? The only people who knew that I was coming here, aside from you, are Mac Smith, my receptionist, Mrs. Warden, and Flo.”
“You spoke with Dimka on the phone,” Portland said.
“Sure, a few times.”
Maybe your phone is tapped,” Portland muttered.
The squad car pulled up and an officer motioned for them to follow.
“I might have seen who set the fire,” Brixton commented as they drove.
Portland turned in his seat. “When?”
Brixton told the Brit of the man in the yellow shirt and how he’d run away when he saw him approaching.
“Not an especially intelligent chap,” Portland commented, “staying around after the deed was done.”
“The plate on the black Mercedes he was driving is from the District. I got the last two numbers of it.”
“Easy to trace.”
“Maybe. We’ll see.”
“Somebody gave him a hell of a whack to the head,” Portland said.
“That’s what killed him,” Brixton said glumly. “The fire was probably started to cover it up.”
Portland noticed the package that Brixton had taken from Dimka’s study and dropped on the floor between the seats. “What’s in that?” he asked, picking it up.
“I’ll know when I open it. I just want to get this over with and get back to my office, where I can take a look.”
“These cops think that you and I might have had something to do with the fire.”
“They’ll get over it,” Brixton said as he pulled into the local police department’s parking lot. Brixton shoved the package beneath his seat, and he and Portland were led inside, where they were settled in a small, sparsely furnished interrogation room. One of the officers who’d come from the house fire was joined by another uniformed cop who was introduced as “the chief,” a beefy, pleasant man with ruddy cheeks.
“I don’t know why we’re here,” Brixton said. “Like we told the officers, we had a meeting scheduled with Mr. Dimka, who owned the house. We were at the front door when the explosion took place. We managed to get inside, spotted Dimka on the floor, and dragged him outside. We were too late.”
“Overcome by the smoke?” the chief asked.
“Can’t be,” said Brixton. “His head was bashed in before somebody torched the house. The smoke had just started, not enough time to overcome anybody.”
“‘Torched the house’?” the chief said. “You’re saying the fire was deliberately set?”
“Looked that way to me,” Brixton said.
“Why would somebody do that?” asked the chief.
“It’s a black family,” the other cop in the room said. “Maybe—”
“A hate crime?” the chief said.
That possibility had crossed Brixton’s mind, but it didn’t play for him. As far as he knew, the Dimkas had settled comfortably into the neighborhood and were liked and respected. Of course there could always have been some racist nut who decided to play out his hatred, but Brixton didn’t think so. It had to have been because Dimka was about to go public with what he knew about Nigerian financial scams.
The chief looked at Portland. “You’re with the British Embassy?” he said.
“That’s right.”
“And you were meeting with the homeowner, too?”
“Right again.”
The second officer said, “You told me something about meeting with him because of what he knows about Nigeria.”
“About Nigerian financial scams,” Portland said.
“Why would you be interested in that?” the chief asked.
“My son was—”
“Your son got caught up in one of those scams?”
“No, he—it doesn’t make any difference. I came along with Mr. Brixton to meet Mr. Dimka. I’m sorry I didn’t have the chance.”
Brixton hesitated mentioning his spotting of the man in the yellow shirt. He’d made a decision while driving that because the plate on the Mercedes indicated that it was registered in the District of Columbia, he’d take that scant information to friends at D.C.’s MPD instead of leaving it with the suburban cops.
After another twenty minutes the chief thanked them for being there, his only request that they be available should the investigation into the fire raise other questions.
“You have my handgun,” Brixton said. “It’s licensed.”
The chief looked to the other officer, who left the room, returning moments later with the weapon. He handed it to Brixton without a word.
“Thanks,” Brixton said. He gave the chief his business card, and Portland wrote his contact information on a slip of paper. They left the low brick building, got in Brixton’s car, and headed back to Brixton’s office.
“I want to see what Dimka left me in this package,” he said.
“Mind if I tag along?”
“Hell, no. I’d be disappointed if you didn’t.”
CHAPTER
33
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Mac and Annabel Smith were in Mac’s office when Brixton and Portland arrived.
“David, good to see you,” Mac said.
“Always a pleasure.” Portland shook Smith’s hand. “And good to see you again, Mrs. Smith.”
“How did your meeting with Mr. Dimka go?” Mac asked after they’d taken seats around a conference table.
Brixton and Portland looked at each other before Brixton answered, “It never happened, Mac.”
“Oh? He wasn’t there?”
“He was there all right,” said Brixton. “He was dead.”
Brixton’s blunt statement brought a hush to the table.
“Dead?” Annabel said.
“Somebody killed him and torched his house,” Portland said.
“My God,” said Annabel. “How terrible.”
“You say someone killed him?” Smith said. “Do you have any idea who?”
Brixton shrugged. “I saw somebody run from the scene and got a partial reading of his car’s tag, but I can’t be sure he was the killer.”
“You never got to speak with Dimka?” Smith asked.
“Not today,” Brixton said, shaking his head. “Whoever did it started one hell of a fire. The house was damn near burned to the ground when we left.” He went on to tell them of having been interviewed by a local Virginia police chief. “I grabbed this before it burned up along with everything else.” He handed the package to Smith, who turned
it over in his hands.
“He obviously wanted you to have this,” Smith said, indicating Brixton’s name on it. “Do you know what’s in it?”
“We’re about to find out,” Brixton said.
He took it from Smith and peeled off the strip of tape that sealed it, removed the large envelope’s contents, and spread them on the table. The piece on top was a letter that Dimka had written to Brixton in anticipation of their getting together. Brixton read the first of three pages and handed it to Smith, who did the same and passed it to the others. The letter was, in effect, a synopsis of what Dimka had intended to verbally tell Brixton when they met.
After the four of them had read the correspondence, Annabel said, “It’s almost as though he had a premonition that you wouldn’t have a chance to talk.”
Brixton, who’d gone on to begin reading the next letter from the package, handed it to Smith. It was a letter Dimka had written about his wife, Abiola, in which he professed his undying love and acknowledged that what he was doing regarding the infamous Nigerian financial scams could—and he underlined the word “could”—anger some people sufficiently to seek retribution.
Brixton read that sentence aloud and slapped the letter on the table. “Damn it!” he growled. “He knew he was in trouble talking to me and wanted things on the record in case anything happened to him. He’s dead because of me.”
“Not because of anything you did, Robert,” Portland said. “If he hadn’t decided to confide in you it would have been someone else. He also talked to your newspaper pal, Sayers.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t make me feel any better. What I want to know is who was aware that Dimka and I were meeting and knew the reason that we were getting together.”
“You say that you got a partial read on the car the man running from the scene used,” Smith said.
“It was a District plate. I know that. Last numbers were six and four.”
“Want me to run it past Zeke Borgeldt at MPD?” Smith asked.
“I’d appreciate that,” said Brixton. “It was a black Mercedes, four-door.”
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