The radio was playing and a news bulletin came on not long after I’d got in. I wondered if my name was going to come up, but the news was all local and the shoot-out at the motel in New York wasn’t mentioned. I found out more about the latest news on the occult killings.
“Good old D.C.,” the driver said, glancing at me and smiling wryly. “You get much of that kind of thing back home?”
I had a flash of the White Devil and the Soul Collector. “No,” I lied. “It’s pretty quiet where I come from…in Ontario.”
“Well, it sure ain’t been where we’re heading.” He laughed and lit a cigarette. “Go, you Redskins, go.”
I tried to make sense of what was coming from the battered speakers. It seemed that a body had been found in a river, and there was evidence to connect the unidentified male Caucasian to the previous murders. My name didn’t come up. Then I heard that the FBI had taken over the investigation. That was not good news.
The young man let me off in the area he identified as Adams Morgan and I went straight to a phone booth. I had enough coins to make a call. Fortunately Joe’s number was listed. I got connected.
“Greenbaum.”
“Joe, it’s Matt.”
There was a brief silence. “Jesus, Matt. Where are you?”
“In your town.”
“I don’t believe it,” he said, the words coming in a rush. “The police…well, I’ll tell you when I see you. Where are you exactly?”
I looked around. “Eighteenth Street and Belmont Road.”
“Okay. Stay there. I’m on my way.”
About fifteen minutes later, a yellow-and-black taxi pulled up and I saw Joe’s heavy frame in the back. I got in the other side and punched his shoulder.
“It’s great to see you, man,” I said, meaning it. I suddenly felt emotional. Seeing someone I knew, someone I remembered, brought home how much I’d been through.
Joe smiled. “Yeah, this is a surprise—a great one, of course.” He looked over his shoulder and said the name of what sounded like a bar to the driver. “I only hope I haven’t landed you even more in the shit.”
“What do you mean?”
“I went to the cops about you.” He raised his hands. “All good, don’t worry. But they may have thought it was worth staking out my place, in case.”
“So they’re still after me….” I said, my voice low.
“Not if they listened to what I said.”
“I just heard on the radio that the FBI has taken over the investigation.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I heard that, too. I’m not sure that’s a good thing.”
The taxi pulled up outside a run-down bar. After paying, Joe got out and scanned the area. “Don’t worry. We’re not going in. There’s another place about a ten-minute walk from here. You up to it?”
I laughed. “Are you?”
“What do you mean?” he said, feigning outrage. “I’m at my fighting weight.”
“I didn’t know hyper-heavyweight had been recognized.”
He thumped me in the chest. “Yeah, I’ve missed that classy English humor.”
“Shall we split up for a bit? See if anyone’s on our tail?”
“I forgot you were an expert at this. Okay.”
I crossed the road and ducked down behind a van with high sides, while Joe kept walking straight ahead. I waited while a couple of people passed him, but neither showed any interest. I kept him in sight as he waddled on. When he went into a much more salubrious bar, I looked around again. There was no one suspicious, at least to my eyes, so I went to join him.
Joe had found a table at the far corner of the place, which was a cross between a neighborhood bar and a trendy young persons’ hangout. The waitresses were wearing short black skirts, so it was bearable. Joe had already ordered us beer.
“So, let me look at you, man,” he said, taking in my less than salubrious clothes. “Still buying your gear at Bloomingdale’s, eh?”
I laughed. The oversize reporter had a comic streak that was at odds with his work outing corrupt businessmen and officials. “I see you’re still on the sperm whale diet.”
“Yup,” he said, grinning. “Blubber three times a day keeps the doctor away.”
I had come up with that jibe the first time I’d met Joe—he’d made a comment about how thin I was.
The beer arrived, accompanied by a platter of snacks. I suddenly realized that, although Bo had given me a bottle of water, nothing solid had passed my lips since last night at the motel. I actually managed to match Joe bite for bite. That seemed to impress him.
“All right,” he said, wiping his lips. “Tell me what happened.”
“I’ll tell you what I can remember.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Meaning?”
“Somebody wearing army boots has been stomping through my memory.” I told him what I could about the camp and my escape. It would be fair to say he looked astounded.
“Jesus, Matt. What is this shit?”
I shrugged. “I was hoping you might be able to help me out there, Joe.”
He smiled. “What, along the lines of ‘Yeah, now you come to mention it, Matt, I know just the place you mean up in the Maine woods. It’s a research center run by the CIA and—oh, look—I have the cell-phone number of the man in charge.’”
I laughed. “That kind of thing, yeah.”
Joe’s expression grew more serious. “Why would someone want to mess with your mind, Matt? Do you know something they want forgotten?”
“Good questions, both.”
He rubbed his unshaven chin. “Can you remember anything about how you got up there?”
“No, that’s one of numerous things that my brain is steadfastly refusing to access. I’ve remembered Karen’s disappearance, but…” I broke off, suddenly seeing the woman on the upturned cross whose throat was cut.
“What is it, man?”
I took several deep breaths. I wasn’t going to let myself believe that Karen had been the victim. It must have been a trick. But why would anyone be so heartless? She was pregnant, for Christ’s sake. Our son…
“Matt?” Joe’s hand was on my arm. “Are you okay?”
I snapped out of it and gave a weak smile. I wasn’t going to tell him—if I did, it would seem even more real.
“Just a bit wasted—not enough sleep.”
“Not enough beer.” Joe raised a hand for more. “So you don’t recall you and me running around Virginia and D.C. after Karen disappeared? I pulled the chain of any law enforcement professional I thought might be able to help.”
“No…. Doesn’t surprise me that you did what you could, though.”
“Yeah, well…” He looked away, embarrassed. “’Course, I had to do the same thing when you didn’t show for our usual late breakfast. You must have been snatched somewhere between your hotel and my place. We were using it as base camp for our investigation—the Feds were getting nowhere fast.”
“What about the local cops in Virginia?”
“Oh, they did all they could. I used a contact of mine in the Bureau to kick ass down there.”
“Then you had to cope with me vanishing, too.”
He nodded. “It was the same story as with Karen. I kept them at it, but there was nothing—no witnesses, no messages, no ransom demand. I even wrote an article about you both for the Washington Post. They stuck it on page twelve, so who knows how many people noticed. That was ten days ago. The story’s died a death since then.”
I gave an ironic laugh. “And I nearly died several more times in the camp and on my way here.”
“Certainly sounds like the people in that camp were very unhappy that you’d gotten away. I wonder…” He broke off, for once not raising his glass to his lips.
“What?”
“Nah, it’s just my suspicious mind. I was thinking that maybe those assholes in the gray uniforms have got some pull with the Bureau. I mean, I was always sure you weren’t behind any of these occult killings, despite yo
ur prints at one of the scenes. Someone’s gone to a lot of trouble to frame you, my friend.”
“That much I’d worked out for myself, Joe. The question is, who?”
A spectacular waitress brought a fresh pitcher and Joe filled our glasses.
“Someone who had access to the scene, obviously.”
“Which means either the killer or someone who knew his or her movements. Or, alternatively, one or more of the investigators.”
He nodded. “The latter being the patrol cops first on the scene, the CSIs, the D.C. detectives on the case or the FBI—take your pick.”
“How come the FBI was involved?”
Joe put his hand over his mouth and burped. “Because it’s D.C. and there are so many VIPs around. That’ll no doubt be behind the Bureau pulling rank and kicking the MPDC team off the case today.”
I watched as the waitress brought another platter of food, then I picked up a buffalo wing. “So what’s your line on the murders, Joe?”
“My line? Well, apart from the fact that no one seems to have a clue what’s going on, I reckon that the occult shit is just a distraction from the real deal.”
“Which is?”
“Come on, Matt. It shouldn’t be too hard for a crime novelist like you to spot.”
Joe stared at me. “Yeah. Jesus, Matt, you hadn’t forgotten you were one of those, had you?”
“Em, no…it just hasn’t seemed very important recently.”
“No, I guess it hasn’t. On the other hand, you’ve been right in the middle of a prime example of what I’m talking about.”
“Of a…shit storm?”
Joe grinned. “Well, yeah, that. But what I’m getting at begins with a c and has four syllables.”
I shrugged, being far from in the mood for word games.
“Come on, man,” Joe said, spreading his arms wide. “This is the world capital of—”
“Conspiracies,” I said, in a flash of enlightenment.
“You got it, Matt. And I know just the man to help us nail the fuckers behind this one.”
That made me feel better, but not a whole lot. I had the feeling that time very much wasn’t on my side, or on Karen’s—if she was even still alive.
After I’d eaten and drunk enough to feel human again, we decided to go back to Joe’s place. The fact that we hadn’t seen a tail earlier suggested there probably wasn’t surveillance on him. To be certain, we went the back way into his apartment, climbing over the fences between small yards. Joe said his neighbors used that route all the time for dope deals.
We made a plan for the next day and Joe went to crash, claiming that he’d overdone the beer. I sat at his desk with great heaps of printouts and files all around me, and logged on to the Internet—one of the things that my unpredictable memory seemed to have retained was how to operate a computer. I checked the reports of the D.C. occult killings in the American Press and brought myself up to speed. Then I checked the U.K. papers. I was glad to see that my own rag, the Daily Independent, had been suitably shocked by the disappearance of its crime columnist, though the story had quickly gone cold. There had been a degree of outrage when I became a murder suspect, though it was hard for my colleagues to argue against the fingerprint evidence. No doubt it would have helped if I got in touch with them, but I wasn’t going to do so—at least not yet. Joe and I had agreed it was better that I kept my head down for the time being.
I looked at references to Karen in the Web pages, too. There was much indignation about the disappearance of a senior Metropolitan Police detective, but even that story had lost the news editors’ interest after a couple of weeks. I leaned back in Joe’s oversize chair and looked at the ceiling. It was so cracked that the people upstairs must have been ardent punk fans, though thankfully they weren’t pogoing right now. I was thinking about Karen—the way her face turned from stern to amused to loving in the space of a few seconds; the way that, in the weeks before her disappearance, she had started to rest her hand on her belly…. God, how I missed her….
…and I’m in a luxurious hotel suite, watching CNN on a vast plasma TV attached to the wall.
“Matt,” Karen says from the bedroom, “come and see.”
I tear myself away from a story about Mormon marriages and go through, my legs still numb from the transatlantic flight. Karen is in the bathroom. It’s twice the size of mine back in London, and I reckon I have one of the bigger bathrooms in that city. The fittings probably aren’t real solid gold, though I couldn’t be 100 percent sure. And, miracle of miracles, there’s a normal-height bath in an American hotel.
“Neat, eh?” Karen says, laying her toiletries out on the marble runway behind the taps.
“Neat, yeah,” I reply. “Can you leave room for my toothbrush and razor?”
She hits me with her toilet bag and that leads to a tussle, which leads to one of the beds. I am told to be careful. Strangely, that instruction, as well as the emperor-size bed, add a certain frisson to our lovemaking. If I’m not careful, she’ll be wanting to be pregnant on a permanent basis.
“Is he all right?” I ask, resting a hand on her belly.
“Loving it,” she says, her voice deep. “Apparently fetuses are stimulated by their parents doing it.”
I find that vaguely disturbing, but don’t say so. Shortly afterward Karen, being Karen, starts to talk about her big case. To be fair, she has a meeting at the Justice Department tomorrow and she wants to have all the facts straight.
“…nail that bastard Gavin Burdett,” she says, her eyes flashing. “God, he makes me sick.”
I smile at her. “Aren’t police officers supposed to remain impartial and dispassionate?”
I get an elbow in my stomach for that.
“Take my word for it, he’s a complete scumbag.”
I remember the time I tailed Gavin Burdett to the occult supplies store in the East End. I still haven’t told Karen about that, not least because I don’t know what to read into it. Burdett is the kind of highly focused investment pirate who doesn’t waste his time on anything that doesn’t make him money.
“In fact,” Karen continues, in an unusually forthcoming mood, “when he’s in Washington, which he is at least once a month to meet with the thieving money men over here, he stays at a private house in Georgetown, near the university.” She turns to me, an expression of disgust on her face. “Do you know what he does there?”
I’m tempted to reply that he summons up the devil, but hold myself back. “Do tell,” I say sweetly.
“He has whores sent round. According to the FBI, they all look underage…”
“Why haven’t they arrested him, then?”
She looks at me as if I’m an idiot. “Because he’ll get off in half an hour with the lawyers he can afford. Besides, his hide is mine.”
“You’ve been reading my Western phrase book again.” I can no longer resist the urge to needle her. “And just how are you going to get the Justice Department to sign off on that?”
“Simple,” she replies. “I’ll ask them for everything they have on Burdett, and at the same time insist I have a right to arrest a British citizen back home.”
“And you think they’ll buy that?”
Karen gives me her most seductive smile. “Undoubtedly,” she says, getting off the bed. “I’m going for a bath.”
“Mind you don’t drown under the weight of your own…the weight of my son,” I say. When she’s safely ensconced in two feet of warm water, I go over to the expansive dressing table. Typical Karen. Instead of facial unguents and hairstyling equipment, she’s laid out her case files under the mirror. I cast a practiced eye over them and find the one on Gavin Burdett. The thing is, I’m going to have plenty of free time when Karen’s at meetings. I’ve acquired a taste for tailing Gavin Burdett and it would be a challenge to do so in a foreign city. I find the relevant FBI report and note down the address of a house in Georgetown.
Thirty-Two
Joe Greenbaum was sitting on a b
ench in Rock Creek Park in northwest D.C. I was watching from behind the tree line through a pair of his binoculars, the midmorning air still chilly enough to make my nose twitch. We were about a hundred yards from the nearest road but, given time, it wouldn’t have been hard for the cops to set up an ambush. So Joe had called Detective Simmons only half an hour ago and insisted on meeting immediately. He hadn’t mentioned me.
When a heavily built black man came into sight, I scanned the area behind him, and to his left and right. It was a weekday, so there weren’t many people in the vicinity. A female jogger passed Joe, but she was wearing skintight gear—no place to hide a weapon. Besides, she disappeared round the corner rapidly.
The cop approached Joe and, after shaking hands, sat next to him. I watched his face. It was rugged, with a slightly world-weary expression. He looked competent and, more to the point, reasonable. I gave them a few minutes, scanned the paths and woods one last time, and then broke cover. I had one of the Glocks and the combat knife under my belt in the small of my back. No doubt Detective Simmons was armed, too, but I wasn’t going to let myself be locked up again, no matter what happened.
I joined the track about twenty yards behind them and started walking. Joe didn’t turn round, and neither did Simmons, until I was almost on them.
“Jesus, Matt!” Joe said in surprise, as I sat down. I hadn’t told him how furtive I could be. He looked at the detective. “Like I say, just hear the man out.”
“Mr. Wells,” the detective said, leaning forward and extending a hand. “Welcome back to D.C. I’m Clem Simmons.”
I shook his great paw. He seemed friendly enough and not particularly interested in arresting me. “Call me Matt,” I said. “Clem.”
He smiled. “Okay, Matt. Joe here says you’ve got things to tell me. You’ve got to understand, I can’t offer you any kind of assurance that I won’t take you in.” Furrows appeared on his forehead. “But, as you know, I’m not investigating the killings anymore.”
Maps of Hell Page 22
