Corruption of Power

by Brenda English

  “Jesus, McPhee,” I lectured myself as I sat there behind the wheel and tried to clear the scary pictures from my brain. “You’re okay. It’s over. You’re safe. You can stop this anytime.” But I knew it wasn’t over. Before the man who had grabbed me last night had told me it was a warning, I had been afraid I was about to die, the kind of fear that gets imprinted in every cell of your body, that washes back over you unexpectedly and sets off all your alarms all over again. Part of my surliness at the ambulance crew really had been anger, at my attacker and at myself, anger that someone had been able to instill that kind of fear in me.

  And it wasn’t over, because I knew the warning was sincerely meant. Someone was very unhappy about something I was doing. I didn’t think, no matter how much I pissed them off, that it was Noah Lansing or Bill Russell. Which left Ed Lloyd or Hub Taylor—or both of them. At first glance, it might sound farfetched to think that a U.S. senator or even a county supervisor would run the risks involved in making such a threat or in carrying it through. But I knew—and they knew I knew—those risks were small compared with the risk I posed to them, because of the information I had made it clear I had. I would, I decided, have to be a lot more careful from here on out, checking over my shoulder frequently. But no way was I backing off. They might be able to make me afraid, but they weren’t going to force me to give in to that fear. All they had done, I vowed, was make me more determined than ever to find out the truth.

  My resolve intact, I calmed myself with some yoga breathing, relaxing the muscles and letting the fear drain away, taking the mental pictures with it. Then I drove off to meet Noah Lansing.

  * * * *

  This early on a Sunday morning, the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, which carries I-95 across the Potomac at Alexandria and into Maryland, was free of traffic jams, unlike the mess I knew it would be in much later in the day, as every weekend traveler on the eastern seaboard went home. Within fifteen minutes of leaving the apartment, I was taking the exit onto Indian Head Highway. My turn onto Fort Washington Drive led me down through several subdivisions, ranging from modest to the $400,000 range, and down to Warburton, the last street turning off before the entrance to Fort Washington Park. Several more winding blocks of side street took me down to the river, through a cool tunnel of overhanging trees that was laced with the heavy, heady scent of wild honeysuckle and that ended at the Fort Washington Marina. I pulled into the large graveled parking lot and realized I had no idea what kind of car Noah Lansing drove when he was off duty.

  At the end of the parking lot was a hulking, gray, wooden-sided building with signs that said things like DELICATESSEN, OFFICE, and SHIPS STORE. A sweeping deck dotted with tables and chairs hugged the water side of the building and looked out on rows of wooden piers along which powerboats and sailboats of various sizes, colors, and styles bobbed gently on the water’s surface. It was a beautiful day, I thought. The air was pleasantly warm, with a soft breeze. Except along the water, the marina was surrounded by thick, lush trees, with occasional glimpses of houses clinging to the sides of the bluffs that climbed steeply behind it from the river’s edge. It was still early enough and quiet enough for most of the noise to be provided by a variety of birds. There could be worse places to spend a Sunday, I thought.

  I walked across the parking lot to the piers. Each one jutted out across the water for two hundred feet or more. At the landward end, they were blocked by a series of locked gates and short sections of wooden fence.

  I stopped at the gate to the first pier and looked around for any sign of Lansing or a blue-hulled boat like the one I had seen in the photo in his office. Although there were many boats still in their slips this early in the day, there already was a steady foot traffic of people moving back and forth from cars and trucks and 4X4s to several of the boats, unloading supplies for the outings they were getting ready to take. At the third pier, I finally spotted a boat, its bow pointed in my direction, with a navy hull that looked, to my landlubber’s eye, like the one in the picture. I quickly walked along the wooden sidewalk to the third gate, only to find it locked by a push-button combination lock. I fiddled with it for a minute or two, randomly punching in combinations with no success, and was about to walk up to the marina office for help when two beefy guys with a cooler, fishing rods, and sunburned bare chests and backs came up from the parking lot. We exchanged good mornings.

  One of them entered the right combination and then held the gate open for me to go through first. I thanked them and walked ahead toward the end of the pier where the boat I had seen sat in the last slip. The fishermen stopped halfway along, at an expensive-looking powerboat with a shiny blue, metal-flake paint job and the name NADINE in fancy script along the side.

  The boat I hoped was Lansing’s was called SECOND WIND. It sat gracefully in the water, its mainsail furled and hidden inside a navy sail cover. Its white decks glistened cleanly in the morning sun, made whiter still by the contrast with the navy hull below. A red stripe near the top edge of the hull warmed the color scheme just enough to make the boat look elegant, but not cold. There was no sign of Noah Lansing, but through the open hatch door I could hear a metallic banging followed by some thuds of wood on wood.

  “Detective Lansing?” I called. It sounded silly somehow in this setting, but he had never invited me to call him anything else, probably because he was always angry with me. Too bad I liked the sound of Noah so much, I thought.

  There was another clank and Noah Lansing stood up in the hatch. He was actually smiling.

  “McPhee,” he said. “I’m glad you came over. Hold up a foot.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “So I can see what kind of soles your shoes have.”

  It made no sense to me, but I humored him and held one foot up for him to inspect the white soles of my Keds.

  “Okay,” he said, “you can come aboard. Shoes with dark soles leave black marks all over the deck. But those are fine.” I could see this boat thing was going to be more complicated than I had realized. My experience with boats had consisted of a ten-foot, flat-bottomed aluminum fishing boat that I had paddled around my grandfather’s pond, and an occasional ride during high school in a friend’s small speedboat that he used for skiing on the nearby lake. Sailboats apparently were more complex creatures.

  Intrepid as ever, however, I walked out onto the little finger-shaped pier that ran along the side of the boat, to where I could step across to the boat and through an opening where the lines that encircled the deck had been unhooked. In the U-shaped cockpit, which was molded fiberglass with a bench seat down each side, a large stainless-steel wheel took up much of the space. I sat down on the hard seat, and Lansing climbed up from below and sat on the other side, wiping grease from his hands with an old rag.

  “Just doing a little maintenance on the engine,” he said, smiling again, the breeze lifting his dark hair slightly. He was dressed in a red knit shirt and khaki shorts. My pulse increased, and I decided I was still feeling the effects of the blow on the head from last night.

  “It’s a nice boat,” I said, my ignorance of sailing terms leaving me inarticulate. “What is it?”

  “She.”

  “What?”

  “She. Boats are shes. She’s a Sabre. Thirty feet.”

  “Is that big?” I asked. It was to me.

  “As big as I’d want to put on the river,” Lansing said. “It’s too shallow in too many areas around here, once you leave the boat channel, to get in easily with anything bigger. Plus I sail it by myself quite a bit right now, and I wouldn’t want to try single-handing anything larger.”

  “You must be good to go out alone.”

  “Actually David, my son, is usually with me, but he’s only five, so he’s not a lot of help yet.”

  He had opened the door. I decided to go through it.

  “Is he the little boy I saw in the picture in your office?” I asked.

  “Yeah, that’s him. He’s with his grandparents in Richmond for a couple of wee
ks, or he’d be here supervising.” His love for his son was evident in his eyes. How painful it must be to have to raise him alone, I thought.

  “I’m a single father,” Lansing went on, as if picking up on my thoughts. “My wife died when he was eight months old.”

  “I’m sorry,” I responded simply, not wanting to let on that I already had gotten the whole story from Bill.

  “It was a long time ago,” he said, dismissing it as a topic of conversation. “Listen, would you like some coffee? I have a Thermos and some mugs.”

  “Sure,” I answered. He went back down below for a moment, then reemerged with a tall, silvered Thermos bottle and a couple of odd-looking, wide-bottomed mugs with pictures of boats on them. As he poured the coffee I leaned back against the side of the cockpit, enjoying the surroundings and the morning, letting myself pretend for a moment that I was here for pleasure, not work, and wondering what that would be like.

  “I wanted to talk to you again about how Dr. Morris died,” Lansing said, getting down to business and dissolving my fantasy. “We’re beginning to think you may be right.”

  “About what?”

  “That it wasn’t suicide.”

  “I never really said that,” I told him.

  “Bill reads you pretty well. He said you didn’t believe it was suicide for a minute.”

  “Touché, but what makes you think it wasn’t?”

  “Problems with the scene. Problems with why he would have killed himself.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, the gun, for one thing. It was still in his hand, but when someone shoots himself, the hand usually opens in reflex and drops the gun. Not always, but most of the time.”

  “And?”

  “The fingerprints for another. The gun was clean of any prints except the one set. Usually, we’ll find the person’s prints all over the gun, where they handled it, maybe loaded it, before shooting themselves. Again, not conclusive, but certainly odd. Plus, we can’t track down the gun’s registration, and Morris’s ex-wife says he never would have had one in the house.” He went into a thoughtful silence for a minute.

  “More?” I asked finally, sensing that he wasn’t done yet.

  “Powder burns.”

  “Couldn’t you find any?” If someone else actually killed Morris, their absence would make sense.

  “Plenty on his head, where the gun was fired point-blank. But only some traces of gunpowder on his hands. Not nearly what I would have expected in a suicide.”

  “Could it have been lost in handling the body?”

  “Not likely. His hands were bagged at the scene before he was ever moved, and not uncovered until the autopsy started yesterday afternoon. And then there’s the question of a motive.”

  “Yes?”

  “He didn’t seem to have one. We’ve talked to his office staff, his ex-wife in Boston, other doctors, his neighbors. They all swear up and down he never would have killed himself. He was wealthy, he was successful, he was very respected. Stable, down-to-earth guy. They all said he had no reason and that he wasn’t the kind of guy to do himself in.”

  “So what do you think happened?”

  “That’s what I need you to tell me.” He looked at me, holding my eyes. “What were you working on with Peter Morris? Why did he call you? Did whatever it was get him killed?” Well, here we were again. Horns locked, my neck on the chopping block. My neck… memories of last night.

  Maybe, I thought, remembering the frightening little episode in the parking lot, it was time to tell Lansing at least some of what I knew. Maybe I didn’t know when I was getting in over my head. Maybe I should take last night’s warning seriously.

  “Will you help us, McPhee?” he asked.

  “I need a little time to think about it,” I said, wanting to sort it out in my own mind first. “I’m not saying no. I just need to think it through.” I waited for the thunder and lightning.

  Instead of erupting in anger, however, he accepted my answer.

  “Okay,” he said. “How about this? While you’re thinking about it, I’m going to take the boat out. Would you like to come? You might think better out there.”

  “I’ve never sailed before,” I told him. “I wouldn’t have the faintest idea what to do.”

  “You don’t have to do anything, unless you want to. Second Wind is set up so I can sail her by myself, remember. You can just enjoy the trip.”

  “Okay,” I accepted, delighted at the thought of going out on the boat with him. “I’ll try to stay out of your way.”

  “You haven’t been able to so far,” he said, laughing. “Why should I expect you to start now?”

  Twenty-two

  I watched in fascination as Lansing got the boat ready to go out, uncovering the mainsail, taking out a second sail he said was a spinnaker, and attaching it to the thin cables—sheets, he called them—that ran from the bow up to the mast. When everything was the way he wanted it, he came back to the cockpit, started the engine, and expertly maneuvered the boat out of the slip and into the creek that emptied into the Potomac.

  It wasn’t until we had passed between the last of the red-and-green channel markers and a big green buoy with the number 77 on it and had reached the deeper part of the Potomac itself that Lansing put up the mainsail and turned off the engine. As the breeze caught and then filled the sail with a sharp snapping sound, suddenly pulling the boat along with it, my pulse quickened with excitement. Within minutes I was a convert, deciding that this sailing stuff had it all over the powerboats, with their noise, fuel fumes, and rougher rides. As I watched Lansing’s attention move from the water to the sails that gathered and spilled the wind, as he deftly fine-tuned everything with a nudge of the wheel or a slight change of the tension or placement of a line, I began to understand what a heady mix of the physical and cerebral sailing must be for those who did it.

  The sun, the water, the wind—it was a new experience for me to feel it all this way—and it drained me of any residual tension from the previous week. From time to time I would look over and see Lansing watching me quietly. Finally, he spoke.

  “So what do you think?” he asked.

  “This is wonderful,” I told him with honest enthusiasm. “I’m just sorry no one introduced me to this before now.”

  He smiled, satisfied with my answer, and for another few minutes we sailed along in silence, except for the hiss of the water against the hull and the wind against the sails.

  Finally, he changed the direction of the boat, explaining what he was doing and using words like reach and run, which meant nothing to me. Then he put up the spinnaker, a huge blimplike sail that bellied off the front of the boat in bright splashes of royal blue and yellow. The boat went even faster, spectacular in her new finery.

  After a long stretch on that tack (see how fast I was picking this up?), Lansing lowered the spinnaker and set off in a new direction. He explained how the boat used the sails like the wings on an airplane, balancing wind direction and air pressure against the size and shape of the sail to go in the direction he wanted to go; how, in sailing, going in a straight line often wasn’t the quickest way to get somewhere; how one had to travel at an angle to the wind to make it all work. I was completely lost, but it obviously had become almost instinct with him. He sailed as much through the feel of the boat in his hands and the wind on his skin as through what his eyes told him. It was a pleasure to watch this man and his boat work together like one creature.

  For two hours we went back and forth, up and down, playing the wind, riding it for all it was worth one minute, tricking it into taking us somewhere other than where it wanted to push us the next. We spoke little. I didn’t need to voice the enjoyment that I was certain was as evident on my face as it was on his.

  By noon, as the now-heating wind began to die down and the sun was shifting into broil, Lansing turned the boat back toward Fort Washington and the marina. On the return trip, I was the one who watched him. After the third or fourth tim
e of looking over to find me studying him, he said, “What?”

  “Sorry,” I said, laughing. “You’re very different out here than I’ve seen you at work. I’m just wondering which is the real you.”

  He looked thoughtful. He reached over to make an adjustment to the sail, then sat down beside me, his right hand firmly on the wheel. “They both are,” he said finally. “I throw just as much of myself into the work when I’m there as I do into enjoying the sailing when I’m here.”

  “No, it’s more than that,” I told him. “Out here, you seem at peace with yourself.”

  A shadow passed across his eyes. “The waters of the Lethe,” he said. “River of forgetfulness.”

  I didn’t know what to say, not because he was much more literate than most policemen I knew, but because I understood the reference to his wife. I just looked at him in uncomfortable silence.

  “I took up sailing after my wife died,” he said finally, looking up at the sail. “I had sailed a little as a kid, but not for years after, even in Virginia Beach. But after she died, I found myself drawn to the idea as a way to leave it all behind. It worked, for a few hours at a time anyway. Back then, it helped get me through the really bad times. Now I do it because I love it.”

  Again I was quiet, afraid anything I said would open old wounds. He looked back at me in silence as well. I could drown in those eyes, I thought, and die a happy woman. His gaze was unwavering. I caught my breath as Noah Lansing reached up to brush aside a lock of hair that had blown down into my face. As he brushed it back over my ear his hand touched the spot where my attacker had hit me. I flinched at the pain.

  Instantly, his look changed into a scowl, and his fingers started to probe.

  “Ow!” I yelped, jerking my head away.

  “What the hell is that?” he asked. “You’ve got a lump the size of an egg on your head.”

  “I’m okay,” I answered, blinking as the pain his hand had set off began to recede. “It’s nothing.”