The Drowned Man

by David Whellams

  When the car stopped next to her, the first hooker did nothing. She waited for the passenger-side window to open. Far up ahead, the second girl noted the car but it was dark and she couldn’t be sure that it was the same sedan that had just passed. The first girl keyed into the fact that it was the dumb-ass woman again. Alice let the window down halfway so that the girl could not quite put her head inside the car. The hooker crossed the wet grass fringe and leaned close to the window. She saw that the driver was dark, maybe Pakistani, she thought, and she was immediately suspicious. Had she bothered to mark the Canadian plates she might have held back.

  “What kind of fool are you, lady? You think some sisterhood is going to protect you on this beat?”

  The girl was a better body double than Alice had first thought. She had to get the hooker into the car. Alice lowered her voice. “Hi. I’m looking for . . .”

  “You looking for what, sugar?”

  “Service.”

  She took out Carpenter’s billfold, making sure the girl saw the wad. She removed two hundreds, in fact, most of her American cash; the rest was still in multicoloured Canadian bills.

  The sight of the money lessened the prostitute’s misgivings. She adjusted her bra and tightened the sash around her waist in greedy anticipation.

  “What kind of service?” the girl said, preparing to control the transaction by naming a firm price.

  Alice pressed a button to bring the window all the way down. She rubbed the two bills together and said, “You can fuck me for two hundred dollars.”

  The hooker gasped. This bitch was kinked out. Leaning through the window, she sized up the risk. The Pakistani bitch was a sicko — why else would this lesbo cruise Anacostia Park? — but she was no danger to anyone yet. The hooker judged that she could handle the woman. She had her gun, a Lorcin .380 that fit nicely in her clutch bag. Her pimp liked the tiny guns because they were cheap and universally available on the black market, and the girls liked them because they made a big, scary bang. The hooker had never fired her gun and was unaware of its tendency to foul and otherwise break down. She liked it, light as it was, because she had confidence that she could always get close; slap that barrel up against a client’s head and the bullet would rattle around his skull like a pinball.

  Alice made a move to slide the crisp hundreds into her own bra, a gesture both inviting and potentially dismissive. It told the prostitute that it was her decision to make. The hooker tried to open the passenger door but found it locked, and Alice opened it with a button in the armrest. The girl got inside and turned to look her free-spending client over. She caught sight of the pink bag in the back, with two vaguely familiar faces painted on the front panel. Was that Leo, Leonardo DiCaprio? Yes, it was! She had seen him the week before in that new movie Inception. Alice caught her looking and turned as if to lift the rucksack over the headrest. This move brought her close to the girl and her mint breath. But Alice never got to the bag. As she subsided back in the driver’s seat, she swung the tire iron in a smooth movement against the back of the hooker’s skull, with a force calculated to stun without killing.

  The prostitute crumpled forward in the passenger seat, her forehead just avoiding the dash. Alice held the bar above the girl’s head. She gurgled a couple of times, moaned, and collapsed against the door. Hitting her again was the wrong thing to do, Alice judged. If the hooker woke up, Alice would club her a second time but she hoped to avoid getting blood on the upholstery. If she managed to run the Ford off one of those bridges — only one of her scenarios — the blood might not matter but she increasingly had reservations about that plan. If this had been London, one or more of thousands of cameras would have caught her on any given bridge. Even though America — even its national capital — might not be so scrupulous, the bridges she had seen so far appeared too exposed.

  The girl moaned again and shivered, a bad sign: she might have a messy seizure in the car. Alice knew she had to move. She eased the Ford down the avenue but turned left at the first corner, leaving the second streetwalker farther along puzzling over her rival’s new client.

  The side street was deserted and there were no overhead lamps, so Alice risked pulling over. It was easiest to go around to the other side of the vehicle (the shotgun seat, Johnny had called it). She centred the wounded girl so that she appeared to be looking straight ahead; Alice strapped her in with the seat belt. She had stopped moaning, and Alice pulled the cheap fringed sash from around the young woman’s waist and wrapped it about her head like a hood. The hooker had coughed up some blood but no open lesions showed on the back of her neck. Alice folded and tucked the scarf in the Indian fashion and tilted back the seat to make it look as if the girl was her sleeping passenger.

  Alice beelined towards the next bridge but found herself under it with no route onto the span. She would have to keep going and find a way to double back. But when she pulled over and glanced back, she saw that the bridge was lit by fixed lampposts every forty feet or so; it was no place to dump a body. She decided to try the next crossing and continued driving parallel to the river. A hundred yards on, she took a completely wrong turn and ended up again on the Anacostia Parkway; she could see the river receding behind her. All this driving increased the risk of detection by a night owl trucker, or worse, a bored state trooper. She decided to turn around at the next exit.

  She met no one on her side of the divided road until a sedan began to pass her in the left lane. The two vehicles were alone on the parkway. As the sedan pulled up parallel to her she saw the decal on the passenger door: “U.S. Park Police.” The driver looked over but, not really hesitating, pulled away.

  Alice turned at a featureless exit a mile on and followed the ramp to the parking lot of a small power plant, its bulky generators sequestered behind chain-link fencing. Tread marks in the driveway showed that others had turned around here before.

  She opened the Rand McNally to the expanded D.C. city map and followed the Anacostia River from the top of the page to where it joined the left branch of the Potomac just south of the capital, and continued to Chesapeake Bay. The hooker sat silent beside her. Any other driver would interpret the scene for what it was: a fellow driver losing her way. Alice moved inch by inch down the river. Her eye caught a narrow strip of white on the map on the far side of one of the bridges, hard by the Anacostia, and she considered its suitability as a disposal site. To be thorough, she traced the river down to a third bridge, where she encountered an installation labelled “Anacostia Naval Annex.” Anything military in nature was to be avoided in this post-9/11 world; also, she saw that if she crossed the last of the bridges she would be forced into the city, close to Capitol Hill. She went back to the white blotch and decided to give it a try.

  She examined the tiny notation next to the white spot: “Eastern Yacht Club.”Most promising was its location right on the water. She might be able to organize the body in some secluded spot and roll it into the river.

  The hooker didn’t wake up. Alice judged that she was close to dead, or had already expired. Without employing the GPS, she found the northern entrance to Anacostia Drive and at once spotted the bridge to the far side of the river. She followed the signs onto the vaulting span. It was under reconstruction, with plastic cones lining the road, and there was no possibility of stopping to heave a body into the river. Temporary signage had been tacked up everywhere. One sign read, “John Philip Sousa Bridge, secondary access ahead.” Another arrow vaguely pointed the way to Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium on the far shore. A chill ran through her: he was the president — but no, Johnny Carpenter had been named after JFK, the brother, the actual president.

  Yet another sign promised an efficient turnaround over to the Navy Yard, which lay downriver on her map. Alice had no way of knowing that she was on the Potomac Bridge (both branches of the river were called the Potomac in 1865) and that John Wilkes Booth had crossed it in his flight from the killing gr
ound at Ford’s Theatre.

  Almost onto the far shore, she studied a last-chance sign that gave her two choices: turn around and head back to the Naval Annex, or proceed “Downtown.” Moving straight ahead on the second tack she noticed a narrow construction road off to the right. She lurched onto it, the wheels grinding into the gravel surface.

  And there it was. The sign she wanted, nailed to a telephone pole, beckoned her to the Anacostia Yacht Facility, with an arrow pointing ahead.

  She was now running parallel to the water. Two SUVs sat by the road and she gathered that construction crewmen used this lane for parking. She would have to watch out for traffic, especially security patrols. But for now the farther section of the road remained empty and she soon found the yacht club lot, also vacant at this time of the morning. She pulled in and parked, angling the Ford towards the river.

  The girl hadn’t moved from her original position. Alice came around to the passenger side and leaned over the body, not certain she was dead. She hefted the iron bar, ready to strike again. When it proved unnecessary she dragged the girl out of the seat and onto the gravel, managing to turn the hooker about so that she sat leaning against the front wheel. Moving to the boot of the Ford, Alice used the key to open it. She thought about replacing the tire iron but she saw that it had blood and hair on it; she was strong enough to hurl it about fifteen feet out into the water and she did so now without hesitation. Returning to the rear of the car, she took out a plastic jug of windshield washer antifreeze. She crouched down by the girl and opened the container, careful not to get fluid on her own slacks. Pushing her left hand inside the black girl’s slack mouth, Alice used two fingers to wedge open the throat, at the same time levering the head back in a crude parody of a sun worshipper’s pose. The jug was full and Alice spilled half of it on the gravel. Holding the gullet open, she managed to pour several ounces down the hooker’s throat. She replaced the jug in the back of the car.

  A few yards beyond the parking lot stood a clapboard house, once a harbour master’s residence. It remained entirely dark. The Stars and Stripes and a marine flag drooped from a flagpole next to it. She saw no sign of life in the house.

  Alice Nahri’s plan was all about buying time. If she created enough confusion, the police might believe that the prostitute in the Anacostia was Alice Ida Nahri and stop searching. Her greatest fear was the sunrise. It was now almost 4 a.m. but she had one more bit of misdirection to fabricate. She worked her way between the body and the car’s front quarter panel, slipping her arms under the dead woman’s armpits. It proved easy to lever up the body this way. She dragged the slumping corpse across the gravel and broken macadam to a section of smooth asphalt only three yards from the river’s edge; the final few feet was grass, culminating in a stone retaining wall. She put down the body in a spread-eagle position on its back.

  The girl coughed. Alice recoiled backwards and tumbled onto the sharp gravel. Just as swiftly she launched herself forward and fell on top of the stubborn victim. “Bitch!” she hissed.

  The fringed scarf had slipped and Alice had to get up from the reanimated hooker to retrieve it, but in seconds she was back straddling the woman and pressing the sash into her throat. She held it there — three, five minutes? — until she was sure.

  Dawn was emerging in the eastern sky directly across the channel. The early shift of construction workers might arrive any minute now. Alice stuffed the scarf into her Titanic bag in the car. She returned and without ceremony took the hooker’s out-flung left arm and turned the hand over, straightening the fingers. She pressed the tips against the pitted asphalt, pushing down on all five together, and drew them across the surface towards herself. She did this several times under the maximum pressure she could generate, scraping until the fingers were grey, bloody sticks. Let the coroner figure that one out, Alice said to herself. She repeated the mutilation on the right hand.

  Alice scooped out the contents of the sequined purse: lipstick, condoms, a richly embossed business card from a customer (a reckless one), a roll of American twenties, and the pistol. She couldn’t spare the time to count the cash but at least $400 went into Carpenter’s billfold. The rest of the junk she left in the purse. She had no use for the gun and decided to throw it into the river with the body from the end of the dock.

  In order to drag the corpse the length of the quay without raising a racket, Alice had to remove the girl’s spiked heels. She again gripped the corpse under the arms and heaved it backwards along the wooden pier, out to the end. It surprised her that there was no danger light there, no beacon for passing river traffic; it also seemed odd that no boats were moored in either side of the dock. She set the body down and immediately understood her mistake. The river below her was almost a mud flat, not deep enough to drown a rat. She appreciated that the Anacostia was tidal but this was absurd. She came from a dry, barren state in India and knew little about the timing of ebb and flow. How long would it take the eastern arm of the Potomac to refill itself from downriver? She sensed that the tide was rising but at an agonizing rate. And was it possible that the tide would send a body upstream in the morning flow?

  She had little choice. Eventually the tide would rise and carry the body away, perhaps as far as Chesapeake Bay. She wanted the corpse found but certainly not right away. Five days, even three, in the water would suffice. The emergence of the woman’s body in Maryland would halt the search for her in the other forty-nine states and by then Alice would have selected her new, anonymous home. With some gruesome luck, fish and crabs would chew up the corpse and the water would bleach the face and leave its features bloated beyond recognition.

  The dead woman hit the muddy soup with more of a splat than a splash and, to Alice’s surprise, began to float, face up, in the shallow river. She did not wait for the tide to take it away. She had seen enough burials in the Ganges.

  She gathered up the clothes and the girl’s purse. She decided not to risk the gun getting stuck in the river mud and put it into her rucksack for the time being. Leaving her British passport under the driver’s floor mat, she checked that she had her Indian passport and her European Union papers. For the next stage, she would use her Indian identity. Everything went into the pink bag with $20,000 in Canadian cash. She tossed the car keys into the river. At the last minute she turned back to the Ford and retrieved the portable GPS unit and its dashboard stand; it went into the bag. She recapped the GPS port in the console between the front seats; perhaps they would forget that the hire car had been leased out with the device.

  It was still an hour short of sunrise and she walked down the dirt road and up the ramp at the side of the massive bridge without seeing anyone. She was a student or perhaps a young charlady on her way to work. At the rise, she sighted in both directions along M Street. Instead of turning left or right she began to walk directly north. She wanted to clear the nest of elevated carriageways and bridges as soon as possible. At G Street she paused and tossed the scarf, the shoes, and the purse and its contents into a dumpster. She kept the gun and the GPS for now.

  She paused to breathe in the freshening pre-dawn air. The fashionable streets were peaceful. She liked this neighbourhood, even though she could never settle in such a high-end community. Off to her right she saw a massive banner that had been strung across the side wall of a school building. In red and blue, it shouted, “Tea Party! Glenn Beck. Restoring Honor to America.” She had no idea who Glenn Beck could be — one of the TV evangelists Americans seemed to dote on? — or what the Tea Party was all about, and she did not care.

  She did a last check of her picture and name in her new passport. Alice Nahri / Alida Nahvi turned away and began to walk into the heart of Washington, with no fear of anything more the night could offer.

  CHAPTER 19

  Peter Cammon flew into D.C. in an optimistic mood that approached exhilaration. He had always enjoyed himself in the U.S. capital and had many old friends in the FBI. He t
ook the shuttle in from Washington Dulles International and registered at the Willard Hotel (a place where Abraham Lincoln had often stayed) and quickly grabbed a taxi to the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue.

  He still believed that the key to John Carpenter’s murder was his mysterious girlfriend, Alice Nahri, and further that it was a good possibility she was alive and hiding somewhere in the maze of the lower forty-eight states. He was eager to track down the medical examiner at Quantico and review the autopsy results on the woman lying on a cold slab in the FBI mortuary. Protocol, however, required that he touch base with headquarters first and sort out the jurisdictional niceties.

  From the lobby of the Hoover Building he was ushered up to the office of Owen Rizeman, a Bureau lifer well known to both Peter and Sir Stephen Bartleben.

  “Peter Cammon! Thought you’d retired. Are you here for a job interview? I’ll tell the others to sod off. I’ll hire you myself.”

  He beckoned Peter to take a chair, while he positioned himself behind a desk that was covered in memorabilia from a lifetime of service.

  Rizeman was sixty. His hair had turned white and he risked becoming the cliché Southern gentleman out of an antebellum movie, with the bluster to match. He ran the Office of Law Enforcement Coordination but Peter had first met him during the Oklahoma bombing case in 1995. Rizeman was the eternal optimist, a force of nature. He had sent Peter a friendly note when he retired.

  “Thanks for that offer, Owen,” Peter responded, “but driving around the country on the right hand side of the road, well, those days are behind me.”

  “So, to what do I owe the honour, Peter?” Rizeman said. He knew the reason for Peter’s visit but the basics bore repeating.

  “Dead body dragged from the Anacostia a few days ago. Woman. Apparent suicide. We need to confirm COD and her identity. Quebec Sûreté have formal jurisdiction over the larger case, which is murder. She’s a British national and a fugitive from Canada.”