“You just don’t understand. Most of it, all the transcript shit, was pure babble. Disconnected words. Like those famous monkeys at the typewriters. It’s probably meaningless.”
“Okay, Con,” he said, clearly exasperated. “So you tell me what all this is about, then, if not the clinic. Some guy in your house, your cat poisoned, threats on the phone? You been borrowing money from the wrong people or something?”
She didn’t know what to say. He slapped a hand down on the dining room table, making her jump. “Listen to me, Connie. Something bad happens, and it comes back to this guy, or anybody at that clinic with the Muslim doctors? The whole country will want to crucify you, you don’t bring it in. Right now. Tonight. You listening to me? You need to tell that Morgan guy what you know.”
“But—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know you don’t know who or even what it’s all about. But this might be the final link in some deal the Secret Service has been wrestling with for a year or two. There’s no telling what might be going down. You have to call that guy.”
Heismann, watching them argue, decided to go check out that car. Keeping low, he opened the big wooden door wide enough to slip out. Staying bent over, he went right, away from the back porch light, and then down the driveway to where her car was. He crouched beside it on the side away from the house, then crept over to the driver’s side of the man’s car. The engine was still making ticking noises as it cooled in the night air. It was a large four-door sedan. He checked the house, but the front windows were still dark. He looked inside the car and saw a radio handset and a small console below the dashboard. He looked through the back window and could see the radio antenna embedded in the glass, but there was another one, a stubby wire antenna sticking up out of the trunk. He slipped behind the car and checked the plate. District plate, but no sign of government decals. He examined the taillights and saw the extra lens for a white or blue strobe light.
Very well, then. Police.
He went up to the grille to confirm that, ran his fingers along the warm plastic louvers, where he found another pair of recessed strobe lights. Definitely police.
Talking to the nurse about what? Their sex life? Or that doctored medical file he’d left behind at the clinic?
If this was about the bait, what would the policeman do? Demand that she come in, tell all she knew about the clinic, the patients, especially the patient in that record? Federal agents, now police. Weeks after the fire. Surely they did not suspect her of starting the fire. So this had to be about something else. Something that would concern the sole survivor.
It had to be the bait.
He took a deep breath of cold night air, stood up, and then began moving back to the garage. It was too soon. Much too soon. The deception plan had been designed to play out in two stages. The first was to drop an indication that a patient at the clinic, whose name was unknown, was planning to bomb the Union State speech. That had been the point of leaving the fake record behind at the clinic, in such a way as to ensure that it would survive the fire. By mentioning the Union State speech, they had established the wrong target, and, more important, the wrong time line. As long as everyone in the night crew died in the fire, stage one would initially be all they had. But for whatever reason, this nurse had survived. His reaction to that unexpected development had been to drop the second critical piece of information into the investigation, but Mutaib had scotched that idea. Told him to kill her.
Now federal police, and even a city policeman, were talking to her all of a sudden, weeks after the fire. The nurse might inadvertently compromise the timing of the second stage of the deception, which involved getting the Ammies to focus on that last name in the transcript’s Nazi pantheon, Heismann. They’d need a description, and Interpol, which had a file on Heismann, would give them one. The trick was that his Interpol description no longer pertained, not after a year of cosmetic surgery. At the beginning of their search, they wouldn’t know that. And they would also think they had some time, because stage one had pointed them at the Union State speech.
But everything depended on their being unaware, at least for a while, that he had a totally new physical identity. With all these policemen suddenly converging on his loose end, there was now a distinct chance that this damned woman could reveal that one crucial bit of information much too soon.
Mutaib was right. And he had already failed once to do what he had promised to do.
He would have to take her now. Tonight. Direct action. No more delay.
He’d tested the car’s doors, but they had been locked. A security light had been blinking out its warning on the dashboard. Besides, he’d brought no tools, other than a small flashlight, the minibinocs, and his trusty Walther. So improvise. Do something to bring the policeman out into the backyard. But what? Shoot him? No. Too drastic. The hue and cry would be tremendous. Something else. He had to disable the policeman, not kill him. Unless, of course, the policeman himself forced the issue. But the policeman wasn’t the objective; it was that damned woman he needed to silence.
He scuttled back up the driveway and into the garage again, swinging the big doors almost shut behind him. Looking through the crack, he could see that they were still in the dining room, talking, faces frowning, the policeman up now, walking around, agitated, although not shouting. Not an argument, more like a serious discussion. He needed to get that man out into the backyard, away from the woman. Disable the policeman, then disable and grab the woman, take her down the hill, drown her in the creek, and stuff her body under a rock. “Disappear her,” as the Argentine secret police liked to say. Desaparecidos. Wonderful expression, that. Those Argies were German-trained, too. By real Germans. Back when Germany commanded some respect in the world. Not like now.
He looked around the garage for something to use to set up a trap. A wire of some kind. Something that would ensnare the policeman if he came running out. He spotted the band saw. It gave him an idea.
He checked back to see where they were. They were still visible in the window and still talking. He moved to the band saw and used a bench brush to wipe off all the cobwebs. He felt the band blade—a flexible steel ribbon of serrated teeth one-quarter of an inch wide and about two and a half feet long. Times two: The band would be almost five feet. That would do. He unscrewed the wing nuts that held the housing cover and pulled it off, revealing the pulley wheels and the tensioning latch. He rotated the latch and the band sagged off the steel pulleys. He undid the bottom cover and removed the entire band. The teeth were still sharp and spiked his hands, even through his gloves. He lay the band on the workbench and searched for metal cutters, which he found on a Peg-Board wall. He cut the band, ducking his head when it snapped back into one flat ribbon of teeth and then flipped like a live thing down onto the floor.
He went back to the crack and looked out. She was still sitting there, head in hands now, while a shadow was visible moving around the kitchen. He went back and retrieved the glistening band, then spotted a miter box, its short, hard-backed, fine-toothed saw gathering webs on the bench. Perfect. Now all he needed was something large to throw through that dining room window. He looked around and spotted the vise.
“How much money we talking about?” Cat asked from the kitchen, where he was refilling his coffee cup.
“They paid eighty, base pay,” she replied. “Plus overtime for day work, and benefits. The bonus I reported was five grand; the cash bonus was twenty.” She was getting tired of this. She was suddenly ready for him to leave, go see his goddamned kid.
“Wow. And you invested all that?”
“Most of it. My broker, God bless her, pulled me out in early 2001, and we slapped it all in grade A, six and a half percent tax-exempt munis. Everything.”
“Those guys must have been making a fortune,” he said. “And you’ve got what—a couple hundred large working for you, tax-free? Nice.”
She had a lot more than that, but he didn’t need to know. Not now. “The IRS probably won’
t think so,” she said. “Another reason I don’t want to go front and center with the government.”
He sat back down at the table. “I’ll tell you what, Con. I think with the right shyster, you could get immunity from all that tax shit if you were willing to lay it out, everything that was going on at that clinic. You might have to pay some back taxes, but that would be negotiable. Your info is too valuable. Foreigners getting ID changes right here in Washington? Shit. Those DHS people would go nuts for that.”
“And what if they lock me up?” she said, chewing a nail. “After nine eleven, they rounded up a shitload of people, and some of them are still in jail, no charges filed, no bond, no lawyers. Hitler would feel at home here these days.”
He laughed. “No way. Hitler kept it simple—just the gestapo. We’ve still got eighty-odd law-enforcement outfits here in D.C. alone, the DHS notwithstanding. It’s like this Morgan guy—him and his Office of Special Investigations. That should be Bureau work.”
“How’s about I do an anonymous tip? Write something up, drop it into the system. Or I can give it to you—you can say you developed it from a confidential informant as part of this arson investigation.”
He grunted sympathetically. “Like they wouldn’t know who that was? With one person surviving the fire? C’mon, Con.”
She screamed as something large crashed through the dining room window, landed on the table, and knocked her computer monitor right onto the floor, where its glass face exploded in a puff of arcing white smoke. Still frozen to her chair, she stared at the billowing curtains, stunned to see a face, a horrible face, pop up into view for a split second and then disappear. She heard Cat yell, “Hey!” and then he was running into the kitchen, trying to snag his gun out of his hip holster. She willed herself to get up, to get out of that room, trying not to step on all the glass or breathe the noxious cloud of phosphorous smoke hovering above the ruined monitor. That face—something about it. It had been all eyes and teeth, as if illuminated from below. How was that possible? She heard the back screen door open and then bang shut. And then came a strange strangling noise and then a huge thump as something—Cat?—went down in a heap on the back steps.
She snatched up the phone and dialed 911 as she backed into the living room, feeling almost naked in the light, those curtains blowing in and that ominous silence outside. The phone rang and rang and rang, but no operator picked up. Goddamned District of Columbia! She hung it up and redialed, this time getting a busy signal. She swore out loud and redialed one more time, the cord stretching all the way out now. Ringing. Then she heard footsteps coming toward the back of the house. Cat? Or that face? She was terrified to go out there, but then she remembered the derringer in her pocket. The operator came on just as she pulled the heavy little gun out of her jeans, nearly dropping the phone.
“Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?”
She froze again. What was her emergency? The footsteps were still coming, and they didn’t sound like Cat’s.
“Murder!” she said, blurting out the one word that ought to move their asses right along. “Help me, please.” And then she dropped the phone and backed into the living room, where the lights were off, as the footsteps came up onto the back porch and she heard the screen door open slowly, then bump closed. She could just hear the 911 operator saying hello several times from the handset down on the floor. They would have caller ID, and that would give them the address. But right now, she had bigger problems, for she saw the lights in the kitchen switch off, followed by those in the dining room. Definitely not Cat.
She shuffled as quietly as she could backward across the living room carpet until she felt the couch behind her legs. Realizing she was silhouetted against the dim light coming in through the front window drapes from the street, she slipped behind an upholstered chair and squatted down. The house was silent except for the noises of the wind moving the front bushes around. She held the derringer in both hands, then remembered it wasn’t cocked. The two diminutive side-by-side hammers were still down on the receiver. She heard a sound in the dining room, then another.
He was coming.
His shoes were crunching through the bits of glass from the monitor. And where the hell was Cat? She folded the derringer into her belly to mask the sound and thumbed back the two hammers. She sat fully down on the floor, her back against the wall radiator, and brought the gun up. She froze, barely breathing. Let him find me. Cat had told her the effective range of the derringer was arm’s length. Okay, that’s where I’ve got it, she thought.
She heard a small noise and what sounded like a grunt of effort, and then one of the table lamps came flying over the chair and into the front window, breaking out the glass and dropping heavily on her right shoulder. She nearly dropped the gun and had to bite her lip to keep from crying out. Where are the fucking cops? She wondered. Where is Cat? And then the man was right there, pulling the chair away, towering over her, that same face, a familiar face, something in his hand, a hammer coming down in a wicked strike at her head.
She rolled to the left, toward the hallway, aimed upward, and pulled both triggers on the derringer. Two rapid-fire blasts banged the palm of her hand and she heard him yell and stumble backward, colliding with some piece of furniture. She didn’t hesitate. She scrambled away from the overturned chair, rolled into the front hall, got up, and ran as fast as she could straight out the back door, where she promptly tripped over the inert form of Cat Ballard, who groaned when she hit him. Her arms windmilling, she whacked her shoulder as she hit the railing on the back porch and slipped in something wet. She sat down abruptly on the top step, then went bumping right down the steps on her backside and hit the cold concrete of the sidewalk on all fours, her hands covered in—blood?
Cat’s blood?
She heard footsteps again, this time from inside the house, thumping heavily down the front hall toward the kitchen, sounding like a drunk trying to run. She saw Cat’s gun lying at the bottom of the steps and reached forward to grab it as a form filled the kitchen doorway, just inside the screen.
She raised the gun and tried to pull the trigger, but her bloody, trembling hands slipped on the butt and she dropped the gun. As she lunged to retrieve it, she heard the man laugh, and then the screen door was opening and he was silhouetted in the kitchen light, shooting at her, stars of red flame blossoming in the doorway as steel hornets slashed the air by her cheeks. She screamed and began rolling across the yard, barely conscious of bullets hammering the concrete and tearing up chunks of dead grass all around her as she kept rolling, rolling, and then she was into the cedars, Cat’s bloody gun still clutched in her hand. She tumbled through the dense green branches, got up, and ran straight down the hill, bushes and branches whipping her face. She was falling forward as much as she was running, caroming off small tree trunks in the darkness, until she twisted an ankle when she finally reached flat ground. She went down with a yelp, then stopped to listen.
She got up, hopping on one leg, rubbing the throbbing ankle, trying to hush her screaming lungs, her heart pounding so hard in her ears that he had to be able to hear it. She listened for signs of somebody coming down the hill after her, and then she could hear sirens, so she slumped back against a tree and tried not to cry. The creek was right below her, and, even in the cold, she thought about sliding down the huge boulders into that black water, if only to get that sticky mess off her hands.
He lunged out of the darkness and tackled her, sweeping her sideways and down, grabbing for her mouth with one hand while she fought, twisted, bit, and tried to shout, but he was too strong, one iron arm encircling her chest and squeezing the breath right out of her. She thought she felt Cat’s gun under her knee, but she couldn’t reach it. Then he lost his balance for an instant and came lunging over the top of her, giving her one glorious free shot at his crotch, which she took, kicking out with every ounce of her strength. And then he was off of her, curling into a retching ball that went sliding down the stone banks of the creek a
nd into the water. She patted the ground for Cat’s gun, found it, and crawled to the edge of the rocks, looking down, determined now, waiting for him to surface, ready to kill him, to empty that thing at him in the water. But he didn’t surface. There was only the sound of the creek, running high in winter, rushing over all the rocks. Rock Creek, that’s why they called it that, she thought as her adrenaline began to crash and she slowly lowered the gun.
She heard voices shouting above her on the bluff and saw blue lights flickering through the cedars. Walking backward up the hill, she kept the gun pointed down the slope, waiting for him to show himself again. She trudged back up the slope the way she’d come, step by step, the backs of her shoes filling with bits of soft dirt and mud. When she neared the top, she stopped, out of breath, her ankle pounding, her ribs sore from grappling with her attacker. She could hear men shouting, doors banging, other vehicles arriving. Then she heard an authoritative voice shouting, “What’ve we got, Larry?” And another man—Larry, she guessed—answered in an excited voice: “You’re not gonna believe this, but it looks like Cat’s punch cut his throat and then shagged ass. That’s his car, and that’s her car. We need some fucking dogs back here.”
She froze in the cedars. Cut his throat? Sweet Jesus! And they thought she did it? She started to push forward, out of the cedars, determined to clear that shit right up, but then stopped in her tracks. She didn’t recognize any of those voices, and she knew most of the guys on the District Homicide squad. Could she clear this up? She felt the sticky mess on her hands, Cat’s blood. She hefted Cat’s gun. What would that look like to a bunch of cops who were cranking up a cop-killer frenzy out there? And the guy who’d busted into her house? Where was he?
Instinctively, she backed down the hill again, watching the bluffs this time, waiting to see if someone would come through the trees, or turn loose a pack of tracking dogs. Surely the evidence in the house would reveal—what, exactly? Two broken windows. Overturned furniture. A struggle in the living room. She thought she had hit him with the .45, but then he’d come right back after her. So there’d be bullet holes in the ceiling, right? Proof that she had—what? They’d had a lovers’ quarrel, which had escalated into a shooting? The derringer was still up there, with her prints all over it.
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