Guilt by Silence

by Taylor Smith

  They approached the yellow line and spotted a police officer whom Mariah recognized as the patrolman who had been first to arrive at her house that afternoon. He lifted the tape for them to pass under. “Ms. Bolt, Mr. Chaney—glad you’re back,” he said. “Sergeant Albrecht’s been waiting to talk to you.”

  “What’s the matter?” Mariah asked. “What’s happened now?”

  “There’s been a body found.”

  “Who?”

  The cop shrugged. “Not sure, there’s no ID. Been there a couple of days, looks like. Come this way, please.”

  They followed the officer down the path until they came to the junction where it turned toward the recreation center. A couple of people wearing vests stenciled POLICE in large white letters were taking measurements along the path and into the wooded ravine that dropped steeply from its side. Mariah recognized Officer Harmon, the policewoman who had been gathering evidence in her bedroom earlier. Portable floodlights were angled down into the ravine and a small generator throbbed noisily. Paramedics were milling around a white-draped stretcher.

  The officer tapped Sergeant Albrecht on the shoulder. He glanced at Mariah and Chaney and nodded briefly, then turned back to his conversation with a man whose jacket identified him as being from the coroner’s office. A moment later, the sergeant walked over. As he approached, Mariah was conscious of the weight of the gun in her pocket and felt decidedly uneasy. She slipped her hands into her pockets.

  “Busy day we’re having in your neighborhood, Ms. Bolt.”

  “The officer said you’d found a body.”

  “Some guy walking his dog came across the old guy when the dog suddenly took off into the ravine.”

  “Your man said there was no ID on the body,” Chaney said.

  Albrecht nodded at Chaney, then addressed Mariah. “You said your stalker followed you from the pool on Thursday night.”

  “Yes, but I was walking with—oh, no!” Her eyes went wide. “He killed him!” she whispered. “Oh, God—oh, God, no!” She felt Chaney’s arm go around her shoulders. She leaned against him and closed her eyes, her hand across her mouth.

  “That’s what it looks like, I’m afraid,” Albrecht said. “You mentioned a stalker. And Laughlin, the old guy at the pool?”

  “John Laughlin,” she replied dully.

  The sergeant shuffled his feet, waiting as she took a deep breath. When she looked up at him, he said, “Do you think you could manage to take a look at him and see if it’s the same man? We’ve already determined that Laughlin lived alone and his neighbors haven’t seen him for a couple of days. We’re tracking down next of kin now. Dollars to doughnuts it’s him, but a positive ID would help us a lot.”

  “Whatever you need,” she said.

  He took her gently by the arm and led her to the stretcher. As they approached, Mariah was conscious of a strong, cloying odor. Unpleasant. Like the nursing home, but worse, much worse.

  “Brace yourself, now. It’s not a pleasant sight.”

  “How?” Mariah whispered.

  “Cut his throat.” Albrecht signaled to the paramedics and one of them rolled down the top half of the sheet covering the body.

  The eyes were wide and dull, the mouth gaping. The white hair, so neatly combed after his swim, was mussed and tangled with dead leaves. His skin, even in the poorly illuminated night, shone a pearly gray-green color. A dark port-wine stain spread from his neck down the pigeon chest that he had pounded so heartily that night.

  “Oh, poor Mr. Laughlin. I’m so sorry,” Mariah whispered. She tore her eyes away and looked up at Sergeant Albrecht and nodded, as the paramedics pulled the sheet over the old man.

  At that precise moment, old John Laughlin’s killer was well on his way to getting blind drunk.

  Rollie Burton stretched forward on the sofa, reaching for the bottle of whiskey on the table in front of him. He made a halfhearted attempt to pour another glassful, scowled at the glass in his hand and let it drop to the floor. Leaning back on the sofa, he grasped the neck of the bottle and took a long gulp. He held the burning liquid in his mouth for a second or two, then swallowed and reached up to massage his aching head. Black pools of blood had formed in the hollows under both eyes, leaving them raccoonlike, puffy and swollen. His nostrils were packed with cotton, and he breathed noisily through his mouth.

  After leaving the condominium complex that afternoon, he had driven straight back to the underground garage of his dingy apartment block in Arlington, knowing he had to get the Toyota and himself off the road quickly. He had made good time in the early Saturday-afternoon traffic.

  In the garage, Burton had stuffed his nose with tissues, cleaned up his face as much as possible and slipped a windbreaker over his bloody sweatshirt. He had pulled on his baseball cap and dark glasses as extra precaution before bounding up the stairs to his second-floor apartment, avoiding the elevator, but no one had been around to see him. He had spent the rest of the afternoon lying down with ice on his nose, knowing it was broken, knowing there was no way he could chance having a doctor look at it. Knowing he was going back to kill the bitch the first chance he got.

  Taking another swig of whiskey, he was startled by the jangle of the telephone. The liquor went down the wrong way and he coughed spasmodically, rolling himself over and off the sofa, stumbling toward the kitchen and the phone. His voice, when he finally recovered enough to pick up the receiver, was hoarse and dusky. “Hello?”

  “Burton?”

  Burton froze at the tinny, slightly garbled sound of the familiar voice. “Yeah?” he said cautiously.

  “You screwed up.” The voice knew his phone number—whoever it belonged to probably knew where to find him, as well. The kind of people who had Burton’s number and made use of it were not the kind to tolerate mistakes.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t play games with me,” the voice hissed. “You were supposed to take her out, not get your jollies, you idiot!”

  Burton leaned against the wall, the burning liquor in his stomach barely counteracting the profound unease that this high-pitched voice was rousing. “I was doing what I was supposed to do—making it look like something else. It was a professional decision.” He winced at his own audacity, praying the voice would buy it.

  When he heard only silence at the other end of the line, he decided to plunge ahead, taking the offensive.

  “And you neglected to mention some critical facts—like she’s got a kid. What the hell am I supposed to do, take out a kid, too, and have every cop in the Commonwealth of Virginia looking to strip my hide? And how about the reporter, for chrissake? He tails her everywhere! You want me to do this under television lights?”

  Burton shook his head vigorously, his courage mounting along with his whiskey-primed indignation. “I’m a professional! You want me to work under these kinds of conditions, you bloody well better give me all the facts—not to mention a hell of a lot more money. Otherwise, this contract’s just a piece of garbage!”

  He held his breath, waiting for a reaction. For a long, agonizing moment, there was only silence.

  “What do you want?” the voice asked.

  “A few more days—and more money.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. This isn’t as straightforward as you led me to believe. We’re talkin’ high risk here—real high risk. That’s gonna cost.”

  “How much?”

  Burton was feeling decidedly courageous now. “Double,” he said, “including another ten grand up front before I move again.” There was a squeaky hiss on the other end of the line that he took to be an intake of breath. Buy it, he prayed.

  “All right,” the voice said at last. Burton slumped with relief. “It’ll take a day or so. Be at Tyson’s Corner—same place as before, the Dumpster—after 2:00 a.m. Tuesday morning. The money’ll be there.”

  “Got it.”

  “And Burton?”

  “What?”

  “No more
screwups. Is that clear?”

  “Yeah, sure. It’s in the bag.”

  He hung up the phone and leaned against the wall, holding his hand to his throbbing head. Then he moved back to the sofa to finish the bottle and drown the nagging feeling that he might finally be getting too old for this game.

  “The good news,” Sergeant Albrecht said, “is that we think we know who this guy is.”

  Mariah and Chaney glanced up sharply. They were sitting in Mariah’s kitchen while the officer posed more questions about the night the stalker had tracked her from the pool.

  “Already?” Chaney said. “How did you manage that?”

  “Dumb luck. That, and the fact that my next-door neighbor works on the FBI’s national fingerprint ID system. We ran the prints we picked up here through our own computers this afternoon, but came up blank. I gave my buddy a call, and he happened to be working today and agreed to run them right away. Usually it takes weeks to get anything back from those guys,” the cop added, grimacing.

  “And they found something?” Mariah prodded.

  “Yup.” Albrecht reached into his notebook and pulled out a photo. He laid it on the table. “Is this your guy?”

  Mariah and Chaney examined the picture of a white-haired man sitting at a sidewalk café, glass in hand. A sign in a window behind him advertised food and beverages in Spanish—vino y cerveza, tapas y platos combinados. Having seen many such pictures, Mariah guessed that it was a surveillance shot taken with a telephoto lens. She shuddered, then glanced over at Chaney. The two of them looked up at the sergeant and nodded.

  “Looks like the guy’s a professional hit man named Roland Norman Burton,” Albrecht said.

  “Professional?”

  The cop nodded, watching her closely. “You got any enemies, Ms. Bolt? Been involved in any CIA funny business?”

  When he had asked her that afternoon where she worked, Mariah had said that she was with the Central Intelligence Agency. As she had told Frank, it wasn’t a national secret, although she had always preferred to maintain the public fiction of a State Department job—there was always someone who wanted to take you on when they found out you were with the Company. Where the police were concerned, however, she had decided to come clean.

  “I’m just a political analyst, Sergeant. I told you that. Why do you ask?”

  Albrecht looked over at Chaney. “Mr. Chaney,” he warned, “since you’re involved in this case and a friend of Ms. Bolt, I’m letting you sit in. But you understand that none of this is for public consumption until we nail this bastard?”

  “My interest here is personal, not professional, Sergeant.”

  “Okay, good,” Albrecht said, turning back to Mariah. “It seems Burton works for various employers, mostly the mob and international drug cartels. Both the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency have files on him a mile long, but neither one’s been able to get enough evidence to make anything stick. They were surprised to hear he was even in the country—seems he operates mostly in the Far East and Latin America. Guy’s getting on, though. He’s in his fifties and he could be slowing down, coming home to retire.”

  “I don’t understand why he would be after me, then,” Mariah said. “The Company has a narcotics unit that works with DEA on international cases, but I’ve never been anywhere near that part of the outfit.”

  “Well, I said Burton does mostly drug-related hits, but he’s not choosy. He’ll free-lance for anyone who comes up with the price. And,” Albrecht added, “he’s one of yours—used to be, anyway.”

  “What? CIA, you mean?”

  The sergeant nodded. “Covert operator from the days of the old Phoenix operation in Vietnam. Trained assassin—well trained. Word is, the Company booted him out after a year or so, though—bastard was too mean, even for those guys. Seems he kept getting picked up for sexual assaults on local women over there, some of the attacks pretty vicious.”

  Mariah shuddered again. She got up and went to the kitchen sink for a glass of water, then leaned back against the counter as she drank it. Putting the glass down, she noticed the flashing light on the telephone answering machine.

  “So where does this leave us, Sergeant?” Chaney asked.

  “A little further ahead. We’re contacting the CIA Office of Security to see if they might have any recent information on Burton or contacts he might have in the D.C. area.” He snapped his notebook shut. “Meantime, folks, you should be extra careful. I’m going to keep a patrol car close by, but this is one mean S.O.B. we’re dealing with. We can’t underestimate him. Normally, I wouldn’t expect a stalker to be back after a close call like the one he had here, but if he’s on a contract, all bets are off. If you did break his nose, though,” he added, looking up at Mariah, clearly reaching for some sort of encouragement, “he may lie low for a few days. That might give us enough time to track him down. We can hope, anyway.” She didn’t feel encouraged. The sergeant got to his feet. “I’d better be going now. We’ll be in touch.”

  Mariah nodded and Chaney followed him to the front door. She stood thinking for a moment, then turned to the answering machine and hit the playback button.

  “Mrs. Tardiff, this is the Montgomery Convalescent Care Home. The time is 11:15 p.m. Please call the night duty nurse as soon as possible.” Mariah frowned and glanced at the clock on the stove—just after midnight. She searched her phone list for the number and dialed.

  When Chaney came back into the kitchen a couple minutes later, she was just hanging up the phone. He stopped dead when he saw her face. “Mariah? What’s the matter?”

  Her eyes drifted slowly up to him. “Has the sergeant left?”

  “The car’s still outside,” Chaney said, glancing out the window. “What’s wrong?”

  “Get him back in here, Paul.”

  “What is it? What happened?”

  “I just spoke to the nursing home,” she said numbly. “David’s dead.”

  “I want an autopsy,” Mariah said when Sergeant Albrecht came back in and had been told what happened.

  “What did the nursing home say?”

  “They were doing evening rounds about two hours ago and found he had died in his sleep. His doctor came in and signed the death certificate. He listed a probable aneurysm as the cause of death—apparently, that’s common after head injuries like my husband’s.”

  “You don’t buy it?” Albrecht questioned.

  Mariah glanced at Chaney and then dropped her gaze, picking at the bandage on her wrist. “I don’t know what to think,” she said quietly. “Maybe there’s something more.” She looked up to see Albrecht watching her closely through narrowed eyes. “After everything that’s gone on today, I’d just feel better if we ruled out any other possibility.”

  The sergeant hesitated, then nodded slowly. “Okay. I’ll get on the radio and catch the coroner’s people—they just left with Laughlin.”

  “Can you wait just a little?” she pleaded. “I’d like to see him first. Please. I’ll go over to the nursing home right now.”

  Albrecht flushed as he watched her. “Sure,” he said, “I understand. I’ll have the coroner’s people go by first thing in the morning.”

  “I’ll take you, Mariah.” Chaney led Albrecht to the kitchen door. “How soon will you have the autopsy results, do you think, Sergeant?”

  “By noon or shortly thereafter.” Albrecht turned back to Mariah. “I’m sorry, ma’am. This has been a truly awful day for you.” He reached out and placed a card on the table. “If there’s something else you think you’d like to tell me, call anytime, day or night. The dispatcher can reach me at home if need be.”

  She nodded, unable to speak.

  14

  “Remember Rollie Burton?” George Neville asked.

  He and Dieter Pflanz were strolling by the fifty-eight thousand names inscribed on the black granite walls of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. They had paused briefly near the vertex of the walls—each, because of the other’s presence, resisting the
impulse to reach out and finger names of friends who had sunk in that quagmire, young men, in most cases, hardly more than boys. Even hardened as the two of them were now, after too many years spent doing too many dirty jobs, resisting the impulse to touch the wall and the memories those names evoked was almost as difficult as resisting the impulse to breathe.

  Ramming his fists deeper into his pockets, Pflanz glanced over at Neville, then stepped back from the wall and turned to walk up toward the reflecting pool. The morning had dawned dull, gray and cold. Now, close to noon, the heavy sky threatened snow. The trees along the Mall were bare and uninviting, and the few tourists who had ventured out walked quickly, hunkered down in their coats.

  “Yeah,” Pflanz said as Neville caught up to him. “Guy was borderline psycho. What about him?”

  “Our security people had a call from the Fairfax County police. They believe Burton was the man who attacked Mariah Bolt yesterday. Wanted to know if the Company had any recent information on his whereabouts.”

  “So?”

  “So do we, Dieter?”

  “Why are you asking me?”

  “I’m just wondering if you know anything about it.”

  “Why would I know anything about an attack on one of your people?”

  “Come on, Dieter!” Neville snapped. “Don’t be cute! I know you’ve never been happy about that screwup in Vienna. But I told you she was okay—neutralized. If you’re involved in this, I’m gonna have your hide, because it’s completely unnecessary and counterproductive.”

  Pflanz stopped cold and spun around, his beaked nose bearing down hard on the other man, one fist wrapped in Neville’s lapel. “Don’t you mess with me, George,” he growled. “If anybody’s hide gets nailed to the barn door, it’s not gonna be mine. You called me in here, remember? We’ve done one hell of a job for you, so don’t give me this butt-covering bureaucratic garbage!”

  “Take it easy,” Neville said, glancing around quickly and then turning back to Pflanz’s angry face. “I know what you’ve done. But the woman’s asking hard questions. And she’s got friends, all of whom seem intent on protecting her. If she gets hurt, there’ll be hell to pay.”