by Taylor Smith
He watched her for a moment, then took a deep breath. “Hi, Mariah.”
“I guess this means I’m out of the running for Mother of the Year, huh?” she asked.
“Don’t ask me.”
“Do you know what she’s mad about?”
He debated lying, but what for? “Yeah, she mentioned it.”
He heard the depth of her sigh. “I had no idea Paul was going to show up at this Romanov thing,” she said.
That didn’t explain how Chaney came to be in her room, of course, but at a certain point, Tucker thought, the details really didn’t matter. “Oh,” was all he said. What else could he say?
“So, I hear Lins cut her hair. How does it look?”
“It looks good,” he said, relieved at the change of subject, “once you get over the shock.”
“Shock? How short is it?”
“How short is it,” he repeated thoughtfully. “Good question. Lindsay, what’s the name of that Irish girl singer with the razor buzz? The one who went on TV that time and tore up the pope’s picture?”
Lindsay turned to him, eyebrows raised over her sparkling, red-rimmed eyes. “Sinéad O’Connor?”
“That’s the one. Like Sinéad O’Connor,” he said into the phone.
“Get outta here,” Mariah exclaimed. “She didn’t.”
“Well, yeah. Had to, you know.”
“Why?”
“How else was anyone going to appreciate the tattoo?”
“The what?”
“Tattoo. You know—ink and needles? On her neck? What do you call that pattern, Lins? Kind of a barbed-wire-choker affair, isn’t it?”
Lindsay shook her head, grinning at him. Carol had just come back into the room with the laptop, and she’d heard enough to walk over and smack his arm. “Stop that,” she chided, her eyes laughing.
He leaned back and nodded. “Yup. Barbed wire. That’s it.”
“Frank?” Mariah said.
“Uh-huh?”
“Get stuffed, would you?”
He grinned, giving Lindsay a thumbs-up sign. She leaned across the table and high-fived him. “I made that Falls Church run you asked me to,” he said, turning back to the phone.
“So I heard. Thank you. You’re a wise guy, but I forgive you everything. What did the letter say?”
“Um…this is not a good time.”
Mariah was silent for a moment, then she said, “You know what? I don’t care if Lins and Carol hear. I’m sick of family secrets.”
“No. Not on the phone.”
“Well, can you give me a hint at least? Does this Urquhart person really say my father was murdered?”
“Uh-huh,” Tucker confirmed.
“And? Do you buy it? You don’t think it might just be some kind of shakedown to cash in on Ben’s rep, what with all these sixtieth-birthday tributes looking to get so much press?”
Tucker glanced at Carol and Lindsay, who were clearly riveted to his half of the conversation. He exhaled heavily. “I might,” he said, “except I got something from another source that tells me he could be on to something.”
“What other source?”
“Remember the Navigator?”
“Sure.”
“My trip?” he hinted.
There was a stunned silence at the other end of the line, and then Mariah breathed, “You’re kidding! That’s where you were?”
“At his request. I can’t go into it on the phone, except—”
She interrupted, her voice urgent. “Frank, the Navigator’s dead.”
Tucker sat up straight in his chair. “What?”
“I’m in the Federal Building comcenter right now. I came over to check my messages, and it was in this morning’s cable traffic out of Moscow Station. Weren’t you copied on it?”
He ran his hand over his head. “I didn’t go in to work today. Anyway, I’m so far out of the day-to-day loop, they probably wouldn’t have copied me.”
“But if you were just there over on business…?”
“Station wasn’t informed—deliberately. Strict ‘need to know’ rules. They had no need. When was this supposed to have happened?”
“They said he was found at his dacha yesterday. That he’d been ill, but his death had been unexpectedly sudden, to the point of being suspicious. The papers over there are saying the police want to question a foreigner who reportedly visited him a couple of days ago. Oh, Jesus, Frank! When did you see him?”
“Day before yesterday.”
The line fell silent. The rain on the cedar deck outside beat a nervous rattle that matched his own rising anxiety. He was one of the last people to see the Navigator alive. Maybe the very last, outside of the man’s driver. He knew he’d left the old man alive, but who’d believe him? Not the Russian authorities, that was for sure. And the American crew of his aircraft hadn’t actually laid eyes on the man, who’d stayed behind tinted windows the whole time the limo was on the tarmac.
Once again, Tucker had the sinking feeling there was a script playing itself out here and he had a central part in it—except someone had forgotten to give him his lines. Was turning him into a hunted man part of the Navigator’s Machiavellian plot? For what purpose? Might Deriabin have committed suicide, speeding up the inevitable? Or had his enemies finally caught up to him?
Tucker recalled the old man’s mustard-brown skin, wheezy cough and stick-thin body. Death is the surest cure for all disease, but few people take it willingly. Somehow, he couldn’t see Deriabin as a suicide. He hadn’t been fooled by that deceptive frailty. Behind the bright, fevered eyes, Tucker had seen the self-obsessed glitter of the true sociopath. Deriabin had destroyed colleagues, friends—even, it was said, lovers—over the fifty years he’d spent clawing his way up and then clinging to covert power. Despite his weakened physical condition, he’d obviously still had the power to send secretly for Tucker, then arrange for him and his Company aircraft and crew to enter, move around and leave Moscow at his personal will and whim. The man Tucker had met would never relinquish control willingly, and the disease looked like it had a way to go before doing him in. He had to have been murdered.
“Frank?” Mariah said finally.
“What?”
“You said the Navigator had something to say about my father?”
“Sort of. Look, I’ll show you what I’ve got very soon, but in the meantime, you need to sit tight on this. How did you leave things with the literary agent?”
“We were going to try to meet with Professor Urquhart before Lindsay gets here tomorrow—except now, I’m going to try to change her flight so she can leave tonight. I made a big mistake not bringing her with me right off the bat. She’s still my first priority. If I let this misunderstanding drag on for another day, it’s just going to fester.”
“Fine. Do that, but hold on the other business. I’ve got some things to look into.”
“Frank, I don’t want you taking time away from your own work for this.”
He snorted. “It’s not like I’ve got anything too urgent going on at the moment. Anyhow, I’ve become a self-contained research unit.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing. Look, you just carry on, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”
When he hung up the phone a moment later, Carol and Lindsay were sitting back in their chairs, arms crossed in identical poses of expectation.
“What?” he said.
“You don’t really imagine we’re going to let you walk out of here without telling us what’s going on, do you?” Carol said.
“Is my mom in danger?” Lindsay asked.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because you look worried,” she said. “Don’t tell me you’re not. I’m not a child, and I’m not stupid. What’s going on?”
“Nothing’s going to happen to her, I promise. In fact, she’s trying to change your ticket so you can fly out tonight instead of tomorrow. You’ll see for yourself, she’s just fine. She misses you.�
�� Then he pushed his chair away from the table. “I better get going.” He scooped up the laptop, then hesitated, frowning.
“What?” Carol asked.
He picked up the phone once more. “Nothing. I just need to check my messages.”
All things considered, he wasn’t too surprised to hear an irritated message from Jack Geist on his office voice mail, only vaguely shrouded in the deputy’s phony bonhomie.
“Frankie! Jack. Where’d you get to? We need to talk, buddy. We’ve had a disturbing message about our sick friend. I’ve already fielded a call from the Russian embassy. I’m sure you don’t know any more about this than we do, but there’s also the matter of those files. We opened up your file cabinet, but we can’t seem to find them. And, funny thing—your shredder basket is full of musty old confetti. I’m very curious, to say the least. Minute you get this message, big guy, I want to see you in my office. Understand?”
Yeah, right, Tucker thought, grimacing as he hung up the phone.
“Dad?” Carol pressed.
He leaned over, giving her a buss on the head. “Thanks for the coffee, kiddo. Gotta run.”
He turned and ducked out into the rain before either Carol or Lindsay could finish protesting.
Chapter Fourteen
It was something you had to see to believe.
This wasn’t the first time Scheiber had witnessed a body being pulled out of very warm water, so he was prepared for what was about to happen. But after making a casual inquiry, he learned it was a first for Dave Eckert and a couple of the younger NBPD cops hovering on the late Mr. Korman’s rooftop.
He could warn them, Scheiber supposed. But where was the fun in that?
Instead, he stood slightly to one side to watch their reactions. The coroner’s deputy gave the nod and they hoisted the naked, curled and nearly rigid body out of the hot tub and lay it on its side on the wooden planking. Sure enough, the others were taken aback, to say the least.
“Son of a bitch,” Eckert exclaimed, his voice breaking like a choirboy who’d sat in the loft past his musical best-before date. He glanced around self-consciously, but he wasn’t the only one caught out by surprise. At least one of the young officers had gone deathly pale.
“You okay, Miller?” Scheiber asked. “Maybe you should go sit down, drop your head between your legs for a couple of minutes?”
“No, I’m fine,” Miller said sheepishly. “I just didn’t expect…jeez Louise! What the hell’s happening?”
Everyone—Scheiber, Eckert, the cops and the coroner’s deputies—looked back down at the body, which was going through a transformation right before their eyes, from pinkish-gray to pale gray and white, marbling and streaking in a way only a Hollywood special-effects man could have dreamed up. Within a few minutes, it looked like something Rodin might have carved out of a heavily veined piece of alabaster.
“The way it was explained to me,” Scheiber said, “it’s got something to do with the postmortem growth of microbes. Dave, what’s the temperature of the water?”
Eckert lifted out a bobbing thermometer attached to the wall of the spa by a rope. “Hundred and four Fahrenheit. I already checked out the heater,” he added. “Thermostat’s set high, and with the timer jammed like it was, he’s been cookin’ all night. Maybe he meant to keep it on all the time, but why would you waste the gas and power when these things heat up in ten, twenty minutes?”
Scheiber frowned. “I can’t imagine. Seems to me you’d blow the system before long.”
“Yeah, me, too. Anyway, I guess water that warm would make those little microbe buggers multiply fast.”
“There you go,” Scheiber said, nodding. He turned to Miller, whose own color was slowly returning to normal. “But the oxygen supply is restricted as long as the body’s underwater, right? Keeps the bacteria in check. Prevents them from working like they’re supposed to, which is to break down the body tissue. It’s like the troops are all massed but the charge is delayed. Minute the body hits air, though, decomposition starts instantaneously, marching double-quick time.”
“Looks like a speeded-up time-lapse sequence,” Eckert said, recovered enough from his initial shock to kick in with a familiar photographic analogy of his own.
“That’s about it. I don’t understand all the details, I just know it happens. I’m sure Iris here has a more technical explanation.”
Iris Klassen was crouched by the body, opening a multi-tiered crime-scene case and withdrawing a pair of latex gloves. Her white knit polo shirt said CORONER in crumpled block letters across the back. “It’s a matter of aerobic versus anaerobic action—with and without oxygen,” she said, snapping on the gloves. “You explained it just fine, actually.”
Scheiber hovered over her shoulder now as she went to work, looking for signs of violence or anything else unusual on the body.
Eckert, meantime, was snapping pictures. “What do you think, Iris?” he asked. “Heart attack?”
“Give me a minute. I’m good, but I’m not Wonder Woman.” She took the body temperature and noted it on her clipboard. “Anyway, if it was an MI, we’ll only know for sure after the autopsy.”
“What’s the temp?” Scheiber asked.
“Ninety-nine point four, but that’s just the hot tub talking. Rigor says this fellow’s been dead awhile. He’d have cooled way down by now if he hadn’t spent the night stewing in his own juices.”
She examined the corpse inch by inch, up one side, down the other. Scheiber and a couple of the others standing around helped her turn it over. No small task, given the fact that the body was in a state of solid rigor mortis, a sure sign death had occurred at least eight or ten hours earlier, even allowing for the fact that the heat of the water would have speeded up the process. There was nothing unusual to be seen on the other side.
“He took a bump on the temple,” Klassen noted, kneeling low and probing the victim’s head gently with a latex-tipped finger. “Not too much bruising, but it definitely happened before he was dead.” Her fingers explored the rest of the scalp, separating the old man’s sparse white hair. There were no other signs of trauma that Scheiber could see.
“Brought down by a sharp blow to the head?” Eckert wondered aloud.
Scheiber mimed a striking motion on his partner, switching hands and angles, trying to hit the spot at the ridge of the brow where the body was bruised. “I don’t know. It’s kind of an awkward action, unless he was lying flat on his back at the time.” He glanced at the spa, with its hard plastic sides, then the body once more, his eye traveling down. He pointed to the right leg. “There are bruises on the shins, too, but they look older. Maybe he banged the edge of the tub with his head as he slipped in.”
Klassen studied the shins and nodded. “These are older bruises.” She leaned close and sniffed the body. “Mostly chlorine,” she said, “but I’m getting a boozy note, too. Any evidence he was drinking?”
“Funny you should mention it,” Eckert said. “We recovered a glass by the side of the tub. Contents spilled, but it smelled like Highland single malt. We bagged it and some scrapings off the deck, but I betcha the lab report back says it’s pure Glenlivet.”
She arched an eyebrow. “Whoa! You’re good!”
“Wasn’t hard to figure out,” he admitted, lifting his shoulders in an aw-shucks heft, “since the bottle’s sitting on a table right there in the bedroom.”
Klassen grinned, then shifted aside a little. “Here, you want to get a shot of the bruises, just in case?”
“Thanks,” Eckert said, moving in for a close-up.
Scheiber watched them curiously. Had they been this helpful and chatty on other cases they’d worked recently? Or had something gone down while he was off on his honeymoon?
Most people would probably think it a strange place for courtship, but more than one off-duty romance had bloomed over a homicide case—not that there was any evidence they were dealing with a homicide here. So far, it was looking like natural causes, maybe compounded by
an accidental mishap, like a slip in the tub.
He tried to recall the last few crime scenes they’d worked with Klassen. Had she and Eckert been making googly eyes those other times? Well, why not? They were both single, healthy and heterosexual.
And come to think of it, Scheiber noted wryly, Iris was unusually well behaved today. When he’d first met her, he’d been a little put off by her overt flirting and slightly ribald humor. He didn’t like it when women in law enforcement thought they had to outjock the jocks.
But he’d quickly decided to cut Iris some slack after learning about her husband, a rookie Santa Ana cop who’d taken a gunshot to the head from a gangbanger less than six months into the job. She’d nursed him herself for two years, until a fatal embolism finally did the poor guy in. It was after he died that she’d taken her nursing background and put it to work in the coroner’s office, determined to be on the front lines of crime solving.
Dave Eckert’s own wife had left him for the orthopedic surgeon who’d pinned the leg he broke in a ski accident. Eckert would probably think Klassen’s loyalty qualified her for sainthood.
“His hands are really scratched up,” Klassen said, turning them over and peering at them. “Here, look, Jim.” Scheiber crouched at her other side. “It’s hard to see after they’ve been soaking all night, but there are a lot of cuts and scratches there.”
“Neighbor said he was working in the garden yesterday,” Eckert pointed out. “I saw roses there.”
“So what was he doing? Ripping them out by hand?” Scheiber said skeptically. The burglar scenario kept playing in his head like an old newsreel on a continuous-feed loop. “Iris, those wouldn’t be defensive cuts? Like maybe he was fighting off somebody with a knife?”
She shook her head. “Doubt it. These slices look too short to have been made by a blade. Some of them are just little punctures. I think Dave could be right about the roses.”
“Yeah,” Scheiber agreed, looking closer. “Anyway, you’d expect to see defensive cuts on the palms, not in the creases of the fingers, like these are.”
“Nails are clean as a whistle,” Klassen added, “but a long soak’ll do that.” She went over the rest of the body, then nodded at her assistant, who rolled a gurney over.
