Murder in the House

by Margaret Truman

  “Was he angry?”

  “He was angry before I even told him. Evidently, things aren’t going well for him in Russia. He’s trying to buy Kazan Energy from the Russian government.”

  “I’ve never understood that,” she said. “How a government sells industries.”

  “Because the government doesn’t own industries, for the most part, in this country. The Soviet government used to own everything. Now that it’s opened up, the government is selling off its holdings to raise money, and to give credence to its new free-market economy.”

  “And Warren wants to buy this Russian energy company?”

  “Right. If it were a fair bidding process, he wouldn’t have a problem. But the people in the Yeltsin government responsible for selling its industries are on the take big-time. That’s why the bill in committee is so important to Warren. He told me that if he can deliver that bill, it will grease the skids for buying Kazan Energy.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “Sure it is. The Yeltsin government is—”

  “I don’t mean that. Wanting you—this government—to pass a bill to help him get richer sounds … sounds wrong, as you said.”

  It was a reassuring, somewhat condescending laugh he offered. “Nothing really wrong with it, Ruth, as long as it benefits this country, along with helping out an American business or industry. I admire your black-and-white view of things, but nothing gets done without compromise. When both sides benefit from a bill, it’s a good deal. All the legislation I’ve sponsored over the years that helped Warren’s business also advanced our global competitiveness, especially in Russia.”

  “I’m sure it has.”

  “Which is why I have to back off with this new legislation, unless Warren backs off, too.”

  “The nomination?”

  “What about it?”

  “Is that playing a role in your decision?”

  “Sure. My relationship with Warren is looming large with Connors and his committee. Dan Gibbs, one of the president’s lawyers who’s handling my nomination for the White House, called just before I met with Warren. He says the president wants me to pull back on any legislation even potentially involving Warren. At least until the hearings are over.”

  She squeezed his hand and said, “That sounds smart to me.” She kissed his cheek. “Come on, Mr. Secretary. My, that has a nice ring to it. Time for bed.”

  He returned the kiss, lightly, on her lips. “Not sleepy. You go on. I’ll be up in a while.”

  He sat on the porch for another half hour before going to a dressing room separate from the master bedroom. He showered there, then went to the kitchen and brewed a half pot of strong coffee. He returned to the dressing room and put on a suit and tie, buffed his black shoes with an electric buffing machine, went to the kitchen, and left a note on the table: Couldn’t sleep, so figured might as well get an early start. Call you later. Me. He drew a crude heart with their initials in it, and added an arrow.

  He left through the front door and stood in the driveway, next to the silver Lexus that was his car; Ruth drove the white Plymouth Voyager. He looked up to their bedroom window, where his wife of thirty-one years slept soundly, at peace with herself and their life together. Somehow, in some way, he knew, his decision to accept the president’s bid to become secretary of state threatened to shatter that peace. He forced the thought from his mind, got into the Lexus, and drove faster than was his custom over the empty streets of the nation’s capital.

  10

  Bill Fadis had been a member of the Capitol police force for almost twenty years.

  The force had been started in 1801 with a single night watchman, but grew rapidly over the years—exponentially after 1954, when four Puerto Rican terrorists opened fire from the gallery into the House chamber, wounding five representatives. Seventeen years later, a bomb exploded in the wee hours in a men’s room of the old Senate wing, propelling the Capitol police into a highly professional law enforcement agency, incorporating state-of-the-art K-9 bomb detection capability, hostage negotiation teams, and a large contingent of plainclothes detectives.

  More recently, with the increased threat of terrorist attacks on government institutions, two new units had been created—a Containment and Emergency Response Team trained by the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, and the First Responder Unit, specially equipped to lock down the Capitol should a terrorist attack be launched.

  Nothing like crisis to prompt action.

  Even with the increase in manpower (currently more than thirteen hundred)—womanpower, too (almost two hundred women)—the force was spread thin, providing round-the-clock security seven days a week for the forty-block, 250-acre complex of congressional buildings. Its clients? The 435 representatives, 100 senators, and the more than 25,000 people working for the elected officials.

  An unambitious, placid man, Fadis had been content to remain a uniformed officer assigned to guard building entrances. This day, he’d been on duty since midnight at the southeast entrance to the Capitol. He enjoyed the midnight shift. It was quiet at night, even tranquil without the thousands of sweaty, noisy tourists streaming in each day to see their government in action, or for some, in inaction, plus congressional staffers and members coming and going, making demands.

  He was surprised to see one of those members arrive that morning.

  “Congressman Latham,” he said, pulling in his stomach and smiling.

  “Good morning, Bill.”

  Fadis glanced at a clock on the wall: a little after 2 A.M. It wasn’t unusual to see members of the House working late, all night at times when Congress was immersed in tricky, controversial legislation, or in times of national crisis. But things had been slow that week.

  Rather than walking by, Latham paused next to Fadis. “Rainy day in the forecast,” he said.

  “So they say.”

  “You’ve been here a long time, haven’t you?”

  “Twenty years in two months, Congressman.”

  “A little longer than I have.”

  “Not by much. How’s the family?”

  “My daughter’s a page this term.”

  “Oh?”

  “You’ll be seeing her around. Her name’s Molly.”

  “I’ll … be looking for her, Mr. Latham.”

  Latham, too, checked the wall clock. Four minutes had passed.

  “Good to see you, Officer Fadis.”

  “Yes, sir. Have a good day.”

  Fadis watched Latham walk slowly in the direction of Statuary Hall, the former House chamber, refurbished for the 1976 bicentennial as a repository of two statues from each of the fifty states. During normal hours, as many as 25,000 visitors would pass through it—more this day, with rain in the forecast.

  Latham thought of Shakespeare—“hush as death”—as he walked across the vast black-and-white marble floor, his steps coming back at him. The hall’s quiescence was deafening. It had unique acoustics. Latham had brought each of his three children there when they were little to demonstrate how by standing in a certain place on the floor and whispering, people across the hall, also stationed in a special place, could hear the words. All three kids had been astounded and delighted.

  Latham went to the south door and paused beneath the statue depicting Liberty, then turned to take in Clio, the “Muse of History,” riding in a winged chariot and recording passing events in a large tablet. A gilded clock attached to the chariot had been keeping time there since 1819, the Capitol’s “official” timepiece.

  He drew a deep breath. The clock said two-thirty. They were to meet at three. A half hour to kill.

  He spent the next twenty minutes admiring art in the Capitol’s hallways. At ten minutes before three, he headed for the door that led to a small, parklike area surrounded by trees and shrubbery. On good-weather days, he and dozens of fellow House members would walk past the pocket park on their way to and from their offices when a vote had been called on the House floor.

  The guard at the doo
r, a young black man with military bearing, didn’t recognize Latham and asked for his pass.

  “New?” Latham said, showing him his ID.

  “Yes, sir. Sorry.”

  “Better you do your job. Thought I’d get some air.”

  “Humid.”

  “Yes, it is. Thank you.”

  Latham stepped into the outside air, heavy with humidity, gray, almost green, the moon attempting to bore a hole through low, turbid clouds.

  For some unexplained reason, Latham wanted a cigarette. He’d quit smoking a dozen years ago, but still had sporadic urges, usually during theater intermissions.

  He sat on a small concrete bench and looked up at the illuminated twenty-foot, seven-and-a-half-ton bronze figure, the Statue of Freedom, rising into the mist from atop the Capitol dome like some ethereal figure ascending from the grave.

  He stood and looked at his watch. Five past three. The urge for a cigarette was stronger. He thought of Ruth sleeping at home, unaware he’d left the house to wait in this picturesque little oasis from the strife and turmoil of Congress.

  * * *

  Another five minutes passed.

  Angry now, he decided to wait for only another five.

  Two minutes went by.

  And three.

  “Hello.”

  Latham turned in the direction from which the nearby voice came.

  The discharge sound from the weapon was small and almost noiseless, a tiny pop.

  Latham fell to his knees, his right hand involuntarily going to his right temple, where the bullet had entered. Blood ran freely down his fingers and over his hand. He pitched forward, twisting as he did so, his final living action. He landed on his back, eyes open wide, arm outstretched, more blood seeping from his partially open, crooked mouth.

  A figure stepped from the shrubbery, came directly to the body, went down on one knee, and with gloved hand placed the instrument of Latham’s death, a 9-mm Uzi, silencer removed, in the dead congressman’s right hand, curling his sticky, red fingers around it. It took only seconds to accomplish. The figure stood, looked left and right, and disappeared into the bushes, leaving the lifeless body to be viewed only by the Statue of Freedom, looking down on it from her position on the Capitol dome, the crown of the building symbolizing the American dream, which had inspired Hawthorne to write during an 1862 visit, “the world has not many statelier or more beautiful edifices.”

  Paul Latham, eight-term congressman from Northern California, nominee for secretary of state, would never see it again.

  11

  Paul Latham’s body was found at five-seventeen by a member of the Patrol Division of the Capitol police’s Uniform Services Bureau. He immediately notified a dispatcher in the communications room beneath the Russell Senate Office Building, who in turn passed the message on to the Contingency Emergency Response Team (CERT), housed in headquarters a block from the Hart Office Building.

  “Member down,” the CERT commander on duty yelled. “Congressman Latham. Let’s go.”

  The commander and two other officers, wearing camouflage pants, white T-shirts and sneakers, pulled on camouflage shirts and bulletproof jackets and ran upstairs to the roll-call room, where a gun rack was unlocked. Each was handed an M-249 automatic weapon, capable of firing more than a thousand rounds a minute.

  The watch commander joined them. “He’s in the pocket park, southeast corner. He’s not in succession.”

  An important piece of information.

  Had the victim been the Speaker of the House, or the president pro tempore of the Senate—in the line of succession to the presidency—the Secret Service’s CAT, or Counter Assault Team, would immediately be brought in. The Capitol police’s CERT unit and the Secret Service’s CAT held periodic joint drills to prepare them for such situations.

  As the CERT team headed for the scene, news of Latham’s death reached every division of the Capitol police. Its chief, Henry Folsom, raced to the park after issuing orders to seal off all Capitol Building entrances, and to do the same with the crime scene. As an afterthought, he ordered patrol cars to shut down the six intersections marking the perimeter of Capitol Hill. By the time he arrived at the park, it had been draped with yellow plastic tape: CRIME SCENE—DO NOT CROSS. The crime scene unit under his command was on its way. It had started to rain, as promised.

  Latham had been covered with a blue blanket. Folsom reached down and slowly, gingerly folded it back to reveal the head, upper torso, right arm, and hand. He stared at Latham for what seemed to others to be a very long time. Finally, he turned to his assistant chief, Vic Lombardo. “Have the architect and sergeants-at-arms been notified?”

  Lombardo lowered the cell phone from his ear. “Yes, sir. They’ve just gathered in the architect’s office waiting for you.”

  Folsom sighed and pressed his lips tightly together.

  As chief of the Capitol police, which he’d headed for six years after a long but undistinguished career in the FBI, he answered to the Capitol Police Board, consisting of three people—the architect of the Capitol, and the sergeants-at-arms of the House and Senate, both political appointees. Folsom really couldn’t be critical of political patronage. He was the beneficiary of it, a long friendship with two powerful senators leading to his job on Capitol Hill.

  As for the “architect”: His name was Jack Goss. Goss was not an architect. There was a time when those holding the position possessed that credential. But that was when the job focused upon how things looked on Capitol Hill. Now, the architect was responsible for keeping things running, a building superintendent of sorts, charged with the technical and physical operations of the Capitol and its House and Senate office buildings, the Supreme Court and Library of Congress, even the ten thousand species of flowers and plants in the U.S. Botanic Garden. In a word, everything federal within the confines of the Hill.

  Folsom carried no brief for Goss, and was disappointed when he was chosen to replace the previous architect, with whom Folsom had a better, certainly more cordial relationship. The problem, Folsom often told his wife, was that the Capitol police answered to three people who knew little if anything about law enforcement and security. At least at the FBI, you reported to pros. Folsom’s first and foremost priority from the day he became chief was to continue the process of turning his force into one as capable and advanced as any other police department in Washington, of which there were many, too many as far as he was concerned.

  There was—he could recite the list in his mind—the CIA’s own security cops protecting Langley; the National Institutes of Health private force; D.C.’s MPD, with more than 3,500 armed cops; the FBI; 469 park police; 345 uniformed Secret Service officers; 286 Metro transit police; 159 U.S. marshals; 100 armed Federal Protective Service agents; 68 drug cops with the Drug Enforcement Agency; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; Immigration and Naturalization; the State Department’s 1,000-person force protecting Washington’s vast foreign diplomatic community.

  Even the Washington aqueduct boasted its own police force.

  And Folsom’s 1,300-strong Capitol police.

  Small wonder the heads of these agencies spent half their days trying to resolve jurisdictional disputes.

  Folsom said to Lombardo, “Keep everybody out of here except for the crime scene people. Everybody! No exceptions.”

  “Got it.”

  “I’ll be with Goss.”

  “Okay.”

  The architect of the Capitol occupied a large, handsomely appointed office on the fourth, or attic, floor of the Capitol. Folsom, dressed in his dark blue uniform with gold buttons, the six stripes on his left sleeve and gold on his cap’s visor designating his leadership rank, was immediately ushered into the office and asked to take a chair across from Goss’s expansive mahogany desk. The two sergeants-at-arms and a few assistants sat in chairs to either side of Goss.

  “What do we know?” Goss asked, not bothering with preliminaries.

  Folsom ran it down for him. Not
much to tell. Congressman Latham found at five-seventeen in the pocket park outside the southeast entrance. Possible suicide. Gun in right hand. Fatal wound to right temple.

  “What’s the status of the investigation?” Goss asked, hands forming a tent beneath his narrow chin. He was bald—he shaved his head each day—and wore round glasses from another era. Jack Goss was fifty years old. He had a habit of chewing on his lower lip; Folsom sometimes wondered why he didn’t bite through it. His voice was unpleasantly high.

  “Status? Of the investigation? We haven’t even thought about that phase, Jack. We’ve just secured the body and the scene. Crime lab personnel are there going over everything. We’ve shut off the building at all entrances. Same with the intersections.”

  “I know about the intersections,” Goss said. “The mayor called a few minutes ago. He’s concerned about rush hour.”

  “Rush hour? That’s his concern? I—”

  “Hardly seems necessary to create a traffic snarl, considering it’s a suicide. Where’s the threat?”

  Folsom told himself not to demonstrate annoyance. He said in an even voice, “We don’t know if it’s a suicide, Jack. We don’t know much of anything at this moment. It’s prudent to seal off the Capitol until we know more.”

  “The press?” the House sergeant-at-arms asked.

  “Gathering rapidly,” Folsom answered. “We’re herding them into the plaza.”

  The Senate sergeant-at-arms said, “You’ve notified the FBI.” Folsom would have preferred that it be put as a question.

  “No,” he said.

  “Why not?” Goss asked.

  “Premature,” Folsom replied.

  “What about the medical examiner?” Goss asked.

  “I want the crime scene people to finish up first.”

  “Why?” asked Goss.

  “It makes sense,” Folsom said. “There’s nothing to be gained calling in MPD’s crime scene techs. Nothing they can do that we can’t. Besides, the faster the scene is examined, the better. Less evidence to lose, or screw up.”