Nom de Guerre

by Gulvin, Jeff

  ‘Domestic Terrorism in Washington.’

  Logan turned to Chaney, who was chewing on a cigar stub and talking to Harrison.

  ‘Did you make any progress with the case?’ she asked him. He replied without looking directly at her.

  ‘Not really. Our main suspect was a black guy who claimed to be from Alabama. Rode into town with a broken truck and got set up over at one of the autoshops there. He was in the jewellery store the day before Mary Poynton was murdered.’ He looked at Swann. ‘Greer was her maiden name. I guess y’all will want to talk to her old man. That’d be Jim Poynton. He was interviewed by the Carnesville sheriff’s dicks and myself. But he couldn’t say much, except give us her background history. Y’all go on and talk to him, but she didn’t do a whole lot. He’ll tell you.’

  Swann put the phone down and leaned against the wall, folding his arms, as Chaney continued. ‘The black guy reconnoitred the joint, I reckon. He drove outta town in the tow truck. Only other vehicle sighted was a blue Toyota with tinted-out windows. Nobody tagged the plate and the body wasn’t discovered till five hours after the crime was committed.’ He made a face and clamped his teeth over the cigar. Still he looked at Harrison and Swann as he talked, his eyes never alighting on Logan’s face, though he dropped his gaze to the curves in her skirt more than once. ‘Sure shook them people up, up there. They got no history of crime to speak of. Place is where Ty Cobb grew up.’ He squinted at Swann. ‘Baseball player from way back. Only other claim to fame is Tony Jones Street. Tony was from there too, or had a house there or something. He plays football for the Broncos.’

  Byrne arrived and was shown into Chaney’s office. He wrinkled his nose at the combined cigar and cigarette smoke and introduced himself to Chaney. Chaney got the file from his cabinet and spread the papers out on the desk. ‘We need to speak to the husband,’ Byrne said. ‘You know where we can locate him today?’

  ‘I ain’t sure. Give Van Clayburgh a call. He’s the Carnesville sheriff. Poynton did work for the Chevy dealer up there, but that may’ve changed. If y’all don’t mind, I’ll let you get on up there by yourselves.’ He glanced briefly at Swann. ‘You want that butt end of the reefer, buddy?’

  Swann nodded.

  ‘OK.’ Chaney took a nylon evidence bag, with the stub of cigarette inside, from the drawer, and parcelled the papers into a blue file. He handed them both to Harrison.

  ‘Guess it was federal, after all,’ he said. ‘Get the sonofabitch and I’ll book him for you.’

  18

  THE FBI GROUND TEAM drove up Highway 29 from Athens to Carnesville and the sheriff’s department on James Little Street. Clayburgh remembered Harrison, probably from his long hair. He was talking to one of his detectives when the team came in.

  ‘Hey, Sheriff,’ Harrison said. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘How y’all doing?’ The sheriff shook hands and glanced briefly at Logan.

  ‘Sheriff, I’m Special Agent Logan,’ she said, offering her hand.

  ‘Uh huh.’ He shook her hand and looked at Byrne.

  ‘We need to speak to James Poynton,’ Logan went on.

  ‘You do, huh.’ Still Clayburgh looked at Byrne.

  Byrne introduced himself and then Swann.

  ‘Scotland Yard, uh?’ Clayburgh scratched his nose. ‘No shit.’

  Logan interrupted them, her voice calm, no hint of irritation. She let it all just blow over her head. ‘Sheriff, apart from seeing Mr Poynton, we need to go back to Royston and look at the crime scene.’

  ‘Thought y’all decided this wasn’t a federal case.’ Clayburgh addressed Harrison.

  ‘Things have changed,’ he said.

  ‘All righty,’ Clayburgh said. ‘Be my guest. Ain’t nothing changed over there. The store closed down after Mary passed on. Nobody wanted to run it any more and the owners don’t need the money. Seemed like the right thing under the circumstances.’ He squinted at Logan now, not so much in her eyes as looking her up and down. ‘The GBI never did catch that black feller. Had to be him that done it, I figure. He was the only out-of-towner we saw that day. And it weren’t a local deal.’

  ‘Of course not.’ Logan looked him right in the eye.

  They checked into the Royston motel and Byrne set up conference lines. Swann told him about his conversation with Webb. ‘Something happened, Louis, after Dubin visited him. Why would he send a note out right then? And why we? What does he mean by we?’

  Byrne rubbed a palm over his marine-style haircut. ‘Figure of speech, Jack.’

  ‘What, like the royal we?’ Swann looked at him with one eyebrow lifted.

  ‘No.’ Byrne shook his head. ‘If your DNA test proves positive, then we know Boese is working with Tal-Salem again. The we is referring to them.’

  Swann cocked his head to one side. ‘Could be that, I suppose.’

  ‘Can you think of anything else, Jack?’

  The four of them took Harrison’s car from Carnesville into Royston. ‘Small-town, Georgia,’ Byrne said, as they drove past the Chevy dealership. Poynton still worked there, but they had decided to visit the original crime scene again before they spoke with him. Logan wanted to see if, given what they now knew about a connection in London, a motive might be more apparent.

  They parked on Church Street and Swann looked out of the side window at the jewellery store. Logan was sitting next to him, and she leaned across him to see, her hand brushing his thigh. The building was single-storey in pale brick, with a sheet of corrugated iron as a canopy, and pink woodwork round the windows. The door was pink and Swann could make out heart-shaped cushions, probably for display cases, beyond the glass. The twisted trunk of a naked tree grew out of the concrete on the sidewalk.

  Harrison switched off the engine and adjusted his ankle holster. ‘You guys go take a look-see,’ he said, ‘I’ll see if I can round up old Mack, the police chief.’ He took a cigarette from his shirt and popped a match, cupping both hands to his face.

  Swann turned up his collar against the chill wind that drifted the length of the street. He glanced at the darkened windows of the Western store, and the business premises giving way to domestic ones, as Church Street cut a straight line into the distance. The three of them crossed the road and Swann peered through the shop window, cupping his hand to the glass. The display cases were intact, but bereft of anything to sell. Logan moved alongside him. ‘See anything?’

  He shook his head and they joined Byrne in the alleyway behind the shop.

  ‘The GBI file states she was found in the dumpster back here.’ Logan pointed to the green dustbin on wheels, which was set in the small space behind the back door. She looked the length of the alley to where the water tower dominated the rapidly greying skyline. ‘Took off this way, maybe.’

  Swann glanced at Byrne, who was standing by the dumpster, deep in thought.

  ‘Louis?’

  Byrne looked round at him. ‘The killer put the body in here,’ he said slowly.

  ‘That’s right.’ Logan checked the file. ‘Just like the garbageman in Louisiana.’

  ‘Right.’ Byrne still looked at the dumpster. ‘And New Orleans had someone from the CASKU out here?’

  ‘Special Agent Mallory. I graduated with her, Louis. She’s got a master’s in criminal psychology.’

  Harrison came back with Mack, the aging, yellow-toothed chief of police. ‘GBI boys never came up with nothing,’ he was saying. ‘I ain’t gotten in here in a while now, but the owners left me a set of keys. Reckoned I’d need them till this thing got figured out.’ He stopped on the sidewalk and glanced at the other three as they looked at the area out the back.

  ‘They all with you?’ he said to Harrison.

  ‘You bet. Got us a limey back there, too, Mack. International now. Gonna put this town on the map.’

  ‘No kidding.’ Mack unlocked the front door and showed them inside.

  Swann took in the surroundings; Harrison remained by the door, chewing tobacco. He had been right throug
h this building when he came in Cochrane’s stead the last time. He watched Swann, as he walked about the salesroom with one hand in his trouser pocket. Swann caught Logan’s eye and made a face. The room smelled musty, damp and old. The door to the rear section, the kitchenette, stood open and it looked as though nothing had been disturbed since the murder happened. Dust lay thick and grey on the work surfaces. The police chief stood and watched them, particularly Logan, as they paced the room, none of them saying anything. Byrne looked closely at everything, face cold as if he was calculating every step the killer must’ve taken. Swann looked to where Harrison remained by the door.

  ‘Seen it before, bubba. Don’t need to see it again.’

  ‘Why?’ Byrne said suddenly, looking directly at Swann.

  ‘Good question.’ Swann touched the layers of dust on the glass cabinets and rubbed the ends of his fingers together. ‘If this was Tal-Salem, he went to a hell of a lot of trouble over this woman.’ The police chief was watching him. ‘Our intelligence told us that Tal-Salem was back in Spain. We were making attempts to try and get him back to the UK.’

  Byrne looked beyond him to the street outside, where a pick-up truck rumbled slowly past. ‘Helluva lot of trouble.’ He turned and spoke to Logan. ‘Let’s go talk to the husband.’

  They found Jim Poynton at the Chevy dealership and his boss gave him some time off to talk to them. Logan wanted to do it at his home. She told him she wanted to see some of Mary’s things, get a feel for her surroundings.

  ‘GBI did that already, mam.’

  ‘I know that, Mr Poynton. But this is a federal case now, and if we’re gonna apprehend your wife’s killer, I need to be thorough.’ She smiled at him and laid a long-nailed hand on his arm. ‘This musta been real hard on y’all and I thank you for giving us this time. I can promise you, Mr Poynton, we’ve got the best FBI agents there are working on this one.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘You can count on it, sir.’

  He drove Logan in his car to the house, and the rest followed in Harrison’s. ‘First time her black face made an impression that wasn’t the wrong one,’ he muttered. He glanced at Swann. ‘You get that shit in London, duchess, the black/white thing?’

  ‘It’s around. Not like it is down here.’

  They arrived at Poynton’s house and followed him and Logan in through the screen door. The drapes were still pulled and the sitting room lay in darkness. Swann could see two mock leather couches and a reclining chair, all arranged round a TV set and video. A black cable box squatted on top of the TV, and the time stared out at them in liquid crystal letters.

  ‘Sorry about the mess.’ Poynton scooped last night’s dinner dishes off the coffee table, and placed them in the sink, set round the corner in the open-plan kitchen. He opened the drapes and sat down in the reclining chair with a beer he had got from the fridge. ‘Only got the one,’ he said apologetically, and sucked off the froth. ‘Goddamn. Four FBI agents in my house. What would my daddy say?’

  ‘Your daddy?’ Logan asked him.

  He stood his beer on the arm of the chair and pushed a hand through his hair. ‘My daddy was sheriff’s deputy in Hart County.’

  ‘So, y’alls a Georgia boy,’ Harrison said.

  ‘Yessir, I am. Born and raised.’

  ‘And what about Mary?’ Logan asked him. She had the file from the GBI on her lap.

  ‘Alls in there, I guess.’ Poynton nodded to it. ‘I done told everything I ever knew about her to Agent Chaney in Athens.’

  The Poyntons had been married in 1985, and had lived since then right there in Royston. Mary had been born in Clarksville, Virginia, fifty-three years previously, and her parents had run the Lakeview Motel. She had graduated from high school, then worked for a while in the Winn Dixie food hall right across from the police department. Logan read the file, then looked up at Poynton, who was nursing his can of Coors.

  ‘Mary’s maiden name was Greer,’ she said. ‘Where’d you meet her, Jim?’

  ‘California.’ Poynton put the can of beer down again and took a tin of Smokey Mountain snuff from his pocket. He sucked noisily, looked for somewhere to spit and swallowed instead. ‘I was over in Orange County there for a while. Mary went to Berkeley.’

  Logan glanced at her notes. ‘She arrived in California in 1970.’

  ‘I don’t know. I guess.’ Poynton poked himself in the chest. ‘Me, I was just a surf bum. I don’t remember a whole lot about the late sixties and early seventies. It was all just the Beach Boys and party on. I never hooked up with Mary till just before she moved to Nevada.’

  Harrison stared at him: plump, middle-aged. He imagined him lying on his couch every night, watching HBO or Showtime, eating potato chips and drinking beer. It was hard to equate the person seated before them with the waves off Laguna Beach.

  Logan sat forward in her seat. ‘Have you got any pictures of Mary?’ she asked.

  ‘There’s none there?’

  ‘There is, honey, but only this one.’ She smiled again, as she held up a portrait of his wife, taken, according to the inscription on the back, in 1997. ‘You got any albums, Jim?’ she asked. ‘Any of her stuff. Did she collect stuff? Women like to collect stuff.’

  ‘Are you kidding me? We got boxes up in the attic.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Sure we do. You wanna see some of it?’

  ‘You bet.’

  Harrison stood up. ‘I’ll give you a hand,’ he said.

  Swann smiled at Logan and she flicked her eyebrows. He had to hand it to her. After all the implicit shit he had watched her eat, she had this man wrapped so tightly round her little finger, he couldn’t move. Swann bet with himself that Logan would find out more about who Mary Greer was in five minutes than Chaney would in a month.

  Poynton and Harrison rummaged about above their heads for a few minutes, then came down carrying a cardboard box between them. They set it on the coffee table and Byrne stood up. ‘Cheyenne,’ he said. ‘I’m gonna get back to D.C. I’ve got my car at the motel and you guys can handle things here. If you want help from Atlanta, let me know.’

  ‘OK, Louis. I’ll call into the SIOC later. You sure you don’t want to stay?’

  ‘I’m more use in D.C, trying to co-ordinate the other offices with Tom Kovalski.’ He shook hands with them all and left.

  ‘That’s Byrne,’ Logan muttered. ‘Flutters in and flutters right out again.’

  ‘Guess he wanted to see for himself, though, huh,’ Harrison said.

  ‘I guess.’ Logan was sifting through the box of memorabilia that Mary Greer had kept. She glanced at Swann. ‘He knew her as Greer,’ she said.

  Swann thought for a moment. ‘The note, you mean. Yes, he must’ve done.’

  ‘What note?’ Poynton was looking puzzled.

  ‘Mr Poynton,’ Logan said to him. ‘The reason we got involved again is because there’s more to your wife’s death than the random killing you were perhaps led to believe. We don’t know for sure, but we think we might be able to identify the killer.’ She hesitated for a moment, then laid a warm hand on his knee. ‘Right now, sir, this must be for your ears only. We’ll make our findings public when we have to, but I don’t want to do that yet.’ She nodded to Swann. ‘This man is from the British Antiterrorist Branch, and we think that Mary’s death might be connected in some way with events you may have read about in Europe.’

  ‘I don’t read much about Europe. What events y’all talking about?’

  ‘Terrorist stuff,’ Swann said. ‘Suffice to say, there’s a bigger picture here, Mr Poynton. None of us know how that picture gets completed, but we’re looking at some of the pieces.’

  ‘We believe the killer knew your wife, or of her, before she married you,’ Logan finished.

  ‘Hell, that was fourteen years ago.’ Poynton’s face reddened about the ears. ‘Y’all telling me this guy’s been waiting to kill her for fourteen damn years?’

  ‘We don’t know. All we do know is that h
e used her maiden name in a note that we discovered, and she wouldn’t have used her maiden name since 1985.’

  She turned back to the others. Each of them had a pile of Mary’s papers and books from the box. ‘So we’re looking pre-1985,’ she said.

  Harrison had a yearbook in his hands and was flicking through the pages. High school 1963; Mary would have been seventeen. He browsed every page, looking for some clue, something that caught his eye.

  Logan looked over at Poynton again, who had got another beer from the refrigerator. ‘When did Mary leave California, Jim?’

  ‘I can’t remember. I was still there. I guess 1979, maybe 1980. She went to Reno and worked on the tables there for about six years. Matter of fact, she only quit when I brought her back here.’

  ‘Reno?’ Harrison said.

  ‘Yeah. She worked the blackjack tables. Dealer. She was pretty good.’

  ‘Did she know anybody with the initials TJ?’ Logan asked him. ‘Or CC, maybe?’

  ‘Beats me.’ He flapped his arms at his sides.

  Swann sifted through his pile of papers: old letters, some perfumed from lovers, cuttings from magazines and photo albums. Some of the photos had come loose and he gathered these separately and worked his way through them. One caught his eye and he stared at it for a long time—three women, one black, and a dark-skinned boy of about nine or ten. The picture was taken in a park and the three women were leaning on wide-fanned grass rakes, the boy huddled between them. He turned it over and read the inscription on the back. Me, Gabby & Oko. Park attendants one and all—1970. He showed the picture to Poynton. ‘D’you remember this?’ he asked.

  Logan looked up then. Poynton took the picture and regarded it thoughtfully. ‘Before I was on the scene,’ he said. ‘In 1970, I was still surfing at San Clemente. I guess this is Berkeley, though. She attended classes there, worked as a park warden-cum-gardener for a while. These gals musta been her buddies, I guess. I don’t know who they are, though.’