Butterfly Knife

by Larry Matthews

Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The Washington area is one of the most traffic-congested regions of the United States, rivaling even Southern California. The public officials who are charged with trying to do something about the traffic backups are usually years behind any meaningful policy and, in any event, the states of Maryland and Virginia are not always on the same page, traffic-wise, and commuters are the worse for it. The traffic is so bad that off-hour traffic backups are common. The state of Virginia decided that its portion of the Capital Beltway should be expanded to include HOT lanes, “high occupancy toll” lanes on the most-travelled portion of the beltway. The idea is that flexible tolls, rising with traffic volume, will allow a few well-heeled motorists to drive faster than the peasants who can’t afford the exorbitant tolls the swells can pay. The accomplish this, the state ripped up miles of the Beltway for years and, in the process, also began a major expansion of the Metro System through the same area at the same time, creating a monumental mess for drivers at all hours.

  The worst of it was where Interstate 66 crossed the Beltway near a suburban center called Tyson’s Corner, once known only as the site of a shopping mall, now a jumble of outdated roads that were nearly impossible to navigate at peak hours. The nighttime hours were the peak construction periods in this project. Into this drove Father Darius and his prize, now beginning to come around in the small trunk of the MG. Traffic was backed up to Route 123 and the electronic sign over the roadway informed drivers that all exits to the Beltway were closed. Since nearly all of the motorists wanted access to the beltway, they were forced to remain on I-66 until they could find a suitable exit somewhere in Arlington and a road that would take them where they wanted to go. That meant that Father Darius would be travelling at five miles per hour for a very long time.

  Adding to his problems was the car itself, a standout on a road littered with gray sedans and dark SUVs driven by suburbanites obsessed with safety and room for their bikes. The men who were trapped in their vehicles, idly pondering the option of chucking it all for points west and a life in the Rockies, glanced at the small red car and smiled. Overheated anxiety in traffic jams can cause heart attacks and all sorts of horrible physical reactions as stress chemicals flood the brain, which explains why some people go berserk and open fire on others or simply get out of their cars and start walking anywhere. A brief fantasy about another life can relieve some of that anxiety and a small classic roadster was an ideal outlet for such fantasies. Which is to say that the car was noticed.

  The backup eased at Glebe Road, but by then Father Darius was in no condition to carry on with his mission that night, so he drove to a small house in North Arlington, a post-war bungalow that he had rented furnished and used as an occasional safe house. He was weak and light headed and nearly passed out while he was driving down the residential street and up the driveway to the back of the house, to a small, free-standing garage which he opened with great difficulty, straining under the old, wooden door that rotated outward from the bottom. He managed to park the car in the garage, lift Elena from the trunk, close the garage door, and stagger into the small kitchen, where he placed Elena on the floor.

  She was moaning and moving against the rope that tied the blanket around her but she was far from alert. He sat on a chair and watched her struggle to come around, feeling a great love for her. She is the physical manifestation of the Virgin, he thought, smiling down at the form on the floor, and she must be returned to her eternal home. His head fell back and thought he was losing consciousness. His back was wet and he knew he was bleeding and it worried him because he would be delayed in his work. He got up and poured himself a large glass of orange juice, thinking it would fortify him. He needed rest. He would deal with her later.

  He struggled to drag Elena into the living room where he tightened the ropes around the blanket and tied her to a radiator. He pulled a portion of the blanket away from her face and pressed the ether and chloroform to her nose and mouth to send her into unconsciousness, and collapsed onto the sofa, allowing himself to sink into welcome oblivion.

 

  Dave was emerging from the traffic backup still in a rage, but he had set the wheels in motion to find Elena. He had left the mountain with no clear plan but by the time he got to Warrenton he had his thoughts together. He called Sid and briefed him on what had happened.

  “What a bunch of dingdongs,” Sid said. “All bets are off with these guys. I’ll call the desk and tell them you’ll be filing on this. Don’t bother to write it up, we’ll just do a Q and A. Don’t leave anything out and mention the red MG as often as you can get it in. We’ll run a special every hour in morning drive and you can bet your ass that the networks will be all over this. I want you to make yourself available to every news outlet that wants you, which will be all of them. Take a minute to get your thoughts together and call the desk. They’ll be ready. We’ll get this up on the website as soon as possible and alert some other reporters to check it. This thing will be headlines for every swinging dick that gets up in the morning. Goddam it!” Sid hung up.

  Dave tried to get his thoughts in order but he needed to talk to O’Neil, who no doubt would be in bed or at least having a last nightcap. He called his number and it rang several times and Dave thought he was going to voicemail when O’Neil answered. “I know what you’re calling about. All I can say is I’m sorry.”

  “What the hell happened, Captain?”

  “It got away from us. We’ll find her. We’re doing all we can.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “All of us, Dave.”

  “Are you talking about the police department or the dumbasses out at the farm?”

  “It’s not easy to explain, Dave.”

  “Why don’t you give it a try? I’m going with this all over the country in a few hours and I’m not leaving anything out, so now’s the time to contribute your end of it.”

  “I wouldn’t do that, Dave. There are some things you don’t know.”

  “There are some things I do know, Captain, and one of them is that Elena was kidnapped by this mad dog killer under the noses of the guys you sent to protect her. Who are those guys, anyway? Are they cops or some freelance lunatics you and Frank happen to know?”

  “Look, we’re working with the F.B.I. on a press release. It will say that pretty much what you know and we have an APB out for the MG, which should not be hard to find. We don’t want to drive him underground. Let us handle this and work with us on what you put on the air.”

  “Fuck yourself, Captain. Your way isn’t working out.”

  “You might want to rethink that position. You and I have a relationship that works for both of us right now but there are no guarantees it will be like that in the future.”

  “Thanks for the threat. Now go to hell.” Dave hung up and called the desk at Now News. The pasty news assistant named Megan answered and put him through to a production manager who was ready to record. He recited everything that had happened, working backward from the most recent event, beginning with Elena’s kidnapping. He outlined all he knew, including the monitoring equipment in the silo, the mysterious men who had failed to protect him and Elena, and O’Neil’s attempt to censor his report. When he was finished, he did it again using different phrasing. This would allow the production manager to have two versions and could cut them up into smaller bites to use on newscasts, special reports, and feeds to the stations. A printed version would be posted on the Now News website, along with sound bites and a full version. The production manager was very good at what she did. By four o’clock, just as the morning drive news producers were having coffee and checking the news menu, Now News was in full bloom on all of its outlets and the network morning shows were calling and requesting live interviews with Dave.

  He went to his apartment to shower and change into television-friendly clothes, clean Levis, a nice sweater, and a preppy jacket. He looked every inch the swashbuckling journalist as he walked into the Now News newsroom to the ast
onished looks of the morning crew. A desk assistant went to a printer and handed Dave a story from the AP. Headlined “Washington Journalist Kidnapped.” It outlined the information contained in Dave’s Q and A and attributed most of the details to him, with confirmation from the F.B.I. that authorities were looking for a red 1959 MGA and the driver was thought to be the man responsible for the murders of priests, a park service ranger, and possibly others. The F.B.I. had no comment on what Dave claimed to have happened in Rappahannock County nor did it have any comment on his report that a group of men there were engaged in electronic and communications monitoring of unknown persons. D.C. police were said to be preparing a statement on the alleged link between the kidnapping in Virginia and the priest killings and possibly to other murders cited by Dave Haggard, a journalist employed by Now News.

  Sid arrived and walked into the newsroom with his hands in the air. “Attention! I want your attention! As you all know by now, one of our own has been kidnapped. Until she is returned to us we are a one-story organization. Am I clear? We are a one-story newsroom. It is our story and I do not, I repeat do not, want to us to be scooped by another other news organization about any aspect of this story. Am I clear?” There was a round of murmuring as the staff looked at each other. “Dave Haggard is our lead on this. He will get whatever he needs. He has given us the lead story for the entire country this morning. He will be appearing on most if not all of the morning shows. You will all work your sources even if they don’t seem to have any connection to this story. They might have heard something or know something that no one has asked them about, so call them and work the phones. Pass along to Dave anything you get. Do not sit on it. Let him decide if it’s important and relevant. I don’t know if any of you pray. Such things are not a normal part of the journalism experience, I know. But right now we will take a moment of silence to talk to whatever higher powers we believe in to send our best to Elena. God bless her. Now let’s get to work!”

  Dave’s first interview was with the Now News affiliate in Chicago, the station that had, in effect, stolen his clandestine interview with Captain O’Neil about the priest killings, and possible ties to Warriors of Mary and police officers. It was a quick Q and A version of what Now News was putting out all over the country. Next was Boston, then New York. He had decided that the lead was the kidnapping of Elena and the man in the red car. His secondary points were the activities at the farm. He let the anchors who were talking to him use the priests killings in the introduction. He knew the value of bullet points on the air and the need to stay within easily understood boundaries. It was a given that people who listened to the radio or watched television in the morning were doing something else at the time, like brushing their teeth or toasting frozen pastries, and could only absorb a limited amount of detail. He wanted to hammer the point that Elena had been taken by a man in a red MGA. Find the MG and we find Elena. He said it as often as he could.

  By seven he was on the network shows from a small studio on M Street that was available for such things and was often used by guests on the Sunday morning “game shows”, the network news-a-thons that were created to provide something to report on Sundays, normally a slow news day. Government officials and members of Congress would sometimes appear on all of them and had no time to race from one to another, so they sat in one studio and were plugged into a series of shows.

  Dave ran through the facts as he knew them and mentioned the red MGA. Find the car and find Elena. The priest killings, the Warriors of Mary, the farm, the police connections, all were relegated to the later stages of the interviews, not that they were considered unimportant, but these aspects of the story were considered less perishable, if not less sensational.

  By eight o’clock Virginia State Police were fielding dozens of calls about the MG. Fairfax County and Arlington police were also getting calls from men and women who claim to have seen the car. So were cops in Illinois and California. Every red MGA that had recently been on any road or highway was suspect and was reported. The only ones that mattered were ones that might have been travelling between Rappahannock County and D.C. the previous night. As it happened, there was only one. A man reported that he had been stuck in a traffic jam next to such a car and had even memorized its license plate number as a way to pass the time. He passed it along to an operator in Arlington. The car had a Massachusetts plate. It was registered to a priest who was listed as deceased, dead in an accident in Dracut, Massachusetts, on Pelham Road near the New Hampshire line the previous month, following a report that the MG had been stolen. The accident had produced a fire that had left nothing much to identify.

  Around the time Arlington was running the plate number phoned in by the motorist a D.C. cop was watching television and, like everyone else, was caught up in the details about the kidnapping of Elena and its connection to the priest killings. Dave Haggard, now showing his fatigue, was mentioning the red MG, saying yet again that anyone with any knowledge should contact the authorities immediately. The officer recalled such a car days earlier travelling in the snow down Constitution Avenue in the middle of the night. Could it be the same car? He decided to call his supervisor.

  O’Neil was fielding calls from all of his superiors, federal agents, and leaders of the Warriors of Mary. He was holed up in a coffee shop off Pennsylvania Avenue not far from the Justice Department, where meetings were underway about how to proceed with a situation that was fast spinning out of control. A section head was sitting at a conference table asking others in the room how something like this could happen under their very noses. Television trucks were lined up outside, waiting for the Attorney General to say something. She was waiting for more information.

  O’Neil’s phone buzzed and he saw that it was the chief’s office. She was calm, which he knew was a bad sign. “How fast can you get here?”

  Indiana Avenue was nearby but he had no desire to go anywhere near headquarters any time soon. He also knew he had no choice. “Ten minutes.”

  “Make it five.” The line went dead.

  The phone buzzed again and it was Ossening at the F.B.I. “How soon can you get here? I’m at the D.C. field office.” While the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the F.B.I.’s national headquarters, was within sight of the Justice Department, it’s nominal master, the D.C. field office was a few blocks away on 4th Street Northwest, not far off the tourist paths, although tourists were not encouraged to drop by.

  “I’m booked,” O’Neil said.

  “I don’t doubt that, but we have a few things we’d like to talk about.”

  “I’m off to see the chief. We’ll have to see how that goes.” O’Neil was feeling weary.

  “She’s going to advise you to cooperate with us.”

  “Did she say that?”

  “It was implied.”

  “Like I said, let’s see how it goes. I have a busy day.”

  “Don’t we all.” Ossening hung up.

  The chief was standing when he walked into her office. “So,” she said, “let’s start at the beginning. We’ll be recording this.”