Cold Frame

EIGHT

Midnight on the Mall. Mandeville slowed his pace. What would the watchers think? he wondered as he walked over toward the bench. A couple of aging, maybe closeted gay guys meeting after dark on a park bench? Was there a directional mike being trained on the man on the bench? Infrared spotlights coming on in their direction? The monument was lit up by bright white spotlights, but what was looking back at the ground? He didn’t care. He and Strang had a well-rehearsed procedure.

He walked past the bench but then slowed his pace. A minute later, Strang got up and began to follow him. Mandeville deliberately changed course toward the perimeter road and the nearest parked vehicle, one of those now ubiquitous Expedition SUVs. As he walked past, the right front window slid down and an agent started to warn him that he was being followed.

“A source,” Mandeville replied. “It’s okay.”

The agent nodded and rolled up his window. Mandeville sat down suddenly on the next park bench. A minute later, in full view of the watchers, Strang sat down beside him. He was wearing a pair of those square-lensed eyeglasses popular in European fashion circles and sported a black mustache to boot.

“A mustache?” Mandeville said. “Seriously?”

“It has an RF antenna embedded in it which can detect an audiobounce listening beam device and warn me through an earbud in these stupid glasses.”

“Really?”

“No.”

Mandeville grunted. Strang being funny. “What’s happening with the McGavin thing?” he asked.

“The case,” Strang said, “such as it is, is being handled by a foursome of exiles in something the Metro PD calls the Briar Patch.”

“Enlighten me.”

“Well, their mission within the MPD is to move any cases which might involve federal-anything out of the MPD. Such cases are known as tarbabies, hence the Briar Patch allusion.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Not one pound,” Strang said. “This is the ILB Whiting told you about.”

“Oh,” Mandeville said, remembering now. “And did you lean on someone?”

“I had a team try to scare off the lead detective, a Detective Sergeant Ken Smith. As it turned out, that didn’t work. Smith got up a posse and ran my guys off.”

Mandeville grunted but didn’t say anything.

“I covered it by pretending to be a senior guy at the FPS. Bitched to some assistant chief, demanded that they fire the guy behind what happened out on the towpath. The chief seemed happy to oblige, so I think that problem is over.”

“Just like that?” Mandeville said, eyeing the man next to him.

“Well, apparently, anybody sent to the Briar Patch is already teed up for some kind of disciplinary action or even termination. Since the MPD bosses’re just looking for any excuse to fire them anyway, now they have one. I’ll confirm and let you know.”

“Just like that,” Mandeville said again.

“It’s what I do for love of country and a good apple pie.”

Mandeville snorted. “What if he beats it? Keeps nosing around? I do not need a bunch of air-mail cleared Metro cops peeking in the windows at the DMX.”

“Well, that’s why I wanted to meet. You have a way to set a rendition in motion?”

Mandeville took a deep breath and then nodded. “That comes with its own problems,” he said. “Metro cop just disappears? Because that’s what happens in a rendition. Gone from the face of the earth.”

“He’s single, no family, no girlfriend, and a happy loner. I can guarantee nobody at a high level at MPD will ask any questions. And, it doesn’t have to be abroad.”

“The quiet room?”

Strang nodded.

“Let’s wait and see what happens,” Mandeville said. “It’s an option, but not a risk-free option.”

“Sorry to hear about McGavin,” Strang said, turning his head to survey the Mall and all those parked cars.

“A little too well fed, I suspect,” Mandeville said, getting up. “Keep in touch, please.”

“Count on it,” Strang said to Mandeville’s departing back.

After a weekend of general moping around, Av decided to go up to Jeff’s market on Sixteenth Street to pick up a large steak and a premade salad. He bought two bottles of decent red from the wine shop across the street, thought about some French bread and maybe a baking potato, decided against all those extra carbs, and then went home. He’d felt naked out there on the street with no weapon, but he had a cure for that problem stashed in a wall safe in his loft. The old building was full of hidey-holes and odd spaces, and, like all cops everywhere, he had an ample collection of guns and ammo. As a police officer, he was required to carry at almost all times. As a civilian, he did not intend to stop that practice, confirming the old saw that cops don’t carry guns to protect you — cops carry guns to protect themselves.

He turned into the cramped alley on the left side of the building and stopped to wait for a garage door, which had begun rising. The actual garage was nearly forty feet long and L-shaped at the back. There was room for his aging Ford pickup truck, a Harley, two bicycles, and a tool room, some walk-in storage bins, and a workshop. Access to the building itself was through a service door that led to a bricked-up loading bay. From there he could get to the stairwell on the right side of the building that led up to the second-floor apartment foyer and, from there, to his loft on the third floor. Only he had access to the garage. He sometimes let Mr. Kardashian store stuff in the garage, but not very often.

There was an ancient coal-fired boiler room beneath the loading bay, but all the heat and air-conditioning utilities had long since been converted to electric. Bright red fire-main piping lined the stairwell, and the exterior door out to Thirty-third Street was keycard operated. Av had often thought of installing some kind of dumbwaiter system so he wouldn’t have to hump groceries up to the loft but had never gotten around to it.

His loft was what a Realtor would call an open plan: it took up the entire third floor of the old building, whose eighteenth-century interior brickwork and chestnut beams remained fully exposed. The only interior walls enclosed his bedroom, bath, closets, and a small study on the back side of the building away from any street noise. The rest of the loft included a large living room area with a working fireplace that he’d filled with a woodstove insert. There was a corner kitchen with a counter bar and a nice range, a stairway up to the roof, and all the ancient wooden structural beams, pillars, and iron framework of the original edifice. The floors were random-width oak boards, polished by decades of service. He’d put skylights in four places, so the total effect was of space and light. The woodstove in the fireplace was big enough to heat the whole place, and the fifteen-foot-high ceilings and three-course thick brick walls made air-conditioning a matter of a few window units. His uncle had done most of the engineering work when he first built the loft, and, other than to remove some of his uncle’s somewhat disturbing artwork, Av had seen fit to make very few changes.

It was a great place to live and one more reason for Av to never let a woman encumber his life. They could visit, but they could not stay for more than one night. His main attraction for the opposite sex was entirely physical. That suited him just fine. He was content to live alone and enjoyed being able to do whatever he felt like doing when he felt like doing it without having to consider anyone else’s feelings or needs. Whenever he felt a little bit lonely in the evening he only had to walk four blocks to find a dozen bars and nightclubs packed to capacity with good-looking women, many of whom were totally in synch with his own feelings about long-term relationships or marriage. He’d kept himself fit and healthy, had zero debt, and had an interesting line of work — well, maybe not anymore. Even so, he still had one of the most interesting cities in the whole world right there at his feet. Maybe he’d just take a year off, see the sights, something that people who lived in Washington often failed to do, and then see what was what.

Sundown found Av on the roof, enjoying the first bottle of red. He was pleasantly blitzed, thinking hard about opening the second bottle, well satisfied with the way the steak had turned out, and wondering what he was going to do with the rest of his life. He could play out the suspension beef, the inevitable hearings, and then get a union lawyer to fight the termination action, but if the MPD really wanted someone gone, he or she would get gone, one way or another. If the bosses lost through the PBA process, they’d assign him as an assistant clerk in the evidence locker and simply wait for him to get bored to death and just leave.

Or: he could just up and leave now, and save everybody the headaches. Quit instead of getting fired. Money wasn’t a problem, nor was a place to live. He had no sad-eyed dependents wringing their hands and wondering aloud where the next mortgage payment was coming from. He was thirty-five years old, in excellent health, debt-free, with over ten years’ worth of savings, half of them in precrash 8 percent Treasuries. His suspension wasn’t the result of anything criminal, such as lying on an expense report, sexual harassment in the office, or excessive violence toward suspects in custody. He and the MPD were no longer getting along, and he wasn’t ever going to win that one.

And then what? A federal LE job? A county job in nearby Virginia or Maryland? He didn’t have a college degree and still didn’t think he needed one. Careers required degrees, and his idea of work was that it was just that, no more, no less. Do your day job, get paid. Go home. Do what you like. Be happy.

He’d tried one semester at UMD and found the whole thing ridiculous. “Classes” of up to three hundred freshmen sitting in a smelly auditorium, listening to some foreigner, posing as a professor, read from his dissertation in English, his third language. Or, better yet, watching some of his fellow freshmen dress up like Marxist revolutionaries so that they could protest about lesbian, bisexual, gay, and transgender oppression. The bullshit of academia had convinced him to go home to talk to his parents about not wasting any more of their money. His mother had urged him to stick with it, ignore the silliness, and do what it took to just get the piece of paper. Show up, she said. Pretend you respect the professors. You’ll stand out, and you will graduate. His father, ever Mr. Practical, told him to go talk to the military recruiters down at the local shopping center.

Of the four, the Marine recruiter had promised him travel to exotic places, the best physical-fitness training on the planet, and the prospect of shooting people and blowing up their shit. It had been no contest, and, of course, most of it hadn’t been true, either. He’d done three years in the Pacific Fleet Marine Force, stationed variously at Marine garrisons in Guam or Okinawa, with the rest of the time floating around in a big old gator-freighter, helping his fellow marines to drive the ship’s-company sailors nuts.

The physical-fitness part had been true — with nothing much to do aboard ship, the marines spent literally hours on the ship’s weather decks, doing every imaginable PT regimen. He’d then rotated back to a stateside Marine base, where, older and just a wee bit wiser, he took enough local and online courses to qualify for an associate’s degree in criminal justice. That, plus his veteran’s preference, had made a slot at the police academy his for the asking.

He heard his cell phone chirping from where he’d left it next to the grill. Reluctantly he retrieved it and stared at the screen, which had become a bit fuzzy. Red wine, he thought. He was much more of a beer guy than a wino. He looked at the caller ID: Howie?

“Dee-tective Sergeant,” Av said. “What’s shakin’, Mau-Mau?”

“Need to talk,” Howie said. “Can we come up?”

“Come up?” Av said. This was a first. And who was “we”? “As in you’re here, at my pad?”

“At the door,” Howie said. “Getting some heavy looks from some Eye-ranian mope in the store. Wong Daddy’s fixin’ to start, dude don’t quit with the stink-eye.”

“That’s Mister Kardashian,” Av said, heading down the stairs. “Don’t hurt him — he’s cool. Buzzing you in now. Come up two floors.”

He went down to the door and let them in. Off-duty Howie was in full scary regalia, dreads, hoodie, sweatpants, and Air Jordans. Wong was wearing an all-black shiny suit, complete with tie and bowler, what he called his Odd Job look. Howie accepted a beer, as did Wong.

“Slick digs, partner,” Howie said, looking around at the loft.

“Generous uncle,” Av said. He explained how he’d acquired the building. He had the beginnings of a headache; damned red wine.

“I’ll say,” Howie said. “All this, no rent, no mortgage, and paying tenants?”

“No wife, either,” Wong said, admiringly. “Smart mofo standing right here in front of God and everybody.”

Howie shook his head. He’d been married and had tried suburban life with four fractious children and a nagging wife. He now lived in Southwest D.C. in a one-bedroom apartment, where he could look out the windows at night and see Washington’s rich gang life in full color. The homies all thought he was a harmless nut because he’d told them he was an undercover cop and also a secret agent when he moved in. They laughed that off and since then he’d been left alone.

“Listen,” he said. “Two reasons we here. One, OCME called over, after you left? Said McGavin’s body had been claimed.”

“Oh, yeah? By whom?”

“The family lawyer,” Howie said.

“Gee whiz,” Av said. “Am I starting to sense some closure here, please, God?”

Howie grinned. “OCME apparently didn’t resist. Shyster shows up with ID, a Georgetown accent, tweeds and brogues, and positively identifies the remains as McGavin, via televideo. He then provides a funeral home contact, signs the appropriate papers, goes back behind the Ivory Curtain. Funeral-home ghouls show up an hour later to remove the remains. For cremation.”

“And they just let him go?”

“No one in MPD ever put a hold on the body as evidence, so, yeah, they let him go. Probably blowing in the wind as we speak.”

Av’s headache began to assert itself. They should have filed a request to the district attorney to keep the body once the ME had declared cause and manner undetermined. “Shit,” he muttered. Then he remembered: they didn’t work cases in ILB.

Howie shrugged. “C’mon,” he said. “We didn’t really have any grounds. The doc we spoke to personally asked the lawyer if the grieving widow wanted to know more about what had happened. Shyster said no, she did not, overcome with grief as she was and her cruise-planning. And that was that.”

Av realized that OCME was fully within its rights. The District’s lively drug trade and gang rivalries kept the ME’s chop shop amply busy. An unexplained death with no such criminal attributes and no complainant, say, like one of the Metro District’s homicide squads, was sufficient justification to move a body into the capable hands of a crematorium, especially when a family rep showed up and requested just that.

“Okay,” Av said. “I guess that is that. Besides, what do I care, huh? Wait, you said two reasons?”

“Yeah. Tell him, Wong.”

“I had to go see Precious for my monthly behavioral sciences lecture,” Wong said.

Howie saw Av’s blank look. “Once a month,” he said. “Wong, here, gets to go see the lieutenant to be reminded not to conduct himself in the manner of a uniformed monster. No yelling at suspects in unknown Asian dialects, stomping episodes restricted to concrete floors, and a little more effort on paying his bills out in town.”

“Once a month?”

Wong shrugged. The gesture made his black suit coat look like there were small animals running back and forth across his shoulders under the fabric. “Counseling sessions,” he said. “It’s possible that I’m on some kinda probation, time to time.”

“But that’s not the interesting bit,” Howie prompted. Wong frowned, but then nodded.

“Yeah, well, I had to wait outside. She was on the phone. Had her door cracked. Sounded like she was talking to her rabbi. She was pissed off, and I mean not in her normal I’m-so-fierce way. This was different. Said somebody had told her that if she didn’t play ball in getting rid of you, by name, they were gonna fire her.”

“Who was gonna fire her?”

“Them,” Wong said, impatiently, as if that explained everything. “She was asking about how to deal with that shit, what’d she call it, undue command influence. Said she was gonna go to the EEOC, file a complaint, blah-blah-blah, then she got interrupted. Said no several times, then said, ‘I see. All right. I will. Thank you.’ That was it.”

“Who’s her rabbi?” Av asked.

“No one knows, least not in the Briar Patch,” Howie said. “Miz Brown thinks it’s one of the lady lawyers in the general counsel’s office. Thing is, that’s a lotta heat for what happened out there on the towpath, don’t you think?”

“Well, yes, I do, but — so what? I mean, who cares what I think now? I’ve just about decided to fold my tents and walk away. I mean, I appreciate the insight, guys, but whatever this is all about, I’m not sure I care anymore.”

Howie gave him a look. “I was afraid of that,” he said. “How mucha that red shit you had tonight?”

“Too much,” Av admitted. “Seemed like a good idea at the time. But: back to my point: since I’m history, why should you guys care?”

The two of them stared at him until he got it. His temples were really pounding now. Then the light came on. “Oh,” he said. “If it can happen to me…”

They nodded, almost in unison.

“And what do you want me to do?”

“Fight it, dude,” Wong said.

“Yeah, homes,” Howie said. “Get your rep to raise some hell. Insist on a hearing. Ask a buncha embarrassing questions, drag the McGavin tarbaby into it, see if that’s what’s driving the train. Don’t just walk out. They see it’s that easy, we’re all out on our asses, and the rest of us don’t have something like this to fall back on, know what I’m sayin’?”

Av nodded. His head told him not to do that again. “Okay, my fellow inmates. I’m cool with that. But you realize: if I succeed, we may lose Precious as a boss.”

“She’s a big lieutenant now,” Wong said. “Going to law school and all. She’ll bite ’em all in the ass, and I’ll hold ’em down. And then I’ll stomp their asses. Believe it.”

They got up to leave, but then Howie stopped. “What kinda neighborhood is this?” he asked.

“Busy during the day,” Av said. “It’s Georgetown, so we’ve got shops, restaurants, the canal. But at night? M Street is a happening place, but here? Sleepy Hollow. Why?”

“Saw a really strange dude out on the street,” Howie said. “Sitting in some rice-burning POS out on Thirty-third Street. Like he was on a stakeout.”

“Strange how?” Av asked.

“His face,” Howie said. “Something really wrong with his face. Looked like a mask.”

Av looked over at Wong, who nodded his agreement with Howie’s observation.

“Got one eye that looks at you like a snake?” he asked.

“Yeah, he did.”

Av thought about it. “I’ve seen him once before, out on my morning run. He scared my blondie running partner. Just a guy in traffic, except—”

“Except what?”

“He was definitely looking at me. Not like some kinda surveillance dick. He made sure I saw him, seeing me.”

“Want us to roust his ass?” Howie said. “I can sic Wong here on him, maybe turn his car over, then have a little chat?”

Av blew out a long breath. “I will bet you,” he said, “that that dude is long gone when you get out there.”

“Let’s go see,” Wong said, suddenly interested in the prospect of flipping a car on its back.

They called back two minutes later. “Gone,” Howie said. “Keep some heat handy, bro.”

“Count on it,” Av said, worried now. What the hell had he done to invite this kind of shit?

At two-thirty in the morning, Av awoke. He sat up in bed, tasted his cotton-dry mouth, and groaned. The headache had subsided, but his body was not yet in any sort of forgiving mood.

He got up, went to the fridge, got himself three good glugs of OJ from the bottle, and then cracked a soda for some carbonated relief. He looked out the windows. There were no more passenger jets sliding down the Potomac River gorge at this hour. Upriver he could just barely see the lights on Chain Bridge now that the leaves had begun to fall. He shivered. He slept with the windows open, pretty much year round, as his sleeping costume consisted of a pair of tartan flannel boxer shorts and a T-shirt. At the height of summer, the heat broke by midnight. Now that it was September, the outside air was in the low sixties. Wonderful.

He turned to go back to bed, which is when he saw someone sitting in the big recliner in his living room area. He stopped in his tracks.

“Good evening, Detective Sergeant Smith,” a woman’s voice said. “Please forgive the intrusion, but we need to talk.”

“I’ve got a gun,” he said.

“No you don’t,” she said. “You had to hand it over today, along with your badge and creds. Please. I’m here to apologize for all that and to explain a few things. It’s late, and I’ve got a long day tomorrow. Today, I guess. Please. Come over here, sit down, and give me ten minutes of your time.”

She was right — he didn’t have a gun. In his tango with the red wine, he’d forgotten to extract a replacement weapon. He walked over to the living room area and stood facing her.

“Good grief,” she said. “You’re huge. What do you press?” He just looked down at her. She was older than he was, maybe even forty, which made her almost ancient. Dark hair, Italian or Greek face, dark eyed, aquiline nose, prominent cheekbones, slightly parted lips, strong chin. She was wearing one of those Washington power pantsuits that revealed absolutely nothing about her figure, and yet, she was certainly of the female persuasion.

Dangerous, he thought. Definitely dangerous. He sat down without answering her.

“Okay,” she said. “Again, I apologize for breaking and entering.”

“Who are you,” he asked.

“Call me Ellen Whiting.”

“Really?” he said. “The Ellen Whiting? Francis X. McGavin’s lunch partner right up to the moment he did the big jump at the Bistro? That Ellen Whiting? You’re right — I don’t have a gun. On me. But I can get to one pretty quick.”

“Relax, Detective Sergeant. I’m no threat to you. If I were, you’d never have made it out of that bed back there. It’s not like you knew I was here.”

“Shit.” He sighed, acknowledging her point. “I gotta get me a dog.”

“Not a bad idea,” she said. “First, let me explain something. I’m from the wonderful world of federal counterterrorism, which we all know and love as CT.”

“And you’re here to help, right?” he said. “Like all government agencies.”

She smiled. “Of course,” she said. “We’re always here to help and local LE is always glad to see us. But, actually, I am here to help — you. This suspension bullshit? That’s gonna go away. That was initiated by a mistake on our part, amplified by some cowboying on the part of four support personnel. Contractors, actually.”

“Yeah,” he said. “What was up with all that? Those guys scared one of my tenants.”

“The skinny blond number? She’ll survive. Those guys were supposed to provoke you, get you to do something so they could apprehend you. Then we could have had our little talk in private. They failed to anticipate you’d involve the inmates of the Briar Patch.”

“You in one of those cars stopped up on Canal Street?” Av asked, wondering how she knew about the Briar Patch.

“It’s possible,” she said.

“And those runners were not FPS, were they.”

“Like I said, contractors.”

“Whose contractors?”

“Contractors,” she said. “Town’s full of ’em, as you certainly must know. Anyway, there’s no suspension paper, you haven’t called your rep, IA hasn’t been called, so I believe you can go back to work this morning as if nothing happened, because, officially, nothing did happen.”

“Just like that,” he said.

“Yep, just like that.”

“And you know this — how?”

“Because my boss called Happy’s boss, the chief, herself, and shared his thinking with her. Cooled the whole deal.”

He thought about that for a moment. Was she DHS? Bureau? Spooking around like this, she might even be someone in Agency clandestine ops. In this town, you never knew. “The McGavin deal,” he asked. “What’s the story on that?”

“Who’s McGavin?”

“Oh, c’mon.” He snorted. “All my problems started with the McGavin deal.”

She leaned forward. “Look,” she said. “McGavin’s death doesn’t involve you, or MPD, for that matter. That’s the whole point of my visit, actually. McGavin’s demise was something that slipped out from under the federal invisibility cloak momentarily, and, trust me, that will not happen again.”

“You know he didn’t just die of natural causes in that restaurant, right?”

She blinked. “Meaning?”

“OCME’s leaning toward poison.”

This time she definitely reacted. Then she changed the subject. “Do you know how many federal counterterrorism offices there are here in D.C.?”

“I’m guessing more than one?”

“Eighty-five in the public domain, by which I mean the ones funded and authorized by the best Congress money can buy. There are some others that are neither funded nor authorized by any agency that’ll admit to it. Ever since nine-eleven, counterterrorism has come a long way from just a few offices in the Bureau, the Agency, and the Pentagon. Now every federal agency in town has a CT office. The Social Security Administration, Health and Human Services, Labor, Agriculture, the Treasury, the fucking Post Office — you name it, they’re all into the CT game, and, all of a sudden, even the meter maids are carrying.”

“You guys must be tripping over each other,” he said.

“Hourly,” she said.

“Is the country that much safer?”

“Depends on what you think the threat is,” she said. “I work for people who think the real threat has morphed.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Instead of bearded hajjis wearing bedsheet bombs, think American Muslim converts scheming on Twitter. Think a whole generation of kids who’ve been diagnosed as ADD, ADHD, OCD, LD, and chugging down Ritalin and other mind-altering substances since they were five. Kids who’ve spent more time staring at an electronic device than they have sleeping and eating. Or, on the other side of the spectrum, think strong, extremely fit and aggressive young men who have spent three tours on the moon called Afghanistan, killing men, women, and children, with robots as accomplices. Now they’re back, can’t find a job, and they’re a little twitchy. Or, try pizza-faced, gated-community nerds who stay up all night hacking into nuclear power stations and turning off the reactor-cooling water pumps — for fun, giggles, and bragging rights.”

“I didn’t hear Al Qaeda in all that.”

“Oh, they’re still out there and they’re still blowing shit up, but they’ve dispersed their cells to make themselves smaller targets. Makes them even more dangerous, in some people’s opinion, kind of like a cancer that’s metastasizing. They are absolutely not defeated, as some of our more disingenuous politicians would have you believe. But: they are at least being engaged by the folks at JSOC and other unconventional agencies. This new breed, the homegrown breed? We’re still circling that problem, and what we’re seeing is not comforting. Not to mention the bleeding open sore that we call our border with Mexico.”

“Okay,” he said. “Gotta ask: who’s ‘we’?”

She didn’t answer.

“R-i-i-ght,” he said. “And you’re telling me all this, why, again?”

“Basically, so that you’ll forget all about the past week. Go back to being a Weird Harold down in the Briar Patch. Do what the computer geeks call a system-restore to, oh, I don’t know, ten days ago? Resume your workouts and your dedication to not getting involved with women because they are so very dangerous.”

“Your being in my house at two in the morning kinda proves my point, don’t you think?”

“Your life must be very boring, Detective Sergeant, although the deeper I get into the world of CT, I can see where boring could have its appeal.”

“Somehow I doubt that,” Av said. “Ellen Whiting. I think you’re either Bureau or Agency.”

She gave him a speculative smile. “I’ll be going now,” she said. “We won’t meet again.”

“Fine by me,” he said. “Leave the key, would you?”

She fished in her pocket and put a key down on the coffee table. Then she got up and headed for the front door.

“Hey?” he said. “What do I do with the autopsy report that OCME’s gonna send us?”

“Nothing, because they’ll be sending it to me,” she said, as she went out the door and closed it behind her.

He waited for a minute, then picked up the key and went to the door. He opened it and tried the key. It didn’t work. It didn’t even go into the lock.

On Monday he got up, put on his running gear, and went out front. He’d decided to walk today. Maybe jog a little, but mostly just get some fresh air into his system and squeeze the residual alcohol out.

The platinum blonde wasn’t in evidence. Can’t imagine why, he thought, although he was already missing her stretching routine. He warmed up as usual and then just started walking. Bored in fifteen minutes he took it up into route pace. Much better. The serious runners still went by him with sympathetic expressions. He must be leaving an alcohol vapor trail, he thought. He kept a wary eye out for cowboy contractors in sunglasses. At one point he passed Rue Waltham, who waved delicate fingers at him as she ran by in the company of two military guys, who seemed to be competing for her attention.

He got back an hour later. The most exciting thing he’d seen was a sideswipe collision between a marine runner and a cycling Nazi, which had resulted in the trash-talking cyclist being thrown into the canal, along with his bike. Av, who’d had his own share of near misses with tunnel-visioned cyclists coming up behind him like they owned the towpath, had thought that only fair. He showered and shaved, and then made coffee. He took it up to the roof to enjoy late sunrise and to look down with sympathy at all the commuters. At nine-thirty his cell went off. It was Precious.

“Where are you, Detective Sergeant?”

“Suspended, last I heard,” he said.

“Not anymore. Right now you’re late for work. Make my day: get your average ass back in here.”

His badge and creds were waiting for him when he got to MPD headquarters. The officers gave him a funny look when he scooped them up and then presented them so he could then go through the X-ray machine. Up in the office, Howie greeted him with undisguised glee and handed over Av’s Glock and the spare mags.

“Welcome back, partner,” he said. “All us snuffies want to know: how’d you manage this?”

Wong and Miz Brown were having coffee at the conference table, so Av grabbed his usual three-paper-cup rig and sat down with the rest of the crew. He told them about his midnight visitor.

“Golly gee,” Howie declared. “Your own personal fairy godmother, complete with a happy ending.”

“Nice and neat, isn’t it,” Av agreed. “Yesterday I was as good as fired. Today, everything’s cool; welcome back, Kotter. No hard feelings, we hope.”

“All this from some B & E artist claiming to be a fed?” Wong said. “She good-looking?”

They all laughed.

“Detective Sergeant Smith?” Precious called from the doorway. “It seems we have an appointment with Assistant Chief Taylor.”

“We do?” Av said.

“Now would be nice,” she said. “Do not bring that coffee.”

They went upstairs to the assistant chief’s office. Three civilian aides and one uniform occupied desks in the outer office. None of the aides would even look at them. Happy Taylor made them wait for fifteen minutes before admitting them into his presence, where he proceeded to ignore Precious and tell Av that he remained firmly on the assistant chief’s notorious list, and that no matter how he had managed to evade suspension, it was only a matter of time, et cetera, et cetera. Av took the opportunity to remain silent, especially after a gentle kick in the ankle from Precious.

As they were leaving, Taylor put two fingers to his eyes and then pointed them at Av, which he assumed was Hollywood for: I’m watching you. Once in the outer office, with Precious walking ahead, one of the aides actually did make eye contact with Av, who put two fingers to his eyes and then pointed one of them at his own temple and made a circular motion. The aide seemed to be having trouble keeping his composure as they left the office.

Back downstairs, Precious told him that Wong and Miz Brown had a homicide-related interview over at the Sixth and suggested that Av go along to watch. Av figured this had more to do with getting him out of the building for a few hours than furthering his professional education. He was curious, though.

Carl Mandeville was fuming at his desk in the EEOB. On Saturday morning he’d been tipped off by a committee staffer friend in the Senate that three members of the DMX had gone to a meeting with Senator Harris, the chairman of the select committee on intelligence and counterterrorism. Subject unknown, principals only, no horse-holders in the room. Mandeville could guess the subject, but the surprise had been that there were more traitors on the committee than he had suspected. McGavin, Logan, and Wheatley were the three weaklings he’d known about. He’d taken care of McGavin, so why had three members of the DMX shown up to meet with his nemesis? The third man was Howard West, deputy undersecretary for counterterrorism at the Energy Department. Why the hell was Energy even on the DMX? he wondered, then remembered: DOE was responsible for the safe operation of all the nuclear power plants. The target’s rep, Mandeville thought caustically. One would think that, of anybody on the committee, the guy responsible for protecting the prime terrorist targets in the country would be in support of DMX, and yet here he was, consorting with the enemy.

He’d always assumed he had three bad apples on the DMX, senior government officials who went through the motions and then scurried around, behind his back, trying to take down the program. Now he wondered how many more two-faced bastards there were, and, more importantly, was Senator Harris about to make a move? There were twelve statutory members of the DMX. They could not vote themselves out of existence, so a procedural mutiny wasn’t his problem. But if a third of them, or more, appeared before Harris’s committee in some prestaged hearing and declared a vote of no confidence in the entire concept, that would be fatal.

This latest betrayal posed another problem: he had already planned out something for Hilary Logan that would be even more unconventional than McGavin. His strategy had been to take out two of them and then let the others seize upon the notion that people who screwed with the DMX could face grave consequences. He’d take care of Wheatley, too, if necessary, although knowing the man, he was pretty sure it would not be necessary. But four of them? That would be too much. That was serial-killer territory.

He swiveled around in his chair and looked out the large window at his view down Independence Avenue. There was only one other alternative: take them all out, and then start over. He felt a rush of excitement. It could be done. Whenever the DMX met the entire floor was almost hermetically sealed for security purposes to keep everything and everybody out. Those same arrangements could be made to hold everybody in, too.

Blame it on the terrorists. Proclaim that the DMX had been so effective and such a deterrent to the bad guys that they’d attacked it. That would neutralize Harris and his allies, and then allow him to repopulate the DMX with people he could trust to carry this mortal fight to the enemy as only the program could.

He smiled. He amazed himself sometimes. The scale of it! Why the hell not?

Av and Howie took their seats in the darkened room behind a one-way glass pane. The interview room had a single, rectangular table and four chairs. One for the perp, one for his lawyer on one side, and two for the detectives on the other side. There was audiovisual equipment high up on a shelf overlooking the entire room. The interviewee in question was a gangbanger from an Anacostia neighborhood so riven with drug and gang violence that it had once been one of the unofficial no-go zones within the MPD. Anacostia had become a lot safer since those days, but the area, just east of the Anacostia River, could not shake its rep as an urban free-fire zone. The banger’s name was Lavon Jerome Tiles, otherwise known as “Gooey” Tiles. He’d been found, gun in hand, stoned out of his mind in an alley, where he was sitting on the still-warm corpse of another gangbanger. When asked why he was sitting on a dead body, Gooey stated that he’d been cold. No longer in the loving grip of his opiate of choice, Gooey now refused to say anything and was demanding his public defender.

Said public defender had come and gone. He’d told Gooey in no uncertain terms that he was to pay strict attention to that “remain silent” part of the Miranda warning, and since he wasn’t going to say anything, the lawyer could then leave to tend to his three other charges, who were actually going to be in court. Gooey responded that he was down with that, no problem. That’s when the Seventh District guys had asked for Miz Brown.

Wong Daddy and Miz Brown came into the interview room and shut the door behind them. Brown was wearing a sport coat, white shirt with tie, and dark slacks. Wong had a tent of some kind over his upper half, shiny black nylon warm-up suit pants, and size twenty-something sandals. Brown carried a leather folder filled with forms. Wong carried a yard-long piece of what looked like a two-by-six pine board. Gooey, maintaining his supercool pose, refused to look at either of them, and even yawned. He was wearing an orange jumpsuit and his wrists were handcuffed through a ring under the table. If he’d noticed the board, he gave no sign of it.

Brown introduced himself, pointed out that the conversation was being filmed and recorded, and proceeded to read Gooey his Miranda, after which he attempted to get the suspect to sign forms acknowledging his Miranda and the bit about the filming.

“Ain’t sayin’ shit, ain’t signin’ shit,” Gooey pronounced. “Thass it, yo.”

Brown then spoke to the camera, asking that the record show the suspect refused to sign the admin forms. Back in the viewing room, two of the Seventh District detectives had come in to watch. Av asked one of them what the “Gooey” was all about. He was told he really didn’t want to know the answer to that. Av didn’t press it.

“Will you please state your full name?” Brown asked.

The suspect stared at the wall and said nothing, his expression saying, what part of shit don’t you understand?

“Do you understand why you’re here for questioning?”

No response. Brown stood up and began to pace on his side of the table. He cleared his throat and looked down at the floor for a moment.

“Here we go,” Howie said in the darkroom. By now, two more guys had come in to watch.

Brown turned to the camera and began to lecture it. “The problem here,” Brown began, “seems to be that the suspect does not appear to understand the significance of his current refusal to engage the police authorities in a meaningful discussion about the modalities of what certainly appears to be a murder committed by the suspect who stated that the reason he was found with and actually on top of the victim was that he was suffering from thermal exposure to cold, which, in all truth, wasn’t that extreme but which, admittedly, might induce a person of limited intellect to establish close physical proximity in order to make himself more comfortable following what was obviously a serious altercation, which, from the evidence at hand, probably involved the subject in the role of shooter, seeing as the gun used in the shooting was within physical proximity of the subject, who…”

“Jesus,” Av whispered. “When’s he come up for air?”

Howie just grinned. “He just getting started. Keep an eye on Gooey and Wong.”

Gooey had been trying hard to pretend that nothing was going on, but the waterfall of sincerely concerned words coming from Miz Brown was making his eyes water.

“… for the purposes of establishing a logical reconstruction of the events in question, it is of course necessary to have input from all parties to the incident whenever that is possible, however, with one party to the incident deceased, and the other indulging in a display of puerile intransigence because he believes that if he talks to the police, he will be branded as a snitch, even though there is no way anyone can know that he spoke with the police, unless, of course, the police decide to put that word out onto the street, in which case…”

That last bit made Gooey turn his head, showing the observers that, despite his seeming nonchalant attitude, he had been listening to Brown’s barrage. Then Wong put the board down on the table with an audible clack and began to stare at it. As Brown droned on in sentences lasting five minutes each, Wong swiveled his massive head to look at Gooey, and then back to the board. Gooey was sitting up a little straighter in his chair, his professional slouch being undermined by whatever his own imagination was telling him about Wong and the possibilities presented by that board.

“… evidence which includes but is not limited to the gun itself, fingerprints on the gun, gunshot residue on the hands of the subject here present, a ballistics match between the bullets that killed the deceased individual and the bullets in said gun, the time of day, the attendant meteorological conditions, and…”

In the background, just below the threshold of Brown’s monologue, Av could now hear a keening sound. It wasn’t especially threatening, although he had heard a dog once make that sound just before a dogfight started. Wong was stroking the board now, inspecting it inch by inch and then looking over at Gooey for just a second before resuming his intense study of the board, its grain structure, its weight and heft, how well his hand could span it, how heavy it was, and then back at Gooey.

That worthy had now picked up on the keening sound and deduced that it was coming from Wong’s direction. Miz Brown never once let up, not even to take a deep breath, but kept the torrent of words coming, one after another, all somewhat relevant to the issue at hand, but not necessarily following in any sort of logical order. The guys behind Av and Howie in the darkroom were laughing quietly as they watched the show through the one-way and saw Gooey’s increasing concern over Wong and his board.

“I got a ten-spot sez Gooey sings within five minutes,” one of the detectives announced quietly.

“I’ll cover that,” his partner said. “I say four minutes.”

“… past behaviors are an important indication of the suspect’s predilection for violence and an even better indicator for future antisocial behaviors that fall into the category of extreme violence such as the case at hand, and…”

“Yo,” Gooey said, raising his hand.

Miz Brown fell silent. He put his left hand in his coat pocket. Av saw the little red lights go out on the recorders. Brown raised his eyebrows at Gooey.

“’Sup with de slope and dat board?” Gooey asked.

Wong stopped his ministrations and fixed Gooey with a baleful glare. “Slope?” he asked, in full Kurosawa samurai voice. “Slope?”

Gooey started waving his right hand as if trying to make Wong vanish. “Want my shap, man,” he demanded, speaking to Miz Brown. He looked sideways at Wong. “Dis fucker’s crazy, yo.”

“‘Shap’?” Av asked.

“As in Shapiro — O.J.’s lawyer,” Howie said. “Homeboy wants his lawyer in there.”

Wong sat up straight and started to inflate his torso. Gooey tried to be brave but his enlarging eyes betrayed him. Wong slowly picked up the pine board, made some more of the keening noises, and then, using just his hands, twisted the board in half, lengthwise, and slammed the two pieces triumphantly down on the table with a sound like a gunshot. Gooey jumped. Everyone in the darkroom also jumped.

Gooey was trying to back up in his chair, but it was bolted to the floor and his hands were still chained to that ring in the table.

Wong began speaking in the unknown dialect, growling out the words with lots of facial emphasis.

“Hey-hey-hey-hey-hey!” Gooey shouted. “Muh-fucah’s losing it here. Gimme me outa here.”

Wong stopped his growling, took in a long breath, let it out, and then brought one of the pieces of the board up to his mouth like an ear of corn, opened his mouth wide to give Gooey a good look at all those teeth, and then took a huge, splintering bite. He started chewing it, staring at Gooey the whole time. The detective behind Av in the darkroom did lose it, covering his mouth as he bent double with laughter.

Gooey, however, was not amused. Gooey was scared shitless.

Wong spat out an entire mouthful of pine pulp, growled some more, and looked over at Miz Brown.

“Yes, Detective?” Brown said, in a so-very-sincere voice.

“Dry,” Wong said, spitting out some more splinters and wiping his mouth. “Needs blood.”

“What?!” Gooey yelled. He started pulling on his cuffs, frantically trying to leave the scene. As best Av could tell, if he had to leave his hands behind, that was going to be okay with Gooey.

Wong took another bite out of the board and chewed dramatically, growling and spitting at the same time, splinters and spittle flying everywhere, while never taking his eyes off Gooey, who was visibly about to piss his pants.

“Blood?” Miz Brown said. “Really? Blood would help? How much blood?”

The detective behind Av got up and left the darkroom, unable to contain himself any longer. Av heard him tell someone outside in the hall how much he loved this job.

Wong Daddy sprayed an entire mouthful of pine pulp and splinters in Gooey’s direction, licked his lips, and then turned to Brown and pointed at Gooey. “Blood?” he asked. Then he clacked his huge teeth in Gooey’s direction. Av saw the little red lights come back on.

The teeth-clacking apparently did it. Gooey started babbling: “Awright, aw-right! Yeah, I whacked de mothafucka, he be dissin’ my lady, yo? Had it comin’, nine ways, aw-right? God-damn! Y’all get dat crazy muh-fucka outa here, I’ll talk to y’all. God-damn! He gonna bite? Yeah — lookat dat mothafucka — he gonna bite!”

Wong, moving just out of the camera’s view, began foaming at the mouth and making barking sounds. Miz Brown encouraged Wong to take a break, go get some water, forget about blood, it being salty and no help for a mouthful of splinters. Wong hesitated, got up, made some truly ghastly noises, faked one last move toward Gooey that made him squeak, and then left the room.

Miz Brown removed his hand from his coat pocket and asked Gooey if they could start over. Gooey nodded enthusiastically as Wong slunk out of the room, still spitting splinters and making growling noises. Av saw money changing hands out in the hallway.

Fucking beautiful.

Back at headquarters, Av asked Wong how he managed chewing a mouthful of pine splinters.

“It’s not pine,” Wong explained, “it’s balsa, duded up to look like pine. Presplit, coated in a little olive oil, so I didn’t really need any blood.”

Av grinned. “And the foaming at the mouth?”

“Oh, that?” Wong said. “I can do that shit on demand.” He proceeded to demonstrate that ability just as a messenger came into the room with a priority intradepartment envelope. The messenger, a probationer, took one look at foaming Wong, dropped the envelope, and backed hurriedly out of the room in absolute horror.

“Wong, for Chrissake,” Howie protested. He retrieved the envelope, looked at the addressee block, and gave it to Av. He opened it, looked at it, and then pronounced: “OCME speaks.”

Av remembered the fairy godmother’s assurances that the medical examiner would not, in fact, speak — to them. He scanned the results, looking for the conclusions block. “Hoo-aah,” he said quietly. Second District’s got themselves a possible homicide.

“Yeah?” Howie said.

“Victim died from aconitine poisoning, based on preliminary analysis.”

“What’s that shit?” Wong asked, wiping the foam off his mouth.

“Prolly what you been eatin’,” Howie observed. “Foamin’ like that.”

“According to this,” Av said, “it’s a toxin produced by a plant called the Aconitum, or monkshood, which makes aconitine by terpenoid biosynthesis from mevalonic acid that polymerizes subsequent to phosphorylation.”

“Everyone knows that,” Wong said. “So then what happens?”

Av read some more of the pharmacological report, hoping to encounter some recognizable English. “Here it is,” he said, finally. “It stops the big muscles of the body by attacking the neuron channels that make ’em expand and contract. We’re talking heart, lungs, skeletal muscle paralysis, here. Floods the brain with calcium and sodium, which is apparently not good, either. They’re sending some samples to the Bureau’s lab, because some of what happened didn’t quite make sense, such as, how fast it killed him.”

“But he didn’t eat anything,” Howie reminded everyone.

“Didn’t eat anything in the restaurant,” Av said. “But before he got there? Had himself a veggie fit, maybe? Munched on a monkshood plant by the sidewalk?”

“Now what?” Wong said. “What do we do with that report?”

“What report?” Precious asked from the doorway.

“Dum-te-dum-dum, dum,” Howie intoned, to the tune of the old Dragnet show. Precious frowned. She gave really good frown.

Av briefed her on what he had managed to glean from the report. Precious nodded and then announced that this was actually good news, inasmuch as they could now do what ILB was supposed to do and drop that tarbaby on the Second District’s homicide squad. “I want this thing gone. Outa here. Over and done with. Any questions?”

“Doesn’t fit with the mission,” Av said.

“Say what?”

“Our mission here at ILB, as I’m constantly being reminded, is to shop the tarbabies all the way out of MPD. How’s about give me a day to see if I can get the Bureau to eat this one?”

“How do you propose to manage that, Detective Sergeant?” Precious asked.

“Same way as my suspension managed to disappear?” Av said.

Precious gave him a look, shook her head, and then went back to her office.

“Ooooh,” Howie said. “You got the Look.”

“So?”

“Means you better be right, partner,” he said. “Precious not keen on being shut down like that.”