Sweepers

“You’re sure you locked it?”

“I’m sure. I always lock it.”

“Just like I always lock my front door. So whoever did this was able to open the door without damaging it. Just like the front door of my house.”

“I still think we should call the cops,” she said again.

“Get word to Mcnair, or at least a patrol car.”

He reached in and picked up the syringe, touching only the edges of the flange nearest the needle. He smelled the needle, then withdrew the plunger a bit, again touching only the edges of the upper flange. She could see a tiny speck of red on the bottom of the barrel, below the zero line. He handed it to her gingerly, pointing out the speck.

“Do you suppose that’s blood?” she asked.

Suddenly, there was a blaze of bright headlights as a car came diagonally down the parking lot and headed directly for them. Only when it had pulled up fight next to her car did she realize that it was a police car. She suddenly felt very vulnerable, standing there in the parking lot, in uniform, with a, syringe in her hand. Two police officers got out and walked casually around the nose of the cruiser to the driver’s side of her car.

“Evening, sir. Ma’am. Got a problem here?” the taller one asked, eyeing the syringe. The other cop, a woman, was peering into Karen’s car with her flashlight.

“Yes, we do,” Sherman said. “I’m Admiral Sherman.

This is Commander Lawrence. We just had dinner in that Greek restaurant there. When we came out, we found this lying in the front seat.” Karen handed the syringe, point up, to the policeman, who took it and held it the same way Sherman had been holding it, by the edge of the top flange.

“We got a call that some Navy guy was shooting up drugs in the parking lot,” the cop said, looking first at the syringe and then at Sherman.

The policewoman had moved to the other side of the - car and was pointing her flashlight into the backseat area. Karen tried to remember what she might have back there.

“Well, I guess I can understand that,” Sherman said.

“We were just about to call you guys. This is Commander Lawrence’s car.

It was locked when we went into dinner, and there’s no sign of forced entry.”

“Yeah,” the cop said. “Can I see some ID there, Adimral?

Commander?”

Sherman fished his wallet out and flashed his Navy ID card. Karen fumbled in her purse for her wallet. She was angry to see that her hands were trembling. The policewoman came back around the rear of Sherman’s car and shook her head at the other cop.

“Give me an evidence bag, will you, Carrie?” . he said.

“One with one of those test-tube dealies in it. So, you found this thing where, exactly, Admiral?”

“Right on the driver’s seat. We saw it after Commander Lawrence activated the remote lock system and the interior light came on. It was out in plain view, as if whoever put it there wanted to make sure we saw it.”

“And you’re sure you locked the’doors, Commander?” ‘me cop sounded as if he was starting to get bored with it all. The policewoman was back with an evidence bag The cop handed the syringe to his partner, who dropped it gingerly into a tube in the evidence bag and took it back to the cruiser’ The cop took out his notebook.

“Yes, positive,” Karen said. Sherman asked him if he knew Detective Mcnair in the Homicide Section.

The cop stopped writing in his notebook and gave Sherman a suspicious look. A car went by, the driver slowing to gawk. Karen suddenly felt very conspicuous in her uniform. She could only imagine how the admiral felt.

“Mcnair? Sure. What’s he got to do with this, sir?”

“We just finished a meeting with him. This syringe may relate to a case he’s working, one that involves me. Can you make sure he knows about this?” -The cop put his finger in his notebook to hold his place and gave Sherman a perplexed look. “This something we should do right now, Admiral? Call the homicide people?”

Sherman shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. Well, actually, I don’t know. I’m involved in a stalking situation, which may be related to a possible homicide. That’s where Mcnair comes in. I know, this isn’t making much sense.”

The other cop came back with a clipboard full of forms and handed them to the first cop. “You want a Breathalyzer kit?” she asked. “If not, I’ll go ahead and clear us.”

The first cop shook his head, and she went back to the car and got on the radio. The first cop took down their identification data. When he was finished, he put away-his notebook.

“Well, okay, Admiral. We’ll turn this thing in as a suspicious-incident report, and I’ll make sure a copy gets to Mcnair and company. I’ll forward this item to the police lab for analysis. You understand, Commander, it’s your car: If there’re drugs in this thing, you both may have some explaining to do.”

“I understand,” Karen said.

“Thank you, Officer,” Sherman said. “Please don’t forget about Mcnair.”

The cop nodded as he climbed back into the cruiser.

Karen suddenly needed to sit down and got into the Mercedes. Sherman walked around to the passenger side and got in. For a moment, they just sat there. His face was in shadow when he spoke.

“We were being watched,” he said. “That cop car was here too quickly.

Whoever put that thing in the car waited for us to come out, then called the cops.”

She swallowed but did not reply. She started the car, turned it toward the main entrance, and then turned right onto Old Dominion. “That’s a scary thought,” she said.

“But the good news is that nine-one-one calls can be traced.

Even if it turns out to be a pay phone, the call and the syringe are the first tangible evidence that something’s going on. This should also help to convince Mcnair that Galantz is real.”

“Maybe,” he said after a moment. “But I can see his problem: He has only my word for it that I got that letter, And he could make the case that I could have put that syringe in your car. That would explain how it got there without forcible entry.”

“But you were with me the whole time,” she protested.

“Think about it” was all he said as she turned in to his town house development.

Karen did think about it as she drove home. Train von Rensel had inferred something similar earlier. But why would the admiral commit murder? She had seen his house in Mclean. Money as a motive to kill his exgirlfriend seemed implausible to her. And Mrs. Klein had been first and foremost Elizabeth’s friend, and she wouldn’t be nice to Sherman if he had been some kind of bastard toward Elizabeth Walsh.

The admiral’s story about his marriage was depressing.

She wondered about how many of the chosen few who made it to the top in any American profession could tell similar stories about what happened to their families along the way.

The difference with this guy was that at least he seemed to have the capacity to be embarrassed about how it had all turned out, and he could admit that he bore a large share of responsibility for the wreck of their marriage.

She turned right on Springvale Road, and headed out toward the river, adjusting her mirror against the lights of a car behind her. She had met several senior naval officers with similar marriage histories who callously chalked it off to their having picked the wrong wife. The real bastards were the ones who happily let their wives slog through the sea-duty separations and the diapers and the teenager crises all by themselves while the Great Men climbed the ladder at sea, only to dump their wives in favor of new trophy wives to match the trophy stars.

Sherman didn’t seem to be one of those. And it must have been especially hard to know that his only son was out there somewhere, incubating a major psychic cyst.

She turned left on Beach Mill Road at the Frenc h restaurant and started down the winding hill. The car behind her was still there, not tailgating exactly, but staying right with her, its dazzling headlights making it look as if it was right on her bumper. She remembered the admiral’s comment about being careful and tried not to take any particular notice of the car following her. Beach Mill Road was only about a lane and half wide along here, and it wasn’t as if he could pass. Another two minutes down the road, she put her turn signal on and slowed. The car came right up behind her then, its lights filling all the rriiffors.

All right, jerk, hold your horses; I’ve got to make this driveway and then you can go play Richard Petty. Probably one of the local Masters of the Universe with gonads on fire to get his Porsche out of second gear.

She made the turn, going slower than usual just to spite him, and the car roared past. She tried to see who or what it was, but it was long gone in a howl of expensive valves.

She drove down the winding driveway to the house, warmed by the sense of security she felt every time she came down this tree-lined drive. The house Was a two-story Southern Living design, suitably scaled up to fit into the mansion decor of Great Falls. It had graceful white balustrade porches enveloping three sides on the ground level.

There were ten acres altogether, which included a separate two-car garage, a six-stall horse barn, and a small riding ring set within the moss-covered foundations of an enormous old hay barn, all framed by the graying remains of an ancient apple orchard. The rest of the property was divided into three pastures. The property bordered on a narrow strip of state park that formed the Virginia banks of the Potomac River. On still spring nights, she could hear the river from the porch.

She parked in the garage and then diverted down a branch of the driveway that led to the small horse barn to see her three charges. Actually, only one was hers, a steady Morgan mare named Duchess. The other two residents were boarders, one belonging to a neighbor who rarely came to see the creature, and the other to a high school student who lived farther up Beach Mill in what the locals called a “mansion graveyard,” a cluster of huge homes sited much too close together on a hill overlooking Beach Mill Road. The student, a pretty sixteen-year-old named Sally Henson, took care of all three horses in return for’ a break on her board bill.

Karen peered into the near paddocks, but the horses were apparently hanging out in one of the darkened fields, glad to be out of the barn now that winter was over. She took a quick look around the barn, flipping on the aisle lights briefly, but everything seemed to be in order. Sally was conscientious. The sounds of insects and tree frogs were amplified in the confines of the aisleway. She turned out the lights, then returned to the house via the garden pathway, a bricked walk that led through a sixty-foot-long, eight-foot high boxwood hedge passage. She was reassured by the scent of new boxwood leaves and the loamy perfume of freshly mowed grass permeating the night air. There was a bright moon back lighting the low cloud cover and diffusing the shadows among the apple trees and the spreading oaks in the near yard.

The house seemed artificially still in the moonlight as she walked up the steps of the front porch.

A quick peek through the front windows failed to reveal any lurking bad guys. She heard snuffling behind the front door, and she quickly unlocked it to let Frank’s elderly Labrador, Harry, out for a late-night tree-watering mission. She reassured the alarm system, then stood out on the porch while the dog ran around, making his usual federal case out of which tree was going to be honored this evening.

Watching the old dog snuffle around the dark yard, she felt a familiar weight of depression at the prospect of living alone again. It didn’t help that, in all -likelihood, Frank had dishonored the last years of their marriage. An image of Admiral Sherman came to mind, sitting in his living room, rubbing the sides of his face with both hands as he struggled with the ghosts of his scary past. Sherman was a handsome, physically fit, intelligent, and successful man about her own age. But she felt no particular attraction toward him, other than a growin reservoir of sympathy. In her younger years, before Frank even, that kind of man would have had her attending to her makeup, But now all he had were his stars, and a nice, big, empty town house in Mclean with which to share them. She called the dog, but, like an old man with selective hearing, Harry ignored her, intent on pursuing some scent into the bushes.

Over the past few years in the Pentagon, she had watched in amazement as each new crop of flag officers seemed to redouble their efforts to impress, coming in at seven and going home at seven, as if those shiny new stars meant they suddenly had to shoulder the cares of the entire Navy. By his own recounting, Sherman had spurned what had been his best shot at a second chance to have a life pro partner, at least in part because of the demands of his’career.

And now some vengeful ghost from a long-lost war had apparently come back to make his life’truly meaningful.