A Murder of Justice

TWENTY-SEVEN

Frank watched as Randolph Emerson, nose wrinkled in distaste, looked around the upstairs room. Along one wall, a neatly kept workbench with speakers, wiring, and circuit boards. In contrast to the orderly workbench, an adjacent wall cabinet had been ripped apart: expensive sound and video components hung by their wire guts and lay strewn across the floor.

Past Emerson, through the open doorway, in the hall, the woman’s body lay sprawled on the landing.

“Jesus… two in one night.”

“Tony Upton says it was about the same time somebody did Pencil, two, maybe three days after he’d gotten back on the street,” Frank said.

“All this… that… that mess downstairs…” Emerson began, “who…”

“Skeeter left a big business,” Frank said. “Maybe somebody didn’t want Pencil to inherit it.”

“Or maybe somebody thought that Pencil had something they wanted,” Jose added.

“Or both,” Frank said.

“Okay,” Emerson said impatiently. “So we got two rotting bodies and a tossed house. You got me out of bed and down here for that?”

“We got you out of bed,” Frank said calmly, “so you could call Renfro Calkins and put him back to work.”

“What?” Emerson looked as if someone had waved a snake in his face. “What?” he repeated.

“We need him,” Jose said. “We need him now… here.”

Emerson’s anger was edging out his incredulity.

“Calkins was put on suspension because…”

“Because, Randolph,” Frank finished quietly, “you were covering your ass.”

Emerson’s eyes narrowed. He worked his mouth but then stopped, as though something inside him had sounded a warning.

“We had a heart-to-heart with Milton,” Jose explained.

Frank bore in. “You pressured him into making that admin closure on Gentry.”

“You can’t prove that.”

Emerson said it coolly, but Frank detected a deep uncertainty beneath.

“If IAD squeezes Milton,” Frank said, “he’ll recite chapter and verse.” He saw in Emerson’s eyes that he knew it was so.

“Look, Randolph,” Frank continued reasonably, “these two on top of Skeeter and Gentry are gonna cause all kinds of shit to roll downhill. You know how good Renfro is. We can’t afford to keep him out of this.”

Emerson shut his eyes as though to blank out what was around him. He opened them and everything was still there.

“And if you don’t get him back,” he said bitterly, “you two will make sure the shit ends up on me.”

Frank and Jose said nothing; both gave Emerson a poker player’s “Don’t call my hand” look.

Emerson surrendered. His shoulders sagged and his mouth drew up in a grimace.

“You two are bastards, you know,” he gritted, “real bastards.”

Jose teased him with a smile. “Aw, but we’re your bastards, Randolph.”

Frank had his cell phone out. He punched in some numbers and waited until someone answered.

“R.C.?” he said. “Wake up. Captain Emerson wants to talk with you.”

And he handed the phone to Emerson.

Two hours later, Renfro Calkins told Frank and Jose, “I’m releasing the body.”

Nobody had said anything when Calkins walked in. But Frank had sensed a ripple of discipline that spread among the techs, notes on a piano striking now with more authority, with greater certainty.

Jose motioned up the stairs with his chin. Toward where the woman’s body lay and where the room had been ripped apart.

“How long’s it gonna take to get through this?”

Calkins gave Jose a disapproving look. “Long’s it takes, Hoser. Long’s it takes.”

“Nice havin’ you back, R.C.,” Jose said.

Calkins shot Jose another shaft of disapproval, then turned and made for the stairs. At the same time, the front door swung open. Blessingame stuck his head through.

“Frank, Hoser, you got a visitor.”

At the police line set up across the front walk, Brian Atkins chatted easily with one of the uniformed patrol officers. Atkins wore a raincoat against a mist that was off and on turning into real rain. He saw Frank and Jose, and half waved, half saluted.

“Crappy morning,” he said, glancing skyward. “Robin called. Said you’d found Pencil and this…” he gestured toward the house.

Frank waved him in.

Atkins took in the destroyed living room.

“Guy did a job.”

Jose pointed to the stairs. “If you want to see, M.E.’s gonna take the body away.”

The three men climbed the stairs in single file, watching their footing, keeping to one side.

At the top of the stairs, the stench hovered over the corpse like an invisible predator guarding its kill. Frank had been in the house for hours now, but the odor still caused a trembling in the back of his throat.

“Shot twice,” Jose said. “Once through the shoulder, in the room back there. She makes it out here. Shooter follows. Hits her in the back of the head before she gets to the stairs.”

“Any idea about the weapon?” Atkins asked.

Frank shook his head. “Have to wait for the M.E. report.”

“No cartridge cases?”

“Nothing yet.”

Frank led the way into the room.

“Combination office and electronics hobby shop,” Atkins observed, looking around, stepping carefully to avoid a patch of dried blood.

Frank nodded.

“Think whoever it was found what he was looking for?”

“No way of telling, but I’ve got a hunch he didn’t.”

“Why?”

“The mess downstairs,” Frank said. “If he was looking for something, he started here.”

Following Frank’s logic, Atkins nodded. “So if he’d found it up here-”

“He wouldn’t have tossed downstairs,” Jose finished.

Calkins appeared in the doorway with one of his crew. When he saw Atkins, Frank, and Jose, he frowned.

“R.C.,” Jose said, “this’s Brian Atkins from the Bureau.”

Calkins nodded curtly and scanned the room as if to assure himself it hadn’t been disturbed.

“Good to know you’re back,” Atkins said.

“Thank you,” Calkins replied perfunctorily. “You goin’ to be up here long?” he asked Frank and Jose, obviously anxious to have them gone.

Frank suppressed a smile. “Just leaving.”

At the foot of the stairs, Atkins paused. Up above, the indistinct sound of Calkins and his tech talking.

“Never knew a good forensics man who didn’t think he owned the crime scene,” Atkins said, looking back in the direction of the body.

“You’ll never know a better one than R.C.,” Jose said.

The front door was open, and Frank gratefully pulled in the fresh air. A spitting rain was falling outside. At the curb, a government black Mercury Grand Marquis waited, its windshield wipers flapping a metronome beat. Atkins looked past Frank and Jose, back into the house, then focused on the two men.

“I hear somebody put a Colombian necktie on Pencil.”

“Yeah,” Frank said, and he took another breath, as if it would flush away the image of what had been done to Pencil before he’d been stuffed in the trunk of his car.

“Filthy bastards,” Atkins muttered. “Fits,” he said.

“Fits?” Frank asked. “Fits what?”

“We finally broke the code at State.”

Frank had trouble connecting. He glanced at Jose, who was also running slow this morning.

“State?”

Atkins looked at Frank, then at Jose. “Kevin Gentry,” he said. Seeing he’d gotten the detectives’ attention, he continued. “That State Department job of his was a cover.”

“Cover?” Frank said, irritated at himself for not catching on and at Atkins for making it more difficult than it had to be.

Atkins nodded. “Kevin Gentry was CIA. State Department had him listed as a political officer, but actually he was the deputy chief of station in Bogota.”

A Colombian connection?” Kate asked.

Frank felt his bullshit detector twitch and didn’t know why, but registered it anyway.

“Gentry’s time in the agency… the way somebody did Pencil. Not much there.”

After dinner at Tahoga, they’d walked down Thirtieth Street to the river and found a bench along the walk in front of Harbor Place. A 737, landing lights on, wheels and flaps down, passed overhead, then banked to starboard to line up its approach to Reagan National. At the same time, a cabin cruiser, steering between the red and green buoy lights, made its way up the Potomac.

“There’s the time gap,” Kate said uncertainly, as though the thought had suddenly appeared.

Frank shifted on the bench, bringing his shoulder and thigh into contact with her. Dragging itself through the long day’s fatigue from door-to-door canvassing, the thought unreeled slowly, then more rapidly. Yes, the time gap. If there was a connection, why did the person who did Gentry wait two years to do Skeeter and Pencil?

Kate continued circling the riddle. “Maybe the Agency,” she mused to herself as much as to him, “maybe Gentry was still Agency and they had him working the Hill undercover.”

The cabin cruiser had now cleared Roosevelt Bridge, and the 737 had disappeared behind the finger of trees, marking its last turn into Reagan.

Frank added another “What if?” to the conjecture pile. “Or did he use his old Agency connections to go into business with Skeeter and Pencil?”

“You mean Gentry was their ‘insurance’?”

“Skeeter met with somebody in June ’ninety-two. Gentry was working on the Hill at that time for the New York senator. He quit to move to Rhinelander’s subcommittee in January ’ninety-eight.”

“Which could have put him in a better position to be Skeeter’s insurance,” Kate finished.

Frank’s mind replayed the garage rooftop, the Trans Am and the Ethiopian attendant, then Pencil’s house and the dead woman at the top of the stairs. And that brought him to something he’d said to Emerson.

“What?” Kate’s voice seemed to come from a long way off.

“What?” Frank echoed.

“What you just said,” Kate persisted, “quote, Skeeter left a big business, unquote.”

“Oh.” It took him a moment to register. He shrugged, too tired to follow further. “Just something that came back to me from this morning.” He felt himself drop into mental overload. He reached for Kate’s hand.

They sat without talking. Music, soft and indistinct, carried across the water from the cabin cruiser. Finally Kate squeezed his hand. “You’re down.”

“Just tired.”

“It’s more than that.”

He started to shake his head but then realized she was right. He probed, trying to sense the outlines of something lying hidden in the underbrush.

“It’s a feeling. A feeling more than a thought.”

“And the feeling’s like…?”

He probed some more. “It’s like the dropping feeling in your gut,” he added slowly, “like when you sense you’re on a losing team.”

“Losing? Why?”

“Emerson’s face this morning… He sees all this as something he just wants to go away. He tried to sweep it under the carpet once. He’d try again, if he got the chance.”

Kate thought about that, then shook her head. “But he can’t,” she said, “it’s gotten too big.”

Frank drew in the night air and exhaled in a sigh. “Yes, he can. For precisely that reason… that it’s gotten too big. He can pass it off to the Bureau.”

“What makes you think that’s probable?”

“Knowing Emerson for twenty-five years.”

“In a perfect world,” Kate challenged, “why’d it make any difference? If the Bureau could solve it, or the department?”

“In a perfect world it wouldn’t make any difference. In the real world it does. It makes a real difference, who closes the case.”

“Why?”

“If the Bureau takes this over, it sends a message to everybody on the street. It tells them DCMPD can’t do its job. We’re already catching a load of crap because of the cold cases. Now we throw our hands up because this’s just too hard?”

He felt anger rising in his throat. “It’s not up to the FBI or the CIA to keep the peace on the streets. That’s our job.”

“And you don’t want your job taken away?”

“I don’t want somebody saying I can’t do it. Especially somebody like Emerson.”

“And there’s Atkins,” Kate said simply.

He had the eerie feeling she’d read his mind.

“This morning”-Frank drifted, putting his thoughts together for the first time-“we were standing in the door at Pencil’s. There Atkins was, wearing a raincoat that must have cost what I pay for a suit. Hell, two suits. He’s got a driver waiting in a big black car to take him back to an office that’s like the Taj Mahal. Beside him, Hoser and I come off looking like poor cousins… a pair of ragpickers.”

Kate squeezed his hand again. “Envy… a deadly sin,” she teased.

“No. I don’t want anything he’s got. He earned it… putting down Juan Brooks. He stuck his neck out on that one.”

“You and Jose have done a lot of that. But nobody’s given you two a Taj Mahal office.”

“I may not be happy all the time, but I’m content… where I am, what I’m doing. I think Hoser is too. Anyway, neither one of us was cut out to work in a Taj Mahal. What does bug me, though, is a system that rewards the dodgers… the Emersons.”

“I think he’s good for you and Jose,” Kate said, a provocative lilt in her voice.

“Night air’s corroding your brain.”

“No… think about it. You and Jose define your own rewards. One of those is getting the job done despite the Emersons. It’s almost perverse… Sometimes, I think, the worse he is, the better you two get. So maybe the system works?” Kate said it as though she were saying “Checkmate.”

“It works because Hoser and I are dinosaurs,” Frank came back. “We remember how it used to be. New talent comes in, they’re isolated. They didn’t know the old-timers… the Terry Quinns… the guys who were leaders, not managers. The dodger culture rewards risk aversion. The good ones get out-”

Kate finished the thought. “Like Janowitz?”

“Or sell out, like Milton.” Frank watched as the cabin cruiser dropped anchor off Teddy Roosevelt Island and another 737 swung in from the north just over Key Bridge.

Kate reached across and put her hand on his forearm.

“You and Monty have room for a visitor tonight?”