Out of the Dark

67 A Damning Light

The funeral was an all-out affair. The flag-draped coffin making its solemn descent into the earth. State troopers firing a three-gun salute. Speeches about a life dedicated to public service. And then the bagpipes, which never failed to make Naomi mist up.

Robbie and Jason managed to show up for once, to say good-bye to their father.

The former president was due to go into the ground next week, but given the recent torrent of revelations, White House officials were still figuring out how to deal with the pomp and ceremony of the state funeral.

Two days ago the Newseum had been breached, a full display showing up in the Today’s Front Pages installation on the sixth floor. It contained logistics reports from a three-decades-old mission that cast a damning light across Jonathan Bennett and his entire scandal-riddled legacy. The display was effective if unartful, an impeccably neat tiling of pinned documents behind glass.

Naomi had a guess who’d curated the illicit display.

When she’d woken up this morning, the light streaming beneath her shade had caught something on the lip of the nightstand drawer where she stored her service weapon. A gummy dime-size disk, slightly oblong, that on further inspection proved to be an adhesive made of silicon composite. When she’d held it up to the light, she’d seen a print pressed into its surface.

And a second print on the other side.

Which meant that one was fake — but one had to be real. After all, he’d been wearing it.

Orphan X, she was sure, had no prints on record. If she brought the adhesive in to the Forensic Services Division after the funeral, she could add one key piece of evidence to the exceedingly thin file that had been provided to her what felt like a lifetime ago.

As Robbie and Jason tipped shovelfuls of dirt into the open grave, she lifted the fingerprint adhesive from her pocket and stared at it there, perched on her thumb.

Director Gonzalez approached, and she lowered her hand to her side. “Ready to get back at it tomorrow?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “I am.”

He hugged her before taking the shovel from Robbie and stepping around the waiting backhoe to the grave.

Naomi stood with her brothers watching another throw of dirt fall and then another, covering their father, the legend of the Service.

Robbie pursed his lips. “He was tough.”

Yeah, Naomi thought. And so am I.

As her brothers drifted away with the other mourners, she stayed a moment, just her and the open wound of the rectangle marring the green grass. Maybe there would be peace now. For her father, for herself, for Orphan X, even for President Bennett.

Stepping forward, she flicked the fingerprint adhesive into the grave, and then the backhoe did its work, layering over the coffin, her father, the past.