Robert Andrews - A Murder of Justice

Jose got a grip on it first. “Weapon kills Gentry, shows up two years later, kills Skeeter and wounds Pencil.”

“And Pencil loaded it,” Frank tagged on.

“Obviously,” Calkins said, “the weapon got out of Pencil’s possession sometime after he loaded it.”

“So when’d Pencil load it?” Jose asked.

“Yes,” Frank said, his voice on automatic while his mind tried to make sense of the ballistics. “If Pencil got the weapon after Gentry was killed and loaded it then, that’s one thing. But if he loaded it before Gentry was killed…”

“Just might be,” Jose finished, “that Pencil killed Gentry, then got shot two years later with his own weapon.”

Over Calkins’s shoulder, Frank contemplated the microscope, black and silver and mechanical, crouched smugly on the lab counter, silently mocking him with its riddle.

You two have a reverse Midas touch-everything you lay a finger on turns to shit.”

Before the three men, on Emerson’s desk, Kevin Walker Gentry’s file.

Gentry’s death had been one of those nightmare events every bureaucrat dreads: the murder of a politically connected victim in a politically symbolic setting. The staff director of the District of Columbia Appropriations Subcommittee, Gentry, had been gunned down virtually on the steps of the House of Representatives. For months, the heat had been intense, unrelenting: the Post, the Times, the Blade, and the City Paper had hounded Mayor Malcolm Burridge, the city council, and the department. Congress had held televised hearings. Clint Eastwood and Martin Sheen had come to town to testify.

“Milton saved Burridge and Emerson’s asses,” Jose was fond of saying. The Gentry flap had vanished overnight, when Milton had finally come up with Zelmer Austin.

Emerson scrubbed his face with both hands. He had the crestfallen expression of a bone-weary man who’d found out he had another hundred miles of rough going in front of him.

“So the Gentry case’s biting us in the ass again.” Emerson’s lips pressed together into a tight, bloodless line. Viciously he slapped the desktop. “Okay! Okay!” He threw himself back into his chair.

For a long time, nobody spoke. Frank and Jose stood in front of the desk. Emerson sat in his chair in an angry, almost catatonic state, staring at the Gentry case jacket.

Frank took in Emerson’s intense glare.

That case jacket’s going to break into flame.

Finally Emerson took a deep breath and brought his hand up to massage the back of his neck. “We had that case closed.”

“Yes.” Frank shook his head, and spoke softly, as though saying it any other way might cause Emerson to shatter. “But… what’s going to be in the papers-”

“What’s that?” Emerson asked, a tight frown signaling that he knew what it was.

“-is that we may not have gotten the person who killed Kevin Gentry.”

“It could still be that Austin killed Gentry.” The hollow, mechanical way Emerson said it didn’t sound like a man convinced. He pointed to Frank and Jose.

“Set up a task force.”

“What?” Frank asked.

“Set up a task force,” Emerson repeated, his voice suddenly brisk, energy returning with the prospect of bureaucratic ass-covering.

When in worry or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.

“Not us,” Frank said.

“What?”

“He said, ‘Not us,’ ” Jose repeated. “You get a crowd running all over the place, crossing each other’s tracks. Contradicting each other in public. A real cluster-fuck.”

“But the media…”

“Media’s going to be on this any way you cut it,” Frank said. “You form a task force and you just give the media a bigger target to home in on.”

Clearly unhappy, Emerson shook his head and sat seeing nothing ahead but trouble.

Frank interrupted. “We got to look into the Gentry case.”

“Yes.”

“We could use some help… some manageable help.”

“Bodies?”

“One’ll do.”

“Who? You want Milton?”

Frank and Jose shook their heads in unison.

“Rather have a fresh look,” Jose said.

“Then who?”

“Janowitz isn’t real busy.”

A man thinking about the heat this’s going to bring,” Jose said outside Emerson’s office.

“And thinking,” Frank came back, “about how to pass the heat on down to us.”

Jose shrugged. “What’s new? How about call Bouchard? Give him a heads-up.”

Ugly, ugly, ugly.” Frank looked at the building.

FBI headquarters hulked over Pennsylvania Avenue, taking up the block between Ninth and Tenth Streets. Like dresser drawers left carelessly open, the top floors jutted out over the nine stories below. In a snit over the naming of the building after J. Edgar Hoover, Congress had refused to pay for the granite facing called for in the original design. And so, precise rows of anchor points punctuated the dirty yellow poured-concrete walls, looking like bullet holes from the machine gun of a drive-by shooter.

“You should have gone into architecture,” Jose said.

“Rather be in demolition.”

Robin Bouchard stood just inside the Tenth Street entrance, near the visitor sign-in desk. He was a stocky, muscular man, and his Mediterranean heritage was marked by an olive complexion and coal-black hair nicely silvering at the temples.

“Welcome to the Ministry of Truth, Justice, and the American Way.” Bouchard rolled it out in a baritone mellowed with traces of Cajun. He handed Frank and Jose visitor badges and escorted them past the sign-in desk toward an escalator bank.

“I feel like a priest or a proctologist. Only time you guys come through the door, you’re bringing trouble.”

Jose grunted. “Didn’t want to come empty-handed.”

The short escalator ride to the third floor gave them a look into the fishbowl that was the lab for DNA and materials. Bouchard led them down a long corridor decorated with movie posters from 1950s G-men films, charts and maps, and large iconic photographs of the FBI director, Louis Freeh, and the attorney general, John Ashcroft.

“You guys don’t mind… when you said it was the Gentry case, I passed it upstairs.” Bouchard said. “Brian Atkins wants to see you.”

“The Brian Atkins?” Jose asked. “We’re honored.”

“He want to offer us a job?” Frank asked. “We’ll take the Honolulu Field Office.”

“He didn’t tell me. I sent him an e-mail, said you’d be coming over for a fill-in on Hodges and Gentry. His secretary called down with a ‘Be there.’ I don’t ask questions.” Bouchard motioned to the elevators.

Brian Atkins’s corner office was only four floors above the DNA lab, but another world away. Large windows framed views of the Capitol, the old post office, and, in the distance, the Potomac and the control tower at Reagan National. The deep-pile blue carpeting, the mahogany desk and bookcases, the antique conference table with its chairs upholstered in silk brocade-all put the office near the top of the heap. A place where voices were always subdued and neckties carefully dimpled and pulled snug against starched white collars.

Atkins, a man in his late fifties, had the casual grace and slender build of a sailor. A bachelor, he frequently showed up in the style-section coverage of Washington’s black-tie galas. Silver hair, square jaw, and windburnt tan face.

He sat at the head of the conference table, Frank and Bouchard to his left, Jose to his right.

“Robin tells me Gentry’s open again.”

It came with a hint of Down East to it, a John Kennedy brogue-something to do with sea, sails, and salt air.

An assistant in a tailored dark blue suit brought in coffee. Atkins poured and passed around cups that Frank thought were Limoges or a pretty good imitation.