Robert Andrews - A Murder of Justice

“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.