Robert Andrews - A Murder of Justice

He took it into the kitchen, retrieved the carton of milk, and sat at the table. He opened the album and it was Vietnam again.

A series of photographs: the building of the firebase near Ben Cat. GIs filling sandbags, digging bunkers, stringing razor-bladed coils of concertina wire.

In one photograph, he and Masek stood grinning into the camera, interrupted from their task of setting out Claymore mines. Masek held a curved book-size mine in his hand. They were both bare-chested and rail-thin, and their fatigue trousers were stained dark with sweat. A gold tooth glinted in Masek’s mouth, and Frank wore a low-slung pistol belt. They looked rakish and impossibly young.

The pictures tugged at him-he was looking into a time when the firebase at Ben Cat still existed, before Masek became a name on the black marble wall, and when all that had happened to Frank had yet to happen to the Frank in the pictures. It was a time before the images became distorted by shattered truth and failed ambition.

Looking at himself, Frank wanted to whisper a warning to the young man he once was.

The headache was a roaring, clawing dragon behind his eyes. Eyes shut, Frank crab-walked his hand across the nightstand until he found the plastic container. Cursing the nanny state, he managed to work open the childproof cap and roll out two capsules. He got them down dry, then lay back in half-sleep and listened to Monty snore on the other pillow. He heard the grandfather clock downstairs strike two. Only seconds later, he heard it strike seven.

The dragon had left, but the stitches over his right eye felt like dozens of needles thrust under his skin. When he sat up, a painful protest swept over him from the bruises covering his chest and arms.

Every joint creaking, he made it into the shower, then, after gingerly drying himself, in front of the mirror to shave. The stitches pulled his right eye open, while a world-class shiner surrounded his left eye and blood from a ruptured vein had turned the white of the eye a deep red.

“No Hollywood contract today,” he muttered to himself.

Thirty minutes later, he hailed a cab at the corner of Thirtieth and M, and fifteen minutes after that, John Richardson, the department’s dispatcher, was looking up at him.

“Jesus, Frank, you look worse than your car.”

“Car didn’t wake up with a head-popper this morning. You got something drivable?”

“You don’t want to wait until we fix yours?”

“You and I aren’t gonna live long enough, John.”

Richardson checked his computer, running a finger down the screen. “We got a couple of confiscated vehicles. How about a Hummer? Leather, Bose sound, only eight thousand miles, no bullet holes?”

“Maybe when I move to Montana.”

“You moving to Montana?”

“No. You got a spare Crown Vic?”

Richardson swiveled around, ran his fingers across a pegboard on the wall, plucked a set of keys, then turned back to Frank.

“Hummer matches your face,” he said, holding on to the keys. “You look like the Terminator on one of his worst days.”

Frank held out his hand. “I don’t want to be in anything that looks like my face.”

Richardson lofted the keys, and in an easy motion, Frank snagged them out of midair.

“Thanks, John.” Frank put on his dark glasses, and smiled. “I’ll be back.”

Hummer might have been fun, Frank thought as he made his way across the Fourteenth Street bridge. He switched on the radio and there was Joe Madison. As he expected, Madison was waist deep in yesterday’s bombing, grilling a hapless guest from Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Sorry, Joe.

The next preset put him in the middle of Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Can’t Take Love for Granted.” Carpenter’s Marlboro-and-Jack-Daniel’s throatiness came out warm and sexy, and he felt his tension ease as Kate’s smile came to mind.

At Reagan National, Frank hurried past newsstands whose papers carried photos of his bomb-blasted car side by side with file shots of Leon Janowitz. He got to the US Airways gate just as the doors were opening.

Kate was among the first passengers off the shuttle. Catching sight of Frank, she stopped momentarily, obviously shaken, then rushed to him. She dropped her carry-on bag and hugged him, then, feeling him wince, stood back, eyes moist, and cupped his chin in her hand.

“You said a couple of scratches.”

“Looks worse than it is. I was lucky. Leon wasn’t.”

She held him at arm’s length, eyes going over his face.

“Frank,” she whispered, “it was…” As though suddenly realizing how near to the brink they had stood, and how deep the abyss, she shuddered. A single tear ran down her cheek. “… it was so damn close.”

She leaned forward and kissed him.

Five minutes later, they were driving north on the parkway.

“Favor?” Frank asked.

“Not here,” Kate said.

He reached into his shirt pocket for what he’d started thinking of as Janowitz’s envelope. He passed it to her.

She opened it. “Looks like a safe-deposit-box key.”

“It is. From Kevin Gentry’s office files. I want to see what’s inside. We need a court order or something?”

“Unh-hunh. You’ll want it yesterday?”

“That’d be nice.”

“How about today? Even that’ll be a push, getting a judge on a Saturday.”

Frank swung off the parkway onto the ramp to the Fourteenth Street bridge and back into the District. He headed toward Kate’s office.

“Have to do.”

“What do I get in exchange?”

Frank glanced over and grinned, and for the first time that day he felt pretty damn good.

It was an improvised device employing a sodium perchlorate explosive.” Renfro Calkins danced a laser pointer over the poster-size enlargement of what had been the front seat of Frank’s car.

At the head of the conference table, Seth Tompkins raised a hand.

“Improvised, Mr. Calkins… how?”

“Relatively simple, Your Honor,” Calkins told the mayor. Around the table with him were Chief Noah Day, Randolph Emerson, Frank, and Jose.

“You can do it in a bathroom or kitchen. Take HTH, a common swimming pool chlorinating compound, boil it along with table salt. Run the mixture through a couple of filtering processes and you come up with sodium perchlorate crystals. Grind the crystals, then mix with petroleum jelly… Vaseline… and you’ve got a very dandy plastique explosive.”

Calkins nodded toward Frank. “Your batch, Frank, was mixed with aluminum powder… obtainable at any paint store… that increased the explosive power, which also accounted for the bright flash you saw.”

“How big was it?” Tompkins asked.

“Not more than a pound of explosive,” Calkins answered, “perhaps even less.”

Tompkins’s eyes widened. “That small?”

“Enough if you know what you’re doing. The explosive was formed into a shaped charge, much like a cone,” Calkins explained. “The wide end was pointed toward the door and packed with lead pellets. Strictly an antipersonnel weapon. Officer Janowitz wasn’t killed, because the driver’s-side door shielded him from the pellets.”

“So much for the device,” Emerson said. “Any evidence of the origins?”

Calkins made eye contact with Frank, then with Emerson. “The design is one favored by bombmakers in the drug trade.”

Frank knew what was coming.

“Colombian?” Emerson asked.

Persistent if nothing else, Randolph, Frank wanted to say. Instead, he asked, “Forensics, R.C.?”

“The bombmaker was a local.”

“How’d you get that?” Emerson asked.

Calkins went to the easel, reached behind the photo enlargement of Frank’s car, and brought out another enlargement, of an irregular-shaped orange and black object. He settled the photo on the easel and flashed the laser pointer over a series of numbers apparently impressed into the surface.