Mike Lawson - House Divided

“Most folks, they serve these people and they act all happy and hardy, but they’re really not. They don’t like being near them, the way they look, the way they smell. But not Paul. He realized they were human beings and, but for the grace of God, he could have been the one getting served instead of doing the serving. I appreciated that because there was a time when I was on the other side of that serving line.”

DeMarco’s attitude toward street people was that the majority of them were pain-in-the-ass drunks, but Mary Albertson’s comment made him squirm a bit and she noticed, wise woman that she was.

When DeMarco asked her if she knew if Paul had a lawyer, Mary said she didn’t. She’d never heard him speak of one.

“Shit,” DeMarco muttered and then mumbled, “Sorry,” when he noticed the look Mary gave him. He thanked her for her time and started to leave, but then something occurred to him. “There’s one other thing I’m curious about,” he said. “Do you have any idea who Paul’s last patient was? The lady at the hospice where Paul worked couldn’t give me his name because of medical confidentiality rules, but she did say that something was bothering Paul the last time she saw him at this patient’s house. I really want to talk to the man to see if he knows anything related to my cousin’s murder.”

Unlike Paul, the occasional small white lie-in this case, that DeMarco already knew that Paul’s last patient was dead-didn’t bother DeMarco all that much. For that matter, telling whoppers didn’t bother him all that much either.

“Yes, he was really down about something the last time I saw him too,” Mary said.

“Do you have any idea why?”

She shook her head. “No. When Paul talked about the people he was caring for, he’d usually say there was something beautiful in watching how they accepted that the end was near, how it was inspiring-that’s the word he used-the way they readied their souls to meet their God. This last one, though? All Paul said was that the poor man was tormented, as if he was already burning in Hell, and Paul was trying to help him make peace with himself.”

“You mean he was trying to convert him to Catholicism?”

“Oh, no. Paul wasn’t the type to ram his religion down someone’s throat. But if a person asked for help, spiritual or otherwise, he would have given it.”

“Huh,” DeMarco said. “So do you know who this man is? Like I said, I’d really like to talk to him.”

“Well, I’m afraid you’re too late for that, Mr. DeMarco,” Mary said. “They held the funeral for him yesterday, paid him the honor he was due. Paul’s last patient was General Martin Breed.”

As DeMarco was walking back to his car, he thought maybe that explained why the FBI had taken Paul’s case away from the Arlington County cops. Maybe there was some connection between Paul’s death and a two-star army general, a man who would have access to a lot of classified information. And maybe that’s why Hopper had searched Paul’s apartment and taken his computer. Yeah. Maybe.

The next thought he had was that if Paul’s death was connected in any way to a Pentagon heavyweight like Martin Breed, he’d be smart to keep his big nose out of it. He should just do what he was supposed to do: find a lawyer to deal with Paul’s four-thousand-buck estate and then go play golf like he’d originally planned.

Yep, that definitely sounded like the smart thing to do.

Claire returned to her office, still embarrassed that she had overlooked the Post reporter, Robert Hansen, as the man Paul Russo might have met with. She didn’t know for sure that Russo had met with Hansen, but it sounded right. It felt right. It sang to her.

Russo, this gay altar boy, just didn’t strike her as the type who would have been involved in anything illegal or even underhanded. But what if General Breed-a man privy to the Pentagon’s dirty little secrets-had told Russo something before he died? He might have even told Russo something while under the influence of whatever drugs he was being given, maybe delirious, not even knowing what he was saying.

But what about Martin Breed? The man had been an absolute poster boy for the United States Army. Handsome, charming, articulate, a born leader of men. He’d risen up through the ranks at a meteoric pace and had been involved in all the recent wars. In Afghanistan, he’d even managed to get himself wounded, which is quite hard for a general to do, so he got a Purple Heart to go along with all his other medals.

But there had been nothing in Breed’s career to indicate he was anything other than a good soldier. There’d been no financial scandals-no awards of huge army contracts to pals in big business-and his marriage had been rock solid, as far as anyone knew. Nor had he shown any desire for public office, so it didn’t seem likely that he would have compromised his principles to get himself elected after he retired. Breed’s only known ambition was to reach the pinnacle of his profession: to replace General Charles Bradford as the army’s chief of staff.

Assuming Russo had learned something significant from Breed-which was a hell of a big assumption-what could it have been? What could have been so important that someone would want to kill Russo because of what he’d heard or seen? And then there was the question of how Russo’s killers would have known that Breed told Russo anything?

Too many questions-not enough answers. Insufficient data, as Dillon would say.

Claire called Gilbert and two other technicians into her office and proceeded to issue orders, giving them four hours to do what she knew would take them twice as long.

The first thing she had them bring her was Martin Breed’s medical records, which had been easy to obtain. Breed had been a high-ranking army officer so Claire assumed, correctly, that he’d been treated by someone over at Walter Reed. His oncologist was a Dr. Stanley Fallon and Dr. Fallon’s notes, entered into his computer, stated that Breed had died from brain cancer, a particularly aggressive, fast-moving form of the disease. The last entry regarding Breed recommended that the general call in a hospice, as he was not expected to last more than a month, six weeks at the outside.

This gave Claire pause. Martin Breed died only three weeks after the doctor made his final entry on his patient. Did this mean anything? Maybe, maybe not. She doubted a physician could predict exactly how long a patient would last, and three weeks was pretty close to a month. Still, it made her wonder.

What she really wanted to know was who, besides Paul Russo, had talked to the general as he lay dying. That is, could General Breed have told one of his last visitors that Russo posed some kind of threat? General Breed’s phone records didn’t point to any logical person-his last calls had primarily been to family members-and the only other way Claire could think of to get the answer to her question was to ask General Breed’s grieving widow, an idea she instantly rejected. Talking to people always posed a risk because it left a human trail, and Claire was not ready to go down that path just yet. She much preferred to gather information through purloined records-and eavesdropping, if necessary.

Claire was frustrated, and not just because she wasn’t making progress on the Russo intercept. What was really frustrating her was that she might be wasting her time investigating Russo at all. Claire’s organization had been established by Dillon to spy within the country’s borders for the purpose of preventing attacks which could make 9/11 seem insignificant by comparison. The detonation of a nuclear bomb in Manhattan or Washington, D.C. wouldn’t just kill thousands of people; such an event could destroy the economy and cripple the very infrastructure needed to safeguard the nation. If Claire’s technicians had just heard Russo being murdered in some mundane way for some mundane reason, she wouldn’t have spent any time on him at all. But because his death might be linked to rogue elements of the U.S. military and a dead two-star general, she needed to know what the hell was going on-and she was getting nowhere.