Mike Lawson - Dead on Arrival

Emma was disgruntled because she’d wasted part of the day trying to learn more about the people who had shot DeMarco. Although he didn’t seem to be worried for his own safety — which surprised her — and was satisfied that the shooters had been after the DEA agent who was killed, Emma still had her doubts. But after three hours of talking to people on the phone, in the end she learned nothing more than had been reported in the papers: Jorge Rivera, the driver who’d been executed, had been a small-time hood with links to a Hispanic gang. He certainly wasn’t a contract killer, but he did have drug connections. Regarding the second shooter, the person who had most likely shot Jorge, the police had nothing. Cameras on the outside of the DEA building didn’t get a clear shot of the person and the only fingerprints inside the car belonged to Jorge.

The remainder of the day had been spent with Fat Neil trying to find evidence that Dobbler or Baxter were tied in some way to the terrorist attacks. After five hours with Neil — nobody should have to spend five hours with Neil — they’d discovered nothing new. She did decide by the end of the day to focus on Dobbler and forget Edith for the time being. Edith was donating money to Broderick and every other organization and politician she could find with some sort of anti-Muslim bias, and she was paying Prescott’s company to find radical Muslims around the globe, but everything she did was done openly, and nothing she was doing was illegal. She was obviously out of her mind with grief and guilt and doing everything she could to avenge her son, but Emma’s gut told her that Edith wasn’t involved in the attacks. She could only hope her gut was right. She also wished there was some way she could help Edith. It was terrible to see her in the state she was in.

The phone rang and the dog in her lap jumped as if it had been tasered. She hoped it was Christine calling.

‘Hello.’

‘This is Anisa Aziz. I’d … I’d like to talk to you.’

‘Where,’ Emma said.

‘Uh, near the Rotunda? Is that okay?’ Anisa said.

‘I live in McLean,’ Emma said. ‘It’ll take-’

‘Oh. Well …’

‘No, it’s okay,’ Emma said. ‘I’ll come to you. I’ll be there in four hours. I’ll meet you about ten-thirty.’

She hoped the damn dog didn’t tear up the house while she was gone.

‘There were two men,’ Anisa Aziz said.

Emma was sitting with the girl on a bench looking out at a large terraced grass common in the middle of the University of Virginia’s campus. At the northern end of the common, where they were sitting, was the Rotunda, a building designed by Thomas Jefferson that looks like the Pantheon in Rome.

‘I don’t know how they unlocked the door,’ Anisa said, ‘but they broke into my room after midnight and put me in the trunk of a car. We drove quite a while, maybe an hour, maybe more; then they took me into a warehouse. In the middle of the warehouse was an office with glass walls. One of the men pointed a gun at me and then showed me a note written in English that said to take off my clothes. When I didn’t right away, he slapped me. I thought they were going to rape me, but they didn’t. They just tied me to a chair. Naked.’

The girl shuddered. It was a cold night, in the low forties, and all Anisa was wearing were sweatpants and a hooded sweatshirt that said uva soccer on the back. Emma didn’t think, however, that it was cold that had made the girl shiver.

‘What did they look like?’ Emma asked.

‘One was big, at least six-four, and heavy. The other was maybe six feet, skinny but real strong. They both wore long-sleeved shirts and had gloves on their hands and ski masks over their faces.’

‘What color were their eyes?’ Emma said.

‘Brown. Both of them.’

Blue would have been better . ‘Could you tell if they were white? If they were American or from some other country?’

‘No. They never spoke, not once.’

‘Okay, then what happened?’

‘Another man — he was wearing a ski mask too — he brought my uncle into the warehouse. My uncle could see me tied up naked inside the glass office. While my uncle was watching, one of the men, not the big man, the other one, the skinny one, came and stood behind me. He was holding two sticks with a wire connecting the sticks. He put the wire around my neck and began to twist it, to choke me, and I started gagging and my neck started bleeding. He stopped before I passed out. I looked up and the man with my uncle was talking to him. Then the skinny man strangled me again and I could see my uncle crying, begging for them to stop, and then my uncle and the man with him left the warehouse.’

Anisa stopped talking to keep herself from crying and closed her eyes for a moment.

‘They left me alone for a long time, maybe five or six hours; then the skinny man came back. He showed me pictures of my mother and my little brother coming out of our house, and then he held up a note for me to read. It said if I talked to the police they would kill my mother and my brother. And me. Then … then he took off one of his gloves and he — he put his finger in me. After that he untied me and let me get dressed, and then he put me back in the trunk of the car and dropped me off near the campus. When I got back to my room, I tried to call my uncle, but he wasn’t home. Then I turned the radio on and heard what he had done. And that he was dead.’

‘I know this is hard for you, Anisa, but when the man took off his glove, could you see his hand?’ Emma said. ‘I mean, could you tell his race from his hand?’

The girl started to shake her head, but then she stopped. ‘Yes, his hands weren’t real dark, not like a black man’s or an Arab’s. They were tanned, but he was probably white.’

‘Good,’ Emma said. ‘Very good.’

‘And there was something else. When he first took off his glove, I saw these blue marks on his knuckles, but only for a second. I think they were tattoos but I couldn’t see a design and they might have been smudges of grease or dirt. I just don’t know.’

‘Can you remember anything else? The type of car they drove? If their clothes had any sort of distinc tive labels on them, anything like that?’

‘No. I’m sorry.’

She and Emma sat there in silence for a moment, then Anisa gestured with her head and said, ‘Did you know they only give these rooms to seniors, the ones who the professors think are going to be somebody special someday?’

Emma nodded her head; she knew what the girl was talking about. On each side of the grass common were five ‘pavilions’ assigned to prestigious faculty members, and between the pavilions were fifty-four little student rooms called ‘lawn rooms.’ The rooms were built about the time Thomas Jefferson died and have no air-conditioning or showers. Yet in spite of their age, size, and lack of creature comforts, the lawn rooms are the most desirable dwellings on campus because only the university’s most impressive overachievers are permitted to reside in them.

‘What chance do you think a Muslim woman has,’ Anisa said, ‘of being picked to live in one of those crummy old rooms?’

Tim Crocker liked being a fireman.

He liked the guys he worked with. He liked putting out fires. He liked saving people and their homes. Hell, he even liked getting cats down from trees. What he didn’t like was looking at people who’d burned to death.

The sight of a body — or in this case four bodies — burnt black beyond recognition, their heads turned into skulls, their mouths open from their last screams, their backs arched from their final struggles … well, he just hated it. And the smell. Every time this happened, he couldn’t eat barbecue for a month.