Glenn Cooper - Secret of the Seventh Son

“Have them leave the postcard,” Will said.

Chapman reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a white card inside a Ziploc bag. “I got it right here.”

When the room was clear, they inspected the body with the detective. It was getting toasty in there and the first whiffs of decay were in the air. For a gunshot victim, there was surprisingly little blood, a few clots on her matted gray hair, a streak down her left cheek where an arterial gush from her ear had formed a tributary that tracked down her neck and dripped onto moss-green carpet. She was on her back, a foot from the floral flounce of her unmade bed, dressed in a pink cotton nightdress she had probably worn a thousand times. Her eyes, already bone dry, were open and staring. Will had seen innumerable bodies, many of them brutalized beyond recognition of their humanity. This lady looked pretty good, a nice Puerto Rican grandma whom you’d think could be revived with a good shoulder shake. He checked out Nancy to gauge her reaction to the presence of death.

She was taking notes.

Chapman started in, “So the way I figure it-”

Will put up his hand, stopping him in mid-sentence. “Special Agent Lipinski, why don’t you tell us what happened here?”

Her face flushed, making her cheeks appear fuller. The flush extended to her throat and disappeared under the neckline of her white blouse. She swallowed and moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. She began slowly then picked up the tempo as she assembled her thoughts. “Well, the killer was probably here before, not necessarily inside the apartment but around the building. The security grate on one of the kitchen windows was pried loose. I’d have to take a closer look at it but I’ll bet the window frame is rotted. Still, even hiding in the side alley, he wouldn’t have gambled on doing the job all in one night, not if he wanted to make sure he hit the date on the postcard. He came back last night, went into the alley and finished pulling the grate off. Then he cut the window with a glass cutter and undid the latch from the outside. He tramped in some dirt from the alley onto the kitchen floor and the hall and right there, and there.”

She pointed to two spots on the bedroom carpet, including one smudge that Chapman was standing on. He stepped away like it was radioactive.

“She must’ve heard something because she sat up and tried to put her slippers on. Before she could finish he was in the room and he took one shot at close range, through her left ear. It looks like it’s a small-caliber round, probably a. 22. The bullet’s still in her cranium, there’s no exit wound. I don’t think there was a sexual assault here but we need to check that. Also, we need to find out if anything was stolen. The place wasn’t ransacked but I didn’t see a pocketbook anywhere. He probably left the way he came in.” She paused and scrunched her forehead. “That’s it. That’s what I think happened.”

Will frowned at her, made her sweat for a few seconds then said, “Yeah, that’s what I think happened too.” Nancy looked like she’d just won a spelling bee and proudly stared down at her crepe-soled shoes. “You agree with my partner, Detective?”

Chapman shrugged. “Could very well be. Yeah,. 22 handgun, I’m sure that’s the weapon here.”

The guy doesn’t have a fucking clue, Will thought. “Do you know if anything was stolen?”

“Her daughter says her purse is missing. She’s the one who found her this morning. The postcard was on the kitchen table with some other mail.”

Will pointed at grandma’s thighs. “Was she sexually assaulted?”

“I don’t have any idea! Maybe if you hadn’t kicked the M.E. out we’d know,” Chapman huffed.

Will lowered himself onto his haunches and used his pen to carefully lift her nightdress. He squinted into the tent and saw undisturbed old-lady underwear. “Doesn’t look like it,” he said. “Let’s see the postcard.”

Will inspected it carefully, front and back, and handed it to Nancy. “Is that the same font used in the other ones?”

She said it was.

“It’s Courier twelve point,” he said.

She asked how he knew that, sounding impressed.

“I’m a font savant,” he quipped. He read the name out loud. “Ida Gabriela Santiago.”

According to Chapman, her daughter told him she never used her middle name.

Will stood up and stretched his back. “Okay, we’re good,” he said. “Keep the area sealed off until the FBI forensics team arrives. We’ll be in touch if we need anything.”

“You got any leads on this wacko?” Chapman asked.

Will’s cell phone started ringing inside his jacket, counterintuitively playing Ode to Joy. While he fished for it he replied, “Jack shit, Detective, but this is only my first day on the case,” then said into the phone, “This is Piper…”

He listened and shook his head a couple of times before he told the caller, “When it rains, it pours. Say, Mueller hasn’t made a miraculous recovery, has he?…Too bad.” He ended the call and looked up. “Ready for a long night, partner?”

Nancy nodded like a bobble-head doll. She seemed to like the appellation “partner,” like it a lot.

“That was Sanchez,” he told her. “We’ve got another postcard but this one’s a little different. It’s dated today but the guy’s still alive.”

E rnest Bevin was the link, the go-between. The only cabinet member to serve in both governments. To Clement Atlee, the Labor prime minister, Bevin was the logical choice. “Ernest,” Atlee had told his Foreign Secretary, the two of them seated before a hot coal fire at Downing Street, “speak to Churchill. Tell him I’m personally asking for his help.” Sweat beaded on Atlee’s bald head, and Bevin watched with discomfort as a rivulet ran down his high forehead onto his hawklike nose.

Assignment accepted. No questions asked, no reservations tendered. Bevin was a soldier, an old-line labor leader, one of the founders of Britain’s largest trade union, the TGWU. Always the pragmatist, prewar, he was one of the few Labor politicians to cooperate with the Conservative government of Winston Churchill and align himself against the pacifist wing in the Labor Party.

In 1940, when Churchill readied the nation for war and formed an all-party coalition government, he made Bevin Minister for Labor and National Service, giving him a broad portfolio involving the domestic wartime economy. Shrewdly, Bevin struck a balance between military and domestic needs and created his own army of fifty thousand men diverted from the armed forces to work the coal mines: Bevin Boys. Churchill thought the world of him.

Then the shocker. Just weeks after VE day, basking in triumphant victory, the man the Russians called the British Bulldog lost the 1945 general election in a landslide drubbing by Clement Atlee’s Labor Party, tossed aside by an electorate that did not trust him to rebuild the nation. The man who had said, “We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall never surrender,” limped from the grand stage in surrender, depressed and dispirited. Churchill moodily led the opposition after his defeat, but took most of his pleasure from his beloved Chartwell House, where he wrote poetry, painted watercolors, and tossed bread to the black swans.

Now, a year and a half later, Bevin, Prime Minster Atlee’s Foreign Secretary, sat deep underground awaiting his former boss. It was cold, and Bevin kept his overcoat buttoned over his winter-weight vested suit. He was a solid man, thinning gray hair swept back and pomaded, fleshy faced with incipient jowls. He had chosen this clandestine meeting spot purposely, to send a psychological message. The subject matter would be important. Secret. Come now, without delay.