Stephen Hunter - I, Sniper

What brought them there was Bob’s call to Dennis Washington, Washington’s to the coroner’s office to learn the hospital in which Harris had died, followed by Washington’s visit to that establishment. The hospital kept careful records, and it became clear that over the last months of his life, Ozzie Harris was regularly visited by his friends and comrades Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly and nobody else. Washington did some quick, casual interviews, found a few people who remembered and all agreed that the old radical really came to rely on Jack and Mitzi, who in turn had treated him with respect and love. He remained “Mr. Harris” to them, never “Ozzie,” as everyone else called him.

The clerk eventually noticed Bob and the imposing Washington and ambled over with a melancholy weight to his movements. It wasn’t much fun, Bob thought, working among the aisles and aisles of unclaimed property of the dead; most of it, according to statute, would remain in escrow against claims by long-lost relatives for six months; then it was auctioned, and what remained went to the burner.

Washington flashed ID, laid the death certificate out, and the clerk toddled away, returning with a key attached to a necklace that wore a metal disk upon which H-1498 was stamped.

“Go on in, Detective. It’s pretty self-explanatory; you just follow the rows to H, then go down the shelves till you get to unit 1498. The key opens the padlock. I’d take a mask; it’s pretty dusty in there.”

“Thanks,” said Washington, and he and Swagger headed through the big double doors into a kind of cathedral of American stuff, a huge, darkened brick room that was crosshatched by a wooden latticework that supported Cyclone wire dividers.

Ozzie Harris didn’t have much, as his life had clearly not been about stuff. There was furniture, surprisingly Victorian, bags of old clothes, Oriental lamps, rolled-up woven rugs, an ironing board, a small TV that was probably black-and-white, various cheesy appliances like a microwave and a toaster, an old Mixmaster, a juicer, a crate of cereal and laundry products, surely burner-bound, an old bike, a Barcalounger, a state-of-the-art 2003 computer and printer from some clone outfit, tons of books and magazines, six filing cabinets, a ratty set of golf clubs from happier days, the inevitable framed photos of world events Ozzie had witnessed or written about, speeches he’d given, conventions he’d covered, great men he’d loved or despised.

They worked. On hands and knees, bent over the material in poor light in a cocoon of drifting dust in an airless room, they patiently processed all that was before them. The books took the longest, and many of them had notes or underlined passages that had to be examined and determined to be text-related, not secret messages. The photographs had to be probed for things folded and hidden, the files had to be gently exhumed, each sheet quickly examined.

Many were articles, razored out, dumped in manila folders indexed by various outrages: Racism, militarism, sometimes whole drawers like Vietnam ’64-’67, Vietnam ’67-’70, Vietnam ’71-’75. There was a file of erotica, surprisingly mild, mostly drawings of women in tight latex lingerie that pushed their breasts and buttocks out plumply and had highlights from unseen illumination glowing on them; many were tied, all were made up, with bright red cupid lips. Then too there were files of acceptance letters and rejection slips, fan notes from kids, letters from lawyers threatening libel suits or political opponents expressing disappointment or outrage or sucking up. A whole file was full of mash notes from celebs, mostly second-tier movie lefties. There was a file of letters from students wanting Ozzie essentially to write their papers for them or at least do the research or-

“Hey, Sniper,” said Denny, “hey, come lookee here.”

He was lying under the box spring, a tough fit for such a big fellow, and his suit coat spilled open, showing the Sig 229 holstered to his belt.

Bob scootched and knelt and wedged, and saw where Denny’s rubberized finger pointed: inside the box spring frame, toward the end of the structure, four yellowing strands of Scotch tape peeled away from the wood, drying out in the arid atmosphere. Each one showed one end that suggested being torn or twisted loose.

“It looks like he had something taped here. And judging from the yellow color of the tape, for a long time. Then recently someone pulled whatever was there loose, breaking and twisting the tape. I make it to be four by four, about.”

“Yeah,” said Bob. “I wonder if there’s prints on the tape.”

“Well,” said Denny, “I will mark it down, and if we find something corroborating, maybe I’ll get an actual search warrant and come in with technicians, and we can check the tape for prints. Be interesting if Jack Strong’s prints showed. There’d be your proof he took something. I don’t know where that would lead you, but you’d know Jack had dug through all this, at least.”

Bob looked at his watch. They’d been at it over three hours. He had a couple of drawers to go.

Bob went back and tried to find renewed vigor as he plowed through the details of the old lefty’s life, but it had never been new to start with and stayed old all the way through, although a file of letters from angry readers showed some life: “You fucking commie bastard, they ought to hang you from a lamppost. All you Reds will get your day of the rope, you just wait.” But even the craziness grew boring, and none of the letters-the signed ones, as most bore the signature A Patriot or I Gave to My Country-displayed a name that suggested anything or led anywhere.

Agh, he thought. What did you expect? You can’t do this sort of thing on the quick with a buddy helping out. This is what the FBI is for, to go through this stuff, run it down, track it, read it for fingerprints, analyze the forensics, do the dozens of tests, the magic stuff they do. You are stuck in the year 1948, and this is an obsolete black-and-white movie where the detective finds the Big Clue in some dusty old file.

But he didn’t find the Big Clue.

“Well, I guess we crashed and burned.”

“I guess we did.”

“Okay,” Bob said. “Nothing here. Nothing here at all. I’ll call the feds and see where we are. You were great, really.”

“No big deal. Semper Fi, all that shit.”

“All that shit.”

Washington rose and then said, “It is kind of funny though, a guy as red as this guy, so kill-the-rich and power-to-the-people and all that bullshit, of course he saves a letter from his broker. His broker! Can you imagine?”

“They’re all like that,” said Bob. “Look at Strong. He’s secretly trying to get a roll together, not to pay off his debts but to take off and live big like the millionaires he’d execute if he became, God help us, the big boss.”

But then he thought, why wasn’t the letter in the files with all the other crazy shit?

“Where did you find it?”

“Oh, it was folded up in Das Kapital. I don’t know why it was there.”

Bob thought, that is odd. That is unexpected.

“What did it say?”

“Nothing. It was just a recommendation of stocks for him to buy, sometime in 1972.”

Bob thought, nowhere else in all this shit is there any expression of interest in the stock market, any interest in capitalism except how to destroy it, any relationship with a broker, any connection to anything that isn’t somehow political-for Ozzie, whoever he was, was like Jack and Mitzi: a total creature of politics.

“You didn’t find any other letters like that?”

“Nah. Some guy in New York.”

A New York broker.

That set off a tiny alarm in Bob’s brain, from somewhere in his own past.