George Pelecanos - Right as Rain

On the eleven o'clock news, Franklin's suicide was eclipsed by the discovery of a mass homicide on a wooded property at the east-central edge of Montgomery County. Six bodies had been found in various stages of decomposition. The police had been alerted by a friend of one of the victims, a woman named Edna Loomis. The friend, Johanna Dodgson, had not heard from Loomis for days and had called the local cops when her concern became great. After two bodies were discovered in the barn, and another in the house, police found three additional bodies, including the corpse of Edna Loomis, in a tunnel underneath the property. Johanna Dodgson had mentioned the existence of the tunnel in her initial call to the police.

The Out-County Massacre, as it was immediately dubbed by the press, dominated the news for the next three days. A rumor surfaced that one of the victims was a D.C. cop, and then the rumor was publicly confirmed. Drugs and large amounts of money were said to have been found at the scene. Another rumor surfaced, alleging that the suicide of Officer Eugene Franklin was somehow related to the Out-County Massacre, but this rumor remained unconfirmed. Police spokesmen promised a speedy resolution to the case, claiming that an announcement regarding the findings was 'imminent.'

Strange went to work daily and kept to his general routine. He followed the news reports closely but did not discuss them, except with Ron and Janine, and only then in passing. He phoned Quinn and spoke to him twice, and on both occasions he found him to be uncommunicative, remote, and possibly in the grip of depression. He visited Leona and Sondra Wilson briefly and was pleased with what he found.

It was a tentative time for Strange, and though he picked up a couple of easy jobs, mostly he waited. By the end of the next week, he welcomed the phone call that he knew with certainty would come. The call came on Saturday morning, when he was returning from a long walk with Greco, as he stepped into the foyer of his Buchanan Street row house.

'Hello,' said Strange, picking up the phone.

'Lydell here. You ready to talk, Derek?'

'Name the place,' said Strange.

Oregon Avenue, south of Military Road, led into a section of Rock Creek Park that contained a nature center, horse stables, and miles of hilly trails. A huge parking lot sat to the right of the entrance, where people met to train and run their dogs on the adjacent field. The parking lot was a popular rendezvous spot for adulterous couples as well.

Strange and Lydell Blue sat in Strange's Caprice, parked beside Blue's Park Avenue in the lot and facing the field. Blue's hair had thinned and it was all gray, as was his thick mustache, which he had worn for thirty years on his wide, strong-featured face. His belly sagged over the waistband of his slacks. He held a sixteen-ounce paper cup of coffee in his hand, steam rising from a hole he had torn in its lid.

Over a dozen large-breed dogs ran and played in the field, all of their owners white, well-off, and dressed in casual, expensive clothes. At the far end of the lot, near the tree line, a middle-aged man and a younger woman necked in the front seat of a late-model Pontiac.

'You shoulda brought Greco,' said Blue, looking through the windshield at an Irish wolfhound and a white Samoyed sitting side by side on a rise, a woman in a Banana Republic jacket telling them to hold from fifteen feet away.

'Greco's not a dog lover,' said Strange. 'Right about now, he'd be barin' his teeth at those two.'

'Wouldn't want to bust on all these folks' perfect day.'

Strange looked over at Blue. 'Tell me what you got, Lydell.'

'You gonna be up front with me if I do?'

'How long we been knowin' each other, man?'

'Okay, then. Okay.' Blue ran his thumb along his mustache. 'The cops who found Eugene Franklin found a suicide note at the scene. More like a confession, really.'

'You see the note?'

'Got a copy of it from a friend over in Homicide. Written with an ink pen on a plain white sheet of paper. Handwriting was clean and precise, like he was under no kind of duress when he wrote it. Signature on it matched the signature of Franklin we had on file.'

'What'd the note say?'

'Franklin admitted that he and Adonis Delgado were on the payroll of that drug lord, Cherokee Coleman. He detailed his role in the Chris Wilson shooting. How Wilson had gotten onto him and Delgado, and how Coleman had ordered a hit on Wilson. They used Ricky Kane, who was a drug dealer to the restaurant trade, not the clean-cut suburban boy the papers had made him out to be, to get Wilson out there in street clothes and make him look wrong. Franklin was supposed to shoot Wilson. But his partner, Quinn, who Franklin claimed was clean, shot Wilson first.'

Strange digested what Blue had told him. 'The news-people been talkin' about these rumors, that Franklin is somehow connected to the Out-County thing. If he was hooked up with Delgado-'

'Franklin put it all in the note. Him and Delgado were sent by Coleman out to that property to make a drug transaction, and also to kill the two wholesalers, Earl and Ray Boone. Somethin' about makin' it right for Coleman over two Colombians the Boones had murdered out there. That part checks out; two men were found in a tunnel on the property, their death date much earlier than the date of death on the Boones. They've ID'd the corpses as two Colombian brothers, Nestor and Lizardo Rodriguez, who were recently reported missing down around Richmond.'

'What about the Boones and Delgado? Who killed them?'

'Franklin claimed that he did. Claimed he had a crisis of conscience and had to end the whole thing the only way he saw fit. He and Delgado fought over it in the house, they went at it, and he killed Delgado. Then Franklin went down to the barn and shot the father and son. He left the drugs and the money sitting in the barn and drove back to D.C. Ate his own gun the next day.'

'There was a girl found in that tunnel, too.'

'Edna Loomis. Died of natural causes. That is, if you call a woman having a stroke at thirty years old "natural." Methamphetamine will do that to you, you ingest enough.'

'Hell of a story,' said Strange.

'Yeah. Trouble is, it doesn't check out.'

'What's wrong with it?'

'Plenty of things. Start with the crime scene, out at the barn and the house. Okay, so Franklin says he had a change of heart, and he and Delgado got down to it. Why was Delgado naked, then? And Delgado was stabbed. Why wouldn't Franklin just go ahead and shoot him like he did the others?'

'I don't know.'

'They found a boot print tracking out of Delgado's blood, too. Size twelve, I believe it was. Franklin wore a ten.'

'What else?' said Strange.

'The Boones were killed by the same type of gun, a Glock seventeen. But it was two different Glock seventeens that killed 'em. The markings on the slug found in the body of the son and another bullet found in the wood of the bar were inconsistent with the markings of those found in the father and those found around the father. The trajectory angles were inconsistent, too. There were two shooters that night, Derek. Had to be.'

'No fingerprints, nothin' like that?'

'No prints other than those of the deceased, Franklin, and another, unidentified woman.'

'A woman, huh?'

'They found vaginal fluid and pubic hairs in the same bedroom where they found Delgado.'

'The Loomis girl?'

'Didn't match. But if there was some kind of phantom woman there, it explains why Delgado died in his birthday suit.'

'Sounds like y'all got a genuine head-scratcher.'

'Uh-huh.'

Blue turned his head and stared at Strange.

'Why'd you call me here, Lydell?'

'Well, Derek, I'll tell you. I got an anonymous package in the mail, no return address, mailing label out of a printer just like any thousand printers in this city. Had Chris Wilson's investigation detailed in a notebook, and photographs of Franklin and Delgado headin' into Coleman's compound.' Blue took a sip of coffee. 'That was you sent me that, right?'