Дэвид Балдаччи - Walk the Wire

“You ever see any strange activity over at the Air Force complex?”

“Strange?”

“Just anything out of the ordinary.”

“Not really. They got a lot of security over there. Locals call the radar over there the eye in the sky. Used to look for nukes, so I heard. Thing’s been there since before my dad was born.”

“You ever been over there?”

“Nope. Why all the questions about them?”

“Just routine.”

“So what can I do to help find Hal?”

“You’ve helped us by telling us what you did.”

“So that’s it? Nothing more I can do?”

“Not unless you have any information about who might have killed Irene Cramer and Pamela Ames.”

Shane shook his head. “I guess I can see why not a damn thing gets done in DC.”

Jamison said, “We’re working hard on this, Shane. But it’s not easy.”

“Yeah, okay, I guess,” he said offhandedly. “Well, see you around.”

He walked off.

Decker said. “He was pretty certain that Hal Parker would never hire a prostitute. But I think that—”

Decker had stopped so abruptly and looked so out of sorts that Jamison snapped, “Decker, what is it?”

“We’ve got to go.” He turned and started hustling to the door.

“Go? Go where?”

He called over his shoulder, “To see a body.”

The doors to the funeral home were locked, and Decker had to pound on the wood for a full thirty seconds until they saw someone cautiously approach the front entrance. It was a thin, young man dressed as a custodian and holding a mop.

“Yes?” he said from behind the door glass, his features anxious.

Jamison laid her federal badge against the glass and said, “FBI, open this door. Now!”

The man dropped his mop and nearly fell over. He fumbled with the door lock and then jumped back as Decker bulled past him.

“What’s this all about?” cried out the man. “This... this is a funeral home, for Pete’s sake. Show some respect. Hey, where are you going?”

Neither of them answered him.

Decker quickly led Jamison to the morgue room and opened the door. He looked at the wall of drawers where the bodies were kept until he saw the name “Ames” on a notecard taped to one of them. He opened the door and slid out the gurney. Decker lifted off the sheet, revealing the naked body of Pamela Ames.

“What are we looking for, Decker?” said Jamison anxiously.

“Where do you think her clothes are?” he said distractedly.

“I would imagine back at the police station in the evidence locker. I know that Kelly collected them for analysis.”

“Call Kelly up and tell him to bring all that over here.”

“Okay, but I’d like to tell him a reason.”

“Tell him that Ames and not Parker may have been the real target.”

Jamison had worked with Decker long enough not to question a statement like that. She went off to a corner to make the call.

Decker looked over the body and then glanced around and spotted a file folder on another table. He picked it up and leafed through it, quickly finding that it contained Walt Southern’s preliminary notes on the postmortem he’d performed on Ames.

He read through all the notes and then walked back to the body, carrying the folder with him.

Jamison joined him. “He’s getting the clothes and heading over. He was at the station, so it won’t be long.”

Decker nodded absently as Jamison looked down at the body.

“So what did you mean by Ames being the target?”

“Look at the body, Alex. Lividity sets as quickly as thirty minutes after death, and then permanently after about two hours. Southern gave us that speech before with respect to Cramer’s postmortem, not that we didn’t already know that.”

“Right, he did.”

Decker pointed to the body’s waist, chest, and thigh areas. “Once livor mortis is completed, and the blood settles, if the body comes into contact with a mechanical pressure of any kind, blood can’t collect there and the skin remains pale. Now, we found Ames facing forward in a prone position over the handlebars of the ATV. After she died gravity would have forced the blood in that direction once her heart stopped. But even before lividity was fixed, the tight clothes she was wearing would act as multiple pressure cuffs. But do you see any paleness in those areas because the blood couldn’t get there?”

“No, they’re purplish and red.” She glanced sharply up at him. “Which means she was killed and then, sometime later, she was dressed in the clothes she was found in. Did Southern note any of that in his report?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Then Ames wasn’t a hooker?”

“They tried to fool us by clothing her like that.”

“How does that connect to Cramer?” asked Jamison.

“She certainly would have known Cramer from the Colony. What if when she left the Colony she went to Cramer for help? A place to stay, to get some money? And what if Cramer confided in her, something that disturbed Ames? Then Cramer ends up dead and is found by Parker. What would Ames have likely done in that situation?”

Understanding broke over Jamison’s features. “You mean Ames might have gone out there to ask Parker about his finding the body? Maybe hoping he could tell her something that would help her figure out what had happened? Especially if, like you said, Cramer had already told Ames something disturbing.”

“Only someone got wind of it and went there to stop it. And as we saw, they obviously succeeded.” He glanced at the report again. “And you remember the bottle of wine and two glasses?”

“What about them?”

“Ames’s stomach contents show no signs of any wine. So how could that be if she had been drinking wine with Parker?”

“So that was staged.”

“It was all staged.”

“But why kill her and take Parker?”

“To make us think exactly what we did. That he was the target and she wasn’t. That she was wrong place, wrong time only. And they couldn’t let Parker go after that. Not if he saw what they did to Ames.”

Jamison let out a breath. “Damn. So where’s Parker then?”

“I really wouldn’t count on us ever finding him alive.”

“God, Decker, this is really spiraling out of control.”

“They’re trying to tie up loose ends, Alex. But that cuts both ways. Every time they do stuff like this, they risk leaving something behind that will allow us to catch them.”

“But how many more people have to die before we do catch them?”

Decker stared down at Ames’s body and didn’t answer, because he had no answer to give.

Kelly showed up with the clothes and lots of questions.

While Jamison filled him in on Decker’s deductions, Decker took the clothes and laid them over Ames’s body in the exact same manner in which she had worn them.

When Jamison was finished giving Kelly the rundown, Decker said, “Look at where the clothes drop on her.”

They clustered around the body as Decker methodically pointed out the different strike points. “Here, here, and here. Lividity’s fixed. There’s no way the skin and blood pool presents like what we’re seeing right now if she were wearing those clothes when she was killed. They were so tight they actually cut into her skin, there and there.”

Kelly nodded enthusiastically. “She was dressed in something else, then they changed her into these clothes to make it look like the encounter was paid sex.”

“Then they took her real clothes and deposited her in the shed on the ATV.”

“And took Parker. You think he’s dead?” asked Kelly.