“What?” I am incredulous, then furious.
“So the only one at your house is the one with Bray’s blood on it. One hammer. Found at your house. And it’s got Bray’s blood.” He makes his point, not without some reluctance.
“You know why I bought that hammer,” I reply as if my argument is with him. “I wanted to see if it matched up with the pattern of her injuries. And it was definitely in my house. If it wasn’t there when you guys went through everything, then either you overlooked it or someone took it.”
“You remember where you had it last?”
“I used it in the kitchen on chicken to see what the injuries looked like, and also what kind of pattern the coiled handle would leave if I put something on it and pressed the handle against paper.”
“Yeah, we found pounded-up chicken in the garbage. And a pillowcase with barbecue sauce on it, like maybe from your rolling the handle around.” He doesn’t think such an experiment is odd. He knows I engage in a lot of unusual research when I am trying to figure out what happened to somebody. “But no chipping hammer. We didn’t find that. Not with or without barbecue sauce,” Marino goes on. “So I’m wondering if asshole Talley swiped it. Maybe you ought to get Lucy and Teun to turn their secret squirrel organization on him and see what they find out, huh? The Last Precinct’s first big investigation. I’d like to run a credit check on the bastard and see where he gets all his money from, for starters.”
I keep glancing at my watch, timing our drive. The subdivision where Mitch Barbosa lived is ten minutes from The Fort James Motel. Taupe clapboard townhouses are new and there is no vegetation, just raw earth sprinkled with dead young grass and patched with snow. I recognize unmarked police vehicles in the lot when we pull in, three Ford Crown Victorias and a Chevrolet Lumina parked in a row. It doesn’t escape my attention or Marino’s that two of these vehicles have Washington, D.C., plates.
“Oh shit,” Marino says. “I smell the feds. Oh boy,” he says to me as we park, “this ain’t good.”
I notice a curious detail as Marino and I follow the brick walkway to the townhouse where Barbosa lived with his alleged girlfriend. Through an upstairs window I see a fishing rod. It leans against the glass, and I don’t know why it strikes me as out of place except that this isn’t the time of year for fishing, just as it isn’t the time of year for camping. Again, I think of the mysterious if not mythical people who fled the campground, leaving behind many of their possessions. I return to Bev Kiffin’s lie and feel I am moving deeper into a dangerous airspace where there are forces I can’t see or understand moving at incredible speeds. Marino and I wait at the front door of townhouse D, and he rings the bell again.
Detective Stanfield answers and greets us distractedly, his eyes darting everywhere. Tension between him and Marino is a wall between them. “Sorry I didn’t make it by the motel,” he announces curtly as he steps aside to let us in. “Something’s come up. You’ll see that in a minute,” he promises. He is in gray corduroys and a heavy wool sweater, and he won’t meet my eyes, either. I am not sure if this is because he knows how I feel about his leaking information to his brother-in-law, Representative Dinwiddie, or if there is some other reason. It flashes across my thoughts that he might know I am being investigated for murder. I try not to think about that reality. It serves no good purpose to worry right now. “Everybody’s upstairs,” he says, and we follow him up.
“Who’s everybody?” Marino asks.
Our feet thud quietly on carpet. Stanfield keeps moving. He doesn’t turn around or pause when he replies, “ATF and the FBI.”
I notice framed photographs arranged on the wall to the left of the staircase and take a moment to peruse them, recognizing Mitch Barbosa grinning with tipsy-looking people in a bar and hanging out the window of the cab of a transfer truck. In one photograph, he is sunbathing in a bikini on a tropical beach, maybe Hawaii. He holds up a drink, toasting the person behind the camera. Several other poses are with a pretty woman, perhaps the girlfriend he lives with, I wonder. Halfway up is a landing and the window the fishing pole leans against.
I stop, a strange sensation lightly whispering across my flesh as I examine, without touching, a Shakespeare fiberglass rod and Shimano reel. A hook and split-shot weights are attached to the fishing line, and on the carpet next to the rod’s handle is a small blue plastic tackle box. Nearby, as if set down when someone entered the townhouse, are two empty Rolling Rock beer bottles, a new pack of Tiparillo cigars and some change. Marino turns around to see what I am doing. I join him at the top of the stairs and we emerge into a brightly lit living area that is attractively decorated in spare modern furniture and Indian rugs.
“When’s the last time you went fishing?” I ask Marino.
“Not freshwater,” he replies. “Not around here these days.”
“Exactly.” I am cut off by an awareness that I know one of the three people standing near the picture window in the living room. My heart jumps when the familiar dark head turns to me and suddenly I am facing Jay Talley. He doesn’t smile, his glance sharp as if his eyes are tipped like arrows. Marino makes a barely audible noise that is like a groan from a small, primitive animal. It is his way of letting me know that Jay is the last person he wants to see. Another man in a suit and tie is young and looks Hispanic, and when he sets down his coffee cup, his jacket falls open and reveals a shoulder holster holding a large caliber pistol.
The third person is a woman. She doesn’t demonstrate the devastated, confused demeanor of a person whose lover has just been killed. She is upset, yes. But her emotions are well contained beneath the surface, and I recognize the flare in her eyes and angry set of her jaw. I have seen the look in Lucy, in Marino and others who are more than bereft when something bad happens to a person they care about. Cops. Cops are offended and in an eye for an eye mode when something happens to one of their own. Mitch Barbosa’s girlfriend, I suspect right away, is law enforcement, probably undercover. In a matter of minutes, the scenario has dramatically shifted.
“This is Bunk Pruett, FBI,” Stanfield makes introductions. “Jay Talley, ATF.” Jay shakes my hand as if we have never met. “And Jilison McIntyre.” Her handshake is cool but firm. “Ms. McIntyre’s ATF.”
We find chairs and arrange them so all of us can look at each other and talk. The air is hard. It is flinty with anger. I recognize the mood. I have seen it so many times when a cop is killed. Now that Stanfield has set the stage, he slips behind a curtain of sullen silence. Bunk Pruett takes charge, typical FBI. “Dr. Scarpetta, Captain Marino,” Pruett begins. “I want to state the obvious right off. This is highly, highly sensitive. To be honest, I hate saying anything about what’s going on, but you got to know what you’re dealing with.” His jaw muscles bunch. “Mitch Barbosa is—was—undercover FBI, working a big investigation here in this area, which now of course we have to dismantle, at least to a certain degree.”
“Drugs and guns,” Jay says, glancing from Marino to me.
CHAPTER 24
IS INTERPOL INVOLVED? I don’t understand why Jay Talley is here. Barely two weeks ago, he was working in France.
“Well, you should know,” Jay says with a trace of sarcasm, or maybe I imagine it. “The unidentified case you just contacted Interpol about, the guy who died in the motel down the road? We have an idea who he might be. So yes, Interpol’s involved. Now we are. You bet.”
“I wasn’t aware we’d gotten a response from Interpol.” Marino barely tries to be civil to Jay. “So you’re telling me the guy from the motel’s some sort of international fugitive, maybe?”
“Yes,” Jay replies. “Rosso Matos, twenty-eight-year-old native of Colombia, as in South America. Last seen in Los Angeles. Also known as the Cat because he’s such a quiet guy when he goes in and out of places, killing. That’s his specialty. Taking people out, a hit man. Matos has a reputation for liking very expensive clothes, cars—and young men. I guess I need to talk about him in the past tense.” Jay pauses. No one res
ponds beyond looking at him. “What none of us understands is what he was doing here in Virginia,” Jay adds.
“What exactly is the operation here?” Marino asks Jilison McIntyre.
“Started four months ago with a guy speeding along Route Five just a couple miles from here. A James City cop pulls him.” She glances at Stanfield. “Runs his tag and finds out he’s a convicted felon. Plus the officer happens to notice the handle of a long gun protruding from under a blanket in the back seat, turns out to be a MAK-90 with the serial number ground off. Our labs in Rockville managed to restore the SN and traced the weapon to a shipment from China—a regular shipment to Richmond. As you know, a MAK-90’s a popular knock-off of the AK-47 assault rifle, going rate of a thousand, two thousand bucks on the street. Gang members love the MAK, made in China, regularly shipped to local ports in Richmond, Norfolk, legitly in crates accurately marked. Other MAKs are being smuggled in from Asia along with heroin, in all kinds of crates marked everything from electronics to Oriental rugs.”
In an all-business voice that only occasionally reveals the strain she feels, McIntyre describes a smuggling ring that, in addition to area ports, involves the James City County trucking company where Barbosa was undercover as a driver and she was undercover as his girlfriend. He got her a job in the company’s office, where bills of lading and invoices were falsified to disguise a very lucrative operation that also involves cigarettes en route from Virginia to New York and other destinations in the Northeast. Some weapons are being sold through a dirty gun dealer in this area, but a lot of them end up in backroom sales at gun shows, and we all know how many gun shows Virginia has, McIntyre says.
“What’s the name of the trucking company?” Marino asks.
“Overland.”
Marino’s eyes dart to me. He runs his fingers through his thinning hair. “Christ,” he says to everyone. “That’s who Bev Kiffin’s husband works for. Jesus Christ.”
“The lady who owns and runs The Fort James Motel,” Stanfield explains to the others.
“Overland’s a big company and not everybody is involved in illegal activity,” Pruett is quick to be objective. “That’s what makes this so tough. The company and most people in it are legit. So you could pull their trucks all day and never find anything hot inside a single one of them. Then on another day, a shipload of paper products, televisions, whatever, heads out and stashed inside boxes are assault rifles and drugs.”
“You think someone put the dime on Mitch?” Marino asks Pruett. “And the bad guys decided to whack him?”
“If so, then why is Matos dead, too?” It is Jay who speaks. “And it appears Matos died first, right?” He looks at me. “He’s found dead in these really weird circumstances, in a motel right down the road. Then the next day, Mitch’s body is dumped in Richmond. Plus, Matos is an eight-hundred-pound gorilla. I don’t see what his interest would be here—even if someone out there dimed Mitch, you don’t send in a hit man like Matos. He’s pretty much reserved for big prey in powerful crime organizations, guys hard to get to because they are surrounded by their own heavily armed thugs.”
“Who does Matos work for?” Marino asks. “Do we know that?”
“Whoever will pay,” Pruett replies.
“He’s all over the map,” Jay adds. “South America, Europe, this country. He’s not associated with any one network or cartel, but is a lone operator. You want someone taken out, you hire Matos.”
“Then someone hired him to come here,” I conclude.
“We have to assume that,” Jay replies. “I don’t think he was in the area to check out Jamestown or the Christmas decorations in Williamsburg.”
“We also know he didn’t kill Mitch Barbosa,” Marino adds. “Matos was already dead and on the Doc’s table before Mitch went out jogging.”
There are nods around the room. Stanfield is picking at a fingernail. He looks lost in space, extremely uncomfortable. He keeps wiping sweat off his brow and drying his fingers on his pants. Marino asks Jilison McIntyre to tell us exactly what happened.
“Mitch likes to run midday, before lunch,” she begins. “He went out close to noon and didn’t come back. This was yesterday. I went out in the car looking for him around two o’clock and when there was still no sign, I called the police, and of course, our guys. ATF and FBI. Agents came in from the field and started looking, too. Nothing. We know he was spotted in the area of the law school.”
“Marshall-Wythe?” I inquire, taking notes.
“Right, at William and Mary. Mitch usually ran the same route, from here along Route Five, then over on Francis Street and to South Henry, then back. Usually an hour or so.”
“Do you remember what he was wearing and what he might have had with him?” I ask her.
“Red warm-up suit and a vest. He had on a down vest over his warm-up. Uh, gray, North Face. And his butt pack. He never went anywhere without his butt pack.”
“He had a gun in it?” Marino assumes.
She nods, swallowing, face stoical. “Gun, money, portable phone. House keys.”
“He wasn’t wearing the down jacket when his body was found,” Marino informs her. “No butt pack. Describe the key.”
“Keys,” she corrects him. “He has the key for here, for the townhouse, and his car key on a steel ring.”
“What does the key for your townhouse look like?” I ask, and I feel Jay staring at me.
“Just a brass key. A normal-looking key.”
“He had a stainless steel key in the pocket of his running shorts,” I say. “It has two-three-three written on it in permanent Magic Marker.”
Agent McIntyre frowns. She knows nothing about it. “Well now, that’s really strange. I have no idea what that key might be to,” she replies.
“So we gotta figure he was taken somewhere,” Marino says. “He was tied up, gagged, tortured, then driven to Richmond and dumped in the street in one of our lovely projects, Mosby Court.”
“Hot drug-trafficking area?” Pruett asks him.
“Oh yeah. The projects are big into economic development. Guns and drugs. You bet.” Marino knows his turf. “But the other nice thing about places like Mosby Court is people don’t see nothing. You want to dump a body, don’t matter if fifty people were standing right there. They get temporary blindness, amnesia.”
“Someone familiar with Richmond, then,” Stanfield finally offers an opinion.
McIntyre’s eyes are wide. She has a stricken expression on her face. “I didn’t know about torture,” she says to me. Her professional resolve shivers like a tree about to fall.
I describe Barbosa’s burns and go into detail about the burns Matos had, as well. I talk about the evidence of ligatures and gags, and then Marino talks about the eyebolts in the motel room ceiling. All present get the picture. Everyone can envision what was done to these two men. We have to suspect the same person or persons are involved in their deaths. But this doesn’t begin to tell us who or why. We don’t know where Barbosa was taken, but I have an idea.
“When you go back there with Vander,” I say to Marino, “maybe you ought to check out the other rooms, see if another one has eyebolts in the ceiling.”
“Will do. Got to go back there anyway.” He glances at his watch.
“Today?” Jay asks him.
“Yup.”
“You got any reason to think Mitch was drugged like the first guy?” Pruett asks me.
“I didn’t find any needle marks,” I reply. “But we’ll see what comes up on his tox results.”
“Jesus,” McIntyre mutters.
“And both of them wet their pants?” Stanfield says. “Doesn’t that happen when people die? They lose control of their bladders and wet their pants? Just a natural thing, in other words?”
“I can’t say losing urine is rare. But the first man, Matos, took his clothes off. He was nude. It appears he wet his pants and then disrobed.”
“So that was before he got burned,” Stanfield says.
“I would assume so. He wasn’t burned through his clothing,” I reply. “It’s very possible both victims lost control of their bladders due to fear, panic. You get scared badly enough, you wet your pants.”
“Jesus,” McIntyre mutters again.
“And you see some asshole screwing eyebolts in the ceiling and plugging in a heat gun, that’s enough to scare the piss right out of you,” Marino abundantly illustrates. “You know damn well what’s about to happen to you.”
“Jesus!” McIntyre blurts out. “What the fuck is this about?” Her eyes blaze.
Silence.
“Why the fuck would someone do something like that to Mitch? And it’s not like he wasn’t careful, not like he would just get in someone’s car or even get close to some stranger trying to stop him on the road.”
Stanfield says, “Makes me think of Vietnam, the way they did things to prisoners of war, tortured them to make them talk.”
Making someone talk can certainly be one reason for torture, I respond to what Stanfield has just said. “But it’s also a power rush. Some people are into torture because they get off on it.”
“You think that’s the case here?” Pruett says to me.
“I have no way of knowing.” Then I ask McIntyre, “I noticed a fishing pole when I was coming up the walk.”
Her reaction is a flicker of confusion. Then she realizes what I am talking about. “Oh, right. Mitch likes to fish.”
“Around here?”
“A creek over near College Landing Park.”
I look at Marino. That particular creek is at the edge of the wooded camping area at The Fort James Motel.
“Mitch ever mention to you the motel over there by that creek?” Marino asks her.
“I just know he liked to fish over there.”
“He know the lady who runs the joint? Bev Kiffin? And her husband? Maybe you both know him since he works for Overland?” Marino says to McIntyre.
“Well, I do know that Mitch used to talk to her boys. She has two young boys and sometimes they’d be out there fishing when Mitch was. He said he felt for them because their dad was never around. But I don’t know anybody named Kiffin at the trucking company, and I do their books.”
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