by Dick Rosano
Pitch cradled both left and right handles in the backhoe’s cockpit and maneuvered the boom and bucket to pull dirt from the hole he was digging.
They were only digging test footings on that day, getting a feel for the geology that might not be apparent from the drilling that had been performed by the architect’s design crew. These trenches were roughly where the final outline would be but were important at this stage to prove that the plan for the building was properly arranged and centered. When he was satisfied that each test footing was coming along and didn’t need reorientation, Raul would direct Pitch to focus on certain cross points and corners, digging his bucket deeper into the earth to establish where the pilings would carry the weight of the building and its roof.
Raul and Pitch communicated with hand signals, with the foreman directing the digging and telling Pitch to move the backhoe as needed for the project.
The digging went on for over an hour with hand signals dominating the interaction between the men. Haley and Faheem walked back and forth carrying supplies in the din of the backhoe motor.
Then, Raul’s hand went up, and he jerked it quickly, pushing his palm out and toward Pitch several times. After a few seconds, he swung both arms over his head and peered into the hole that the backhoe had by then dug to about five feet deep. Raul looked again, bent over the edge, before swiping his index finger across his throat as Pitch killed the engine. The suddenness of the quiet made Haley and Faheem stop and look over at them.
“Get me that shovel,” Raul said, holding his hand out but without taking his eyes off the ditch that he was leaning over.
Faheem retrieved a shovel and handed it to the foreman. Raul leaned forward; the long handle was just enough to allow him to poke at a bundle of faded red cloth at the bottom of the hole. It was wadded up; some of the roll was exposed by the backhoe but some was still buried in the wall of the ditch to the left. Raul lowered himself into the shallower trench beside this corner hole and got a two-handed grip on the shovel. He poked at the cloth bundle and stabbed at the dirt wall that enclosed the still-buried part of it.
“Get another shovel and help me,” he said to no one in particular.
Haley was the first to react, retrieving another shovel and dropping down into the trench that tailed away from the corner hole opposite where Raul was standing. Together, they poked the pointed tips of the shovels at the cloth bundle and at the dirt which held it in place. After about twenty minutes, they had freed the roll from its entombment and rolled it into the trench to inspect it.
Faheem and Pitch stood on the ground above, watching the exhumation of this bundle. Now that it was free, they could tell that it looked like an old blanket.
Raul grabbed at one corner of the blanket and pulled. As the entire roll started to come apart, a skull rolled out at his feet.
“Holy shit!” said Faheem, a man never known to resort to curse words.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
April 19
Champions Bar
I walked through the lobby of the Marriott, heading for Champions. Alana and I had had a very enjoyable evening, even with work talk, and I had sent her back home by taxi. She lived on the outskirts of the city but worked inside Vienna itself. As I let her into the taxi, I offered to escort her home.
“No, don’t. I’ll be alright.”
I guess someone who wears a Glock to work probably packs some heat in her purse at night, so I assented.
A light touch of the hands and a small kiss on the cheek would have to be enough.
But the time spent with Alana left me unfulfilled, if that’s the way to put it. So, when I got back to the hotel, I walked to Champions Bar to have a nightcap.
Chi-Chi was sitting at the bar.
“Wandering around our beautiful city, huh?” he asked.
I hadn’t been wandering, and I was sure he knew as much. But I was also curious how he knew I would be here.
“The desk clerk told me you went to Barfly’s, and that you would be back later.”
“Not a very discrete desk clerk. I thought they were supposed to keep their guests’ activities personal and private.”
“He banks at DFR.”
“I see.”
“Secrets don’t keep well in this city, Mr. Priest.”
“So, what brings you here?”
Chi-Chi slid a flash drive across the bar toward me.
“What’s that?”
“What?” was his evasive answer.
“You know,” I said, with some little concern in my voice, “the last time someone tampered with my computer, I got a bunch of porn and evil stuff put on there. Probably from a flash drive that looked a lot like this one.”
“You had your eyes closed then, didn’t you?”
I had to nod as Chi-Chi pressed the flash drive closer.
“What’s on here?”
“Well, the keys that I gave you would tell you, but I figured you wouldn’t be able to open up each and every drawer without drawing attention.”
I had to agree, and still hadn’t decided how to do it.
“So, I looked into it myself. I took a chance on one drawer, based on the off-book ledger I had…”
“Wait a minute. I thought there was no ledger, off-book or otherwise, or inventory of those.”
“There’s always a list somewhere, Mr. Priest. Always. Anyway, I took a chance on the one I thought would matter most to you. I took some pictures – pretty sharp ones I must say. The files are on there,” he said pointing to the drive on the bar.
After a drink and some small talk, I excused myself, slipped the flash drive into my pocket and left the bar. I returned to my room, retrieved my new laptop from the room safe, opened it, and inserted the flash drive.
Sure enough, there were files on it. Not as disturbing as the video that I had witnessed earlier, but still incriminating.
There were photographs of young kids, teenagers, drinking and apparently having sex. There were three photos of a young girl and a boy passed out on a bed. Even Chi-Chi’s copy of the photos made them look old. From the bright reflection on some surfaces in the pictures, I figured it was taken with a flash camera. That was another indication that the pics were old since most modern cameras – or, let’s face it, cell phones – don’t need to rely on a flash.
I clicked another file open and saw a grainy photograph of a bundle wrapped up like an Egyptian mummy. It was in the bottom of a pit and the light from the flash camera illuminated the red fabric that was rolled up, but the rest of the picture faded into blackness, as if it was taken at night.
There were some scanned copies of letters and other written material. One sheet was blank except for a letterhead that mentioned Bindemann Preparatory School. I had heard of it; a rich kid high school outside of Washington. Another item looked like a page from a five-by-eight pad with some handwriting on it. Something about remembering old friends. There was a newspaper clipping without a date; only one paragraph, talked about a missing girl, then the rest of the article was torn off.
I let the images tumble around in my head and wondered whether these were images from the person that Pendleton sent me here to look for. Then I wondered how Chi-Chi had divined my purpose and zeroed in on the drawer that he said would matter to me most. Who was he working for?
The next morning, I went to the concierge lounge for breakfast and picked up a copy of the thin American newspaper at the door to the lounge. Over my usual breakfast of toast and black coffee – not as good as the Julius Meinl Genuss, I might add – I flipped through the few pages of the paper.
When I finished the coffee and stood to leave, I folded the paper back again and intended to leave it at the desk for someone else. Then I saw something on the back cover that caught my interest.
There was a three-paragraph report about recovery of a body outside a private high school in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. There was construction on the site and the crew stumbled across the remains while digging footings for a new
building. The identity of the body hadn’t been determined yet, but the article said the authorities were trying to pin down the age of the skeleton and the approximate year of death, and then they would be poring through the missing persons’ reports from that period of time.
I don’t believe in coincidences. And I didn’t believe that I would find a box of old photos of a boy and girl in bed and another photo that looked like a grave with a bundle at the bottom of it on the same day I read about the discovery of a skeleton buried in an unmarked grave. Both in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Both at a private high school. Although the brief news account that I had read didn’t identify the school, it did say that it was a private high school. And I had the stationary from the safe deposit box that referred to Bindemann.
I had some immediate plans for the morning, including another visit to DFR, but instead I returned to my room to makes some calls. The first one didn’t begin well.
“Do you have any bloody idea what time it is?”
“Yes, Arthur, but I knew you wouldn’t mind.”
“Well, I do, you annoying little fuck.”
Arthur Winthrop was a trusted friend and colleague, despite the irreverent upbraiding he dished out when I called him in the morning. I was on Vienna time and Arthur was on Washington time. He worked in London but had just flown to the States three days earlier on business and had obviously not time-adjusted for jetlag yet. He had great connections with intelligence services on both sides of the pond and I hoped that he could fill me in on details of the excavation I had read about.
“What’s going on in Bethesda?” I asked.
It was 3 a.m. in D.C. and I could hear Arthur switching on the light and huffing slightly as he pushed back the blanket to rise from bed.
“Bloody hell!” came after something that sounded like his glasses falling onto the nightstand. “You Yanks are sure impatient.”
I had to smile as I visualized Arthur pulling his slightly paunchy frame out of bed and adjusting the steel-rimmed glasses on his nose.
“What’s this about Bethesda?” he asked finally.
“A skeleton. They found it outside some private school.”
“A skeleton, you say. Private school? You mean like for rich kids?”
“Yeah, probably,” I opined, although I didn’t have much information. “Do you know anything about it?”
“Haven’t heard of it, no. Why do you care? By the way, Darren, where are you?”
“Vienna.”
“You’re in Virginia? Don’t you believe in sleep?”
“No, not Virginia,” I replied. “Austria.”
“Well, that explains it. That and the fact that you never could tell time worth a pauper’s piss.”
I didn’t know if Arthur had any real enemies, but I smiled knowing that I wasn’t one.
“I read in this four-page paper handed out in the Marriott lounge about a construction site where they found a body, well what was left of one, in a pit they were digging for a new wing at the school.”
“Why do you care about this, anyway?” he asked.
“Hard to say,” I responded, although I could put together some facts that I didn’t want to discuss over the phone yet. “I think I may have bumped into something and hoped you could fill me in on some details.”
Arthur paused and let out a sigh before answering.
“You do know that I’m working, right, Darren?”
“Of course, Arthur. You’re always working.”
“And not just drinking wine.” He put particular emphasis on the last word.
“Yes, at least not at this hour,” I said with an audible smirk.
“Humph!” Then a pause. “I’ll see what I can get,” then Arthur clicked off and probably went back to sleep. I just hoped that he would remember our conversation when he woke up later.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
May 16
Bethesda, Fifty Years Earlier
Mason held the sharpened pencil tight between the fingers of his right hand, his left hand pressing so firmly down on the pages of the blank journal that his knuckles were white.
The recent Doors song, “Light My Fire,” played softly in the background.
“Come’on baby light my fire.
“Try to set the night on fi-ire, yeah!”
The words drifted from the radio past Mason’s ears.
“The time for hesitation's through
“There's no time to wallow in the mire.”
He was scared. He should be, although looking over his shoulder wouldn’t help. He was in his own house, in his own bedroom, and there were no “bumps in the night.” Just the terror of his own conscience.
A drop fell onto his writing hand. Sweat from his forehead, a tear that broke free from his eye, or watery dribble from his nose, he wasn’t sure. It slipped over the taut muscle in the crook between his thumb and forefinger and dripped down onto the page. With a swipe of his hand, he smeared the drop across the virgin paper.
Mason had only rendered a few words on the top line: “It couldn’t have happened.” But now he had smudged the words and had to begin again.
He owed it to her.
His hand shook gently, and the skittish movement was reflected in his handwriting. He wanted to write everything down, even identifying the guys he knew, but he couldn’t. He was still afraid of them.
“They’ll know who they are, but the police won’t,” he thought.
Whether that gave him solace or just a veil to hide behind, he wasn’t sure.
But on this evening, in his own bedroom, in his own house in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., Mason was confessing in the pages of the journal that he filled with a hasty chronology. It was his way of unburdening himself.
Occasionally, he heard someone – either his mother or one of his sisters – padding down the hallway outside his bedroom on the second floor of their house. Each time, he closed the book and waited for the sounds to recede. Then, he would resume his writing. He was well into his story and had revealed much of what happened that night, but he felt that he needed to write about what they did after, and who was there.
We left…
For a moment, his hand paused, resting the tip of the pencil on the newly turned page.
We left Axle at the party. He was too drunk to be of much help. When I saw him the next day, he was hungover but otherwise seemed normal. I asked him what he thought of the girl he was in bed with and, at first, he kinda went blank. Like he didn’t remember. A few seconds later, an uncertain smile spread across his face as he rubbed his head.
“Oh, yeah, her!” he replied, but it wasn’t very convincing. He tried to have sex with her and wants me to think he did. But, now, he can’t even remember. I could tell he was faking it. I hoped that he wouldn’t ask me what I meant, because then I would have to tell him everything.
When I saw…
Again, he paused. He lifted the pencil to his face, its tip just inches from his eyes, as if he was looking for answers in the wood and lead cylinder. “Perhaps, the pencil would do this for me,” he thought. Then, he returned the instrument to the page and resumed writing.
When I saw Miller…
The name came out of nowhere and had no meaning. But Mason could still see the boy’s face and was fear-struck and unable to put his name onto the page.
When I saw Miller in the hallway at school, his memory was clear, and so was mine. He even had an odd look of triumph on his face. It was completely contrary to what I was feeling. Something horrible had happened the night before. Axle didn’t remember any of it, and Miller seemed pleased with himself.
Mason slipped a bit on that. His friend’s real nickname was Axle, a moniker from sports. He stared at it for a moment, bit his lip, and left it there.
They – Miller and Axle – had sent me down to the kitchen for more beer as they played with the girl. By the time I returned, Axle was passed out on the bed and she was lying next to him, staring up glassy-eyed at the ceiling. S
he didn’t look good. I knew right away that something wasn’t right. I threw the beer cans on the bed and heard Axle let out a drunken snort, then I went around to the other side and knelt down next to the girl. Her eyes were open, and I didn’t feel any breath at her mouth. I put my fingers next to her neck and Miller – he was standing at the foot of the bed – just snarled at me.
“She’s dead, you idiot. What are you doing?” Miller said.
Axle must have forced himself on the girl before he passed out. I don’t know exactly what he did to her, but his pants were unzipped, and her underwear was wrapped around her right ankle.
I was too scared to run. By the time I thought I could make a decision, Miller had already taken control. His plan was to bury the girl without calling the police. His plan scared the shit out of me, coming almost like it was from a dark spot in hell. But I was terrified of what was going to happen next and I didn’t have a plan of my own. So, I followed along.
The next day, Miller passed by me in the hall at school. He held a manila envelope in his hand, which he slapped against his thigh as he walked.
“Pictures,” was all he said, and he laughed. I knew what he meant. He had taken pictures of Axle and the girl on the bed that night. And now he had developed them. He had proof that Axle had raped the girl and somehow killed her in the act. I didn’t need pictures; it was all too clear to me. She with her panties pulled down and her skirt pulled up. Axle with his pants unzipped.
I could feel cold beads of sweat on my forehead as Miller looked at me.
“Whatcha doin’?” he asked.
I didn’t know whether to look at him.
“Nothin’.”
“You came back to the room at the wrong time, Mason.”