A Simple Act of Violence

by R.J. Ellory

Miller glanced back toward the corridor, looked to the window, and then he carefully opened the envelope.

  It was the same picture. On the back were written the same words. Christmas ’82. But this time John Robey and Catherine Sheridan were not the only faces that looked back at him. The photograph beneath Sheridan’s bed had been cropped from this one. Here there were five faces, and he recognized all but one.

  Miller knew who the man to Robey’s left was immediately. James Killarney, the Arlington FBI representative. And behind and to the right of Catherine, the unmistakable face of Judge Walter Thorne. They were all younger. But Miller knew who they were, except one. A dark-haired man standing beside Killarney, smiling as if this was summer vacation, a fishing trip . . . .

  Miller frowned. Could this be right? What the hell did this mean? What in God’s name did Judge Thorne have to do with this?

  The FBI and the Justice Department knew the identity of Catherine Sheridan and John Robey? Killarney had come down to brief them on the Ribbon Killer investigation, and yet he had known Catherine Sheridan personally?

  Miller tucked the picture back into the envelope and put it into his pocket. He went through the desk drawers. A couple of pencils, a rusted thumbtack, some more dead flies. He looked beneath the carpet as best he could, behind the file cabinet, ran his fingers along the edge where it met the floor to see if anything was hidden beneath.

  There was nothing.

  He left quickly, did his best to push the broken panel back into place from the inside, and then returned to the street.

  Miller looked back at the building from the opposite sidewalk. There was no movement behind the windows, no indication that he’d been seen or was being watched. But that, as he now understood, meant nothing at all. There were eyes everywhere, and they possessed universal pivots, and they watched ceaselessly, and they saw everything.

  He headed back the way he’d come.

  It was then that he saw him again. No question.

  The raincoat man.

  Sure of it. Sure as living and breathing. Passing by the end of the street and turning left at the junction.

  Miller went after him, at first a rapid walk and then he was jogging past Freedom Plaza. The man did not look back, did not glance over his shoulder, and when he turned left onto Pennsylvania Avenue Miller speeded up. He knew that by the time he reached the corner the man would be gone, but he was scared, and he did not like what he was feeling, and in that moment he believed it would have been better to face the man than to stay back and do nothing.

  Just as he’d predicted, when he turned the corner the raincoat man was nowhere to be seen. He wondered if a car had been waiting for him. He wondered if there were other people, watching him through high-powered binoculars even now; people who knew he had broken into the offices of United Trust Incorporated Finance and stolen a photograph.

  Miller stopped to catch his breath. Was he now imagining things? He asked himself how many men in Washington wore dark suits and tan-colored raincoats. Did he see the man already running and assume that he was escaping?

  Was he losing his mind?

  People passed by; Miller looked at none of them directly, saw them all as one faceless wave of humanity, and then he retraced his steps and made his way to the car.

  He drove northeast towards the familiar part of the city, past the FBI Building, Ford’s Theater, through Chinatown and onto New York Avenue. He could feel the photograph in his jacket pocket when he turned the steering wheel and his upper arm pressed against his body.

  James Killarney was in this. And Thorne. Judge Thorne. Was he supposed to talk to him? What the hell did it mean?

  Miller wondered where Judge Thorne would be. In court? In chambers? All judges had an office in Judiciary Square near the Verizon Center. Judiciary Square was no more than three or four blocks away. Miller slowed up and pulled the car over to the side of the road. He looked at the photograph again. The words on the back were printed in block caps. There was no point guessing who might have written them. He had a photograph and a name: Donald Carvalho.

  Miller drove down Sixth and took a left onto F Street. He walked the remainder of the way, past the National Building Museum and down to the corner. In the precinct there was a directory of judges’ offices for the Square. He had spoken with Judge Thorne on a couple of occasions, the standard arraignments and court appearances. Thorne would be familiar with Miller’s recent IAD investigation, the small storm of publicity that it had created. Beyond that, Thorne would know as much as Miller regarding this current investigation. Thorne had received copies of all of their reports. Miller wondered if Thorne was an ally or an enemy. Was he being told to speak to him or investigate him?

  There was no way of knowing, aside from going up there and finding the man.

  He located the judicial administrative office. He was asked about the nature of his business. He told the receptionist it related to an outstanding warrant, and he waited while the judge was paged. The receptionist told Miller that the judge was in his office but unable to meet with him. Did he wish to make an appointment?

  ‘Could you just check with him if he can answer some questions about United Trust?’ Miller said.

  The receptionist smiled understandingly. ‘He really is very busy,’ she said.

  ‘I know,’ Miller replied. ‘I appreciate that, but if you could just check with him—’

  The receptionist called through to Judge Thorne’s office, spoke with his assistant, waited a moment while the message was relayed. The receptionist frowned, nodded her head, said, ‘Okay, I’ll tell him.’

  She looked at Miller, the understanding smile gone. ‘You’re to wait here,’ she said. ‘Someone is coming down to get you.’

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  Miller waited, apprehensive, his pulse quickening. A cool sweat broke out on the back of his neck. For a moment he wondered if he shouldn’t ask to sit down.

  He did not wait long. A middle-aged man appeared, smartly-dressed in a charcoal suit, white shirt, dark blue and white polka dot tie. They all looked the same, these men, eminently forgettable, and when he asked Miller to relinquish his gun, said it would be kept safe for his return, showed Miller toward the outer door without ever introducing himself - without offering an explanation for the sudden availability of Judge Thorne - these things simply contributed further to Miller’s anxiety and unease.

  ‘Judge Thorne does not have a great deal of time,’ the man told Miller as they walked down to a building at the end of the street. There, he punched a number into the external security box. A buzzer sounded, the door was unlocked; Miller followed the man inside.

  The inner hallway smelled like a library, took Miller’s thoughts to the Carnegie, the books that Catherine Sheridan had marked; he thought of the day after her murder when he and Roth had gone there to speak with Julia Gibb, the small note she’d made in the hope that it might be helpful. He considered the beginning of this thing, his complete lack of awareness of where this thing would take him: here. Nine days after her murder she had brought him here, to the private offices of Judge Walter Thorne, a highly respected and very intelligent man; a man slated for the United States Supreme Court, perhaps the Senate.

  Miller was instructed to stand in the reception area for a moment. He did as he was asked, then, in less than a minute, he was shown into a luxurious office, ceiling-high bookshelves to the right, a pair of French windows to the left, and told that Judge Thorne would be with him shortly.

  Miller drew aside the lace drape that obscured the view of the yard. The French windows overlooked a walled, neatly manicured yard prepared for the winter, in its center a small marble urn flanked by a pair of intricate wrought-iron benches. He heard the door close gently behind him.

  He turned, and Judge Walter Thorne stood there, smiling.

  ‘When it’s warm I sit out there,’ he said. ‘Also when I don’t wish for my conversations to be overheard . . . not that it makes a great deal of difference I’m sure
. I imagine that if someone wished to eavesdrop on me they could do it anyplace at all.’

  Miller estimated that Walter Thorne was in his early sixties. He was around five-foot-nine or ten, but the character and authority in his face gave him the presence of someone much taller. There was something about Thorne that communicated a sense of importance.

  ‘You are lucky to be alive,’ was the first thing that Walter Thorne told Robert Miller.

  Miller frowned.

  ‘Don’t be naïve, Detective Miller . . . don’t tell me you didn’t realize that the officer who died on Friday evening was supposed to be you?’

  ‘What?’ Miller felt his knees start to give. He took a step backwards.

  ‘I credited you with a greater understanding of what was happening here,’ Thorne said. He smiled, indicated a chair by the windows. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Sit down. Let me get you a brandy.’

  Miller raised his hand.

  ‘What? No brandy? But you’re not on duty, detective . . . my understanding is that you have been liberated from this investigation, free to do with your time as you wish . . .’

  ‘The case was taken off us by the FBI.’

  Thorne smiled. ‘The case was taken off you by James Killarney. The FBI and James Killarney are not necessarily the same thing.’

  Miller opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came to him. He didn’t understand what Thorne was saying. He thought of the photograph in his pocket, but felt it better not to reveal his hand before he understood the game.

  Thorne busied himself with brandy snifters and a decanter. He turned to face Miller, a glass in each hand. ‘This is better than brandy,’ he said. ‘This is a ’29 Armagnac, very good indeed . . .’

  Miller took the glass, drank it straight down, felt the rush of it filling his chest.

  Thorne raised his eyebrows. ‘That, Detective Miller, is not the way you drink a 1929 Armagnac.’

  Miller couldn’t look at the man. He looked, instead, at his own hands, the way they were visibly shaking.

  ‘You have come a little closer than anyone would have wished,’ Thorne said quietly. ‘I receive word from the desk that you wish to discuss a warrant. Then I receive word that you want to discuss United Trust.’ Thorne looked at him, his expression one of understanding. ‘You are a man out of your depth, Detective Miller, and the very best advice I can give you at this point is to leave my office, take your car, drive home, and get some sleep. Go back to work in a couple of days and forget that you ever heard of John Robey or Catherine Sheridan, or any of these other people that may or may not have been connected with this thing.’

  ‘This thing—’ Miller began.

  ‘This - thing - is what we called a sacred monster.’ Thorne smiled benevolently, looked like he knew exactly what Miller was going through.

  Miller’s eyes widened. He’d heard the expression before. John Robey had used the self-same phrase.

  ‘Monstre sacré,’ he said, using the French. ‘Our Frankenstein. ’ He smiled broadly now, as if suddenly realizing the irony of everything. ‘One of our many Frankensteins,’ he added. He held the snifter in his hand and swirled it before raising it to his lips and sipping. ‘I would offer you another drink but it is very, very expensive and you don’t appreciate it.’

  Miller leaned to his right and set the empty glass down on the table. ‘I don’t understand what is going on here . . .’

  ‘And I don’t know that you ever will,’ Thorne replied. ‘Fact of the matter is that there are so many parts to this, so many different viewpoints and understandings of how this thing has happened, that I don’t know that anyone has all the information - except perhaps John Robey. Perhaps out of all of us, John Robey is the one who knows the most.’

  ‘All of us?’ Miller asked. ‘You’re involved in this?’

  ‘I use us in the loosest sense. I include myself only because I have been aware of this thing for many, many years. It is not something that anyone wants to face. Many of the people who started this are now dead, and the vast majority of those who got any kind of inkling as to what was going on were summarily dispatched—’

  ‘Dispatched? Or murdered? Is that what you mean when you say dispatched? You’re talking about all these people who’ve been murdered, aren’t you?’

  ‘People? What people are these?’

  ‘The ones that Catherine Sheridan wrote in the books that she returned to the library.’

  Thorne frowned. ‘I don’t know what you mean, detective . . . what books?’

  ‘Her and John Robey . . . she took some books back to the library on the morning of her death. We have them at the Second Precinct and we’ve found notations all the way through them . . . initials and dates, you know? We started working through them, trying to find out who all these people were.’

  ‘John Robey,’ Thorne said quietly, almost to himself. ‘To think that after all this time . . .’

  ‘They are names, aren’t they, the initials and dates in the book? We’ve already started going through them, cross-referencing them against missing persons reports—’

  Thorne raised his hand. ‘Enough, detective. There is no need for me to be apprised of all the numerous details of your investigation. People have died. This I understand. People have been dying for twenty years over this thing—’

  ‘What thing? What are you talking about?’

  Thorne was silent for a moment, smiling as if granting indulgence to a whim. He walked to the French windows. For a while he stood with his back to Miller, and then he turned.

  ‘Did you ever see a movie called A Few Good Men? Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, you remember?’

  ‘Yes, I know the one. I’ve seen it a couple of times.’

  ‘And what do you feel was the fundamental essence of that story, Detective Miller?’

  ‘I’m sorry . . . I don’t understand what this has to do with—’

  Thorne stopped him. ‘Indulge me, detective.’

  ‘I don’t know . . . that authority can corrupt a man . . . that people in positions of power can forget—’

  Thorne was shaking his head. ‘No, detective, quite the contrary. What the movie was trying to communicate was the complete impossibility of preventing the bigger picture. You really consider that taking one man out of the frame would make any difference at all? For every man that falls, there are three more ready to take his place.’

  ‘You’ve lost me, Judge Thorne . . . I don’t know that you and I are even talking about the same thing.’

  ‘Of course we are, detective . . . we’re talking about Nicaragua. ’

  Miller’s eyes widened visibly.

  ‘See?’ Thorne said. ‘We are talking about the same thing. We’re talking about Nicaragua, an illegal war that was funded by drug smuggling and arms dealing. We’re talking about forty tons of cocaine a month coming in on CIA-PILOTED aircraft. We’re talking about CIA operatives . . . people who by reason of their jobs actually discovered some of what really happened out there and began to understand that the cocaine and arms, and everything else that happened, was simply too profitable to stop once this imaginary war was over . . .’

  Miller rose suddenly. He wanted to leave. He was not ready to hear this. Everything that Robey had talked of was now being confirmed from the lips of a Washington judge.

  ‘Sit down, Detective Miller,’ Thorne said.

  ‘No,’ Miller said. ‘I’m out of here right now. I don’t want—’

  ‘What you want is the very least of our concerns,’ Thorne interrupted. ‘Sit down, or I will call for security and they will take you out of here and drive you to some godforsaken project building and kill you.’

  Miller could not believe what he was hearing. ‘You’re a judge . . .’

  ‘Of course I’m a judge,’ Thorne replied. ‘And you’re a Washington Police Department detective, and the simple truth is that you have walked right round the edge of something without ever really understanding what it was you were looking at. And this Joh
n Robey?’ Thorne laughed. ‘John Robey thinks he can take apart something that we spent thirty years trying to build? He is one man, Detective Miller, one man alone, and if he thinks that there is even the slightest chance of breaking this thing to pieces then he is sorely mistaken.’

  Thorne stepped away from the window and returned to the chair facing Miller’s. He sat down, made himself comfortable. ‘You want to understand what happened here?’ he asked.

  Miller looked up. ‘Understand what? That the U.S. government is still smuggling cocaine out of Nicaragua?’

  ‘Not the government my friend, the CIA.’

  ‘The CIA?’

  ‘You remember Madeleine Albright? Secretary of State?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘She said that the CIA behaved as if it had battered-child syndrome.’ Thorne laughed. ‘I don’t know that I understand precisely what battered-child syndrome is, but the sentiment communicates nevertheless, don’t you think?’

  Miller’s heart was running ahead of itself. He felt dizzy and nauseous.

  ‘You find yourself in a very compromising position, Detective Miller. You are nothing but the latest in a long line of people who, intentionally or unintentionally, have jeopardized a spectacularly profitable operation that has been keeping the CIA busy for many, many years.’

  Miller was finding it hard to breathe. He looked back at Thorne.

  ‘Robey tried it before, you know, five years ago . . . with a CIA operative named Darryl King. Darryl King was broken in about three weeks. Heroin. Crack cocaine. They could have given him anything.’

  ‘Darryl King was CIA?’

  ‘As were Catherine Sheridan and Ann Rayner . . . Ann I knew. A nice lady, used to work for Bill Walford.’

  Miller remembered the conversation in Lassiter’s office, the fact that the Rayner woman’s connection to Walford was sufficient reason to keep this thing out of the papers.

  ‘They were all CIA . . . the ones who were killed?’ Miller asked.

  ‘CIA, family of CIA, cohorts, colleagues, snitches, confidential informants . . . any of their extended family . . .’