Gate 76

by Andrew Diamond

  Things started to go sour toward the end of his second tour of duty. Soldiers who served with Suggs said he had become bitter toward his commanders and the US government. They described him as combative and paranoid. Most of his army buddies attributed the changes to the stress of war, several concussions he had suffered, and a falling out with his wife back home. His friends started avoiding him, and he became increasingly isolated.

  Suggs was caught trying to ship weapons back to the US that the army had seized from local fighters in Iraq. According to Fox News, the “weapons” were just disassembled parts from a pair of semi-automatic handguns. A number of soldiers had sent home similar souvenirs, often piece by piece, to be reassembled later. The practice wasn’t all that uncommon. Suggs just happened to get caught. He was nearing the end of his enlistment, and managed to depart with a censure and an honorable discharge.

  CBS reported that Suggs was involved in an operation in which some C4 explosive went missing. The reporter speculated that Suggs may have held on to it somehow.

  Then late last night, another story broke. A couple of ATF agents caught up with Suggs unexpectedly, on a road near Kellogg, Idaho. He was in a pickup truck with another man. Suggs and his friend opened fire on the ATF agents, wounding one of them before escaping into the wilderness.

  An ATF spokesman said, “Obviously, if we had known we were going to run into him, we would not have come in with just two agents. Suggs has been on our radar for months. We know he’s dangerous.”

  When Ed called me to check in this morning, he said, “This is exactly what we were worried about, the news announcing to the world that we were after this guy. We knew they were on to Suggs because they started asking the Bureau and ATF about him. I get that they have their mission to inform, but when people’s lives are at stake, you need to keep a lid on it. Just for one day. We asked them to keep quiet on this, and they wouldn’t. Sometimes I wish these journalists would shut the hell up.” I could just see Ed shaking his head.

  “He had to know they were coming,” I said. “If he’s as paranoid as the news makes him out to be, he’d know the Feds would want to talk to him after a plane blew up with his friend on board.”

  “Maybe so,” Ed said. “But the press doesn’t need to fan the flames of a paranoid mind, or the hatred of a hater. That’s just irresponsible.”

  Then he added, “Hey, the reason I’m calling is I want you to talk to the guys in the Bureau. Lomax and Rollins. Just to meet them, so you know who you’re passing information to.”

  “What’s the point?” I said. “All the action’s in California and Idaho. We haven’t uncovered anything yet. Anyway, I already met Lomax.”

  “Well, I talked to Rollins yesterday,” Ed said. “There’s a coffee shop on Pennsylvania Avenue near the Hoover Building. Ten o’clock, you’re going to say hello. It’s always good to know who you’re working with.”

  So that’s what I’m doing in this place right now. Waiting for the two of them to show up.

  At two minutes to ten, Lomax comes through the glass doors with an older guy. Lomax looks like he had a rough night. Maybe a late date, or one too many beers. He’s got dark, puffy circles under his eyes, and he’s moving a little slow. The guy next to him looks to be in his midfifties. He’s a few inches shorter than Lomax. Maybe five foot ten, thin, with a dark red moustache and a ring of reddish-brown hair around his shiny bald pate. He has the indifferent expression of a man who’s just going through the motions, and his rumpled brown suit looks like it hasn’t been pressed in a while. It hangs off him like a hand-me-down from an older brother. I wonder if he lost a lot of weight recently, if he’d once had enough meat on him to fill out those clothes.

  Lomax sees me, and I stand as they approach the table.

  “Freddy Ferguson,” he says. “Mitch Rollins.”

  Rollins and I shake hands, and he gives me a quick once-over. Checks out my shoes, the ring finger on my left hand, my shirt, my hair, my eyes. He takes it all in quickly, and I can see the thoughts run through his dark brown eyes as he makes his detective’s notes.

  “You work with Ed,” he says. “Ed’s a good guy.”

  Lomax asks what I want. “A large coffee, black.” Rollins wants a quadruple latte. Lomax goes to the counter to place the order while Rollins and I sit.

  “He’s going stir-crazy behind that desk,” Rollins says. “He likes to be out in the field.”

  “I understand that,” I say. “I’m the same way.”

  “You get a high-profile case like this, and it’s all hands on deck.” Rollins taps his fingers absently on the table as he talks. His eyes wander from person to person, and I get the feeling he’s not all that interested in talking to me. “They throw every spare body into the investigation. There’s a lot of wasted effort. A lot of duplicated work. After a while, things settle down. We can do our jobs without all the media pressure. You used to box, huh?”

  “I did, for a while. Are you a fan?”

  He pulls his cell phone from his pocket, but he doesn’t look at it. He flips it slowly in his hand as he watches a woman walk by. “I was back in the eighties and nineties,” he says. “I stopped watching after Chavez went downhill.”

  Everything in his manner shows a lack of urgency that I’m not used to seeing at this level of law enforcement, a disengagement that tells me he’s burnt out.

  “So what sports do you keep up with now?” I ask. Lomax is over at the counter, sipping coffee and chatting up the barista. She’s a young, dark-haired woman. Maybe twenty-five. She’s making eyes at him while she fills the steel pitcher with milk. That must be for Rollins’s latte.

  “Baseball’s about my speed,” he says with a laugh. “You know, nothing happens for twenty minutes, then there’s a burst of excitement, then it all calms down again. You can tune out for half the game without missing a thing.”

  Lomax returns with the coffee. Though he seems more alert than when he first walked in, he has none of that vibrating energy I saw yesterday. I wonder how many cups it takes him to rev up. Before he takes his seat, he gives me a little slap on the shoulder and says, “We doing OK today? No violent outbursts?” His whole face lights up when he smiles.

  “No,” I say. “Sorry about yesterday. Sometimes I lose my cool.”

  “We all do,” he says. “You been following this guy Suggs?” Lomax takes two big gulps of his coffee like it’s a cold beer.

  “Just what I’ve heard in the news.”

  “Fucking nut job,” Lomax says. “The whole reason I went into this line of work was to go after guys like him. Asshole.” The coffee seems to be kicking in. His energy is picking up. He turns to Rollins and says, “Get me off of desk duty, Mitch. Put me out in the field where I can make a difference.”

  “It’s not up to me,” Rollins says. He doesn’t look at Lomax when he talks. Just stares out the window at the passers-by. “You won’t be stuck at your desk forever. It’s just timing. Our last investigation wrapped up early, and they don’t have our next gig lined up yet. So we got sucked into this bombing mess.”

  “What did you wrap up?” I ask.

  Lomax shakes his head. “Corruption case. Bunch of bullshit. You get a few disgruntled people in an organization making allegations about their coworkers, it’s all sour grapes, and then the Bureau gets called in to follow up on it. It’s like this whole thing with the passenger list. We know there’s nothing there, but we have to look into it anyway, so we can write up the report that says we did our job, turned over all the stones and found no evidence.”

  With his energy and his athletic build, I can see why Lomax would get antsy behind a desk. It’s a waste of his talents. The guy’s got the kind of charisma that inspires confidence, and that goes a long way when you’re working with people face-to-face.

  “Yeah,” I say. “You seem like the type who’d rather be in the middle of the action.”

  “You read that right,” Lomax says. “You know wh
at my take on you was? First impression?”

  “What?”

  “That you’re the type who could go either way.”

  “What do you mean?” I say. “Like just as happy at a desk as in the field?”

  “No. I mean like, you could be on either side of the law.”

  He waits for me to respond, but I’m not sure what to say. I wonder if he got a hold of the same police report Ed saw. It makes sense he’d want to look into me after yesterday.

  “Am I wrong?” he says, chiding me with that big white smile. His teeth are perfectly straight, like a toothpaste commercial.

  “No. You’re not wrong,” I say. “I’ve been on both sides. This is act two for me. Act one is what prevented me from ever getting a job like yours.”

  He nods and says, “You want to cut to the chase?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, talk about why we’re here. You have any info you want us to dig into? That’s what this meeting’s supposed to be about, right?”

  Lomax is getting to the bottom of his coffee, and his knee is starting to bounce again. Rollins, slouching in his rumpled suit, stares blankly out the window.

  Do I have anything I want them to dig into?

  The face of Anna Brook flashes in my mind. Not the stoic face from the security line, or the determined face of the woman on her way to the Chicago gate, but the terrified face that looked over her shoulder as she fled onto the gangway. All of a sudden that feeling is back. The sinking, churning feeling in my gut that I felt as a premonition when I first saw her.

  Sometimes I can’t make myself talk, even when I know it’s the right thing to do. It always made Miriam angry. But then, she made me angry too.

  “No,” I say. “I got nothing.”

  “Well, I don’t either,” Lomax says. “So instead of wasting our time…” He stands and drops his business card onto the table. “Just give me a yell if you find something. You ready, Mitch?”

  Rollins gets up slowly and shakes my hand again. “Nice to meet you, Freddy.”

  He doesn’t leave a card.

  The trip over here from my apartment, plus the twenty minutes we just wasted, plus the trip back to the office—that’ll add up to one nice round hour on the bill we send to the airline. It’s a line item on a corporate invoice, and an hour of my life that I won’t get back. If I tack on an extra twenty bucks for a cab ride up to Second District Police headquarters on Idaho Avenue, will anyone care? The name Julia Brook gave me, Butterfly Talent Management, is in their territory.

  12

  Butterfly Talent Management is Kim Hahn’s latest DC venture. Before that she ran an outfit called Angels by the Hour, which, according to her tax returns, was in the business of “party equipment rentals.” She has a reputation as a fortress of secrecy. According to my friend up at Second District, no one can get information out of her.

  She lives on P Street, west of Wisconsin Avenue, near the university. Her neighbors know her from the public hearings of the zoning commission, where she’s the voice of preservation for historic Georgetown. No one can build an addition to their house or remodel their storefront without having to answer some pointed questions from her. Outside of the zoning commission meetings, she doesn’t talk. Period. The DC cops have an ongoing bet to see who will be the first to get more than two sentences out of her. Whenever they come across a suspect who won’t talk even after hours of interrogation, they say they “got Hahned.”

  She has an office above a coffee shop on N Street. My friend at Second District told me she usually stops in there around four p.m. to pick up an ice coffee before she heads upstairs. So I sit at a table by the barista, nursing a coffee and looking through recent death records on my laptop while I wait for her to show.

  At about ten of four, she walks in. She’s short, maybe five foot four, and plump, with a big exaggerated bust. She’s wearing a black designer skirt suit—I don’t know what label—but well cut, elegant, and expensive. She has a black leather purse with a gold snap that matches the suit. The jacket dips down to show her cleavage, centered perfectly between the lapels. If she’s wearing a blouse under there, I can’t see it. Her black hair is tied up in a bun on top of her head. Her sparse eyebrows are accentuated with pencil, drawn upward above the outsides of her eyes, giving her a look of severity, like she’s about to get angry. She has gold hoops in her ears, gold rings on her fingers, a gold watch on one wrist, and a gold bracelet on the other. I can’t tell how old she is. Undo the facelift and she’s at least fifty. Maybe fifty-five. Boobs like that on a woman her age should be down around her waist.

  She picks up an ice coffee, and on her way out the door, she shoots me a sideways glance. She seems to know who to watch out for.

  I follow her outside, and she turns immediately to the next door on the sidewalk and pulls a set of keys from her purse.

  “Ms. Hahn,” I say. “You mind if I ask a few questions?”

  She doesn’t respond or look at me, just turns the key in the lock and opens the door and goes up the wooden staircase. She doesn’t try to shut me out, so I follow her in.

  At the top of the stairs, she unlocks the deadbolt and goes into an office. Again, she leaves the door open, and I follow her in.

  The place is sparse but elegant: a glass desk with a swivel lamp and a phone, a black swivel office chair, a black leather sofa. A simple rug covers most of the wood floor, off-white with a thick black border. She can’t have many people in here or that rug would be dirtier. The walls are decorated with ancient Chinese prints framed in black—spare, ink-drawn scenes of misty mountains and stylized trees. A row of windows looks over the street, and in the far corner, bamboo grows from a round black iron pot.

  She sets her ice coffee and her purse on the desk, takes a seat in the swivel chair, and picks up the phone.

  “Ms. Hahn?” I say.

  She dials and waits.

  “I want to ask you about a girl.”

  She says into the phone, “There’s someone here who needs to be removed.” Her voice, accented in Korean, is scratchy and severe, like those upward-slanting eyebrows. She hangs up the desk phone, pulls a cell phone from her purse, and thumbs through it while she sips her coffee through the straw.

  “Can you tell me about Crystal?”

  “Crystal is delicate,” she says absently. “Breaks easily.” She doesn’t look up from her phone.

  “You know her real name?”

  “You’re talking about a person?” she asks. “Or a wine glass?”

  “I’m talking about a person. Crystal. She used to work here. Now she’s dead.”

  “Mmm. Not my fault.” She sips her coffee.

  “I didn’t say it was. What about Cat? She also worked for you.”

  “Cat will scratch you if you get too close,” she says.

  “Wait, are we talking about a person?”

  “Maybe cat broke crystal,” she says. “Cats on shelves, always swatting things off.” She’s still scrolling through messages on her phone.

  I take a long breath and let it out slowly, trying not to lose my patience. “Are you interested in helping their families?”

  “What help is there for the dead?” she asks indifferently as she lays the phone face-down on the desk.

  “So you do know them?”

  “Did I say that?” Her eyes are a soft, deep brown, but they show an immovable stubbornness and iron resolve.

  “Well, you know they’re dead,” I say.

  “You said they were dead.”

  “I said Crystal was dead.”

  “Mmm. Crystal breaks easy.” She picks up her coffee and takes another sip.

  “Jesus Christ.” I said that under my breath. This woman would try anyone’s patience. “OK, look, I’m going to show you some photos.” I open up my laptop and the screen flicks on and then right back off. I hit the power button, and the screen lights up again with a message saying I’m runnin
g on reserve battery power. OK, fine. Just keep working for a few more minutes.

  I click an image in the Gate 76 folder. “Can you tell me if you know any of these people?”

  I turn the screen toward her so she’s looking at the monitor and I’m behind it watching her face.

  The first image is a picture of Anna from the security camera at the airport. I cropped it so it’s just her. You can’t see the guy holding her arm. This gets no reaction.

  “You know her?” I ask.

  She doesn’t respond. So far, I’m getting Hahned.

  I hit the right arrow key, and the next photo slides onto the screen. It’s the tall guy, her escort in the security line. I watch her face for a long time, but again, no reaction. “What about him?” I ask. “You seen him before?”

  Nothing.

  I hit the arrow key, slide to the next photo. Another one of Anna. No reaction.

  I hear heavy boots clomping up the stairs, and the narrow wooden steps creak beneath the weight. I assume it’s a man. A big, heavy one.

  I don’t have any more photos related to the investigation—none for her, anyway—but at this point I just want to see if I can get any reaction out of her at all.

  I keep hitting the right arrow, every two seconds. Click, click, click, staring at her eyes the whole time. She doesn’t react to any of it. I almost want to take her pulse to see if she’s still alive.

  Click, click, click, a little faster now. She’s actually focusing on the images as they slide in. I can see that. But I don’t even know what I’m showing her at this point. The passenger manifest, maybe. Or the seating chart. Stills I pulled out of the funeral video, or photos from news articles about the crash.

  The guy reaches the top of the steps, lets out a sigh, and says a tired “Goddamn!” Both the sigh and the voice sound familiar.

  I keep going through the photos. Click, click, click and then—what was that? Her pupils just flickered. Dilated for a split second, like fear, then contracted, like hatred. The rest of her face shows nothing.