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by Philip Kerr

Corsicana is less than two hundred miles north of Houston and I thought of driving there to straighten things out, but I stayed in Houston and told myself she’d come home when she was good and ready. After that, I only called her cell and I must have sent her about a hundred texts but she never answered. Every marriage has its ups and downs. I figured that Ruth just needed time and space to get her head around what was important in her life. There was plenty of space in Corsicana.

  A couple of times I sent Danny some books and a new Xbox game from Amazon so he’d know I was thinking of him; I knew they were delivered all right, but he didn’t reply, either—or at least Ruth didn’t allow him to send me a text or an e-mail, which struck me as mean. It was odd how quickly I felt removed from them both—almost as if they had ceased to exist, so much so that I started to question just how much I had loved them. Would I have risked the affair with Nancy Graham if I’d been the loving husband and father I ought to have been? Was that how it was for most men when their marriages end? I asked a few of the guys around the office and the consensus was that it wasn’t them who had ceased to exist, it was me. After a while, they said, you’re just some guy who used to live with them but who still pays for stuff and you might as well get used to this. But I certainly didn’t want to.

  It helped a lot that I could throw myself into my existing caseload as well as a closer investigation of what was in Bishop Coogan’s file; and in this I was lucky enough to have the assistance of Anne Goldberg, who was by general consensus the best investigative analyst in the Houston field office. As a member of our Field Intelligence Group, Anne handled the collection of raw information such as telephone records, webpages, bank details, and, of course, criminal backgrounds; as someone who’d worked as a journalist, Anne was very good at getting information out of other journalists—they’re always cagey about sharing information with the FBI. So she had several conversations with reporters from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. Her greatest skill, however, was her ability to see patterns and shapes in assembled data, and this was the main reason why brick agents like me wanted to work with her. No one could make a link chart like Anne Goldberg.

  It’s not just bits of information that we like to connect in the Bureau, it’s each other, too. There are no lone wolves at the FBI. The brick agent I worked with in DT was Helen Monaco and, like me, she was ex-Counterterrorism. Helen’s first case had been working undercover on an FBI yacht in the Mediterranean; her role had been to act as the eye candy while a sting on some al-Qaeda Arabs went down. It was plain to see how someone thought she could play that role to perfection. Helen Monaco was everyone’s fantasy desert-island partner. In an effort to play down her looks and be taken seriously, she now wore weak-prescription and possibly unnecessary glasses, little or no makeup, and severe business suits, but no one was fooled by the Betty Bureau shtick. Helen Monaco could have worn a used trash-can liner and she’d still have looked like a hot babe. Not that I entertained any intentions toward her. Besides, I had the strong impression that she’d already been warned about me by Chuck Worrall. He had my card marked as a hustler, and until now, I’d thought that was good. It helped to keep my feet on the straight and narrow for Helen to think of me as someone with whom it wasn’t safe to share an elevator car.

  Helen had one other qualification that marked her out as an excellent partner. During the undercover operation on the yacht, she’d shot two al-Qaeda when they drew on one of her colleagues. One of the men she shot died; the other’s driving a wheelchair around the supermax prison yard in Florence, Colorado. Result.

  The three of us—Anne, Helen, and I—started to work the Philip Osborne case on Monday; and by Thursday, we had enough information to take it to the ASAC. I asked those two along because I figured that all three of us made a more convincing argument in favor of a proper investigation than just one line supervisor. Besides, I had a theory I wanted to test; actually it was Helen’s theory. Helen said that Gisela Delillo always gave me a harder time when there were other female agents present—almost as if she were trying to prove that there was nothing between us.

  While I lined some sharpened pencils up in neat little ranks beside my Bureau leather folder, Gisela made all of us coffee and then invited me to make the case against our unsub—the as yet unknown subject of an FBI investigation.

  “This is the strangest case for investigation I have ever presented,” I began. “Almost three weeks ago, here in Houston, the writer Philip Osborne suffered an acute shock that has left him mentally impaired, perhaps permanently. No explanation for how that shock came about has yet been discovered. At first it was assumed that he’d been attacked. But if so, it’s not clear how. Or by whom. There were some superficial wounds on him, only these would appear to have been self-inflicted. But there’s a lot that’s not clear here so I’m going to have to ask you to be patient, boss.”

  “I’m always patient with you, Martins,” said Gisela, and she grinned at Helen and Anne. “I guess it’s the only way, huh?”

  I let that one go. When you’re just a line supervisor, you let it go more often than you pick it up. Besides, my theory about her was already starting to amount to something: in front of other women Gisela liked slapping me down.

  “As you may know,” I said, “Philip Osborne was gay and his two most recent books were both about atheism. In the last few years he’s managed to upset a lot of people. But everything I’ve read about him makes me think he gets a kick out of that. At first I wanted to dismiss what happened as a celebrity crack-up. But I was wrong. My friend Dr. Eamon Coogan, who is the emeritus Catholic archbishop of the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, drew my attention to a number of recent homicides that display some interesting similarities. The other victims were also what you might call enemies of the conservative right: a senior consulting obstetrician, an evolutionary biologist, and a philosopher and cognitive scientist. But at present no connection has been established between any of these cases.”

  “If the other three were relatively well known,” said Gisela, “and you’re arguing a connection, how come the newspapers haven’t done that? They’re usually not slow to spot a trend.”

  “Because they all look like natural causes. But Coogan thinks there are circumstances that bear further examination and share common features with what happened to Osborne. And so do I.”

  “Is there any other field office interested in investigating a connection?”

  “No,” I said. “This will leave Houston as the office of origin.”

  “If we take it on,” said Gisela. “Don’t jump the gun, Gil.”

  She smiled at me, but that was the second time in five minutes that I’d been whipped. I wondered if Helen and Anne noticed it, too.

  “All right. I’m still listening. But start here in Houston. With this Osborne guy. If any of this is connected, he’s what lets us buy the blinds.”

  I knew to my cost that Gisela was a skilled poker player, although it was rare that she ever talked like one. But it seemed like another way of reminding me that she was holding all the aces in this meeting.

  After setting out the facts as reported by the HPD officers who had attended the scene at the Hotel ZaZa, I described the visit I had made with Helen Monaco to the Harris County Psychiatric Hospital.

  “Dr. Andrew Newman, the medical director, gave me a diagnosis of Osborne’s condition. The guy is in a catatonic state. He doesn’t move at all and appears to be in a frozen state of being that Newman thinks is psychological rather than neurological. Specifically, he thinks something induced an extreme fight-or-flight response—a stress response—that caused his adrenal hormones to kick in on a massive scale and induce a sympathetic nervous system dynamic. There’s a third strike after the fight-or-flight pitch: you freeze. You know, the rabbit caught in the headlights kind of shit. But humans do the same thing. And if that isn’t resolved, it builds up, sometimes really quickly, and you ent
er a shock state that is designed to protect you from something worse, perhaps. Usually you come out of it. Sometimes quickly, sometimes not so quickly. And in Osborne’s case it’s clear Dr. Newman doesn’t have the least idea if he’ll be like that for eighteen days or eighteen months.”

  “So, what, is he just lying on a bed staring at the ceiling?”

  “They keep him strapped on a bed for his own safety in case he does snap out of it all of a sudden. But like a piece of Play-Doh, Osborne’s body can be contorted into any posture, which he’ll maintain for several minutes, or until you move his limbs or his head in some other direction.”

  I felt Helen shiver beside me.

  “And all the time he just stares straight ahead as if he were dead,” I said. “Only he’s not. All his vital signs—heart rate, pulse, blood pressure—seem to indicate that he’s perfectly normal. It’s like he’s imprisoned inside his own body. But there was one thing that was odd, and it ties in with the fight-or-flight response described by Dr. Newman. Quite soon after he was admitted to the hospital, the doctors took a blood sample. Adrenaline is often measured in blood as a diagnostic aid. In any of us right now, the level is probably ten nanograms per liter. That can increase by as much as ten times during exercise and by as much as fifty times during extreme stress, to five hundred nanograms per liter. Osborne’s body contained about ten thousand nanograms per liter, which is apparently the amount they might administer to acute-care cardiac patients with a hypodermic. To inject that amount of adrenaline in a short period you’d need a large Epipen or a cardiac needle; and yet there is no sign anywhere on Osborne’s body of a hypodermic mark. Nor any evidence that an inhaler was used. No Epipen or inhaler was found at the hotel, or the plaza, or on Osborne’s person. Newman hasn’t ever seen that quantity of adrenaline occur naturally, but he says that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. He hasn’t ever seen a case of acute catatonia like Osborne’s, either.”

  “That is strange,” said Gisela, scribbling something down on her pad.

  “He also recently applied for a concealed-handgun license.”

  “Nothing strange about that,” said Gisela.

  “Except that he was a vocal opponent of the NRA and gun ownership in general,” I said.

  “So something had him scared.” Gisela looked at Anne Goldberg. “Anything on his telephone records, Anne?”

  “Not a thing that shouldn’t be there. All of the numbers were in his address book.”

  “E-mails?”

  “The guys at the lab are looking over his computer to see if there are any clues there,” I said. “But that’s going to take a little time. Until then, here’s what we know about the other three.

  “Dr. Clifford Richardson ran the Silphium Clinic in Washington, D.C. Until his death six months ago, he was one of the country’s leading obstetricians. He was also a former president of the American Gynecological and Obstetrical Society, and an internationally recognized authority on clinical obstetrics. Following threats to his life in Utah during the late 1990s, Richardson came to live and work in the capital, opening a clinic just a few hundred yards north of the White House, on Sixteenth Street where, he assumed, there might be less opposition to abortion.”

  “If it wasn’t for people like him,” said Gisela, “I don’t know what women would do in this country.”

  “He was wrong,” I said. “About there being no opposition in D.C. The Silphium Clinic has been regularly picketed as a so-called abortion mill by self-styled sidewalk counselors from pro-life groups and D.C.’s Catholic University of America. They try to talk women out of having abortions, and pray for women who are coming out of the clinic having had one.”

  “It sounds like harassment,” observed Anne.

  “Which is why there are cops on the scene,” I said. “And pro-choice escorts. Or ‘deathscorts,’ as the pro-life people call them.”

  “Oh, brother,” muttered Anne. “There are times when I wish we could bring in Jesus for questioning and ask him if he wouldn’t mind disowning some of these stupid pricks.” She looked at me. “Sorry, Gil. I know you go to church.”

  “That’s all right. Matter of fact, you didn’t say anything about him that I haven’t been thinking myself. And just for the record, people, I’m no longer a churchgoer.”

  Gisela sat back in her chair. “What does Ruth think about that?”

  I was about to make a remark about how thought didn’t seem to be part of my wife’s decision when the failure that was my marriage choked the words in my throat. I thought of Danny, and I swallowed hard and felt my eyes begin to blink as if I didn’t quite trust them to stay open without displaying more emotion than was appropriate for a case meeting with my ASAC. There followed a longish silence that grew more revealing and eloquent by the second as I tried to get a grip.

  Gisela’s quick, poker-player instincts read the tell that was in my eyes and guessed the whole story, or at least half of it.

  “Oh, my God,” she gasped. “Gil. Has Ruth left you?”

  I shook my head but my face and fluctuating Adam’s apple said different. “I’d really rather not talk about it right now. One way or another, it’s been a difficult week.”

  “Look, do you need a minute?”

  I took a deep breath.

  “No, I’m fine,” I said, and suddenly, for the moment, I was.

  “Cliff Richardson lived in the Watergate complex,” I said. “His apartment had a balcony with a view of the Potomac. On Friday, February 21, of this year, Richardson was late finishing work at the clinic. His receptionist described him as unusually preoccupied. After filling the tank of his car at a gas station, he arrived home at about nine o’clock, parked in the underground parking lot, and took the elevator upstairs. Despite what you may have read, security is good at the Watergate. His neighbors reported seeing or hearing nothing unusual. It was a cold night and there was snow on the ground, but not enough to break a man’s fall from the eleventh floor. The following morning one of the gardeners found Richardson’s body in some bushes beneath his balcony. He had a ticket for a concert the following evening and a full refrigerator. The same day he apparently jumped off his balcony he also ordered some books from Amazon that arrived on the same morning his body was discovered.”

  “What you’re saying,” said Gisela, “is that none of this behavior was consistent with a man who was going to kill himself.”

  “Correct,” I said. “The Metro Police Department attended the scene and—with some difficulty, I might add, for there were several locks on the door—they entered Richardson’s apartment, where they found no suicide note and no signs of a struggle. The TV was still on, and there was a meal cooked in the microwave oven. Because of these contraindications to suicide and Richardson’s previous history, MPD decided to treat the death as suspicious. Inquiries were made in Utah. And people who had been picketing the clinic were interviewed. There’s also a CCTV in the apartment block and everyone who went in and out of the building that day was accounted for and cleared. None of them had any connection with the pro-lifers outside the clinic. Having failed to turn up any leads, the MPD concluded that Richardson had committed suicide and closed the case. But there was one unusual thing the police noticed in Richardson’s apartment. A Torah scroll open on the sideboard in a kind of pride of place. You know? The sort they use in a synagogue, written on parchment paper in ancient Hebrew, with wooden rollers ’n’ all.”

  “So?” said Gisela.

  “Richardson wasn’t Jewish,” I said. “According to his daughter, he wasn’t even religious. She couldn’t explain why he owned such a thing.”

  “It was a Sefer Torah scroll,” said Anne. “They’re expensive. Richardson bought it on eBay about two weeks before he died. And he paid seven thousand dollars for it.”

  “Which is strange,” I added, “when you consider that he read not one word of Hebrew.”

 
“Strange, yes,” admitted Gisela. “But not evidence of murder.”

  “Next we have Peter Ekman, a prominent British journalist who became an American citizen after 9/11. He was a former editor of The New Republic, the author of many books and an irreverent daily news blog called Ekman: Hack that appeared on The Daily Beast. Until his death in April this year, his blog was receiving five hundred thousand hits a day.”

  “I didn’t even know he was dead,” said Anne.

  “Apart from politicians, Ekman regularly went after religion. The week before he died, he wrote a piece about the Baptists that drew sixty-five thousand complaints, which is a record for The Daily Beast. Ekman was the kind of guy who would say things no one else dared to say. And he got away with it because he was funny. Famously, he was on The Volker Walker Show on HBO with Pastor Ken Coffey, the evangelist, and Coffey got so angry with Ekman that he suffered a seizure and had to be taken to the hospital. That got Ekman in a lot of trouble with the religious right. I once saw him debating with the former archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Mocatta, at Georgetown University, and he was extremely funny and trenchant. But the biggest stink he attracted was with the Muslims when he blogged about Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, when she gave a press freedom award to Kurt Westergaard—the Danish guy who drew the caricatures of the prophet Mohammed.”

  “Always a mistake,” said Anne.

  “Actually, Ekman used his blog to compare the Danish cartoons with ones that used to appear in the newspapers in Nazi Germany, but even though he was defending them, he still managed to piss off the Muslims by reproducing the cartoons.”

  “Some people you can’t help,” said Anne.

  “All right,” said Gisela. “Ekman was funny. But he had a smoking-related illness. Emphysema, wasn’t it? And I remember that he had a heart attack. So why are we talking about him?”

  “After the Muslims threatened his life, he decided to take some precautions regarding his personal security; and he had a panic room built at his home. The room had its own generator and an alarm button connected to the local police. That should have saved his life. Instead, his wife came back from the city one day to find him dead in there. The police concluded that the room wasn’t properly ventilated and that this caused carbon monoxide poisoning. He was sixty-two.”

 

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