Red Tide

by G. M. Ford

  In real life…under pressure…at this very moment, for instance…he was forced to deal with the world through his wife’s greatest fear, which consisted of Jim losing his job at the station, beginning what she invariably envisioned as a downward socioeconomic slide to oblivion, to a two-bedroom subsidized firetrap down in the Rainier Valley someplace, to an inner-city school district where her girls would not only become objects of derision and scorn but would instantly morph into drug-sniffing unwed mothers whose multiracial special education spawn would summarily be dumped on Jim and Beth ensuring their much anticipated golden years would be fabricated of far baser material indeed.

  So, with Robert Tilden all up in his face…first damn thing in the morning…right in front of God and everybody…Jim Sexton did what he always did. He ate shit.

  “There you go with that attitude again,” Robert was saying. “That self-defeating stuff isn’t going to make it here, Jimbo.”

  “There was nothing going on, Robert. In case you didn’t notice they imposed a complete news blackout on the scene.”

  “Now…now, let’s watch that tone,” Tilden chided.

  “Have you got anything yet?”

  “Sammy’s on the—”

  “Has he gotten anything?”

  “I don’t think I like that—”

  And the words froze in his mouth. His eyes moved out over Jim’s shoulder, sweeping the room like a prison break was in progress. Jim peeked over his shoulder just in time to see Senior News Editor Albert Lehane storming across the newsroom floor like a tornado. “Tilden,” he called from across the room.

  Robert opened his mouth to reply, but nothing came out. He coughed into his hand in an attempt to clear his throat, but by that time, Big Al, as he was known to his friends and close associates, was already at his side. “We need a remote,” he said.

  “I’ve got…” Robert croaked.

  Lehane turned to Jim. “Jim,” he said, “get your crew and hustle over to Harborview. I want you to camp out at the coroner’s office.”

  “I’ve got Sammy Anacosta down at…” Robert tried.

  Lehane waved him off. “He’s just a kid,” he scoffed. “We’ve had a threat,” Lehane said. He pulled a piece of paper from his pants pocket. Read it. “The dead are just a reminder. Today is the beginning. Sunday is the end.”

  “Has somebody issued a statement?” Jim asked.

  “Just what they said last night.”

  “The mayor’s press conference is at the Olympic at eleven o’clock. I’ve got Kittie on the way with the number one unit,” he said, referring to Kathy Greby, the station’s long-standing female news anchor.

  Lehane was still rambling. “If there’s dead, there’s bodies. Bodies eventually end up at Harborview ’cause that’s where the coroner is.”

  “Mr. Lehane…” Robert Tilden began. “I could send…”

  Lehane wasn’t listening. “Let’s go, Jim,” he said. “Hustle it up to Harborview.”

  20

  Detective Sergeant Charly Hart was not, by nature, a happy man. In the best of times, the most charitable description of his demeanor was reckoned to be somewhere in the immediate vicinity of morose. That he’d spent the past three hours with a nearly decapitated corpse and hadn’t been to bed for a day and a half merely served to deepen the sense of gloom that followed Charly Hart around like a flock of starving pigeons.

  That said, Charly Hart found himself intrigued by the young woman in the chair. Most murders were strictly mom-and-pop. Once in a while somebody got tricky and threw them a curve, but, for the most part, after nearly thirty years on the job, he could walk in the door of a crime scene and pretty much see what had come down. This one though…

  Something about this one didn’t feel right. His partner Reuben Gutierrez had picked up on it too. Instead of throwing smooth all over her like he usually did, Reuben the Cuban was over by the door, leaning against the wall, picking his gold front teeth with a matchbook cover, waiting for something to lend a little clarification before he picked up the ball. Reuben hated to be wrong.

  “Paperwork in his pocket says his name’s Martin Magnusen. From Toronto, Canada,” Detective Hart said.

  “His name is Brian Bohannon,” she said again. “He’s wanted on felony assault charges. He’s been living in Europe for the past five or six years.”

  “The ID’s legit,” Reuben said.

  “His name’s Brian Bohannon,” she said stubbornly.

  Reuben sucked his teeth and then spit something small and white onto the floor. He was digging for another morsel when the squeak of shoes drew his liquid brown eyes toward the hall, where they followed an indistinct form as it passed by the wavy glass window and came to stop at the door of Interrogation Room Number Four. Reuben used his handkerchief to shield his hand from the doorknob. Pulled it open, stuck his other hand out into the hall, came back with a thick black folder.

  Meg Dougherty and Charly Hart looked on in silence as Reuben used a well-buffed fingernail to pry open the folder. Several photographs were paper-clipped to the inside cover. His facial expression said nothing at all.

  He crossed the room, keeping his body between Dougherty and the folder as he made his way to his partner’s side. He held the open file in front of Hart’s face.

  “Look like him to you?” he asked.

  Hart thought it over. “Could be, I suppose.”

  “Hair’s different.”

  Detective Hart’s eyes moved to the bottom of the page. “Height and weight are about right,” he said.

  Reuben dropped the case file onto the scarred desk and leaned down into the woman’s face. “So…let’s go over this again.”

  Dougherty rearranged herself in the chair. Looked him right in the eye. “I had a show tonight…” she began. Waved a hand. “Last night.”

  “You’re a photographer.”

  “…at the Cecil Taylor Gallery on Occidental.”

  “Which ended when?” Reuben asked.

  “It ended about nine o’clock when the cops came and told us we had to evacuate the area.”

  “So you what?”

  “So I…we headed down to the stadiums to get a cab.”

  “We who?”

  Charly Hart watched the waver in her eyes and, for the first time, thought she might be about to lie. “A friend of mine and me.”

  “You didn’t mention a friend before,” Reuben complained.

  “I was making a long story short,” she said.

  “What’s this friend’s name?” Charly Hart inquired.

  She hesitated. “Frank Corso,” she said finally.

  Charly Hart wrote it down. Reuben began to pace back and forth behind her chair.

  “This Frank Corso…” Reuben said. “He your lover?”

  She looked over at Charly Hart as if to question what this had to do with the subject at hand. Hart slipped his notebook into his jacket pocket and met her gaze. “We’re gonna have to check this out with Mr. Corso,” he said. “The nature of the relationship…between you two…” He waggled a hand. “I’m sure you understand.”

  She surrendered a grudging nod. “No…” she said. “Not anymore.”

  “But you used to be,” Reuben pressed.

  “Yes.” She squeezed the word through her teeth.

  “And you two were alone.”

  She started to say something and then stopped. Raised a finger. “We walked the last part with another guy.” Reuben stopped pacing. She anticipated the next question. “I don’t know his name, but he said he was the maintenance supervisor for the Smith Tower.”

  Reuben flipped Charly a quick glance. “So you get down to the stadiums,” Charly prompted.

  “It’s a zoo down there,” she said. “But I get a cab.”

  “What about this Corso guy?” Charly asked.

  When her eyes flickered a second time, they knew they’d touched a nerve.

  “He went his way and I went mine.”

  “What was his way?”<
br />
  She shrugged. “Back to his boat, I guess.”

  “And where’s that?”

  “I don’t know. He moves it around from marina to marina.”

  When neither cop said anything, she went on. “He’s sort of a recluse. He doesn’t like to be bothered.”

  “So you took a cab home,” Charly Hart said.

  She laid it out for them. For the third time. They had a few questions along the way, but mostly they just let her talk. When she finished, Charly Hart excused himself and left the room. Reuben Gutierrez waited for a moment and then picked up the case file from the table and began to leaf through it. Near the middle, he came to another set of photographs. Of Dougherty this time. She’d seen the look before. That odd amalgam of pity and lust that men experienced when looking at her tattoos.

  She heard the involuntary rush of breath. When she looked up, he was looking her over with renewed interest. “Nobody’d blame you,” he said in a soft voice. He looked down at the folder again. Shook his head. “What he did to you. Nobody’d blame you if you offed the guy. You come home. You’re big-time stressed out and there’s this guy who…” He flicked the folder with his fingernails. “Who wouldn’t?” he asked sympathetically. Shook his head again, as if to say he was at a loss for words. “All those years…All that anger built up inside.”

  “I didn’t kill him,” she said. “I found him there on the floor.”

  Reuben stayed at it for another ten minutes. All kindness and understanding. Fishing for admission, he liked to call it. Dougherty sat there staring at the wall, occasionally issuing a denial, but otherwise refusing to play the game, until suddenly, the hall was full of voices and then people.

  First in the door was Charly Hart, his hands thrown out at his sides as he backpedaled into the room, rightfully indignant that anyone would violate the sanctity of the interrogation process, negate the sense of isolation that skilled interrogators instilled in a suspect until finally it seemed as if the only people who existed were right there in that room and the only hope of salvation was to give it up and come clean.

  “We got a murder investigation going on here,” he bawled. “Who the hell are these yahoos to say they’re gonna walk with one of our…”

  A trio of suits followed him into the room. Mid-thirties. Clean-shaven. Looked like they had a mold somewhere out back and these guys were fresh off the assembly line. The guy in the middle cocked an eyebrow and pointed at Dougherty. “Margaret Dougherty?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer. Before anyone could respond, the other two stepped forward, took her by the elbows and helped her from the chair.

  “What’s—” she sputtered.

  “FBI,” said the center suit. “We’ll be needing Ms. Dougherty here.” He pulled out a black leather ID case and waved it around the room like he was dispensing holy water.

  “No fucking way,” Reuben said evenly. “You think you walking out of here wid…”

  Center fed stuck out an arm as if to ward Reuben off only to have it brushed aside like a twig. “You’re interfering with a—” the fed mewed, rubbing his elbow.

  “Fuck you,” Reuben spat. “You gonna take somebody in our custody, you damn well better—”

  That was as far as he got. The doorway filled again. Everybody stood still.

  “Detective,” Harry Dobson said.

  Reuben straightened his shoulders and stood at attention. In his peripheral vision he could see Charly Hart doing the same thing. Life without a pension was the first thought to cross his mind. “Yeah…ah…Chief,” he mumbled.

  “I appreciate your dedication to the job,” the chief began. “But we’ve got an extraordinary situation going on here. These gentlemen are going to need to borrow Ms. Dougherty for the foreseeable future.”

  “Yessir,” the two detectives said in unison. “But listen, Chief, we got a—”

  Dobson waved them off. “One of you just make a file request on a Frank Corso?”

  Charly Hart raised a tentative hand. “He’s her alibi,” he said.

  Dobson nodded. “He’s also involved in a terrorist act.”

  “No way,” Dougherty said.

  Dobson’s eyes were hard as rivets. “We’ve got a hundred sixteen dead citizens,” he said. “And this guy Corso is the closest thing we’ve got to a suspect.”

  “Frank would never…” Dougherty began. But, by then, it was too late. Her feet barely touched the floor as the G-men hustled her out the door.

  Detectives Charly Hart and Reuben Gutierrez stood silent as the sound of scuffling feet faded from hearing. Chief Dobson heaved a sigh. “Get some sleep,” he said. “Then report to your lieutenant for reassignment.”

  “We really got a hundred dead citizens?” Charly wanted to know.

  “A buck sixteen,” the chief confirmed. “And a viable terrorist threat for Sunday sometime.”

  Reuben swallowed hard. “This is the real deal then,” he said.

  “The President has been notified,” Dobson said and walked away.

  21

  Shauna Collins caught sight of them the minute she turned the corner. The one in the Mariners cap…must be the cameraman…screwing some kind of aluminum tripod together over in the corner. The newscaster guy…the one with the red hair…the ski report guy…was leaning on the reception desk, smiling, trying to draw Laura’s attention from the paperwork in front of her. Shauna thought about turning around and scurrying back down the hall to the cafeteria where the impromptu staff meeting had just been held, but instead took a deep breath and walked faster, her rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the clean tile floor as she hustled along.

  She kept her eyes on the door at the far end of the reception area. The one marked NO ADMITTANCE—STAFF ONLY, hoping that if she didn’t acknowledge the newshound, maybe he wouldn’t acknowledge her. No such luck.

  Three squeaks in, he lifted his eyes from Laura’s desk, swallowed the grin and started her way. “Hi there,” he said. “I was hoping you could help me…”

  She waved him off. “Information is released through the Public Affairs Office,” she said, picking up her gait until it amounted to a brisk trot.

  He was at her left shoulder now, keeping pace as she hurried along. “You’re a pathologist, right?”

  She didn’t answer, just kept making a beeline for the door. “All information is released through the Public Affairs Office,” she said again. He hurried over to the door, and while not exactly blocking the way, made his presence conspicuous.

  Shauna Collins moved him aside with a swimming motion, belly-bumped the swinging door open and started down the hall toward the autopsy room. He was still throwing questions her way when she turned hard left and let herself into the room.

  She pushed a long breath of air out through her generous lips, grabbed a fresh pair of latex gloves from the box on the wall and began to pull them on over her chubby hands.

  “Let’s clean this up and then get that last one outa here, George. That way we’ll have the decks clear when they start coming down from upstairs.”

  “Comin’ right up.” George Bell announced it like it was an order for chili con carne. Sixteen years of dancing with the dead had taught George the value of a positive outlook. Early on, he’d come to realize that survival as a coroner’s assistant was entirely contingent upon the manner in which one approached one’s job. Although he’d begun his tenure as a full-fledged adult—thirty-four to be exact—long past starry-eyed illusions regarding the goodness of man and the sanctity of life, the true nature of the urban slaughterhouse had not become apparent to him until he’d spent sufficient time on the job to see, firsthand, the array of violence, casual and otherwise, which members of the species were prepared to visit upon one another on a daily basis.

  So it was with a cheerful whistle that George Bell wheeled the silver table to the middle of the room and began to hose it down. When the trickle of murky water got too loud, he switched to humming while he worked. Somewhere among the whistles an
d the hums and the slap of water, “When You Wish Upon a Star” found its way along the tile walls. He’d been humming the tune for the better part of three days now. He was like that. Something caught his ear and, sure enough, he was stuck with it until another tune came along to take its place. The Jiminy Cricket thing was wearing thin on him. He was ready for something new.

  “They tell you what they got going on up there?” he asked as he worked.

  When he looked up, her round face was grim. “Just that we’ve had an act of terrorism,” she said. “The figure I heard was in the low hundreds. Hundred ten…hundred twenty dead. Something like that.”

  George shook his head sadly. “What are we comin’ to around here? What those Al Queda people got with us make ’em do something like that?”

  “They think we’re the devil. And let’s not jump to any conclusions here. We don’t know for sure who did it,” she chided.

  “Who else it gonna be?” George demanded. “Who else crazy enough to do something like that ’cept that Osama Ben Saddam fella.” He placed the power washer on the cart. “Somethin wrong wid those damn people. Might better we just took out that whole section of the world and be done wid it…once and for all.” He made a chopping motion with his free arm. “Good-bye.”

  She said, “I don’t think we can do that, George,” which, not surprisingly, did little to soothe his wrath. He continued to rave about world politics as he worked to remove every last scrap of blood and tissue from the smooth stainless steel surface.

  “What kinda crazy son of a bitch gonna strap fifty pounds of dynamite to his ass and then set the damn thing off?” He made another chopping motion with his arm. “How crazy you gotta be? Wanna die that damn bad. Suicide bomber my ass. They wanna die that damn bad, we ought to help their ass out. If it was me…”