by John Douglas
“No, just an old cop’s paranoia, that’s all.”
Ali looked straight at me, her head slightly cocked. “That’s why the gun was on the table.”
“Of course not,” I lied. “But if you think of someone, you let me know, okay?”
Ali nodded, stared at me for a moment, then continued her climb up the steps. She hadn’t bought my lie for a second.
I looked at Gadget and said, “You ready?” He ran to the door and did his nightly dance.
Out in the darkness, I looked up and saw Mars on the horizon, a red spark against the black. If I had been more of a classical scholar, I might have seen it as a sign of the violence to come, but as it was, all I saw was a planet, no more a messenger than Saturn or the stars or the satellite making its shiny way across the night.
17
The shooting in North Carolina was headlined on the local news. The story was spun as a fatal blunder by Hollywood Jake Donovan that resulted in the death of an innocent bystander. There was no mention of the SWAT sniper, or local law enforcement. The grim-looking stringer from the coast made no mention of the missing husband, or the reason a literary agent was meeting with “two of Donovan’s operatives, Kathleen McManus, suspended from the FBI just two years ago for endangering innocent lives, and Trevor Malone, also suspended from the Bureau for the controversial killing at Owl Creek.”s
This was followed by a profile of the victim, Sid Whare, representative of athletes and TV stars with literary aspirations as well as a herd of writers specializing in true crime. Mr. Whare was from East Hampton, New York, and, from the reverent tone in the reporter’s voice, had apparently walked across the water from Long Island to Beaufort before being cut down in his prime thanks to Jake Donovan’s cowboy disregard for public safety.
I turned off the TV. The Black Diamond nightmare had kept me rolling all night long in that place between wake and rest. My eyeballs felt as if they were being sanded smooth by my eyelids, and I could still taste the fear. To wake up to a public pummeling by a perky morning show, sandwiched in between the cholesterol tips and the celebrity news, was more than I could stomach.
I let Gadget relieve himself on Toni’s roses, put him back in the house, and took off at a fast jog down the path that runs along the riverbank. This is probably what I miss most about the house. Not the fireplace or the deck on the river, not even the small office I had once lined with the mementos of a lifetime with the FBI. It was this narrow path, crowded on either side by snake berry and poison ivy. The run took me past places where the Union engineers had constructed pontoon bridges, always under Confederate sniper fire. On the far side of the river was the railroad, and a pyramid erected by Union veterans to mark the forward line of the assault. It was there that Union victory seemed possible until Jackson’s reinforcements drove Meade’s men back across the Rappahannock.
I lost myself in the rhythm of the run, and the lingering spirits of brave men captured in the rising mists of the river. I ran until the fear was gone and the nausea I’d felt watching the news was replaced by anger, and the commitment I’d need to see the investigation through in spite of everything, including my screwed-up personal life.
At the third mile mark, I turned around and ran home. The trip back was harder than I’d remembered, and by the time I reached the yard my shirt was soaked through and I was seriously winded. I walked around, catching my breath and stretching my muscles. Eric was up and throwing a stick for Gadget. I settled into a lawn chair on the deck and wiped the sweat from my face.
“Hi, Dad.”
“Hey, sport. What’s up?”
“Nothing.” He fell into the chair next to me. “You working today?”
“Some. Why? You want to do something?”
“Nah. Just wondering.”
“You see the news this morning?”
“No. Why?”
I told him that he might hear some pretty rough things about his old man in the next few days. He took it well. He’d grown up with so much bad news that once he’d known Katie was unhurt, the rest seemed to roll off.
That was until Rob McManus came roaring into our driveway and skidded to a stop. Before I could stand up, Rob was out of his SUV and striding across the lawn toward me, his hands clenched into fists.
“Hi, Rob,” I said, looking up at him. His face was red and specks of spittle dotted the corners of his mouth.
“You son of a bitch.” He jabbed at me with his finger. “You could have gotten Katie killed.”
I tried to stand up but Rob crowded me and I couldn’t rise without his backing off, something he had no intention of doing. “Look, Rob, I understand why you’re upset, but this is Katie’s job. You, of all people, should understand that.” Had Rob been a civilian, I might have been a bit more consoling. Had Rob not been a prick, I might have been a bit more sympathetic. Had Rob not taken Katie from me, I might have been a bit more patient. As it was, I didn’t care much for Rob, or his tender feelings.
Rob shoved his finger in my face. “It isn’t Katie’s job to get shot over your hotdogging, Donovan.”
I held down my anger and said, as evenly as I could, “She was covered, Rob. It was one of the locals who pulled the trigger.”
“Just like Owl Creek. You and Malone.”
That did it. I stood up, forcing Rob to step back. “You know what happened at Owl Creek, McManus. That was a clean shoot. Now I suggest you get your philandering, phony, self-righteous ass out of my yard and back to the Bureau where you might do somebody some good.”
Gadget barked at us from the driveway and then lifted his leg on Rob’s tire. I couldn’t help it; I laughed. Which left me completely off guard when Rob took a swing. The throw was short and his fist went zipping past my nose. I backed up, all my attention focused on Rob, younger than I and in better shape, and said, “Rob, don’t do this.” He stepped in and shot another short jab at my ribs. This one I blocked.
“Eric, go inside,” I said as Rob and I circled each other on the lawn.
“Should I call the police, Dad?”
“No. Agent McManus was just leaving.”
Rob threw a left that I sidestepped. When his fist went past my face, I grabbed his wrist, planted my other hand against his elbow, and pushed Rob to his knees. I thought that might take the fight out of him, and I let go. Rob came up, intent on tackling me, and I had to pivot out of the way. I hit him just behind the ear as he went past. It wasn’t hard, but Rob fell to his knees again. His anger was making him sloppy.
“Rob, don’t do this. Go home.”
Rob went into a low stance, his arms up, and came at me with a few short kicks followed by a two-shot punch, one aimed at the bridge of my nose, the other at my throat. The punches caromed off my forearms and I hit him once.
Rob backed away, his hand at his eye.
“I’m asking you to go home, Rob, before one of us gets hurt.”
He seemed to consider it.
Eric came outside. “I called the police, Dad. They’re on their way.”
“Rob, go home before the police get here. I’ll tell them it was a mistake. You don’t want another letter in your file, Rob. Go before they get here.”
Still holding his eye, Rob backed up to his SUV and got in. From the safety of his car he said, “Stay away from Katie, old man. It’s disgusting.”
“Go tell your friends how an old man just kicked your ass,” I hollered, my anger rising. “Oh, that’s right. You don’t have any friends.”
Rob drove off, throwing gravel into the grass. Gadget barked until the SUV was out of sight.
“Are you okay, Dad?”
Eric stood in the doorway, and in an instant I remembered the first time I’d ever seen my father in a fight. It was with a neighbor, over what I didn’t know, and it didn’t last any longer than a minute. I still remember the awful smack of fists on flesh and I remember being terrified. I hugged Eric’s shoulders as he wrapped his arms around my waist. “I’m sorry you had to see that, sport.”
“
What are you going to tell the police?”
“That it was just a fan wanting an autograph, that’s all.” It was a credible story. The local police had come out several times to calm down avid followers of serial murder. One fan, sure that I had souvenirs of Ted Bundy, Manson, Gacy, and other killers I’d interviewed, even broke into the house hoping to add to his own collection. He didn’t believe me when I told him all I took from those men, besides information, was disturbing dreams.
My hand began to throb. “I better put some ice on this”—I laughed—“or I won’t be able to open that spaghetti sauce in the pantry.”
Toni called that afternoon, just to make sure we hadn’t set the house on fire. “Everything all right there?”
“Fine here.” I shifted the phone to my left hand so I could keep my right in the ice bucket. “How is it in Toronto?”
“There was an intriguing presentation on Native American psychoactive therapies.”
“Peyote.”
Toni sighed. “Always the cop. No, it was about meditation. How tuning your inner rhythms to the natural rhythms of the world aligns your neural activity. There was quite a bit about menstruation.” She laughed. “You would have hated it.”
“Probably.”
“There was no single malt involved.”
“Yeah, I would have hated it.”
“Ali up yet?”
It was past two. “She rolled out of bed about an hour ago.”
“Anything else you’d like to tell me?”
“Not a thing.”
“Not even”—Toni’s voice slipped into all-business—“about your partner, your girlfriend, who was almost killed last night?”
“You saw.”
“Of course I saw, Jake. Toronto may be in another country, but they have news. In English and French.” She waited for me to say something but I came up short. “You weren’t going to tell me.”
“I didn’t want to worry you.” Even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t going to cover the situation. So I tried a quantity of words over quality: “I thought the news would ruin our vacation.”
With a great deal of patience Toni said, “I know Katie. And what’s more important, she’s a big part of your life, and whatever affects your life affects all of us. Does Eric know?”
“Yes. We talked about it.”
“How’s he taking it?”
“He’s fine.”
She let some of the anger boil off. “He has such a crush on her. It’s a good thing I’m not a Freudian, Jake, or who knows how this twisted little Oedipal fixation would play itself out.”
“Maybe, instead of a college fund, we should start saving for therapy. Maybe you could get a discount from your new boyfriend.”
There was a long silence on Toni’s end. “That was pretty clumsy, Jake.”
“Sorry.”
“We’re still talking about you, Jake, not me.”
“I know.”
“My personal life doesn’t involve snipers, Jake.”
“You’re right.”
“I haven’t been shot at since, oh, let me see—ever,Jake. People don’t shoot one another in my life, and that’s the kind of life I’d like for my children. Is that too much to ask?”
“No.”
“What was that, Jake? I couldn’t hear you.”
“No,” I said, louder this time. “It’s not too much to ask.”
“Good. I’ll be home on Friday. Try not to get into any gunfights in the yard until then, okay?”
“What about fistfights?”
“If you must. Call me if you need me. I’ve got to go.”
“Okay, and don’t worry. Everything’s fine here.”
“Sure. I’ll call later to talk to the kids.”
We said our good-byes and she hung up. Before I could cradle the receiver, it rang in my hand. “Hello?”
“Jake. Spider Urich.”
I made a note to screen my calls. “What do you want?”
Spider ignored my tone. “I want you to use me, Jake, abuse me, make me write filthy limericks on men’s room walls.”
“I didn’t peg you for an obscene caller, Urich. You know that’s punishable by a ten-thousand-dollar fine and time alone with your cell mate.”
“Ha ha, Jake, always the cop.”
“I’ve heard that.”
Spider rattled on, “I saw the news, and I think you’re getting a raw deal, buddy.”
“Gee, thanks, buddy.” The sarcasm bounced off Spider’s hide. “I can see you’re in mourning over your agent.”
There was the briefest pause before Spider said, “Yeah, that was a shocker, wasn’t it? Who knew?”
I couldn’t help laughing at Spider’s chutzpah. “You’re telling me that you didn’t put the late Mr. Whare in touch with our fugitive? Is that what you’re saying?”
Spider went into heavy CYA. “Look, I just took a call and made a call. What they talked about after that was between them.”
“But you didn’t call the police.”
“Jake, in this business, you call your agent first and the police second.”
“Today isn’t a very good time to be making those kind of jokes, Urich.”
“Right. Because of what happened. Right. And I’m torn up about Sid. Really. He and I’d been together for eight years. I was at his son’s Brith, for Christ’s sake.”
That struck me funny, or maybe I just needed some kind of release, but I laughed. “Okay, Spider, what do you want?”
“The reason I’m calling, Jake, is I want to give you a chance to clear things up and tell your side of what happened last night.”
Sid Whare isn’t dead twenty-four hours and Spider’s working the angles. It didn’t surprise me. I’d known Spider to plant a microphone at a grave site to catch the words of the bereaved and just maybe the confessions of a killer. “Thanks, but no thanks.” I started to hang up, then stopped. “Spider, you still there?”
“Yeah, Jake, I’m still here.”
I gave myself one more time to think about the downside of going public. I decided that with the Broken Wings funding frozen, my team scattered, our political capital spent, and our investigation deeply in the tank, there wasn’t much farther down we could go. “Maybe I could use some airtime.” Maybe, I didn’t say, I can get our fugitive husband with literary aspirations to come to me. “When do you want to do this?”
I could hear Spider’s million-dollar smile beam over the wires. “That’s the Hollywood Donovan we know and love. Let’s say tomorrow morning at six, here in the D.C. studio. You’ll go on by eight-fifteen. How’s that sound?”
“Okay. See you then. And, Spider?”
“Yeah?”
“You sandbag me, for any reason, and you can give my condolences to Sid, personally.”
“Gotcha, Jake. I’ll be a damn Boy Scout.”
Before I hung up, I got Sid Whare’s family’s address so I could send flowers and suggested Spider do the same. It hadn’t occurred to him.
18
That afternoon, I drove into town and picked up some Italian takeout for dinner.
The owner, a strong woman with a good grip, took my hand and told me to keep my chin up. “God gives us only those things we can bear, and He gives us cannoli to help us with those things we can’t. I put a few in with your order, on the house.” She patted the back of my hand.
I placed the bag, heavy with hot carbohydrates in tomato sauce, on the floor in front of the passenger seat. Gadget dipped his nose into the top of the bag and I shooed him away with one hand as I turned the key with the other. The Aston wouldn’t start. I cursed, warned Gadget away from the takeout, and grabbed the nightstick. I opened the hood and stuck my head inside the engine compartment. Slowly, I got the feeling I was being watched and I looked up.
“You need help?” A man in a red shirt, unbuttoned down to a pair of dog tags, stood behind me, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses. He casually licked at an ice cream cone, dwarfed in his fist.
“No, thanks. It does this all the time.” I hit the starter with the nightstick. “That usually works.”
“Maybe you should callCar Talk. You know, the guys on the radio.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Funny guys.”
“Yeah.”
Something in his voice made me grip the nightstick a little tighter. I stepped away from the car, just in case I needed room. “Do I know you?”
“No, just a guy on the street.”
That’s when I saw the prison tattoo on his forearm. The work was good, most likely the artistry of Anson Toller in Leavenworth. It was a flaming cross topped by a halo of barbed wire, the symbol of the Holy Knights of New Jerusalem. This is what you get when you throw the Klan and the Aryan Nations together in a small cell and let them breed. Toss in a little psycho killer just to muddy up the gene pool and you come up with the Holy Knights, a murderous gang of racists suspected of terrorist acts throughout the South and West.
“You take it easy now,” the guy said, and touched a finger to his brow. But he didn’t move.
I memorized his stats: blond and blue, six-two, two-ten, the prison tat, and scar tissue around the eyes, probably from boxing.
“Dog’s in your dinner,” he said.
Gadget had his head buried in the take-out bag. “Gadget!” He pulled his head from the bag. Cannoli filling frothed his muzzle.
The man strolled up the sidewalk, in no hurry to get away, one hand in his pocket as if it were Sunday in the park. He tossed the half-eaten cone into a trash can and turned the corner without looking back.
I climbed in, started the car, and pulled into light traffic. As I turned the corner, I looked for the red shirt in the white and tan tourist flow. The Holy Knight had vanished.
But his threat lingered.
I parked the car and went inside the ice cream place next to the restaurant.
“Hi, Jake,” the counterman said. “Got some of that pistachio you like.”
“Bill, there was a guy in here just now, got a cone. Big guy with blond hair, dark glasses.”
“Yeah, is he a friend of yours?”