Private Sector

by Brian Haig

  “Most likely.”

  “Further indicating the murderer was a male, correct?”

  “It takes great strength to snap a neck.” In other words, yes.

  She asked, “Any particles or skin in her fingernails?”

  “Yeah. There was.”

  “Skin?”

  “Deerskin.”

  “Then the killer wore gloves.” He nodded again, and she then hypothesized, “The gloves were to protect against fingerprints.” When he didn’t respond to that, she suggested, “And from that, is it safe to assume the murder was premeditated?”

  “From that, it’s safe to assume it was cold. I wore gloves.”

  They stopped dueling for a moment to catch their breath.

  Janet’s courtroom experience and technique were evident and impressive. She understood the trail of evidence in a murder investigation, what questions to ask and which to avoid. Some lawyers are very good at this. Some lawyers should consider a different line of work.

  Spinelli, no hump either, had stuck obstinately to the facts and displayed impressive restraint when she tried to prod or lead him into conclusions and conjecture. All in all, he was a tough egg to crack.

  But I’m as competitive as the next guy. I searched my brain for what she’d left out, and then asked Spinelli, “Have you searched her car yet?”

  “Yeah . . . her car. There was some nondescript smudge marks on the side, from the struggle probably. That’s it.”

  “No fingerprints, no footprints, no hairs?”

  “Didn’t I just say only smudges?”

  “Right.” Prick. I asked, “And your best guess at motive?”

  “Theft. A woman workin’ late . . . comin’ out into an empty parking lot . . . her purse stolen—”

  “That’s really your conclusion?” Janet interrupted.

  “That’s really my working hypothesis . . . and all that implies.”

  “But why would a thief kill her from behind?”

  “Who says it was only one? There coulda been a backup man. In a public parking lot, breakin’ her neck that way—no noise, no attention, no evidence . . . Makes sense, right?”

  Yes, it did. And Janet replied, “Perhaps.”

  I said, “So what’s next, Mr. Spinelli? What are you doing to find the killer?”

  No cop likes to be asked this particular question. It’s smacks of accountability, and public servants are allergic to the entire concept of responsibility and liability. But sometimes it’s because they have good and well-thought-out plans and don’t want them compromised. Other times it’s because they haven’t got a clue. They intend to tie all the proper procedural bows and knots, and wait breathlessly for the next crime so they can stuff this one in the unsolvable drawer.

  Spinelli regarded me a moment, then replied, “If it’s a robbery, the killer was probably some punk from D. C. or the suburbs. I’ve notified the local authorities and asked for lists of known felons who operate this way. I traced her charge cards and military ID and notified the Post Exchange and Commissary to be on the lookout. I notified her banks that if there’s any attempts to charge on those cards, I’m to be informed.”

  In short, everything Spinelli’s procedures required when the felony is robbery. He probably had a file reserved in the unsolvable drawer.

  Janet asked, “And do you expect to get anything?”

  “I’m optimistic.”

  I glanced at Janet and she glanced back at me. Bullshit.

  I said to Spinelli, “Do you really expect him to be idiotic enough to use her charge cards?”

  “Crooks do all kinds of stupid shit. It’s why they’re crooks.” Spinelli then bent forward and asked, “We done yet?”

  “Yes, thank you,” Janet replied. “You’ve been very helpful.”

  He smiled. Then he stated, “Let me be even more helpful, then. I catch you or him stickin’ your toes in this, I’ll slap you both with charges for obstructin’my investigation. We clear on this point?”

  She conceded, “It would be hard to be more clear.”

  His rodent eyes turned to me. “You clear on this point?”

  “Oh . . . me? I’m the chauffeur, right?”

  He gave me a nasty, distrustful squint, then looked at Janet and added, “Also, I’d get very pissed to discover you withholdin’ relevant information or evidence. Should I explain the deep pile of shit

  that can get you into?”

  “I’m aware of the penalties, Mr. Spinelli.”

  Before you knew it we were all shaking hands, pleased to have had the pleasure of one another’s company we all agreed, which was, of course, bullshit. Nor did Spinelli offer to escort us out of the station, which struck me as perfectly in character. In fact, the session had gone pretty much as I had anticipated—a waste of time—and Spinelli had been every bit the unlikable asshole I recalled.

  Outside, walking through the parking lot, I asked Janet, “Did you get what you wanted?”

  “I got what I expected.”

  “Which was what?”

  “Confirmation.”

  “Go on.”

  “They’re headed in the wrong direction.”

  It struck me that Miss Morrow sounded more certain about this than me. If, in a day or two, some hophead was apprehended in D. C. for charging a stereo or something with Lisa’s charge card, I could live with that. Eight years of trying criminal cases had taught me that first impressions are often wrong impressions, and clues that may appear very complex often turn out to have very simple solutions. But I detected no hint of doubt in Miss Janet Morrow and I obviously wondered why. Wanting to find out why, I asked her if she wanted a drink, but she begged off, claiming it had been a hard and emotionally draining day.

  It had indeed.

  And what I should have done at that moment was drop her off at her hotel, wish her all the best, and disappear. But I wanted Lisa’s killer. And I enjoyed hearing Lisa’s voice, even though it belonged to a different body and personality. So I took her back to her hotel and we agreed we would stay in close touch and share everything we learned.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  He began tracking Julia Cuthburt as she pulled out of the parking garage underneath her Connecticut Avenue office building at 5:30. She drove a silver 2001 Toyota 4Runner with a six-cylinder engine and four-wheel drive that had probably never once, not since the day she’d bought it, ever been engaged. Her choice of automobile was in character with her general profile: practical, reliable, and best on the market for holding its value. The car conveyed an outdoorsy, rugged, and adventurous image, three qualities Julia Cuthburt roundly admired and sorely lacked. Poor Julia was a glorified clerk who wanted to be a princess in a Disney movie. Following her was too easy.

  It was rush hour in Washington, and the traffic was dense and sluggish. She was a cautious, meticulous driver who rarely changed lanes and signaled far in advance of every maneuver. She drove like a snail.

  At 6:15 she took a left off M Street in Georgetown, drove downhill half a block, and turned right into an underground garage. He waited fifteen seconds before he followed her in, just in time to see her taillights turning to the right. She went down three levels. He went down three levels. She pulled into an open space and he parked twelve spaces away.

  He was quietly congratulating himself, when, suddenly, things went haywire. She locked her car and walked directly to the handicap elevator instead of the stairs. He was just stepping out of his car as the elevator doors closed and her guilty grin disappeared. The lazy bitch should’ve taken the stairs, instead of abusing the public trust.

  He rushed for the stairwell, sprinted up three levels to the ground floor, and barged through a pair of heavy double doors just in time to knock a mother and her little children flat into a wall.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled, looking frantically around, as the mother glared nastily and one of the children wailed, bouncing up and down on a hurt foot. He found himself on the ground floor of a two-level indoor mall, filled wi
th expensive and exclusive shops. Julia Cuthburt wore a dark blue business suit. The crowds were light, and spotting her should be easy. If she was there. For five minutes he searched with increasing despair.

  He gritted his teeth and cursed as he rushed toward the M Street exit from the mall. He stormed out onto a street thick with pedestrians, mostly young people and college kids wandering in noisy swarms and barhopping. He looked both ways and Julia Cuthburt in her blue business suit was nowhere in sight.

  He had not considered this. Not from her. His computer had rated her a three. Tiny children with their naive trust of strangers and frivolous ways were twos. Julia Cuthburt was barely two steps above a drooling paraplegic in a wheelchair, he thought, as he shrugged with bewilderment and pondered his options. The simplest solution would be to go back into the parking garage, linger beside her car till she returned, and try something different. That option was canned nearly the moment it popped into his head. Bad enough that Lisa Morrow had required a script revision. One, okay, but Julia’s role was sacrosanct.

  He racked his brain and tried to calculate what had brought her here.

  Shopping, possibly, but as he looked up and down the street and studied the environment, it struck him as more and more unlikely. The array of expensive, upscale Georgetown shops was out of character for a tight-fisted bargain hunter who liked to brag to her friends about all the great deals she bagged at Wal-Mart and Kmart and Dollar stores. Her pretensions aside, Julia had an accountant’s soul. Life for her was a never-ending tug-of-war over who got to keep the highest percentage of the margin.

  She would be hungry at this hour. But he doubted she had driven forty minutes through rush-hour traffic to find an overpriced restaurant in the most crowded district of the city. Possibly she was meeting a date, and that eventuality unsettled him greatly. It would mess up everything. This was Julia’s night to rise and shine.

  He thought of all the other details and notations in her file and a hunch began to take shape. He looked both ways again, then swiftly crossed the street and walked into Clyde’s. The bar was packed with young men and women, mostly wearing suits and business attire, hefting drinks, chattering and chuckling, ogling one another, and posturing in ways they hoped would attract the opposite sex. He wandered through the bar pretending to search for someone he was supposed to meet. But no Julia in her blue serge suit. Possibly she was in the ladies’room, so he loitered nearby, gave that five minutes, and then departed in a huff.

  A block down was Nathans and he made a beeline for the entrance. An almost identical scene, another upscale meat market filled with horny young people willing to pay seven dollars per beer on the off chance they might get lucky. He searched the tables first on the possibility that she was having dinner with a date. No Julia in a blue suit at the tables. He progressed to the bar, where women aspiring to be picked up mostly congregated. After two minutes of fruitless searching, he caught a flash of dark blue at the far end of the bar, right below a pair of ancient rowing oars hung on the wall to give the utterly false sense of a sporting clubhouse. He moved across the floor and improved his angle. Bingo—it was indeed Julia in her blue serge suit, perched on a tall barstool, a mixed drink of some sort held daintily between two fingers of her left hand. A man stood beside her, gripping a longneck, bouncing nervously on the balls of his feet and chortling at something.

  The man was in his late thirties, balding, chubby, with a long, pointed nose, and his posture and gestures suggested he was trying hard. Her posture and flat expression suggested he was trying much too hard.

  He maneuvered through the thick crowd until he was directly behind the man chatting with his Julia. Was this a date going sour or merely a stranger attempting a pickup? That distinction mattered. It mattered greatly.

  The man was waving his longneck through the air and saying to her, “. . . and the senator was all over me to get it fixed. I have lots of friends in the White House, and you know what? . . . If he hadn’t pissed me off, I might’ve picked up the phone and handled everything.”

  Julia nodded and said, “Uh . . . okay.”

  “Know what I did?”

  “No.”

  “What I did was tell the senator I didn’t like the way he approached me. I told him I wouldn’t lift a finger. You should’ve seen him. Guy’s got hair transplants, you know. I swear to God, his face went red from here to here.”

  He rocked back on his heels and chortled loudly. Julia took a long and serious sip from her drink.

  “So, anyway,” the guy asked, “what did you say your name was?”

  “Julia.”

  “Uh-huh. Ever been up on the Hill, Julia? I could get you in, show you the corridors of power, introduce you to a few senators.”

  “What a thrill,” Julia replied. Funny, she didn’t sound the least bit thrilled.

  The important question was answered. He leaned across the bar and used his elbow to push back the man hitting on Julia as he yelled, “Julia? My God, it’s been what? Ten years?”

  Her eyes shifted to him and she blinked a few times. He winked at her and said, “You don’t remember me? The prom? Senior year in high school?”

  Julia’s expression became even more confused, so he widened his smile and added, “Gosh . . . Tom Melborne? Maybe you don’t recognize me without my tuxedo.”

  Julia seemed to catch on. “Tom? Oh God. Please, I’m sorry.”

  He edged closer to her, using his body to force the Senate staffer to back away a few more steps. He said to Julia, “What are you doing in Washington? Last I heard, you were going to . . . oh, gosh . . . I’m embarrassed—”

  “University of Delaware,” she answered, smiling.

  “Of course.” He looked at the staffer. “I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude. Are you Julia’s boyfriend? Husband? Date?”

  “Uh, no. We just met.”

  He put a hand on the staffer’s shoulder. “We went to high school together, until my mom and dad died in a car accident . . . right after the prom.” He glanced at Julia and said, “That’s why I dropped out. I’m sure you wondered, and . . . I guess I should’ve told you, but I . . . Hey, look, I didn’t want your sympathy. You had your life, your great future, and I had to raise and care for my four younger sisters. You didn’t need that. They’re all doing great, by the way. Jessie, the youngest, remember her? The one in the wheelchair? She just started college.”

  Julia had her face stuffed inside her drink. She bit her lip, glanced up, and said, “I always wondered what happened to poor, sweet little Jessie.”

  Uncomfortably shuffling his feet, the staffer was looking like the deflated third wheel he had tacitly become. He studied the intruder, his competition, and realized without a doubt that he was dealing with a number one draft pick. He saw a tall, broad-shouldered, blond-haired man, slightly older than Julia, with a square jaw, blue eyes, and the kind of sculpted looks that could get him any woman in this bar, or any other.

  The staffer backed away, saying, “Well, uh, it was nice to meet you, Julia. That offer to show you the Hill is still open.”

  She looked down at the floor and mumbled, “Thanks . . . honest.”

  The staffer melted back into the crowd and they erupted in chuckles.

  “The name really is Tom,” he said. “Tom Melborne.”

  “And I’m really Julia . . . Julia Cuthburt.”

  They giggled some more.

  He said, “You owe me. Another three minutes and he would’ve been pelting you with stories about how he and the Speaker of the House play golf together every Sunday. That’s where he advises the Speaker on how to run the country.”

  She chuckled. “Did you really have four little sisters?”

  “Of course. And do you really plan to go visit him on the Hill?”

  She stole another sip from her drink and he could see her eyes studying him, liking what she saw, and wondering if this was all there was. A white knight saves her from a horny dragon and then drifts off into the night, l
eaving her to the next hungry Hill staffer, or lawyer, or civil servant. The city was filled to its bowels with all three and she was long past the point where she found them entertaining.

  He smiled at her and asked, “Would you care for another drink? Perhaps you’d like to hear how poor Jessie is really doing.”

  She gave him a smile that was half yes, and half bald relief. “Rum and Coke would be great.”

  He waved at the bartender, ordered hers, and a scotch on the rocks for himself. As the harried bartender rushed off, he asked her, “So, what do you do?”

  “I’m an accountant at a firm here in Washington. Johnson and Smathers. Maybe you’ve heard of it.”

  “Never. But I’m not in business.”

  “Are you in government?”

  “Sort of.”

  When he failed to elaborate, she said, “I’m baffled. Where do you work?”

  He took the drinks from the bartender, handed her one, and shrugged. “Across the river.”

  “Where across the river?”

  “That big outfit located in a big building down the GW Park-way. I don’t actually work in that building, but I keep a town-house nearby for when I’m in town.”

  “Oh, you’re with the CIA?”

  “Yes. But we’re not really supposed to admit more than that.”

  “What do we talk about then?”

  “At the moment, I’m posing as a college professor on sabbatical who travels overseas and does research on public health systems. If you happen to have a keen interest in matters of public health, ask away.”

  A look of dread crossed her face. “Public health?”

  “I know.” He chuckled. “I hate my cover.”

  “It’s a bad choice anyway. You don’t look like a college professor.”

  “No?”

  “Nor do you dress like a college professor.”

  “I have a closet filled with worn tweed jackets. Also a pair of tortoiseshell glasses. You’d be surprised how a few minor touches can alter an appearance.” And truly she would, he thought.

  She licked her lips. “That’s exciting.”