Rival officers regularly attempt to engage me in behind-Manning’s-back rat-fuck convos on this subject. I shut them down. I don’t want to know Manning’s past. I accept his moods. I live with his irascibility. He’s Old Corps. Serving under a salt like Manning is the ideal way to be trained, even if you yourself don’t want to wind up as that kind of cop or that kind of person.
Manning’s standards are levels loftier than those of any other detective in DivSix. My job is by far the hardest of any junior detective. But every task Manning assigns me contains an element of instruction.
He’s teaching me.
He’s my mentor.
Manning instructs by means of mantras. His first is, “Never discount the obvious.” Manning believes that clues and evidentiary breakthroughs hide in plain sight. Look for what’s staring you in the face. The obvious things are the ones you miss.
Manning almost never talks to me, or to anyone else for that matter. The closest he comes to conversation is thinking out loud. My job is to listen. Entering the scene of the Davis murder nine days ago—a private dining room at the Century Association on 43rd between Fifth and Sixth—I hear him mutter to himself, “What would the dumbest sonofabitch in the world think in this situation?”
Manning’s second maxim is, “Never assume.”
Cadets at the academy are taught to be wary of assumption. Manning takes this two levels further. Flawed investigations, he says, are almost always “towers of speculation built upon foundations of assumptions.”
“When you enter a crime scene or begin an interrogation, you arrive with assumptions. You assume a suspect with needle tracks up and down his arm is a junkie or that the guy holding a smoking nine-millimeter is the killer. Stop thinking like that. Flush that shit out of your brain.”
An investigator’s responsibility before anything else, Manning believes, is to achieve and maintain awareness of his own unconscious assumptions—and to banish these from his thinking. “A little kid sees clearly because she is unburdened by assumptions. ‘The emperor has no clothes.’”
We’re approaching the new Baltimore Harbor Tunnel. The largest and most desperate homeless encampment on the East Coast squats here, almost three hundred thousand souls displaced by the rising water and funneled into camps above the rebuilt seawall. The train slows nearing the tunnel entrance, not so much for attacks, as the police and army have routed most of that, but for suicides, even mass suicides, of people hurling themselves in the dark onto the tracks.
Our businessmen seatmates come alert as the train decelerates. But we’re good today. Other than a broadside of obscene signs and graffiti, we pass through without incident.
Thirty-six minutes outside of D.C., Manning excuses himself and makes his way to the men’s room. When he steps over the legs of Businessman #1 and into the aisle, I note in his jacket pocket the Imitrex STATdose kit. It’s gone when he returns, so I know he has used and discarded the injector.
The only time Manning speaks on the whole trip other than giving me my instructions is when he gets on the phone to the Georgetown PD supervisor whose jurisdiction we are encroaching upon as part of a TJTF, Temporary Joint Task Force. Manning thanks the officer in advance [Detective Sergeant Stellabotte, Rubirosa A. “Ruby”] for letting us work the room, i.e., the crime scene, and for permitting us to employ our proprietary DCSR, Digital Crime Scene Reconstruction, technology. We have brought from New York (actually summoned from his family vacation in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware) our own forensic reconstruction expert, Dr. Jesse A. Uribe.
Before Manning and I boarded the train two hours ago he had me forward to Detective Stellabotte all our files and background about the first New York murder victim, Nathan Davis, and the two others in Russia who share the same profile (about whom we have tantalizing but so far incomplete parallels.)
From Baltimore south, I work this angle on my phone and my laptop.
Manning has a migraine. I can tell his level of pain by what it does to his eyes. He hides them now behind dark glasses, turning his face toward the bulkhead and feigning a snooze. He’s in agony, I know.
4
CRIME SCENE RECONSTRUCTION
ANOTHER OF MANNING’S MANTRAS: “Nothing ever goes down the way you think it will.”
The case, we are informed upon arrival at the scene, has been taken away from the Georgetown PD and kicked upstairs to the next superior jurisdiction, Metro D.C. According to Detective Stellabotte, who apparently has extensive experience in the politics of law enforcement in and around the capital, the case will almost certainly be snatched away from Metro by the FBI, if not the CIA, DIA, or NSA. As a consequence our Crime Scene Unit and Digital Reconstruction guys are working furiously to gather as much evidence as they can before the window of opportunity closes.
Apparently the post occupied by the victim, Michael Justman, is higher on the political food chain than any of the investigating officers had originally realized. His responsibilities, Manning is informed by Detective Stellabotte as we arrive, fall just short of Cabinet level.
Dr. Justman’s recent work is of critical import, Manning is told, to several classified international negotiations, one or more of which may have a bearing upon his murder. Our boss at DivSix, Lieutenant Gleason, has been on the phone with the Feds all morning, apparently. Gleason has clout. DivSix has not only been cleared to participate in both the autopsy of the victim and the crime scene analysis, but has been specifically requested to do so.
How do we know this case is big? By the concentration of network and cable press lining the lane outside Dr. Justman’s townhouse, even eighteen hours after the murder. An ABC satellite van is parked directly opposite the entry. Up and down the block sit others from CNN, Al Jazeera, and RT, Russia Today.
“Which one of you is Manning?”
“Are you guys DivSix?”
Correspondents call out aggressively as our group dismounts from its vehicles and starts up the sidewalk. Reporters are scanning Manning and Uribe with the new FaceRec apps that’ll pull up your name, shield number, and base pay in less than ten seconds. Judging from their shouted questions, the newshounds have somehow put U.S. Victims #2 and #1 together. The prominence of the decedents has the journos betting this story holds national or even international significance.
YOUNG WOMAN AMONG CROWD
Detective Manning! Is this victim imprinted with the “LV” sign? Does he have the “LV” like the other victims?
Manning’s eyes swing instantly to this female. I see his anger even behind his dark glasses. His glance to me says, ID this woman right now! Find out how she knows about “LV.”
Before I can take two steps toward the woman, who is dressed more like a street person than a journalist, she has ducked away into the rear of the crowd. When she sees me pressing after her, she glances back momentarily, then turns and breaks into a run. I get an on-the-move video of her with my phone. But she screens her face skillfully.
She vanishes.
Manning pushes ahead, up the steps and into the townhouse. Uribe, Stellabotte, and I follow. Amid the professional introductions and expressions of gratitude and cooperation, Manning grills his colleagues. “Who let the word out about the ‘LV’ mark?”
Denials all around.
MANNING
How did that woman outside know?
No one has an answer.
As for the video I shot, it turns out to be too low-resolution to support a FaceRec search. The mystery woman is smoke. All attempts at ID come up goose eggs.
We’re in the townhouse now. The place, like every other elite crib from Alexandria to Anacostia, is decorated in faux-Colonial style. West Wing–type curtains, antique sofa and chairs, Alexander Hamilton wallpaper. The oil painting above the mantel is of the sea fight between the Serapis and the Bonnehomme Richard.
The kitchen is modern, however. A Wolf stove, open and blood-striped. A stainless-steel Sub-Zero with a dent that looks like a body was flung against it.
Stellabo
tte hands Manning CSU photos of the room in its crime scene state.
DETECTIVE STELLABOTTE
Dog was a ninety-pounder. Army-trained.
MANNING
What killed it?
DETECTIVE STELLABOTTE
Heart stopped.
Stellabotte hands Manning the necropsy report.
MANNING
What killed Justman?
DETECTIVE STELLABOTTE
Let’s find out.
The office of the chief medical examiner is at 401 E Street SW, three blocks south of the Mall and within sight of the Capitol. We ride in Stellabotte’s patrol car, a non-AV (Autonomous Vehicle) that he drives himself, way cooler than our NYPD self-drivers.
The forensic pathologist from Metro D.C. is Dr. Ernestine Carter. She performs the autopsy. Two detectives from Metro are in attendance, along with Stellabotte from Georgetown. Two doctors and an administrator of OCME attend initially, the former pair departing twenty minutes into the examination, called by other duties.
Our own Digital Crime Scene Reconstruction chief, Jesse Uribe, is also an ME, meaning he’s a medical doctor. I met him this morning for the first time. He and Manning go back years, apparently. Manning clearly likes him, which is strange to see. I’ve never seen Manning like anybody.
Uribe is Manning’s age, about fifty. He collected me and Manning at Union Station this morning, driving his ’29 Buick Enclave, another non-AV, coming from Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where he was on vacation with his family.
The body of the murder victim, Michael A. Justman, lies under the lights on the stainless steel examination table. Dr. Uribe has requested of Dr. Carter that she perform a specific incision and peel-back on the area between the eyebrows. She has agreed.
I’ve got two recorders going, phone and lapel, while taking pencil notes feverishly. Dr. Carter will also, after she finishes the initial incision, examine the “strap muscles” of the neck to determine if cause of death is strangulation, as it was on U.S. Victim #1, Nathan Davis, and the two parallel cases in Russia. An autopsy tech, operating a bone saw, will make a perimeter cut around the skull. This, Dr. Carter explains, will cause drainage of the blood from above the subject’s neck, so that the lower areas to be examined can be seen cleanly.
As she works, Dr. Carter dictates notes into a mike suspended from a ceiling pod. Uribe leans in at her left shoulder. Over his eyes he wears a DOM, a digital optical maximizer, which looks like a tiny pair of binoculars affixed to an eyeglass frame. Dr. Carter wears her own DOM. Hers delivers a magnified 3-D image to a TV screen above the examination table. She makes the cut between the eyebrows and peels back the skin. All of us except Uribe are craning our necks at the screen.
URIBE
(looking through his own DOM)
There it is.
DETECTIVE STELLABOTTE
What?
URIBE
Just like on New York.
Uribe indicates on the screen a dime-sized contusion between the decedent’s eyes. The area stands out prominently from the surrounding tissue, looking exactly like the letters “LV.” It’s as clear as a brand on a Texas steer. The mark, Dr. Carter dictates in her notes, is a “subdural capillary hematoma.” Ruptured blood vessels.
MANNING
“LV.”
URIBE
Bigger than shit.
Uribe calls up onto his own laptop the video from his examination of Nathan Davis, the New York victim. Sure enough, the identical “LV” appears in the identical location, equally prominent and unmistakable. Even to a non-medically-trained observer like me, it’s clear that this mark has not occurred naturally.
URIBE
And on the Russian corpses too.
Twenty minutes later Michael Justman’s skull has been cut, the blood has drained. We can see the killer’s finger marks on the strap muscles of the throat.
URIBE
Cause of death: asphyxia due to tracheal compression. Crushed windpipe. Same as New York. Same as the two in Russia.
The discussion continues for several moments, including both Stellabotte and the two Metro D.C. detectives. All of them cite the skull fracture (or what they believe will be proven to be a skull fracture) on the victim. Couldn’t that be the COD?
Dr. Carter says no. She directs the group’s attention to several figures in a statistical column on the screen. Not only was the larynx crushed, she says, 7.9 seconds before the skull fracture, as indicated by tissue oxygen depletion, but, judging by the angle of collapse, the victim was lifted off the ground vertically by the throat. She points out the killer’s finger marks—thumb and four fingers, which somehow have left no prints. These indicate with 99.9 percent certainty that the lift was accomplished with one hand.
DETECTIVE STELLABOTTE
Then the “LV” is just bruises. The killer bounced this bastard off the stainless steel fridge, for Pete’s sake!
Uribe indicates the matching “LV” sign on his laptop—beneath the skin on the forehead of Victim #1, Nathan Davis.
DETECTIVE STELLABOTTE
What are you saying? Somebody “branded” them both by rupturing specific capillaries? How could anyone do that? And why?
URIBE
I don’t know.
Forty-five minutes later, Manning, Uribe, and I are back at the townhouse watching Uribe’s techs wrap up the digital reconstruction of the crime scene. Conventional CSU has completed its workup. It has drawn a blank. For the assailant: no prints, no foot tracks, no DNA. Even more extraordinary is the video evidence. CSU has examined the community security cameras and Dr. Justman’s own in-home security video. Both show Justman. Both show the Rhodesian ridgeback.
But no assailant.
Uribe cues up his team’s preliminary profile on his laptop. Manning stands at his shoulder.
Uribe is explaining about respiration. DCSR detection gear can pick up presences as minuscule as ten parts per billion. Not just breath but epidermal and follicular exudations.
URIBE
For this crime scene today—and for Davis’s in New York—we got nothing. Other than the victims’, and here the dog’s, the sheet is blank.
Uribe indicates a column of figures on his laptop screen.
URIBE
See this stack? That’s the dog’s breath. Exhalation from lungs, ventriculus, gastric mill. Here’s the victim’s—Dr. Justman’s. This third column here? That’s pollen from the geranium on the windowsill.
Uribe’s gesture takes in the full screen.
URIBE
We got nothing from any other human or animal source. Zip. Zero.
Manning’s glance to me says, Make sure you’re recording every word of this.
MANNING
(to Uribe)
What, the killer wore a face mask? Some kind of respiration device?
URIBE
Even that would show. It has to vent. Particle respirometry will pick it up.
MANNING
So the killer didn’t breathe? What, he held his breath?
URIBE
Jimmy, all I know is what the instruments tell me. And they say the same thing for both victims—Davis and Justman.
Manning glances to me, to make sure I’m writing all this down, then turns back to Uribe.
MANNING
Lemme get this straight, Jesse. For both homicides, the killer flew in the window. He didn’t breathe. His feet never touched the floor. He murdered the hedge fund CEO in New York and the State Department guy in D.C. by picking them up with one hand, crushing their windpipes, and hurling them bodily across the room. He then made his escape, again without taking a step or exhaling a breath. That’s what the instruments say, and the instruments don’t lie.
URIBE
Exactly.
5
THE BROTHERHOOD
GLEASON
Bullshit. I don’t believe a word of it.
We’re back in Manhattan, 0830 the next morning, April 19, 2034, in the sweltering (City of NY climate policy:
no A/C before 1100) conference facility at DivSix called “the Bunker.”
Four DivSix teams totaling nine detectives have been assembled in this meeting space. We’re watching video from Russia—a secure-link convo between our boss, Lieutenant Gleason, assisted by his second-in-command Lieutenant Silver [Lionel T.], and the supervising officer of the first of two Russian teams investigating what are coming to be called within the division “the LV murders,” a pair in Russia and now the same number in the States.
The translation software is seamless. Our guys speak in English, the Russians get it instantly in Russian, and vice versa. It’s like there’s no language barrier at all.
The first Russian murder, eleven days ago, took place in a prosperous suburb of Saint Petersburg called Tsarskoye Selo. The victim, Alexei Marinovich Tcheckousky, fifty-seven, was a prominent official in the Ministry of Agriculture, not unlike our own Victim #2, Michael Justman. The investigating officer is identified on the video monitor as Inspector Anatoly Y. B. Koverchenko. He’s on-camera, in his office, with two associates whose identities are not revealed.
Koverchenko is a voluble guy, about forty, with a shaved skull and a salt-and-pepper beard complete with soul patch—a triangular brush of gray between the lower lip and the chin. He is happy to share intelligence with his American friends. On the video Koverchenko tells Gleason and Silver that “his” victim and the other murdered Russian (Dr. Alexsandr T. V. Golokoff, an author and speaker, killed in his apartment in the affluent neighborhood of Filyovsky Park in Moscow) have been determined to have known each other personally; both were members of a dissident organization called the November Group, which advocated for freedom of the press, for action on climate change, and for the rights of political prisoners.
The inspector seems to have no problem with this politically. In fact, he appears to admire the two victims’ courage. He confesses his astonishment at the “anomalies and aberrations” of the Tcheckousky crime scene, for which he declares he can discover no precedent—a violent murder, producing abundant evidence of a physical struggle (what is called in the Eastern European underworld, he observes, a “crime of the hand,” meaning a homicide enacted without a weapon) resulting in the fatal crushing of the victim’s airway as well as a fracturing of the skull, and yet the inspector’s best forensics experts can discover no sign of entry, forced or otherwise; no fingerprints other than the victim’s; no assailant’s DNA, no foot tracks, no nothing.
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