Deadly Disclosures

by Julie Cave

  Dinah raised her eyebrows at Ferguson, hoping to convey her excitement at the information Lara was telling her.

  “You’ve done very well,” she said. “That’s all extremely helpful. Are you up to talking about what happened to you?”

  Lara sighed again. “Unfortunately, I can’t really remember,” she said. “The doctor told me that’s not unusual with a head injury like mine. I remember taking a shower that night, right before I went to bed. I go to the gym after work and I don’t like going to bed all sweaty and gross. The next thing I know I wake up in the hospital feeling like I’d been hit by a bus.” She paused. “But I did get a phone call when I got home from the hospital.”

  “From who?” Dinah asked.

  “I don’t know,” confessed Lara. “It was a male voice, and I didn’t recognize it. He basically told me not to talk to the FBI anymore. He said that if I did, the next time I would be killed.” Lara stopped speaking for a moment as her voice caught. “So I obeyed him. But when I heard that Mr. Whitfield had been murdered, I wanted to speak to you one last time.”

  “Thanks, Lara, you have been incredibly helpful,” said Dinah. “And I know that it can’t have been easy for you. Do you feel safe where you are at the moment?”

  “I do,” said Lara hesitantly. “But I’m going to keep moving around until I hear that you’ve caught whoever did this.”

  “We’ll find them,” promised Dinah. “I won’t rest until we find them.” She hung up and turned to Ferguson, who was practically tearing his hair out wanting to know about the conversation.

  “That was Lara,” said Dinah. “She came through for us. And we’ve caught the board of regents in a big lie.”

  • • • •

  The two agents managed to snatch four hours of sleep before meeting each other in the hotel’s restaurant for breakfast. Dinah was momentarily shocked to see how old Ferguson was getting — his skin seemed more sallow in the morning and the dark patches under his eyes more pronounced. Judging by his reaction to her, though, she supposed she didn’t look much better.

  Because Ferguson was watching her, Dinah forced down some scrambled eggs and toast, although the last thing she felt like was food. Ferguson heaped his plate with bacon, sausage, hash browns, and fried eggs.

  “It’s amazing that your heart can find the strength to keep beating,” Dinah remarked. “If it were me, I’d have given up a long time ago.”

  Ferguson was too busy inhaling his food to reply. As Dinah sat back with her coffee, her cell phone buzzed.

  “Hello?”

  “Dude, it’s Zach from the lab,” came a cheerful voice.

  “Hi, Zach,” Dinah said. “What’s going on?”

  “I found some further information that might interest you,” said Zach. “I’ve just analyzed the dirt found on the victim’s body that the medical examiner sent over.”

  “Oh, right. What did you find?”

  “Calcium carbonate!” said Zach excitedly.

  “Though I appreciate your excitement,” said Dinah dryly, “I have no idea what that means.”

  “It means that I found a large amount of trace within the dirt that is chalk dust,” said Zach. “Now, the dirt is common to the area. I know that because dirt itself has characteristics such as volcanic activity, the level of minerals in the soil and the like identify it as belonging to a certain geographical area. The addition of calcium carbonate, or chalk dust, is not a natural occurrence unless there is a limestone deposit nearby. We don’t have limestone quarries or deposits anywhere near Washington, so my conclusion is that the chalk dust came to be in the soil by human intervention.”

  “Okay, I’m with you,” said Dinah.

  “So then I started to wonder — where would a person get chalk dust and carry it around on themselves apparently without even realizing? And also how would that person transfer relatively large quantities of it into the soil?”

  “A school teacher?” suggested Dinah. “We’ve already talked about that. It doesn’t explain how it gets into the soil.”

  “Right. So I did a bit of research. Guess what I found?”

  “Don’t keep me in suspense, Zach,” said Dinah, rolling her eyes.

  “I found a factory on the outskirts of the west side of DC that manufactures chalk,” said Zach. “Isn’t that interesting? Now, if soil samples taken from the body of the victim match the soil samples of a very particular area of the city, then I would say you would find the murder scene pretty quickly. Furthermore, since we keep finding calcium carbonate on items which the attacker has touched on associated crime scenes, then I would say that at least one of those attackers spends a good deal of time in or around one of those chalk manufacturers.”

  Dinah felt another thrill ripple up her spine. “Have I ever told you how special you are?”

  “You haven’t,” said Zach, laughing. “My mother tells me all the time. But wait, there’s more!”

  “An extra three types of cheese?”

  “I may have done a little snooping on these chalk manufacturers — there are two of them, by the way,” Zach went on. “I was curious about who owned them, for example.”

  Dinah went very still. “And?”

  “Well, I think this name will be familiar to you. Both of them are owned by one Mr. Kenneth MacIntyre, president of the Seismic Corporation.”

  Dinah racked her brains. The name was familiar, but where had she heard it? Then she had a light bulb moment. “The board! Ken MacIntyre is on the board of regents of the Smithsonian!”

  “Top marks, Special Agent,” said Zach.

  Dinah’s mind had gone into overdrive. “Is there anything else you want to share?”

  “Nope, that’s it. That’s enough, isn’t it?”

  Dinah hung up and grabbed Ferguson’s wrist with excitement.

  “What?” he asked, around what looked like an entire sausage stuffed into his mouth.

  Dinah explained the situation. “We have to get back to DC to talk to this MacIntyre guy, and also Justice Pryor. There is something bad going down here.”

  “What about the Colemans?” Ferguson asked. “We’re not done with them yet.”

  Dinah didn’t reply but dialed the Colemans’ number on her cell phone. When Andy Coleman answered, she said without preamble, “This is Special Agent Harris from the FBI. We have several urgent leads in Washington that we need to follow up and will be returning there today. I need you to come with us.”

  There was an infinitesimal pause. “Okay. I want to help in whatever way I can.”

  Dinah hung up and burst into action, with a flurry of calls to the airline, packing her things, and calling for a cab.

  Poor Ferguson didn’t even get a chance to finish his breakfast.

  Chapter 11

  Dinah and Ferguson barely had a chance to drop their overnight bags at the office before heading out again. Ferguson spent the whole trip whining about his empty stomach, and that it was well past lunchtime. They were headed to the chalk factories that Zach had pointed them toward, and Dinah had a buzz of anticipation that couldn’t be dampened by Ferguson’s grumbling.

  Outside, it was crisp and clear and cold, with not a cloud in the bright blue sky. The winter sky on sunny days always looked like someone had taken a giant brush and scrubbed the vast surface, Dinah thought, leaving it squeaky clean.

  “We’re here,” announced Ferguson, breaking into Dinah’s reverie. In front of them, two identical gray industrial buildings rose into the sky like monoliths. Both were taped off by yellow crime scene tape, indicating that the crime scene technicians that Zach had organized were already there.

  The agents ducked under the tape and entered the first building gingerly. They knew how important it was not to contaminate the scene with their own bodies, and they didn’t know as yet where the valuable evidence might be found. So they stood just inside the door until Zach spotted them and jogged over, still wearing his plastic protective clothing. He shook their hands. Today his eyebrow
ring, nose ring, and lip ring were all in the shape of tiny barbells and he had notches carved into his eyebrows as was the current trend.

  For all his piercings, tattoos, and multitudes of lady friends, Dinah had once seen tears slipping silently down his cheeks as he worked at the murder scene of a young teenage girl.

  “What’s up?” Zach greeted them.

  “How long have you guys been here?” asked Dinah. Zach gave them both latex gloves and plastic booties to cover their shoes.

  “About an hour and a half,” replied Zach, waiting for Dinah and Ferguson to get ready. He spoke somberly, morphing into his serious professional persona. “We’ve found some interesting things. We’ve done most of the inside, but haven’t started on the outside of the building yet.”

  “Have you found anything new that we should know about?” Ferguson asked.

  “At this stage, nothing new,” said Zach. “What we’ve found more or less confirms some of the assumptions we’ve made to date.”

  He started walking, and the agents followed. The front of the warehouse was an enormous, cavernous room where most of the heavy work was done. Zach perfunctorily explained what happened in this room — the limestone quarried would be transported here, and then pulverized, first through large machines with gaping jaws, then through smaller machines that reduced the limestone to pebbles. The limestone pebbles were washed to eliminate impurities, then a process called wet grinding, carried out in rotating steel drums, crushed the limestone until it was a very fine powder. The powder would then be washed and dried, ready for shipping.

  “We didn’t find anything useful in this part of the building,” said Zach. “We found a lot of chalk dust, many shoe prints, and thousands of fingerprints.” He grinned. “A sheer cacophony of evidence is how we term it in the lab.”

  Ferguson nudged Dinah. “A sheer what?” he whispered.

  Dinah glanced at Zach, who had overheard and rolled his eyes. “It means there is so much evidence that it is useless,” he explained.

  “Sorry about that,” Dinah said. “My partner here left high school in the tenth grade, and sometimes it shows.”

  “Hey, I’ll have you know I went to college and. . .” began Ferguson indignantly.

  “Joking, Ferguson,” said Dinah, shaking her head.

  They arrived at a series of offices behind the main hall, some of which were double size and used as storerooms.

  “The offices are used by the administration staff and the foreman,” said Zach. “The storerooms are used — well, to store things, obviously. Nothing of interest in the offices, but take a look here.” He opened the door to a large storeroom that had crates stacked against the walls but was empty in the middle. The concrete floor was coated in chalk dust.

  “There was nothing obvious here,” said Zach, “but when we sprayed luminal, the floor lit up like a Christmas tree.” He pointed to the middle of the floor. “There was also some blood spatter on the walls. I know that the victim in question was strangled, but there was evidence here of quite a severe beating. I can say that because the pattern of blood is star-shaped, which indicates drops of blood falling with a degree of force. There was no pooling of blood.”

  He faced Ferguson. “For example, if I punched Ferguson in the mouth and split his lip” — Zach mimed the punch — “the blood would continue in the direction of the punch. It would eventually fall to the floor in an elongated drop, as if the blood was trying to continue its journey. If I stabbed Ferguson, the blood flow would be immediately downward, in pools, due to the large quantity of it. Does that make sense?”

  The two agents nodded.

  “Also, we found a tooth under one of the crates,” added Zach. “If I remember correctly, the victim’s autopsy showed that he had lost a tooth recently. So I’m pretty certain that when we get the blood and tooth back to the lab, we’ll be able to confirm that it belongs to your victim.”

  “So this is the murder scene,” said Dinah, looking around the drab concrete room.

  “There is certainly evidence to indicate that the victim suffered a beating in this room,” agreed Zach, “and although I couldn’t say this is 100 percent accurate, I would guess he was strangled here too. I say that because there was a great deal of chalk dust found on his body, particularly where he had bled around the head. If you can imagine the victim being beaten, then strangled and then dropped to the floor. Chalk dust will immediately adhere to the drying blood on the facial injuries. That’s exactly where we found chalk dust on the victim.”

  “Zach!” shouted a voice from the back of the property. “We found something outside!”

  The three of them quickly made their way into the bracing cold, into the small plot of earth at the back of the building. Three crime scene technicians, blinding in their white plastic coveralls, were gathered in a tight bunch.

  “What is it?” Zach asked.

  One of the technicians, a middle-aged woman, said, “We found a stain on the dirt that looked like blood, and the testing confirmed that it was blood. We also found a perfect shoe print over here. And we found what looks like human hair, short in length.” Dinah could see that the three separate items of evidence were isolated from each other with string and measured with rulers lying lengthwise. Another of the technicians was photographing each item individually.

  “So perhaps the victim was then dumped out here,” theorized Zach. “He may have lain here for a while as they cleaned up inside or decided what to do next.”

  “That would explain why there was little insect activity,” added Dinah excitedly. “Even though he lay outdoors, it’s too cold for insects at the moment, particularly at night. It may have even slowed down decomposition.”

  Zach nodded and flicked the stud in his tongue. “Listen, I’ll send this back to the lab to confirm the blood, hair, and tooth.”

  “In the meantime,” Ferguson said, looking at Dinah, “I think it’s time we had a little chat with one Mr. Kenneth MacIntyre.”

  • • • •

  Kenneth MacIntyre worked in a large glass and steel structure in downtown DC. His company, Seismic Corporation, occupied the whole building. The agents were surprised to find that it was not an open building. The front doors were locked and manned by two security guards, whose job apparently was to screen guests.

  Dinah flipped open her badge. “Special Agent Harris, FBI,” she said. “We would like to see Mr. MacIntyre.”

  “Do you have an appointment, ma’am?” one of the guards asked, which instantly annoyed Dinah.

  “No. What happens with the FBI is that we turn up to interview people. Sometimes they know we’re coming, sometimes they don’t. Whether you like it or not, we’re going to see Mr. MacIntyre in about ten seconds.”

  The guard stared at her. “Mr. MacIntyre might not be available.”

  Dinah sighed and turned to the other guard. “Sir, you may wish to telephone whoever is in charge and tell them that your friend here has been arrested.” She reached for her cuffs.

  “What?” exclaimed the first guard. “Just give me a minute, and I’ll call up to Mr. MacIntyre’s office.”

  Ferguson just shook his head in bemusement.

  A few moments later, the agents rode the elevator to the top floor, where Kenneth MacIntyre occupied the whole floor. As soon as they stepped off into a large atrium, his secretary looked up, visibly shaken.

  “Excuse me,” she said, standing up. “You shouldn’t be here. There is no appointment in the diary. How did you get in?”

  Both agents continued to bear down on her, showing her their badges. “We’re with the FBI, ma’am,” said Ferguson, trying to be a little gentler with her than Dinah had been with the guards.

  “No, this isn’t in his schedule,” said the secretary, wringing her hands. “This will ruin his entire day! You really shouldn’t be here. Oh dear.” She stared at the phone on her desk, obviously wondering whether to invite the wrath of her boss by announcing his unexpected visitors.

  Sh
e was saved by a large wooden door swinging open behind her, and a short man entering the atrium.

  “It’s okay, Cheryl,” he said. “They’re FBI agents. Could you organize coffee and pastry? Please make sure we are not interrupted.”

  “Yes. Right. Certainly.” Cheryl still looked confused and upset at this unexpected turn of events.

  Kenneth MacIntyre ushered the agents into his office. Dinah and Ferguson sat on two trendy, egg-shaped visitors chairs while MacIntyre sat behind his massive mahogany desk. His office was huge, and in addition to the desk and chairs, contained two Chesterfield couches and a wing chair in reddish brown leather, a wall of built-in bookcases, a marble-topped bar that looked fully stocked, and a treadmill. Behind MacIntyre, ceiling-to-floor tinted glass afforded him an impressive view of the city, White House, Capitol building, and beyond.

  Dinah studied the rather inauspicious man. He was short, probably only about 5'5", with black hair combed straight back from his forehead and held in place with a greasy sort of gel, and eyes that were almost black. Everything about him screamed money — he was wearing an expensive-looking wool suit, Italian leather shoes, diamond cuff links, and a Rolex.

  “Well,” he said, clearly starting to squirm a little under Dinah’s scrutiny. “I must say, you are welcome to call ahead before you come down to see me.”

  “Yes,” said Dinah, “but we like to surprise. So what is it your company does, Mr. MacIntyre?”

  Kenneth cleared his throat while he adjusted to the line of questioning. “Well, in a nutshell, we search and drill for new oil and gas sites using seismic technology,” he said. As he spoke, he flicked a heavy gold pen between his fingers incessantly. “It is often sensitive work. As you would be aware, any new oil field could potentially be controversial and spark an international incident, so we have to be careful. That’s why the building is locked and guarded.”

  “I see. And what about your sideline business interests?”