“You’re talking about Ian Chase.”
He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and gave me an intense look over the rims of his Lennon glasses. “My client did not kill Evelyn Carney.”
“Let him tell me. I’ll put him on camera, and he can shout his innocence to the world. Can you arrange it?”
“You’ve got the wrong guy,” he went on evenly. “What’s more, you’re being led onto a weak limb that will surely break beneath the weight of lies you’re being fed.”
Ah, so that’s why he’d invited me here. He thought to frighten me off.
“All right,” I said, “if not Ian, then who killed her?”
He lifted his hands again. He would very much like to speculate, those hands seemed to say, if it were possible. “My client has asked me to relay his overwhelming grief for his friend’s death—”
“Isn’t ‘lover’ more accurate?”
“This point should also be made clear: my client has attempted to make himself available to investigators. But as you’re probably aware, negotiations with MPD have devolved due to their egregious line of questioning. These experienced detectives, led by the celebrated Michael Ledger, ask little about events on the night of March 8. They care even less it seems about Mrs. Carney and her violent death. Instead, they obsess over this one lurid question: Who was my client having sex with? That is the great mystery rocking the capital. Naturally, it makes one suspicious.”
“Isn’t it routine to question the relationship of a person calling in a police report for a missing person? Why not answer that question?”
He went to the black granite countertop in the kitchenette and lifted a sheet of paper and carried it to where I was seated. “We provided this written statement to the investigators,” he said, handing over the paper.
Much of the document had been redacted with a black marker. At the top was the firm’s letterhead and date of the document, March 13. The last statement described a brief phone call to Ian Chase from Evelyn Carney on the morning of March 8. She asked if she could visit him at his home that evening. She did not give a reason. She also never showed. He waited all night at his home, alone. Late that same evening, he placed a call to her cell phone near midnight. Her voice-mail recording picked up on first ring, suggesting she’d turned her phone off, so he left a message. The next day, he called her office, only to be informed she had not shown up for work. Peter Carney answered her home phone, stating that Evelyn no longer resided at that address. This struck Ian Chase as worrisome, possibly suspicious, and so he called an official at the First District police station, asking if as a courtesy, a uniformed officer could do a welfare check.
“And a patrol officer went by Evelyn’s home?”
“Yes,” he said. “That courtesy led to a missing persons investigation almost immediately taken over by Criminal Investigations. Soon thereafter, my client’s sex life became the focus of their probe. Makes one wonder.”
He had a point, and yet: “The investigators know that your client had a sexual relationship with Evelyn Carney,” I said. “So why not admit to the relationship? Is it because Ian Chase is in the lifestyle?”
His long nose lifted, as if scenting something. “What’s that?”
“Ian enjoys hurting his sexual partners during . . . role play?” There, I said it like I knew what the hell I was talking about. “Sex games with a woman’s consent. And so on March 8, the night she disappeared, Evelyn comes over to Ian’s condo—”
“Didn’t happen,” he interrupted.
“And things get out of control. Maybe they’re playing around and he hits her harder than he intended. The brain’s so fragile, you never know. These head injuries. Maybe it was just an accident?”
“My client did not kill her,” he repeated. He looked at me as if he could will me to believe him. But I’d already gotten the feeling that J. Thomas Winthrop could tell an elaborate lie while staring you in the face. “This is how the MPD gets around the bother of presumption of innocence and standards of proof. Leaking vicious lies to the press in order to convict my client in the court of public opinion. Don’t you see? You’re being used to destroy my client.”
When I wondered aloud why investigators would do such a thing, he explained what everyone knew: Ian Chase had been at the top of a short list for a presidential appointment to replace the outgoing US Attorney for the District of Columbia. What I hadn’t known: the District’s mayor had sent the name of his own choice for top prosecutor to the White House, and Ian Chase was not that guy. There was bad blood between the mayor and Ian, stemming from a long-ago public corruption investigation led by Ian, an investigation that resulted in the resignation of several of the mayor’s cronies. The mayor hadn’t been charged with a crime, but fault lines were drawn.
Simmering beneath the bitter political maneuvering was the District’s ongoing grievance: a federal government that ruled over the city, often with no regard for the votes of its citizens or the preferences of the city’s elected officials. Winthrop was not unsympathetic to the mayor’s position. As a principle of self-governance, the city should be allowed to choose (among many things) its highest-ranking law-enforcement official. But a whisper campaign against Ian Chase to knock him out of the running, whether originated at the MPD or the mayor’s office, was untenable.
It was a compelling theory with one big problem: it relied on Michael Ledger doing the dirty work, and Michael risked his ass for no one, certainly not the mayor, who would sell him out in a heartbeat, as Michael knew.
“Those are some pretty serious allegations,” I said. “What’s your proof?”
He shrugged delicately, indicating nothing. “For now, let me say this is a very dangerous game being played. A game that can quickly turn, I might add. In this city, far too many officials are fucking someone they shouldn’t, and your source isn’t the only one who can spread word of who has been with whom.”
I was trying to decipher his meaning, when it hit me: “You aren’t threatening to slander my name, are you?”
His eyes went wide, the laugh lines like sunbursts. “Oh dear, no. Not you.” In his tone, there was genuine mirth. “Ask your source who I mean. He’ll know.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
ON THE DRIVE back to the station, I put in another call to the number Bradley Hartnett had left. This time he picked up. He had borrowed a friend’s phone, he explained, in case someone was monitoring his. “Like what happened to Evie,” he said.
That had me easing my foot off the gas pedal and looking for a place to pull over. “What are you talking about, Professor?”
“Didn’t detectives tell you? Evie thought her phone was hacked. This fellow, Detective Miller, wanted me to keep that tip to myself. It was to protect the integrity of the investigation, he said. After your report about that prosecutor, I can only think he was looking to protect something else. I think Evie got caught up in a conspiracy, and it looks like it involves the feds.”
Hartnett was agitated, not at all like the man I’d spoken with at his club last week. Who drank expensive brandy and listened for lions in the morning, and though he’d spoken romantically about Evelyn, had been down to earth, no nonsense. Not that I was dismissing him, but . . .
“A conspiracy?” I pulled into a lot for a convenience store and parked under the light. I dug a pen and reporter pad from my satchel and said: “Start from the beginning, Professor. I’m ready when you are.”
“Evie dropped by my office a week before she disappeared.”
“I remember,” I said. “You told me.”
“She suspected someone hacked her phone. She worried she was being followed.”
“Why would she think that?”
He hesitated. “She told me she’d made some kind of mistake. At the time, I’d assumed she meant at work and was too ashamed to say, after I’d put in a good word for her. Anyway, she wanted an expert to look at her phone, so I called my friend who heads up IT for the university. She was supposed to take her ph
one to his office for a scan, but she never showed, and then she disappeared.” He was breathing heavily now, as if struggling with emotion, and then he said, “We have to find her phone.”
I thought of Evelyn in the river, what the river had done to her, how it had washed away her purse and coat and taken everything, except her ATM card and a boot.
“Professor, I’m very sorry, but everything she carried that night was lost in the river.”
“Did you specifically ask about her phone?” he said angrily.
“No, but—”
“Then you don’t know what they have.”
“Who?”
“Did you ask about police surveillance? You know, the Justice Department doesn’t need anything physically to put on your phone.”
He went on a rant about IMSI catchers, a controversial device used by law enforcement that acted like a fake cell phone tower, but was small enough to hold in your hand, like a police radio. The device locked in on a phone number or range of numbers, capturing data and eavesdropping on conversations. According to his IT expert, some IMSI catchers could override the phone’s commands, turning the phone on or off from afar. This haunted the professor. What if Evelyn had tried to call him? What if she’d needed help?
“Back up a second, Professor. Why would the United States government—”
“Not the entire government,” he said.
“All right. Why would someone from Justice, FBI, or whatever put a first-year lawyer at a top law firm under surveillance?”
There was a swift intake of breath before he blasted me: “For the goddamn soon-to-be US Attorney for DC. So they could track and grab her off the street. So Ian Chase could kill her.” He was crying in loud gulps. “Sorry, I’m just so furious about what that bastard did to Evie. That bold, beautiful girl.”
“Okay, Professor, I hear you,” I said, and then gently: “The story was upsetting, and made you consider some theories that we don’t have evidence for? Or can you back up any of those claims?”
As he tried to get control of his voice, I got the basics: he had a couple of screen shots of Evelyn’s phone and some documents that she asked him to keep safe for her. “But I can’t make sense of them,” he said, sniffing. “They appear to be some kind of spreadsheets, maybe financials, except they’re in code. Maybe you could take a look at them?”
“Can I see them tonight? I’ll take the screen shots, too.”
He blew out a breath. “Yeah, that’s good. I’d feel better if you held them anyway. Nothing feels very safe with me.”
“You feel vulnerable because you’re alone.” How well I understood that sentiment. “Give me some time to get across town. There’s a diner by the Avalon Theater on Connecticut. You know it?”
“I’ll borrow my buddy’s Pathfinder. I’ll be there, thirty minutes.”
————
The diner was south of Chevy Chase Circle, in a neighborhood of expensive restaurants and trendy shops and grocery stores. In the District, that’s how you knew you were tucked in a nice upper-class enclave—you got a grocery store. This neighborhood had two.
I parked on the street and walked to the diner. When I opened the door, I glanced around for the professor, who hadn’t yet arrived, and then above the metal counter at the hands on the neon clock. It was 9:07. That’s when I heard the gunshots.
A woman behind the cash register put her hand to her throat. “Fireworks?” she whispered.
“Call the police,” I said.
I jotted the professor a quick note and left it with the hostess before I went outside to call Isaiah. “Send a camera crew to”—I spun around, looking for a street sign—“fifty-five-hundred block of Connecticut, cross street McKinley or Morrison, I can’t tell. Shots fired.”
“On Connecticut Avenue?” Isaiah said sharply.
“I’ll check it out. If I don’t call back in five minutes, send a live truck and Ben.”
“He’s out of town.”
Still? Christ. “Send whoever,” I said through my teeth. “Then call the police. Make sure they know.”
“Police aren’t there yet? Virginia.”
I hung up and ran across Connecticut Avenue, my phone in my hand. Some asshole BMW swerved around me in the crosswalk, putting a hitch in my stride, but I stayed the course in the direction of the grocery store. South of it was an Exxon station. The gunshots came from that direction. A holdup or a street robbery, I figured. Either made sense.
A waist-high brick wall enclosed the parking lot of the grocery store. At the far end of the lot were two very young men: both medium height and narrow in that way of men in their late teens or early twenties, one wearing his hair in long braids, the other in basketball shorts and flip-flops, in mid-March. For some reason, the flip-flops engrossed me rather than the behavior of the teen waving his hands in obvious distress. Maybe because my mind couldn’t accept—it seemed utterly implausible—what I was seeing as I crossed the blacktop.
An older-model green Nissan Pathfinder had backed into a parking space. Across its windshield there was a dark cloud of what appeared to be blood spatter. My feet became heavy, my pace slowed. My breath tingled behind my teeth.
Through the gaping hole of the shattered glass of the side window, I could see a large man lurched forward in the driver’s seat, his cheek pressed against the steering wheel. His hair was wet with blood.
It was Professor Bradley Hartnett. The back of his head had been blown off.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE CATALOGUE OF details came slowly: the pebbles of broken glass crunching beneath my feet, the passenger door ajar and the car’s dome light on, illuminating the windshield—
No, look away from the windshield.
Behind me, one of the teens was saying, “Aww, man, I can’t believe this. You believe this?” and the other teen saying, “No, cuz, I can’t,” and then I steadied myself with my hand on the hood of the car—still warm, he must have just arrived, when someone . . . when someone . . . and then my mind blanked again.
A hesitant touch at my elbow jolted me back. “You all right, lady?” the teen with the braids said. The other teen was chattering nervously. “It’s the worst thing I ever seen, bruh. For real, that’s his brains all over the windshield.”
I couldn’t think, and I had to think. Bradley Hartnett had been en route to meet me. Was that a coincidence? Was he killed to stop him from meeting with me? He had spoken of conspiracy.
“What do we do?” the teen with the braids wanted to know.
Just then, the first siren wailed and others joined, growing louder until the first of many emergency vehicles converged at the lot, and then everything seemed to be happening at once. An officer called us witnesses and told us to wait beneath the awning of the grocery store. I didn’t like standing under the awning. It felt too exposed. Brad’s killer was out there with a gun.
“Sorry, I can’t stick around,” I said in a voice that was high pitched and panicked, and the officer said, “You’ll stay where I tell you until Homicide gets here.”
The officer left us to secure the crime scene. The teens were chattering with that wild brew of terror and excitement and disbelief at what they’d just witnessed. I warned them who I was and to be careful what they said, but they kept talking.
One was Darius Brown, twenty, a University of Maryland engineering major and resident of Temple Hills, Maryland. His cousin Harold “Hal” Wylie, eighteen, a senior at Gonzaga High School, lived in the forty-one-hundred block of nearby Fessenden Street, NW.
Darius was scratching the leg of his shiny basketball shorts, up and down, a tic. “We were at the gas station,” he said, pointing across the street about twenty yards to a sporty coupe with a gas nozzle still resting in its tank. “Right there, pumping gas, and you know how it takes forever, like how slow it is means somehow you’re getting more, because this shit is way too expensive to begin with, and I’m looking around—” He gestured to a stop sign at the end of the block where the busin
esses ended and the neighborhood houses began. “That’s where this skinny white dude was getting off his bike.”
I pulled out my notebook. “What kind of bike?”
“I don’t know motorcycles. Hal?”
“Not a Harley,” Hal said. “All I know.”
“Okay.” I was scribbling it down, the act of reporting clearing my head and focusing my attention, making me feel like me again. “So this skinny white dude, describe him.”
Darius looked at Hal. Hal shrugged. “Maybe my height,” he said.
Hal was about five eight or nine, couple of inches taller than me. “What else?”
“Stone-cold killer for real,” Darius said. “Wearing this trench coat, black leather, like Shaft. You see Samuel Jackson in Shaft? Badass, like that. He had this black helmet, visor pulled down—”
“Wait. I thought you said he was a white guy. You didn’t see his face?”
Darius said, “Nah, but he was carrying out in the open. Brothers can’t carry guns in the open.”
“Brothers can’t even carry a pack of Skittles,” Hal said. “The Second Amendment? That shit is for white people.”
“Also,” Darius said, raising his finger as if to make a point. “Dude’s coat was open and you could see his skinny jeans. Now you tell me, what brother you know wears skinny jeans?” He grimaced in distaste. “Makes you look like you got bitch hips.”
“Cuz,” Hal chastised, tilting his head toward me.
“It’s fine,” I said. “Tell me whatever you got.”
Darius nodded sagely. “Money on it, white dude.”
A young lieutenant was walking our way. His jowls fluttered angrily, as he waved toward my notebook. “What are you doing? You can’t interview a witness.”
The Cutaway Page 17