Death's Echoes

by Penny Mickelbury

  “Mimi? Sweetheart? Wake up for just a second, please.”

  Mimi pulled a pillow over her head. Gianna pulled it away. “No, go ‘way,” Mimi mumbled, pulling the pillow back over her head.

  Gianna wrestled with her to get her under the covers and knew she’d have to wait for morning to get an explanation. She undressed and, in bra and panties, went into the kitchen for one of her all-time-favorite dinners: a huge bowl of raisin bran with extra raisins. She took it to the den to watch at least two episodes of The West Wing, a program she hadn’t seen when it aired, primarily because of her work schedule, but also because watching TV hadn’t been one of her things to do. Mimi had watched it, though, and it remained one of her all-time-favorite shows despite the fact that, in her words, it made politics and politicians look a lot cleaner than they really were. Gianna had come to like it just as much, especially in the current climate. Yes, it was escapist television, but there really had been a time when being the president of the United States was a position of honor and respect, even if it wasn’t who you voted for. Now? It didn’t warrant a discussion. She ate her raisin bran, then got a glass of chardonnay, and fell asleep in the middle of the second episode. Mimi didn’t budge when Gianna crawled into bed beside her. How drunk was she, Gianna wondered. She squeezed a nipple and Mimi still didn’t budge. Pretty damn drunk, and an explanation definitely was called for.

  Mimi grabbed her head and groaned when Gianna’s phone rang at 7:15 the next morning even though Gianna answered it in the middle of the second ring, as she always did, as if it were noon instead of before daybreak.

  “Good morning, Eric,” Gianna said, sitting up and swinging her legs over the side of the bed. It was time to get up anyway.

  “Sorry, Boss, but we’ve got a problem.”

  “Of course we do,” Gianna said, taking the phone into the bathroom when Mimi groaned again, a sign she was in for a huge hangover, made worse by the fact that she rarely drank to excess. And as much as Gianna wanted to know why, she was working to stifle her own groan as Eric explained that the local TV news programs were full of reaction by local politicians to a BBC America story on how the D.C. police department took down an international sex trafficking ring, arresting three Eastern European men and rescuing a dozen underage Asian-appearing girls. The congressional committees with D.C. oversight powers were apoplectic but some local officials, including some from Virginia, were grateful to the D.C. police chief for putting a big dent in what could have been a very large operation. No, she told Eric, she had not known about the story; she was certain that no one inside the department had known about it. But everybody would know about it now.

  And when she got to the unit, it seemed that everyone did. At least everyone who worked for her. They were all there and the BBC story was playing on the big screen on the back wall—all the images of the girls being rescued from the warehouse, the images from inside the warehouse, and the arrest in Virginia of the traffickers, their faces visible for everyone to see, as visible as those of the girls had been obscured, because while the identities of rape victims were protected by law, the identities of their rapists were not. And the only police officers speaking in the story were the D.C. chief and a Virginia state police official who was so visibly relieved at having a trafficking operation in his jurisdiction stopped before it had a chance to get started that he almost cried. Both cops decried the lack of federal involvement in what clearly was a federal crime.

  “Well, we’re in for it now,” Eric muttered.

  No shit, Sherlock, Cassie intoned, and Gianna jumped, then looked around to see if anyone had witnessed her reaction to the voice only she heard. Cassie had been so quiet of late that Gianna thought perhaps she had decided to be at peace. No justice, no peace, Cassie said, putting that theory to rest.

  Bobby and Jim walked over to her. “What do you need us to do, Boss?” Jim asked.

  “Nothing you can do,” she replied. Nothing any of them could do unless requested by the Chief, and so far, she’d heard nothing from him. “No reason for you to be here this early.”

  “We had planned an early start to the day,” Bobby said. “First the track, then the gym.” And they were all dressed for it, Gianna realized.

  “No need to change your plans,” she said. “Just make sure you can be reached. And leave me at least one of the internet people and one of the social media people. I don’t care who—one from each team, maybe?” Whatever the fallout from the BBC story was going to be, they needed to keep track of it. And she needed a cup of coffee. And the unit needed a coffee pot and a refrigerator and a TV, she thought. And at that moment a live news program appeared on one of the screens on the wall, and Tommi was coming her way with a carrier containing four large cups of coffee in one hand and a bag that was screaming raisin bran muffins in the other. The lousy start to the day had just improved with the ability of her staff to read her mind.

  Mimi, however, felt like warmed-over death on a rusty plate. That was one of her old friend Freddie’s favorite sayings to describe his worst hangovers. Mimi didn’t have such a saying of her own because she seldom had hangovers, but she had one now and it was a doozy. She squeezed her head between the palms of her hands, hoping to mitigate the pounding as she sought to remember drinking enough of whatever she’d been drinking to result in a head the size of California. She wandered into the kitchen in search of clues. There were none; the kitchen was spotless. She opened the dishwasher—the popcorn bowl, the largest soup bowl, her favorite rocks glass. Gianna had been here and had cleaned up and she had slept through it. She opened the refrigerator—no extra food. That fact, along with the big soup bowl, meant Gianna had eaten raisin bran for dinner. She opened the freezer and the sight of the almost empty vodka bottle did the trick. She remembered everything, and it was enough to return her to the bedroom and to bed. She had opened that vodka and downed almost all of it because she was unemployed. Because she had quit her job. Because the stupid-ass company lawyer wanted her to apologize to stupid-ass Weasel Boy. Oh god! She was unemployed. She had quit the only job she’d ever had, the only job she’d ever wanted. Well, at least she now knew that getting drunk wouldn’t make her feel any better.

  She had crawled under the covers when she remembered that Freddie always took lots of aspirin when he was hungover, so she got up and found the aspirin in the bathroom cabinet. She shook four into her hand and guzzled the bottle of water on the bedside table. Then she downed the bottle on Gianna’s side as well. She was back in bed when her phone rang, and she was surprised to see that she’d missed four calls. The current one was from Tyler, her no-longer editor. “What, Tyler?”

  “Are you watching the Chief? What is he doing?” The low-emoting editor sounded almost frantic, which, had she been in a better mood, would have amused Mimi.

  “No, I’m not watching the Chief, and I’m not going to. I’m going back to sleep.”

  “You gotta watch him, Mimi, and explain this BBC thing to me! What is he doing? You know him better than just about anybody, and if anybody understands what’s going on, it’s you.”

  “What BBC thing? What are you talking about, Tyler?”

  “Just turn on the TV and tune into any news program. I’ll call you back.”

  She grabbed the remote and turned on the TV and there was the Chief. She upped the volume to hear him explain how an observant citizen had alerted the police to the possibility of a child sex-trafficking ring operating in the middle of D.C., not five miles from Congress and the White House. He was, he said, shocked but not surprised. “After all, this is a worldwide problem but here in the U.S., because we don’t see it, except on television, we think it doesn’t affect or involve us. But it does.” Then the local newscaster overrode the volume on the BBC report to share that federal authorities were calling for the Chief’s head for overstepping his authority, not only in surveilling and eventually shutting down the child sex ring in the Broad Street warehouse, but in pursuing its operators across state lin
es into Virginia. Then the BBC audio of the Chief returned, and he said, “I contacted every federal law enforcement official that I know—and I know a lot of them—in every agency and department of the federal government that might have any responsibility for enforcing the laws against the trafficking of women and children for sex, and there was no interest, none, in stepping in to take over my investigation, or to assist me and my department. So yes, I made the decision not to allow another child to be raped in that warehouse in my city and I shut it down.”

  Mimi muted the sound when the local newscaster’s voice took over. She was sitting upright in the bed, hangover and headache reduced to background noise. “Wow,” she said. “You crafty son of a bitch!” Tyler was right. She knew exactly what he was doing. It was a brilliant tactic, and she was surprised that Tyler didn’t get it. Did Gianna, she wondered? Gianna! “Ah, fuck!” she said as her new normal grabbed her by the throat, returning both headache and hangover to the fore. She picked up the phone to call Gianna, and it rang. Tyler.

  “We got it! He is one savvy, sharp customer.”

  “Better late than never,” Mimi said. “I gotta go, Tyler—”

  “Wait, Mimi! Listen, we really need you on this story.”

  “No, you don’t, not if you know what he’s doing. All you need to do is sit back and wait for it.” It being the shitstorm that the Chief had set in motion when he announced to the world, courtesy of the BBC, what anybody who’d been paying attention to the malfunctioning, misfunctioning, pitiful excuse of a federal government—or what was passing for a “federal government” these days—could see. All of the vacant, unfilled jobs in the State Department, the Justice Department, the Attorney General’s office, the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Agency for International Development, even the CIA, were positions responsible for investigating and enforcing the laws that protected women and children from being stolen and sold into sexual slavery worldwide, including within the U.S. Not filling those jobs had nothing to do with streamlining the government and balancing the budget and everything to do with deliberately ignoring the dangers faced by women and children around the world. And the D.C. Police Chief had just told the world that the emperor was naked, while at the same time taking the heat off himself and, by extension, the D.C. government, for over-stepping his authority. And, showing a very canny understanding of how the media works, he had done it on a Friday, guaranteeing that the story would have legs throughout the weekend: front page on all the major newspapers on both coasts and lead topics of conversation on the weekend TV talking-head news programs. “You crafty son of a bitch,” she said again.

  “That’s why we need you, Mimi. He won’t talk to anyone else. All calls are going straight to his public affairs office, which is handing out statements but not making him available in person.”

  “I can’t help you, Tyler. I don’t work for you, remember?”

  “I only wish I could forget, like I wish it wasn’t true.”

  “I gotta go, Tyler. Go have fun. This is a great story that should be enjoyed!” And it was, and if she were still a working reporter she’d be enjoying the hell out of it. But she wasn’t, and that very important fact still was unknown by the woman she shared her life with. She called Gianna and got voicemail so fast she knew the phone was off, and there could only be one reason for that.

  She hoped that Gianna wouldn’t suffer any blowback from the Chief’s actions and, leaving both text and voice messages, decided that she could tolerate coffee now. In fact, needed it now that the fog of the hangover had begun to dissipate. If she hadn’t promised it to herself in her drunken state, she was promising it now: Drunk was not the state for her. Aside from being able to sleep until well after ten o’clock, which was when her feet finally hit the floor, drunk had nothing to recommend it. A drink or two was enough, though under the circumstances the momentary lapse in her usually good judgement was understandable. She had no experience being unemployed, but she’d get used to it. Much more difficult, though, would be adjusting to the absence of the feeling, the belief, the certainty, that what she did mattered. It had mattered for so many years because the notion and nature of a free press had mattered. Then, almost overnight it seemed, a loudmouthed, thin-skinned, narcissistic bully who didn’t like the truth that was reported about him began to whine loudly and often about the fake news attacks on him, and the locust swarm of his supporters took up the whine until the bleat got so loud that news organizations like hers took to defending themselves and their output, while the real fake news outlets continued producing the fakery and outright lies. That made doing her job difficult enough, without the kinds of stories she found herself reporting: The murder of Cassandra Ali half a block from her mosque; the international sex-trafficking operation not five miles from Capitol Hill; the group of women, willing victims in their own homes because the systems they trusted had failed them and they believed they had no recourse—she just couldn’t do it anymore. Didn’t want to, day after day, the need to understand hatred and depravity so she could write about it. Unemployment would be a welcome change. Never figured you for the kind to cut and run. Mimi sloshed coffee all over the counter and herself. The voice was so clear in her head. Who the hell was that?! And the systems didn’t fail them. You were there every time. The real news. And so were the real cops. Shit. Cassie Ali. Why the hell was Cassie Ali in her head?

  “Are you listening to me, Maglione?”

  No, Chief, but I hear you, Gianna wanted to say. “Of course I’m listening to you, Chief.” She couldn’t tell him that she was trying to silence Cassie Ali in her brain. “It was brilliant, Chief. I just hope you haven’t left yourself too exposed. You know the long knives on the Hill, not to mention those on the City Council, are kept sharp just for you.”

  He gave an evil grin. “The ones on the Hill will be slitting their own throats by Monday morning, and I have a little surprise in store for my friends on the council. Don’t you worry. I just wanted to be sure you know that you and your people were protected on this thing, and that if anything goes south, it’s all on me.” He was up and pacing and jiggling the change in his pockets—a habit Gianna had come to dislike intensely. “How’re things going with the new people?”

  She told him in detail about Team G and Team D and he clapped his hands, then clapped her on the back. “We’re scheduling appointments to qualify them all at the range and then some basic classes—arrest procedures, evidence collection—things they’ve already had but I want to satisfy myself that they’re up to speed. Then I’m going to turn the undercover specialists loose on them: Alice Long and Tony Watkins. They should be ready for whatever comes down the pike.”

  “That’s good stuff, Maglione. Now, get back to work. I don’t want to keep you from it,” and he waved her away.

  Captain Randolph was waiting for her in the Chief’s outer office. “Your warrants are ready, Loo,” he said with a satisfied nod. “You’ll be able to get whatever there is to be had from that townhouse and the car. And I took the liberty of notifying Fairfax County that we might be in their neck of the woods sometime soon and they almost threw me a party. Apparently, somebody down there likes you. A lot,” he said, and made no secret of the fact that he was waiting to learn why. She told him what the case was and he remembered it. “That was some ugly shit,” he said.

  “Yes, it was,” she agreed, recalling the serial murders of prostitutes in D.C., committed by boys from suburban Maryland and Virginia. “Thanks for your help, Captain,” she said, and left.

  Back in the unit, the Team G members were on computers, taking instruction of some kind from Eric while Bobby looked on. Team D and Tommi were nowhere to be seen, leaving Gianna to think that they were somewhere having a lesson of their own. She went to her desk and checked her phone, gratified to see that she had several messages from Mimi. The last one was a text, saying that she was going to dinner with Joe Zemekis who was back from Pennsylvania with really good news for the women of Sunset View whose hu
sbands were killed in that Turnpike crash. Gianna was glad of the news, especially since it would be Zemekis and the insurance company delivering it and not her people. She was still both pissed off and unsettled by her conversation with Alfreda Tompkins, who had lashed out, looking for someone to blame for the fact that her eldest son was on his way to prison, not jail this time, for his assault on the prison guard. Whenever they found him.

  Team D made a noisy arrival, then received a welcoming cheer when they raised hands that held bags from everybody’s favorite deli. Dinner was served! Gianna joined them at the long tables in the center of the room and wolfed down the turkey and swiss Tommi had brought for her, eating every chip and both pickles. “Guess I was hungry,” she said, and instead of giving away the cookie that came with the sandwich as she normally would have done, she ate it, too. Every bite. She looked up at the wall of clocks. “Whoever is working tonight should head out to your assignment. Everybody else go home. Is tomorrow night’s assignment made?” And when she got a “yes, Boss,” from both Jim and Bobby, she stood up. “Good work, everybody, and that includes team leaders and sergeants. It’s very good work and I very much appreciate it.”

  The A’s and the other team members assigned to Metro GALCO went to work. Tim drove them in his new SUV, and everybody else cleaned up, but nobody left. Gianna knew that Eric, Tommy, Jim, and Bobby would stay until the team left. The team members were still learning about each other and learning to enjoy each other and, given her experience with the HCU, Gianna knew they’d hang around for a while. She didn’t mind. She could do her work at her corner desk and keep an ear on what they were talking and laughing about. She enjoyed it, and she was comforted by the fact that they were comfortable enough with her to relax and be themselves. She heard the cadence of Alice’s low, slow drawl, the one that meant she was putting on the South Carolina Southern with a spatula, and laughter erupted. Alice was one of their team leaders, and they didn’t even know it. And Alice was all right with that.