The Storm Murders

by John Farrow

  “Don’t be alarmed,” the man assured her with a smile, “we won’t all come in.”

  “Perhaps what you mean to say is,” she contradicted him, “not all at once.”

  “Ma’am,” the man said, which she thought a meaningless response.

  The two agents from the lead car stepped inside the front door. They’d already dispensed with their overcoats, left behind on the vehicle’s front seat given the unexpected warmth, and once inside slipped off their rubbers, leaving their shoes on. Spit and polish from head to toe. They came through to the living room, where they found Émile Cinq-Mars, also dressed in a suit and tie, lying in state on the sofa, hands folded across his chest in at attitude of peaceful, eternal rest.

  They stood respectfully in silence, hands crossed solemnly at their waists.

  “Gentlemen,” the retired Montreal detective decreed, without opening either eye, “the last of my osteopath’s exercises. My back’s been acting up in light of all this. The stress, he says. I don’t have a clue what he’s talking about. I blame the change in the weather.”

  “Don’t let him kid you,” Sandra chided. “He’s been practicing lying in a coffin since the moment he came within a hairsbreadth of one. Coffee?” she inquired of her guests.

  “Thank you, yes. Much appreciated,” an agent said. They’d not been introduced as yet. “But really. Just the two of us. The minions outside can wait.”

  “Minions?” Cinq-Mars asked, eyes still shut. He had just returned from mass.

  “They brought an army,” Sandra let him know.

  He at last opened his eyes, to see the agent indicate with a facial expression that her observation was abundantly true. “Sorry about that,” he said. “We had nowhere to leave them, so we brought them along.”

  Departing for the kitchen, Sandra pointed to the man she recognized. “That one,” she informed her husband, “kidnapped me in New Orleans.”

  Cinq-Mars spun up onto his derrière.

  “Gentlemen,” he announced and rose from being prone with an evident flexibility unbecoming a man who supposedly was smitten with a sore back, “Émile Cinq-Mars. How do you do?”

  Quietly, Special Agents Pettibone and Hartopp agreed that they were doing quite well, thank you, and having introduced themselves went on to repeat their regret concerning recent events. They apologized again on behalf of the Bureau.

  Cinq-Mars was not ready to accept their words of contrition. “You do realize,” he pointed out to both of them, “that Special Agent Dreher’s blood and brains were spread across my wife’s face and throughout her hair? I had his blood all over me.”

  The two men stood in silent acceptance of that horrific moment.

  “Better his than mine, I suppose, but still. Not to mention Sandra’s abduction in New Orleans. What the hell has the FBI come to, gentlemen?”

  “With all due respect, sir,” Pettibone remarked, “that’s more or less what we’re here to find out. We’re hoping that you can help us with that.”

  Crossing his arms, Cinq-Mars took a deeper breath. He relaxed his combativeness a notch. “I agree. We have a deal. Please, take a seat. Sandra and I are both consoled by the fact that we’re alive today when at one point we didn’t particularly expect to be. I apologize if you find me on the edgy side.”

  “No apologies necessary, sir,” Michael Hartopp said as he located the soft chair behind him, hoisted the cuffs of his trousers a notch, and sat down. Darren Pettibone seated himself as well and Cinq-Mars followed suit, although he remained forward in his chair and folded his hands together between his knees.

  “Actually,” Cinq-Mars agreed, “I know that.”

  Émile’s posture caused Hartopp to ease himself forward as well, either consciously or unconsciously needing to assume a position that conveyed a sense of urgency. “Out of respect, sir, I’d like permission to call you by your former rank.”

  Surprised by the request, Cinq-Mars nodded agreement.

  “Sergeant-Detective, we’ve read the transcript of your debriefing, and you and I have discussed this over the phone. As you say, we’ve made a deal. Inside the FBI, to say that we are alarmed about recent events is a gross understatement. I won’t kid you. I don’t think I can overstate our concern. The seriousness of this situation, I’m sure, has not escaped your attention either.”

  He rubbed his hands together, which gave Cinq-Mars the feeling that he was releasing pent-up stress of his own. He did not doubt that the pressure was on inside the Bureau, probably to an extreme degree.

  “So I want to begin by asking if there is anything else, in the light of the passage of a few days, regarding your exchange with Randolph Dreher that has come to mind. No matter how seemingly insignificant, we would be glad to hear it.”

  Cinq-Mars had indeed been through the debriefing mill. As had Sergeant-Detective Bill Mathers for he had shot FBI Special Agent Randolph Dreher to death. Nodding, Émile resisted an urge to rub his own hands together, simulating Hartopp’s gesture. The agent was a slim man who clipped his hair high around his ears, an odd preference, and his facial features were narrow and bony looking, the nose thin except that the nostrils took a wide flare, as if he had a bit of the dragon in his genes. The eyes though were relaxed and nicely set apart, a soft gray, and somehow initiated the primary impression that he gave off to others, for he exhibited a cautious openness that Cinq-Mars, along with most everyone else, picked up on.

  The other man, Pettibone, had the physique, and also the nature, of a stevedore, a rare FBI agent in that he came across as a tough guy, even a wise guy, an overt physical bully rather than being someone who found his way through mental acumen or even subterfuge. Cinq-Mars didn’t mind him though, as he carried himself with the demeanor of a mean-streets cop, and he was deeply familiar with the brand. Pettibone, though, had suffered a transformative flaw: he had once abducted his wife. He realized firsthand how frightened his wife must have been in his unwanted and unwarranted company.

  “I learned something last night in a conversation with Sergeant-Detective Bill Mathers,” Cinq-Mars began. “I know that you’ve talked to him. We’ve not had much time to chat, he and I, until last night, given that we’ve both been subjected to nearly continuous interrogation.”

  “We apologize also for our part in that,” Hartopp said. “Necessary.”

  “And the beat goes on,” Cinq-Mars pointed out to him. “Of course I understand. Bill and I enjoyed a lovely talk over whiskey—the lad doesn’t drink much and I may have overlubricated his tongue. I do owe him my life. More importantly, I owe him my wife’s life. He asked me not to repeat what he had to say, but I rather gently told him to go to hell, so you can see how far that owing-him-my-life thing goes.”

  Hartopp smiled, asked, “How did he react when you told him to go to hell?”

  “He grinned actually. Which I interpreted as his way of saying that he expected nothing less from me.”

  “What did he tell you?” Pettibone inquired, which, in Cinq-Mars’s mind, marked him as the less patient and more abrasive of the two. No surprise there.

  “If I may, I’d like to frame this for you. We’re sitting right here last night. The lights are down. We’re listening to Coltrane, I’m introducing Bill to the experience, and we’re drinking my best Scotch. As A Love Supreme comes to a close, I’m waiting to hear what he thinks. Bill leans into me and speaks in quite a subdued tone.”

  “He was sharing a secret,” Hartopp surmised.

  “That’s what I thought, too, at first, but it was more than that. He was sharing a secret that he did not intend to share and didn’t particularly want to. That amounts to more than sharing, it verges on confession. Trouble is, confession or secret, he needed to confide, for it was nagging at him. What’s difficult for Bill is that he’s not certain that he believes his own suspicions. But here’s the rub: I do.”

  “Suspicions?” Hartopp asked.

  Cinq-Mars shifted his weight and lowered his voice, hoping to emulate Mathers’s
tone and mood. “Bill told me that when he peeped around the door jamb and saw a gun to my head with Dreher about to blow my brains out, that he looked at him.”

  He paused. Pettibone asked, “Mathers looked at Dreher. And?”

  “No,” Cinq-Mars corrected him. “Of course Bill saw Dreher, and the gun, and me. But it’s Bill’s recollection that Dreher looked back at him. Right back at him. And we’re not talking about an amount of time that anyone can measure, but as Bill said, he needed a split second to take aim, whereas Dreher already had a gun to my head. And Bill had to take another split second to decide whether or not to shout out that he was there or that he was the police and demand that Dreher put the gun down, for I’d be a dead man by his first syllable. He had to fire, and in the nick of time, but with those milliseconds ticking by, or whatever milliseconds do, Rand Dreher was holding his gun to my head and in Mathers’s mind—and this is the part that Bill is having a hard time admitting to, and therefore doesn’t want to say, or at least, not say to just anybody—in his memory bank, Dreher was staring at him and waiting, in Bill’s mind, during those milliseconds, for Bill to shoot.”

  The three men considered that report in silence.

  Hartopp ventured, “Even if Dreher did hesitate, he may have done so out of surprise—”

  “True enough.”

  “Or out of fear, frozen there for, as you say, a millisecond or so.”

  “Also true,” Cinq-Mars concurred. “As well, he may have realized that he had something to think about, a choice to make. Such as, do I pull the trigger, kill this guy, then get shot myself? Or, he may have been thinking, ‘oh oh, before my next heartbeat I’m dead.’ Before he got to complete that thought, he was.”

  They let the news settle in the air another moment. Hartopp again was the first to break silence. “Yet you believe that Dreher saw what was about to happen, and—? And what, Sergeant-Detective?”

  “Rather than duck, spin, and try to shoot Mathers first, he waited for Bill’s bullet to kill him. He knew that the gig was up, but he did not want what we enjoy today, a chance to talk about it. In that fraction of a millisecond, and this is partly coming from Bill except that he doesn’t believe it, but I’m inclined to believe it, he chose death. He chose to take the last of his secrets to the grave with him. He chose, gentlemen, to protect his colleagues inside and outside the Bureau who are involved in this unholy mess with him.”

  He initiated eye contact with each agent and held that connection long enough to communicate what the three of them understood, that as far as Cinq-Mars knew or was concerned these two agents and anyone waiting outside in the yard for a chance to question him, some for the umpteenth time, could be in cahoots with Randolph Dreher, that every conversation needed to be conducted with that thought or at least that distinct possibility, in mind.

  Special Agents Hartopp and Pettibone hadn’t arrived with knowledge of Bill Mathers’s story or the implications that Cinq-Mars ascribed to it, but the account and his opinion dovetailed perfectly with what they had come to ask about. As the FBI processed two potential scenarios, they took comfort in neither, but feared one exponentially more. One limited Dreher’s schemes to himself and perhaps a cohort or two, a cerebral madness that any bureaucracy needed to cut out on occasion. The other delved deep into the heart of the FBI and uncovered core tissue that was infected, cancerous, terminally ill. Even should the former hold true after a thorough internal investigation, and even if doubts lingered if and when that opinion became accepted, the damage affected and likely infected the whole of the enterprise. What the consequences would be should the second opinion win the day remained a matter no one wanted to even contemplate, let alone discuss.

  Dread remained prevalent.

  They were considering all this as Sandra returned with coffee and biscuits.

  Perhaps due to her husband’s graphic description of her ordeal leading to Dreher being shot in her home, the agents were solicitous to her presence, and profuse with their thanks as she departed again. She left plenty of coffee behind. The two men drank as if desperate for a buzz to lift them out of the gloom they’d carried into the house. An impression vexed Cinq-Mars: the agents seemed to be in mourning, they had that vibe, but he didn’t want to ask if their sadness was for Dreher, who had been a colleague at one time, or for the swift demise in Bureau self-confidence. Even, perhaps, although it seemed an incongruous word to ascribe to them, their own innocence. Either way, their supreme lack of cockiness today felt put-on, something of a performance, but in their shoes he’d probably present the same dollop of shamefaced sobriety to the world.

  In the wake of Sandra’s departure from the room, Cinq-Mars asked Pettibone if he knew that she had identified him.

  He was confused. “You mean, recognizing me from New Orleans?”

  “And, sir, recognizing you from the Lumens’ farm. She never saw you there, that’s true, but a local farmer mentioned that when Morris and Adele first arrived, men in black cars helped them settle in. Sandra made the connection that the rosacea of a man on the Lumens farm matched the rosacea of the man who kidnapped her in New Orleans. That would be you.”

  “So you understood you were dealing with FBI involvement,” Hartopp noted.

  “You kidnapped my wife, sir. I could use a word other than involvement.”

  Cinq-Mars, though, kept his eyes on Pettibone, until that man responded.

  The agent surmised what Cinq-Mars was asking him. “Okay. Yes, I was here then. But what you need to understand is that the repositioning of Morris Lumen had nothing to do with Rand Dreher. We feel that Dreher was on the lookout for someone in witness protection not connected to him, to take the heat off him, as it was coming on and he knew it. It’s precisely because Morris Lumen was not connected to him that he came here looking for him. And killed him.”

  “Why didn’t you just take Dreher out of the field if he was a suspect?”

  Clearly, the question landed in Hartopp’s purview. “Sergeant-Detective, we ask some of our special agents to do grim work. We know there’s dirt under their fingernails. They’re trusted, and that’s what allows them to get their jobs done and it allows us to give them some scope. If one goes bad, as we’ve just found out, or if a bad one works himself into a significant position, which would seem to be what’s happened here, then we’re in trouble. This is a hot button issue inside the Bureau right now. We need to reevaluate.”

  His response gave Cinq-Mars a thought. “So, in your opinion, Dreher was bad to start with. He wasn’t corrupted over the course of time.”

  Hartopp slipped in a grin.

  Cinq-Mars called him on that. “What?”

  “We’re supposed to be debriefing you, sir, at least at the start, as per our agreement, not the other way around.”

  He was having none of that. “Would you like me to ask Sandra to come back into the room, so that she can provide the intimate details of the horrors you put her through?”

  Once again, the FBI yielded. First Pettibone spoke. “We’re working night and day on the file, but the suspicion has been broached that from his earliest days Rand Dreher was involved with marijuana production. We’ve concluded that it was, in fact, a family business for as many as three generations, going back to the days of corn whiskey. They also grew mustard seed. Entering the FBI afforded him special opportunities in that regard. We didn’t know.”

  Then Hartopp had his say. “Sergeant-Detective, we confess that we weren’t suspicious of Dreher. We should have been. But we trusted him. He brought very smart people onto his team, and our suspicions of his work were deposited there. Someone in his group. Procedure required us to keep him out of it, in case he was indeed the problem, but we weren’t actually thinking that way. His team was under surveillance, more than he ever was. I only say this with regret.”

  Cinq-Mars had been around the block in his long career. He knew about cops and robbers often being the flip side of the same coin, that there but for fortune … As someone who had c
onsidered first the priesthood and then veterinary medicine in his youth, he was an exception among cops. More than a few he’d known had chosen crime-fighting over a life of crime, if not one it might as well have been the other. Moths to the flame. They’d done a good job, too. A rare few, one always supposed, right from the outset, pretended to do one but concentrated on the other.

  Pettibone offered a further insight. “We think that one of the reasons he was so successful is that from the get-go his knowledge of that soft-drug world was paramount. That made him impossible to spot.”

  He saw where this was going. “Not to rain on your parade, gentlemen,” Cinq-Mars parried, although he meant to do just that, “but it’s not good practice to excuse police failure to successfully discharge their duties by crediting the bad guys with otherworldly brilliance. Just putting that out there.”

  He liked that they were in no mood, and in no position, to argue.

  “Here’s something else that came up since that day,” Cinq-Mars told them, carrying on with his advantage. “I asked Dreher to place funds in escrow, which were to be paid to me if I proved that he was withholding evidence from the investigation into the Lumens’ murders. I did prove that, and he paid up. The check arrived in the mail yesterday.”

  “You’re kidding,” Hartopp reacted.

  “That makes no sense,” Pettibone added.

  “Sure looks like an FBI check to me. I deposited it, too. I guess it’ll be a few days to find out if the bank clears it.”

  “I don’t get this,” Pettibone reiterated.

  “Actually, it makes perfect sense,” Cinq-Mars postulated. “This whole Quebec thing for Dreher was about deflecting suspicion. So why have a check issued for a man he expected to kill before he got a chance to receive it? Answer, it’s the same as everything else. It deflects suspicion. He was expecting to still be alive, of course. But what’s interesting is that Dreher could put his hands on extra funds like that.”

  Hartopp broke from his flat-line disposition. He grimaced, put his head back, and ran both hands through his thin hair. Resurfacing, he acknowledged that he had nowhere to go with that line of inquiry, except to the admission of a problem. Cinq-Mars had received an FBI check. He already expected that they would find out that the money was not exactly FBI money and told Cinq-Mars so.