by Vernon Rush
As these thoughts circled in Isaac Rose’s mind, he descended into a silence that was almost meditative. But it did not last long. The sound of his cell phone disrupted him and he snatched it from his pocket.
“Hello?” he barked.
“Oh, umm, hi,” the startled reply mumbled. “It’s me,...ah…Daniel.”
“Dan,” Rose made himself speak pleasantly. “Sorry man, I didn’t mean to snap. Just got a lot on my mind right now.”
“Yeah, I bet,” Daniel sympathetically sighs. “I can’t believe Ms. Soto’s gone. It just doesn’t seem real, you know? Neither of us thinks she killed herself. . .I mean, Frankie. . .”
“Hmm,” Isaac agreed.
“I guess...umm,” he faltered. “I guess that means she was the leak in the department.”
Rose was quiet for several seconds. He didn’t want to reveal too much to the two young men. However, he was quick to quash the assumption. “Maybe, maybe not,” he muttered. “We still don’t know.”
“Oh,” Dan said, surprised. “I thought the CIA’s discovery had pretty much sealed the case.” With a bemused shake of his head, Isaac asks, “What are you talking about?”
“Didn’t that agent guy send you an email?” Dropping the pen he still held in his free hand, Isaac clutched the mouse of his computer and fiercely shook it from side to side. The blank screen dissolved into his confidential email and he founds two new messages. One is from an ‘Agent Baines’, from the Oval Office:
“Apparently, Ms. Soto had a relationship with some Afghan national. It was brief, but after her lover went back to his own country, he was killed by fire from one of our choppers.”
The sound of Daniel’s voice played in the background, while Isaac read the file that Baines had sent. It shows a photograph of Emma Soto and a Muslim gentleman sitting outside a coffee shop. Hardly anything incriminating. In fact, it was impossible to tell how intimate the pair was; they could have been friends or brand new acquaintances for all an observer could tell.
“How do we know they were together?” Isaac asked.
“Umm, I don’t know,” Daniel mumbled.
Rose continued to read, paying little attention to the sound of the young computer expert in his ear. The evidence consisted of nothing more than a few phone calls and one late night rendezvous. An agent reported seeing Soto leaving the home of Samit Kaba at three in the morning. It certainly looked like a clandestine tryst, and the agent had assumed it was nothing more than that. However, Rose was not in the habit of taking things at face value. And the knowledge of this relationship posed more questions than it answered. If the security forces were aware of it, then why was she still approved for her position in the cabinet?
As he gradually scanned to the bottom of the document, he founds a postscript that he guessed was added by Baines himself: ‘Relationship was fleeting and Kaba’s death seemed not to affect Soto. In discussions about the man, Soto didn’t try to deny an association with him, and it was decided it was no cause for concern.’
The next file centered on Kaba and the surveillance that was carried out on him when he began seeing the then-Senator Soto. There were no affiliations with any radical group; no crimes committed here or in any other country; he was a PhD student, who made it quite clear he intended to return to his country on completion of his studies. Nothing to raise any flags and, despite Soto being ten years Kaba’s senior, nothing to raise any eyebrows either.
“Dan, have you got anything else?” Isaac asks, taking his gaze from the screen and focusing on the phone.
“From the CIA guy?”
“No, with your own investigation. Did you turn anything else up?” he explains.
“Oh, no, we’re still working on it, though.”
“Do me a favor will you? See if you can match the location of the second hack with the location of the first.”
“Okay,” Daniel agreed. “I’ll try.”
“Great, I’ll speak to you later,” he responded, before ending the call. Settling back into his chair, he stared at the wall ahead of him.
A light tap at the door was followed by its opening. Rose hears the noise, but doesn’t lift his head until he can see the movement of the man in his peripheral vision. He knew it was Foxhound.
“So what do you think?” the man asked, shutting the door behind him and walking to Isaac’s desk.
“What do you think?” Isaac echoed..
“I think Soto is looking like a better suspect,” he sighs.
“Yeah,” Isaac nods. “But maybe that’s what someone wants us to think.”
“What do you mean?”
Swiveling slightly in his chair, Rose faced Foxhound. “Her relationship, whatever it was, with this guy didn’t ring any alarm bells then. And now, suddenly it seems relevant for the CIA.”
“Hindsight’s a wonderful thing,” Foxhound shrugged.
“It’s also convenient,” Rose muttered.
“Does everything have to be more complicated than it appears?”Foxhound grinned.
“No,” Isaac bluntly replied. “But this is all being wrapped up a little too neatly, don’t you think. All that’s missing is the bow on top of the package.”
Foxhound leaned forward, staring into Isaac’s eyes. “So, what do you want to do?”
“I want to go back to her apartment, take a proper look around. And then I want to speak to the ME.” Isaac explains, getting out of his seat and bending to reach down into a desk drawer. Opening the top drawer, he removed his Glock and slid it into the back of his jeans’ waistband.
Foxhound nodded, knowing that it would be hard to stop Rose once he was convinced about something and, more importantly, realizing from experience the man’s instincts are often right on the money. “All right,” he agreed. “I hired you, I’d be an idiot not to let you get out there and do your thing. But do me a favor,” he added with a warning glare. “Don’t go out of your way to make waves.”
Isaac shrugged. “What will be, will be,” he comments. “I’ll try not to disappoint you.”
“Just don’t get me thrown out of my job,” Foxhound grumbled.
Isaac sauntered to the door and walked silently away from his superior.
* * *
One police officer still guarded the main entrance of the apartment building, but was now the only police presence. Recognizing Isaac from earlier in the morning, the policeman stepped aside and allowed him access without question or delay.
Rose spent a few moments in the lobby, eyeing the desk that still remained unmanned. He made a mental note to ask about the guard on duty the night before, and made his way upstairs.
Emma Soto’s downstairs neighbor had been away, according to the preliminary police report. Her apartment was on the top floor, so she had no other neighbor in close proximity. And nobody else in the building reported hearing or seeing anything unusual. In fact, Emma Soto seemed to always be pretty much unnoticed. She was always quiet, kept to herself and had, apparently, only been living in the building for four months.
Her apartment door was now closed, two strips of police tape positioned diagonally across the frame and forming a large ‘x’. Paying little attention to the ‘crime scene do not cross’s logan, Isaac grabbed the door handle and twisted it. Once the door was open, he ripped the tape down.
With the soft scuffing of his shoes on the carpet the only sound in the apartment, he crossed the threshold. He began by making a more thorough search of the living room. Careful not to touch anything with his bare hands, he pried up the couch cushions with his hand covered by his pocket handkerchief. He knows he’s unlikely to find whatever was being searched for, but hopes he might find some trace left behind by the person who was searching. He does not believe the messy living room was caused by Soto. And even if it was, she certainly didn’t do it in a fit of frustrated rage.
Finding nothing, he focused his attention on the coffee table and the magazines. In and of themselves, they
struck him as out of place: Cosmopolitan, Life, New Yorker and Vogue. Everyone knew that peoples’ tastes can be eclectic, but it didn’t seem like the reading material of just one person. However, the files were clear that she lived alone and had been alone ever since she moved in.
Eventually, he strolled back through the bedroom, finding it exactly as it was with the exception of Soto’s body and the bottle of sleeping pills, both of which had gone down to the lab. Unable to avoid touching the drinking glass, he did so carefully on one edge with his finger and thumb. Gently, he swung it around to the light, twisting it around and examining the surface for smudges or marks of any kind. He can find nothing, no finger prints at all; not even an impression from the lips that had supposedly drank from it. He wonders whether the police and CSI bothered to look at it; it seems as if they did not.
Shaking his head, he replaced the glass, before turning his attention to the bed. It was neatly made with the exception of Emma Soto’s imprint on the duvet. A single strand of hair was visible on her pillow, which he lifted with a pair of tweezers attached to his Swiss army knife. Again he turned to the plentiful light that streamed through the spacious windows. It certainly looked like Soto’s; it was the right shade and approximate length. However, he took a small plastic bag from his pocket and stored the hair for analysis.
His last stop was the connecting bathroom. There was a shower stall and a corner bath on one side. On the other was a double sink a towel rod and a full length mirror. All was pristine white, however there were a couple of tiny dots of red on the edge of one of the sinks. They had not been tagged by the CSI team, so again Rose assumed it was another oversight by the investigators. Like everything else he’d seen and read made it clear the officers in charge of the case saw it as an open and shut case; the investigation, if it could be called one, was a mere formality.
Isaac wasn’t viewing it in the same way; Emma Soto’s death, no matter what it’s cause, was far from a run of the mill case. Before leaving, he opened a kitchen cabinet, removed a box of Q-tips and used one to mop up what he believed was blood. The cotton swab then went into another small bag and was quickly sealed.
He didn’t know at the time what he was going to do with this evidence. It was clearly of no interest to the investigating officers. However, he was willing to carry out his own test if necessary. One way or another, he was determined to get to the truth.
CHAPTER
9
Sarah and Humphrey Worthington had been married nearly fourteen years when their only offspring, a son, Daniel, was born after only two and a half hours of light labor, during which Sarah was tempted to try and convince the resident intern on duty for that week in October that she must have a “false pregnancy” as her aunts and her mother had been telling her. Actually, she had sat upright on the hospital bed, eager for Humphrey to get back with her Coca-Cola (with crushed ice and a straw), when she stopped speaking suddenly right in the middle of a sentence. Her eyes widened hugely and she grabbed at her slightly bulging belly with her left hand and her right gripped the edge of the mattress so hard her knuckles turned white. The intern hardly noticed the change in her as he tried to write intelligently on her chart bringing it up to date as best he could with nothing much to add. Sarah inhaled deeply and then as slowly as a descending weather balloon losing its inside air, she leaned over to her left, her back as straight as a ramrod all the way, and she landed gently and quietly on her side with her bent legs rising up in tandem and protectively clenched together as if locked as tightly as the vault at her father’s bank. She didn’t make a sound. The nurse’s aide, busily see-sawing an emery board on one of her enviable fingernails, did a double-take and her mouth fell open when she realized the doctor hadn’t noticed Sarah’s leaning tower behavior. For a minute, the young nurse just stared, then she blinked once, glanced at the door of the hospital room just beyond the sliding patched sheeting around both of the beds, saw no one she could nominate for the next inevitable maneuver, so she blinked again and cleared her throat.
“’Scuse me, sir? Doctor?”
“Mmmm?” He kept writing, frowning with concentration.
“Sir? Mister. . .uh. . doctor? I think. . .”
“Oh, my God. She’s..;.she’s crowning, I think. . .HEY! Somebody? Get me a gurney in here, STET! And call McPherson, the OB/GYN. . .he’s on call tonight and I just saw him in the cafeteria. . .”
Julie Brown, the teenaged nurse’s aide-in-training forgot all about trying to get the young doctor to notice her lacy C-cup peeking out of the neck of her uniform and slapped both hands across her gasping mouth as the emery board flew to the floor and skidded away into oblivion.
At this exact moment, Humphrey backed into one of the swinging doors to the ER exam room and carefully holding the two large paper cups full to the brim with Coca-Cola and crushed ice, eased himself into the tiled room focused on not spilling a drop, smiling with pride. Another nurse, a male nurse with his stethoscope flopping on his chest, raced by the quivering statue that was Humphrey, bumped him with his clipboard causing both cold drinks to erupt into twin cataracts of dark coke syrup and miniature icebergs as they shot out of their heat-proof cups and turned the floor into a sticky, slippery miniature brown floodplain. The nurse’s aide dry-heaved as she ran from the room and the attending turned around too quickly and his feet in their brand new Nikes slipped out from under him and he sustained a painful compression fracture of T-12, which distracted him from the imminent obstetrical need of the patient. She, Sarah, was still lying quietly on her side, but now with one leg bent upward and her hands desperately trying to cover herself with the lower part of the hospital gown. The young intern, himself in severe pain but not in a life-threatening condition, at least had the grace to shout a garbled instruction to the male nurse, who got the message and forgot the intern on the floor but began to give orders. In seconds, others had appeared and as they transferred Sarah to a gurney with wheels, she emitted a soft whimper and a baby’s head, covered in bloody streaks and plastered-down wispy hair, delivered itself while the grown-up people in the room tried to act like they knew what they were doing. There was nothing they could do but stop and help Sarah finish giving birth to a four-pound eleven-ounce little boy, who they named after the male nurse who had helped, Daniel Curtis Worthington. It was over an hour before they remembered the intern with the injured vertebra on the floor, but quietly waiting his turn. Humphrey had scooted on his butt over to the wall out of the way, as the crowd grew and the mess on the floor got even wetter. He just watched the chaotic activity and kept cleaning his glasses with a wadded-up handkerchief he kept for that purpose. Eventually, after Doctor McPherson sailed in like a Viking conquering an innocent, unsuspecting village of lesser beings, things calmed down a bit and Humphrey found the Men’s and washed up before retracing his steps and locating Sarah in another two-bed patient room with a baby (a baby?) sleeping peacefully in a bassinet next to her, his miniature old-man’s face peeking from under a knitted cap. Sarah also was asleep so Humphrey glanced at the baby as if he thought it might explode and kill him instantly then he nodded toward Sarah as if she could see him through her translucent eyelids, and he wheeled around and rushed back to his job at the local Wal Mart’s auto supplies department. From that day forward, no one ever mentioned the birth of Daniel, because it wasn’t nearly as exciting as the ensuing repercussions that just about unnerved everyone involved and forever made Sarah feel guilty every time she looked at Daniel. He wore his inherited shame like a warrior carried a shield that was cracked and relatively useless for protection anyway. And he left home, with his parents’ blessings (and sighs of relief) as soon as he could which was after his high school graduation at fourteen and he never did understand how the two people he lived with could have had him as their son.
CHAPTER
10
Daniel lied about his age and managed to get an intern position at the Target store in a town about forty miles from his folks’ house. Ham
pton, Iowa, had a YMCA a block off the main drag and the Christian church next door managed the renting of double rooms there for young men of Christian heritage and seriously representative of clean-living standards. They furnished coffee and apple juice and hard-boiled eggs every morning and at night, the amiable capable mountain of a woman who could cook anything she could catch or find, prepared a hearty soup or stew and sometimes even a cobbler when peaches or apples were in season. For all this, Daniel paid a percentage of his hourly wages which, in his case, amounted to sixty dollars a month, including meals. He had to provide laundry soap for his bed linens and clothing and, of course, quarters for the machines at the laundromat around the corner. Daniel lived in a room alone for about six months then Hampton suddenly got busier than ever, and he found himself with a roommate named Franklin Thompson, a gregarious, cheerful, overweight African American who laughed all the time, even when nothing was funny. He even laughed in his sleep but that didn’t bother Daniel who kept telling himself laughter was better than a lot of things he could think of.
A non-threatening married couple were the resident managers of the rooming house operating under the auspices of the YMCA. Marge and Bert Majors were their names and they had lived in Hampton, Iowa, most of their lives, both from farm families and raised on the corn and wheat their families grew as income-producing crops. Both were the oldest siblings in their respective families and grew up within 8 miles of each other, so they had known each other’s families forever. They had not been blessed with children of their own, so once in a while one of their “roomers” slipped into their need to nurture - and they could not hide their favoritism. Daniel was one of those lucky young persons and his own dearth of parental love and concern was usurped by the avalanche of affection Marge and Bert lavished upon his fair blonde head. The more they catered to him, the harder he worked at his job and at being a “perfect” tenant. Franklin, nicknamed Frankie or Frankfurter, noticed the favoritism and even though his black eyes flashed briefly with a twinge of jealous resentment, he was actually happy for Daniel, who had disclosed enough of his childhood feelings of being unwanted and unloved to incur Franklin’s sympathy. Daniel let Frankie know he appreciated his loyalty in different ways; sometimes he’d share the extra dessert Marge served him when no one else was looking and other times, Daniel made up Frankie’s cot for him before he got out of the shower. They never said much but there seemed to be an osmosis transfer of mutual concern for each other, both different types of below-average personalities: Frankie was at a disadvantage because of his skin color, so he used his bright white smile and gregariousness to disarm suspicious prejudiced white persons. Daniel was at a disadvantage because he began every encounter with his head down and expecting to be short-changed or left out or blamed. And so it was that he learned to expect negative treatment and that’s what he got. In a way, the same was true for Frankie, and it was this common thread that bound them together for a lifetime. They watched each other’s back and maintained this habit even into their adulthoods.