Nothing. Not a sound. Not a squeak, not a creak, nothing.
He waited, flexing his fingers on the butt of the gun. All he could hear was the thud of his own heart.
Slowly, carefully, he groped for the light switch on the wall.
She was lying near the kitchen door with her right leg twisted under her, staring fixedly at the ceiling. In the center of her fore- head was a small red circle. No blood. She had died instantly.
With the revolver ready he went from room to room, turning’on lights and glancing into closets. Everything was neat, clean, tidy. Satisfied that the killer was gone, he came back to the living room and stood looking at Mrs. Jackson. He stooped and touched her cheek. She had been dead for hours. Around the bullet hole in her forehead was a black substance. A powder bum.
The phone was in the kitchen. Her purse sat beside it, the catch still latched. Camacho wrapped his handkerchief loosely around the telephone receiver before he picked it up. He dialed with a pen from his shirt pocket. As he waited for the duty officer to answer, he idly noticed that the fire under the coffeepot had been turned off. A professional hit. With any luck the body would not have been discovered for days and the time of death would have been problematic.
“This is Special Agent Camacho.” He gave them the address- “I’ve discovered a corpse. Better send the forensic team and the D.C. police liaison officer. And call Dreyfus at home and ask him to come over.”
Back in the living room he tried to avoid looking at Mrs. Jack- son. Something shiny in a candy dish on the sideboard caught his eye. He stepped carefully over the body and bent to look. A spent.22 caliber Long Rifle cartridge. The killer hadn’t bothered to re- trieve the spent casing! And why should he? Twenty-two caliber rimfire ammunition was sold everywhere and was virtually un- traceable. But how had this shell got here?
He went back to the corpse and stood near it. Then he stooped down and felt her head carefully. Another bullet hole in the back of her head. Okay, where is the second shell?
The FBI agent got down on his hands and knees and looked under everything. He found it in a corner, half hidden by the edge of the carpet, bearing the Remington “R.” Camacho didn’t touch it.
So Mrs. Jackson had opened the door and admitted her killer. Locks not forced or scratched up. She had started back toward the kitchen, the killer behind, and he had shot her in the back of the head. She had died on her feet and collapsed where she stood. He had walked over to her and fired a second shot into her brain with the pistol held inches from her face. That shell casing was ejected by the pistol into the candy dish. The killer had then proceeded on through the house, checking for other people, turning off lights, turning off the stove, making sure nothing would cause a fire or call attention to the house. Then he had left and closed the door carefully behind him. He hadn’t bothered to lock it. Even that was smart. No doubt the assassin had worn gloves, so he left no fingerprints. If the local punks tried the knob and came in to see what they could steal, they would probably not be so sophisticated, and they would automatically become the prime sus- pects in Mrs. Jackson’s murder. All very slick.
The bastard!
Camacho was standing by the front window looking at the crack house when the lab van pulled up, followed immediately by a sedan with city plates and two sedans with U.S. government tags. Two hours later the forensic team and the other people departed with the body. Dreyfus and a lieutenant from the D.C. force remained with Luis Camacho.
“When are you going to raid that crack house, shut it down?” Camacho asked the question of the plainclothes lieutenant as he jerked his head at the building across the street.
“Who says it’s a crack house?”
“What’re you afraid of? Think the mayor might be in there?”
“Listen, asshole! If you’ve got any evidence that dwelling is be- ing used for illegal purposes, I’d like to see it. We’ll do some affida- vits, find a judge and get a warrant. Then we’ll raid the place. Now are you all hot air or do you have some evidencel”
“We have a statement from a woman now dead. We sent a copy over to you guys three days ago.”
“I saw that statement, then routed it to the narcs. All it said was that there was suspicious activity over there. A little old woman thought something nasty was going on in her neighborhood. Big fucking deal! No judge in this country would have called that prob- able cause and issued a warrant, even if that statement had been sworn, which it wasn’t. Now where’s the goddamn evidence?”
“Whatever happened to ‘usually reliable sources’?”
The lieutenant didn’t reply.
“All you guys must belong to the ACLU.” Camacho stood look- ing at the house, the peeling paint, the mortar missing from the brick joints, the trash in front of the place, the light leaking around drawn blinds. Just then a large old Cadillac hardtop came around the comer and drifted slowly to a stop at the curb. Four young black men got out. One went up the steps toward the door of the house, which opened before he reached it and closed behind him.
“Just follow me,” Camacho said. “I’ll get you some evidence.” Even before he finished speaking he was out the door and going down the stairs to the sidewalk two at a time.
He went across the street toward the Cad at a brisk walk. The three men were staring.
“Hi.” He reached into his jacket pocket with his left hand and pulled out his credentials. “FBI—“
One of the men was moving, going sideways and reaching under his shirt. Camacho rammed his left shoulder into the nearest man and fell on top of him as he drew his revolver. He heard a shot, then two more in quick succession. The man who had gone for his gun fell backward against the car, then slid to the sidewalk as Camacho jammed his revolver against the teeth of the struggling man under him.
“Don’tl” The man opened his mouth and Caroacho jammed the gun in up to the trigger guard. “Freeze, shithead!”
On the other side of the car someone was pleading, “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot.”
“You even hiccup, I’m gonna blow your brains out.” Camacho felt the man for a weapon as he stared into his wide eyes. There was an automatic in his waistband. The agent extracted it and turned the man so he could look over his shoulder at the house.
Dreyfus was checking the man on the sidewalk and the police lieutenant was cuffing the third one.
Camacho pulled the barrel of the revolver clear of his man’s lips. “Is there a back way outta there?”
The lips contorted. Camacho cocked the revolver and placed the barrel right between his eyes. “Answer me, or so help me God — . ”
“Yeah. The alley.”
Camacho pulled the man from the sidewalk and shoved him behind the Cad. “Quick, on your belly, hands behind your back. Assume the position, fucker, right now.” As the man obeyed, Ca- macho tossed his cuffs to the lieutenant, then began to run for the corner.
He rounded the comer at a run just as a car was coming out of the alley in the middle of the block, its engine howling. He dived onto his face. An automatic weapon roared as the rear of the car slewed and smoke poured from the tires. Scrambling behind a parked car, Camacho managed to fire one shot at the fleeing car, although he knew that the hollow-point +P.38 slug had no chance of penetrating the body of the car. Someone leaning out a rear passenger window hosed another burst in his general direction as the car ran the stop sign at the next comer. The bullets slapped the concrete and parked cars. Luis Camacho huddled behind a car and listened to the engine noise fade away.
When he walked back to the Cadillac, Dreyfus was watching the cuffed men lying in the street and lighting his pipe while the police lieutenant used his car radio. Camacho looked at the man who had been shot. He was dead, with two holes in his chest about four inches apart. A cocked nine-millimeter Beretta automatic lay on the street near him.
“Was it you that got this guy?” Camacho asked Dreyfus.
“Yeah. After he took a shot at you.”
“No shit.�
��
“You are a goddamn hopeless romantic, Luis.”
The lieutenant came over at a trot. His face was livid. “You fucking idiot! Are you tired of living? You almost got one of us killed! We’re the good guys, or haven’t you keyhole peepers heard?”
“I’m sorry. I just didn’t think it through.”
“The FBI, the fearless band of idiots.” The lieutenant said the words softly, a benediction, a sublime pronouncement of irrefut- able truth- He looked up and down the street, breathing deeply. The red tinge in his cheeks subsided slowly. Finally he said, “Okay, Rambo. How do you want this to read?”
“Hell, just tell it straight. This car came along and parked in front of a crime scene. I approached them and identified myself and one of them pulled a weapon.” He shrugged.
The police officer nudged one of the prone men with his foot. “A real smart bunch of punks. Drive right up and park across the street from two cars with government plates. You shitheads de- serve to be in jail. Just in case you haven’t figured it out, you’re under arrest.”
The wail of an approaching siren caromed from the fronts of the dilapidated houses.
“See you around. Lieutenant,” Camacho said.
“Leaving? Some congressman fucking his secretary tonight?”
“You city guys can handle this. Mrs. Jackson’s my problem.”
“The old lady can cool off without you, Rambo. I’m gonna go get a search warrant for this house, and you’re gonna have to sign an affidavit. A couple of them. You and your sidekick here, J. Edgar Earp, are gonna be working with me for the next eighteen hours. Now get your cute little ass over here and start searching this car. Let’s see what these hot shooters were driving around.” The lieutenant was right. It did take eighteen hours.
Terry Franklin never knew how long he stayed in the bathroom. The flowers on the wallpaper formed a curious pattern. Each had a petal that joined to an offset flower, all of them; it was very curious how they did that. He thought about how the flowers joined and about nothing at all for a long, long time.
When he came out of the bathroom the house was dark and silent. He flipped on the kitchen light and drank milk from the carton in the refrigerator. He was very tired. He climbed the stairs and lay down on the bed.
The sun was shining in the windows when he awoke. He was still dressed. He used the toilet, then went downstairs and found some- thing to eat in the refrigerator. Cold pizza. He ate it cold. It was left over from a week or more ago when he had taken the whole family to Pizza Hut. He thought about that for a while, trying to recall just when it had been, remembering the crowd and the kids with the cheese strings dangling from their mouths and hands. The memory was fresh, as if it had happened just a short while ago, yet it was all wrong. The memory was from the wrong perspective, like when you remember a scene from your childhood. You remember it as you saw it as a child, with everything large and the adults tall and the other children just your size. That’s the way he remem- bered Pizza Hut.
He sat the empty plate in the sink and ran some water into it, then went into the living room and lay down on the couch. He was tired again. He slept most of the day.
12
At four o’clock Saturday after- noon an exhausted Luis Camacho arrived home with a raging headache and went straight to bed. When he awoke the house was quiet and dark and his wife was asleep beside him. He checked the luminous display on the clock-radio on the bedside stand: 12:47. Slipping on his robe, he padded downstairs to the kitchen, where he raided the refrigerator. He got a plate from the dishwasher and helped himself to some leftover meat loaf and a couple of big spoonfuls of tuna casserole. He nuked it for a minute in the micro- wave while he poured a glass of milk.
From the kitchen table he could see Albright’s bedroom window across the waist-high cedar fence, just twenty feet or so away. The window was dark. Good ol’ Harlan Albright- Peter Aleksan- drovich Chistyakov. Yuri.
Matilda Jackson had unlocked her front door and opened it for her killer, then turned her back on him. So it was someone she thought she had no reason to fear. A small-caliber automatic with a good silencer, the point-blank coup de grace, the methodical search of the house for possible witnesses and the turning off of the lights and appliances; certainly he was no thief or teenage drug guard-tumed-gunman. No, Mrs. Jackson had been the victim of a trained, experienced assassin who convinced her it was safe to ad- mit him into her house. Perhaps he told her he was with the FBI? Then he put two bullets into her brain.
Not to protect Pochinkov, who had diplomatic immunity and coutd not be arrested or prosecuted. The Americans needed no testimony from Mrs. Jackson or anyone else should they decide to declare Pochinkov persona non grata. Camacho thought about the picture of Terry Franklin in his jacket pocket, which he had hoped Mrs. Jackson might recognize. He had discussed the possibility of Mrs. Jackson identifying Franklin with Harlan Albright.
And Albright had lost no time. Why take a chance? Why risk endangering a valuable agent? He probably had not pulled the trigger himself. Just a quick call from a pay phone and Mrs. Jack- son was on her way to the graveyard.
The ability to kill people with a telephone call — that’s the ulti- mate manifestation of power, isn’t it? And those ignorant charla- tans in the Caribbean are still sticking pins into dolls. If only they could comprehend how far mankind had progressed with the won- drous aid of modern technology, developed from the triumphant findings of rigorous, unbiased science. Two thousand years anno domini murder is no longer uncertain, affected by mysterious forces and mystic symbols and the position of the moon and plan- ets. We civilized moderns just let our fingers do the walking…
Camacho rinsed the dirty dish, glass and fork and placed them in the dishwasher. Somewhere here in the kitchen his wife had cigarettes hidden. They had both quit smoking six months ago, but she still liked to savor a cigarette in the afternoon over a cup of coffee while a soap blared on the television. And she thought he didn’t know. A cop is supposed to know things, lots of things, and occasionally he finds he knows too much.
The Minotaur
The pack was on the top shelf in the pantry, behind a box of instant rice. After a couple of puffs, he poured himself a finger of bourbon and added water and ice. He sat at the kitchen table and opened the sliding glass door to the backyard a few inches to ex- haust the smoke.
Beyond the back fence the houses facing the next street over were silhouetted against the glare of the streetlights. The shapes cast weird shadows in his backyard. He smoked two cigarettes before he finished the whiskey and put both butts in the garbage under the sink. In the family room he lay down on the couch and pulled the throw blanket over him.
As he tried to relax the faces and images ran through his mind in a disjointed, unconnected way: Albright, Franklin, Matilda Jack- son with her obscene third eye. Admiral Henry, Dreyfus with his pipe and files, Harold Strong blunt and profane, all the letters with their penciled block words that said nothing at all and yet whis- pered of something, something just beyond his understanding… It was a long time before Luis Camacho drifted off to sleep.
He awoke to the smell of coffee and bacon. Breakfast was strained, as usual. In a crisis of identity last fall, their sixteen-year-old son had transformed himself into a punk all in the course of one sunny Saturday at the mall. The boy sat sullenly at the table this morning with his remaining hair hanging over his forehead and obscuring his eyes. The shaved place above his left ear, clear up to where his part used to be back in those old, “normal” days, looked extraordi- narily white and obscenely naked, his father thought, rather like a swatch of an old maid’s thigh. Luis Camacho sipped coffee and studied the tense, quivering lips visible below the cascading hair.
When the boy had left the table and ascended the stairs, Luis remarked, “What is his problem?”
“He’s sixteen years old,” Sally said crossly. “He’s not popular, he’s not a good student, he’s not an athlete, and the girls don’t know he’s a
live. The only thing he does have is acne.”
“Sounds like an epitaph.”
“It’s his whole life.”
Camacho was just starting on the Sunday paper when the phone rang. His wife answered. “It’s for you,” she called.
It was Dreyfus, calling from a car phone. “Luis, it’s Smoke Judy. He’s out driving this morning. Left his house in Morningside ten minutes ago- Maybe a meet.”
“Where is he now?”
“Going north on the beltway. We just passed the Capital Centre arena.”
“You guys got the van in standby?”
“Nope. It’s back at the shop.” The shop was headquarters, the J. Edgar Hoover Building. “Nobody thought we’d need it today.”
“Get it. I want a record this time. Any idea where he’s going?”
“Not a glimmer.”
“I’ve got to get dressed and shaved. I’ll be in the car in fifteen minutes. Call me on the car phone then.”
“Sure.”
Sally came into the bathroom while he was shaving. “You’re in the paper today.” She showed him the story and the photo. “You didn’t tell me there was a shooting.”
“Friday night. Dreyfus shot a guy.”
“It says here the dead man had already shot at you.”
He eyed her in the mirror, then attacked his upper lip.
“Luis, you could have been killed.”
“Then Gerald could shave his bead as bare as his ass and run around in a loincloth.”
She closed her eyes and shook her hair. “Weren’t you scared?”
He hugged her. “Yeah. I seem to be spending more and more time in that condition.”
Camacho was driving south on New Hampshire Avenue past the old Naval Ordnance Lab, now the navy’s Surface Weapons Center, when the car phone buzzed. It was only 9:30 on Sunday morning, but already a good volume of traffic was flowing along the avenue. It seemed as if all the Silver Spring suburbanites had big plans for this spring day, which was partly overcast. He wondered if it would rain as he picked up the phone. “Camacho.”
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