Pyramid Deception

by Austin S. Camacho

  “Uh-huh.” Hannibal shook his head. “Well, while we’re waiting, might as well tell you what I saw. Three guys started a commotion over by the bar, but it wasn’t serious. I don’t think a punch was ever thrown. They were just a distraction.”

  “Really?” Rissik leaned forward, resting his elbows on his desk. “Distraction for who? Or from what?”

  As Hannibal opened his mouth to speak a solidly-built brunette who could have been twenty-eight or fifty-eight years old marched into the room. She wore a conservative navy business suit, with a skirt long enough to prevent anyone knowing whether or not her legs were worth staring at. She offered Hannibal a large coffee, then handed a cup to Monroe and placed a third on Rissik’s desk.

  “Cream? Sugar?” she asked. When Monroe nodded she retrieved his coffee and took it to the side table. While he talked her through the preparations, Hannibal continued.

  “For the entire bar full of random people. From the little guy with the broken bottle. It didn’t feel like a random attack to me, but it would have looked like one if I hadn’t been sitting there.”

  Monroe’s head whipped around. “You think that man was there specifically to hurt me?”

  “Wash, that guy was too far away from the fight to want to knock the end off a beer bottle,” Hannibal said. “He wasn’t headed for the bar. He was headed for your neck. And under normal circumstances, he’d have opened your neck with that bottle and been gone in the confusion before anybody even knew what happened.”

  “You can’t know that,” Monroe said.

  “Yeah, who’d want to hurt a sweet guy like you?” Rissik asked.

  “Snark does not become you, officer.”

  “Detective.”

  “Whatever.”

  “So how about I just get a written statement from each of you and then you can go home where there probably isn’t anybody who wants to kill you.”

  “Where there isn’t anybody,” Monroe said. “I release the help on weekends.”

  Ignoring Monroe’s bitter tone, Hannibal waved a dismissive hand at Rissik. “There’s nobody to press charges against, and the victim obviously doesn’t care. Do you want to get out of here and get statements in the morning? What are you doing here this late anyway?”

  “Ahh, you know how much paperwork and BS is involved when you find a body.” When he saw the puzzled expression on Hannibal’s face, he said, “Didn’t you know? We found him.” Rissik stopped short, pointing toward Monroe as if he was a reason to stop talking. Hannibal swatted the notion away with his hand.

  “You mean Jason? You found Jason Moore? Where?”

  “Who?” Monroe asked.

  “The boyfriend,” Hannibal said without looking at him. “You thought he ran off with your wife. Instead somebody killed him to sell the runaway story. What did they do to him, Chief?”

  “Actually I kind of thought I’d like to get your gut level impressions of all that,” Rissik said, leaning forward on his elbows. “Besides, you know we can’t make it official based on a photo. We need a personal identification. You want to see the body?”

  “Hey I would like a chance to examine him. But, I do have an errand I need to run first.”

  Monroe looked lost when Hannibal pulled up in front of his house. He stared up at the front door of his colonial palace. A row of lights along the drive and two more in the portico ceiling made the flight of stairs leading up to the door as bright as day. Hannibal wondered if he feared the darkness beyond the door.

  “Want to come in for a drink?” Monroe asked, but his voice revealed that he already knew the answer.

  “You’ll be fine, Wash,” Hannibal said. “And the last thing you need right now is a drink. Just go on in, and make sure you reset the alarm when you get inside.”

  “It’s a big enough pain in the ass getting in,” Monroe said. “Now you want me to lock myself in?”

  “Well, I don’t think anybody would go in there looking for you,” Hannibal said. “That’s not this guy’s M.O. But no sense taking stupid chances. Besides, I imagine you’ll sleep pretty soundly tonight.”

  “Yeah, probably. You know, um…I’m sorry.”

  “What about?”

  Monroe kept his eyes on the dashboard. “I’m sorry your woman lost her money. And I’m sorry this guy Jason Moore is dead, especially if he died just to cover up Irene’s murder. I know it doesn’t make anything any better. I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”

  A little short of an admission of guilt, Hannibal thought, but a bigger step than he expected. He looked at Monroe as if seeing him for the first time. “You’re not quite who I thought you were, Wash.”

  Monroe smirked. “Me too.”

  “I think maybe your hero Ponzi was able to do what he did because he never let himself consider that the people he took were live human beings just trying to make it in this world, like him. Maybe he never had to see the consequences of his work.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Monroe said. “Or maybe he was just having too much fun proving he was smarter than everybody else.”

  “Look, you go on inside and get some sleep, Wash. I got detective work to do if I’m going to find the people who took Irene away from you.”

  Monroe nodded and left the car without saying goodnight. Hannibal thought the shrubs and bushes were too close to the door, so he sat and watched Monroe climb the outside stairs. He watched him fumble with his keys. He stayed until Monroe was inside. He watched lights come on and move upstairs. Then, on an impulse he got out of his car, walked to the door and tried the knob. He felt better knowing for sure that the door was locked.

  Back in his car he opened the vents and let the cool air blow in his face. That kept him alert on the drive back to Fairfax. It was nearly an hour round trip. He knew any sane cop would have told him to forget coming back to the Braddock Road complex that night. He also knew that when he parked on the other side of police headquarters, walked into the medical examiner’s office and continued down the hall to the morgue, Orson Rissik would still be sitting there, looking around as if he couldn’t figure out why everybody else was gone for the day.

  The state medical examiner’s mortuary was not the dark, atmospheric cavern you see in old movies. Nor was it the cold, antiseptic space so often portrayed on television. Instead, it was exactly what it should have been, a medical examination room. This, Hannibal thought, was where the real forensic work was done, where experts measured core temperatures, judged lividity, checked the progress of rigor mortis, looked for insect larvae and determined when and how the most recent corpse came to be their guest. In every way it was like any other laboratory in any hospital. Hannibal didn’t mind the brightness, but he could never get used to the antiseptic smell.

  Rissik greeted him with a nod and walked him through the high-ceilinged rooms, their steps echoing on the tile floors. They were in the room lined with stainless steel drawers before either of them felt the need to speak.

  “Hey, am I supposed to be in here?”

  “You are as far as Billy is concerned,” Rissik said. “I told him you were a relative of the deceased, come for the ID.” Then he called out to Billy, the long-haired, pimple-faced lab tech who was stuck with night duty. He strolled in, tossed off hellos and walked to a particular drawer. He grabbed the handle and looked up at Hannibal.

  “Are you ready for this?”

  “I’ll be strong,” Hannibal said. It wasn’t his first dead body after all.

  Billy nodded solemnly and pulled the handle. The drawer slid forward on silent rollers. Billy stepped back and Hannibal found himself face-to-face with Jason Moore. He had seen a few corpses and it always gave him an initial shiver that people looked so much like nothing had changed after life had left them. Jason was a little paler than Hannibal remembered but otherwise very much himself. He took a deep breath and reminded himself that this was not the man he met three days ago, but just the shell he used to live in.

  “Jason Moore?” Rissik asked.

  “
Jason Moore. This is what you wanted me to see. This does not look like a man who’s been dead for three days.”

  “No, he is pretty well preserved.”

  “So where’d you find him,” Hannibal asked, “and what was the cause of death?”

  Rissik crossed his arms and leaned against the drawers. “Well as you can see, there’s been no autopsy yet. They brought him in after four so the medical examiner will get to him tomorrow. But I don’t need an official pronouncement to guess. Check his neck.”

  Hannibal slipped a gloved hand under the dead man’s head and probed the vertebrae. He stopped at number six. His stomach clenched but nothing showed on his face. It isn’t Jason, he told himself again.

  “Yeah, it’s broken.”

  “Yeah, but how?” Rissik asked. “I know they gave you some forensic training in New York and probably more at Treasury.”

  “The Secret Service doesn’t do that kind of stuff,” Hannibal said. “But they did in New York City detective school. Besides, I’ve felt this before.”

  “So? Blunt force trauma? Or did they toss him down the stairs?”

  “No, this is radial trauma,” Hannibal said.

  “What?”

  Hannibal closed his eyes but didn’t move his hand. “Somebody stood behind this man, grabbed his head and gave it a sharp twist, snapping his neck. Quick. Merciful I guess.”

  “And cold blooded,” Rissik said. “These people are icicles.”

  “At least one of them is a trained killer,” Hannibal said. “The shooter was very calm and clean. But that doesn’t account for the body being so fresh.”

  “When we searched his house we found the body downstairs. How many single guys have a chest freezer? Naturally we had to look inside. Turns out it was pretty convenient for the killers that he had one.”

  “Not the brightest place to leave the body,” Hannibal said, very slowly sliding his hand out from under Jason’s neck.

  “I don’t know about that,” Rissik said. “If we found him weeks later, placing time of death would have been pretty near impossible. And not hauling him out of the house was a pretty smart play, or would have been if not for you. Absent your insistence that Irene Monroe was murdered, everyone would be looking for both of them in Canada. If we believed he ran off we never would have searched his house.”

  Hannibal nodded, looked down at Jason for another second, and slowly slid his drawer closed. “Cold and calculating. Damn, I hope the same guy who shot Irene Monroe did this. I don’t want to find out there are two or three killers this smart and deadly out there, but it sure could be a cell.”

  “Yeah, that’s why I didn’t want to wait for the autopsy.”

  “Wait a sec,” Hannibal spun to face Rissik. “No autopsy, but you said you found him around four. You found him while I was running around with Wash?” When Rissik nodded, he asked, “Why the hell didn’t you call me right away?”

  Rissik shrugged. “I didn’t think I’d need to. Kind of surprised Santiago didn’t tell you.”

  Hannibal lost a beat as his world collapsed in on itself and then exploded back out. In that instant he felt every second that had passed since the last time he spoke to his woman.

  “You told Cindy? You told her you found Jason’s body?”

  Rissik took a step back, palms up in mock defense. “Hey, she called looking for you. I guess she thought you were with me. Anyway, she asked if there was any news, and I knew he was her friend so yeah. I guess I just assumed she’d call you next. You haven’t heard from her?”

  Rissik said more but Hannibal didn’t hear it. He was already running for the door, plotting the fastest way to his hotel room.

  A coworker in his secret service days once remarked that Hannibal Jones was “wired wrong.” When a man stuck a gun in his face, his reaction was more anger than fear. His fellow agent jumped to the conclusion that Hannibal was immune to fear.

  He was wrong. At that moment, fumbling with his plastic card room key, Hannibal was terrified. His imagination raked him with thoughts of what Cindy might do faced with confirmation of her friend’s death. Her mental state seemed so fragile when he left that day. Why in God’s name had he not called to check on her throughout the day? Was he so obsessed with observing Wash, with what was happening in the moment? Or was he just so accustomed to Cindy being able to handle anything that he put her out of his mind while he was gone? No matter what, he spent the entire drive beating himself up for inexcusable self-centered bad judgement.

  Once he got the door unlocked he shoved it open as if he expected an ambush. The room was dark except for the moon glow coming through the windows. It was soft indirect lighting like the kind you see in a movie that you’re supposed to interpret as total darkness. He wanted to see her sleeping form lying in the bed, but it was not there. He turned toward the windows and that was when fear wrapped its icy fingers around his heart and squeezed.

  He took it in all at once without any processing time. Cindy sat slouched in the chair over by the window as still as a corpse, wearing only her lacy silk black bra and panties. She was backlit just as he had been that morning, except that the sunlight had given her skin a golden glow while the moonlight stole the color from her flesh. One small foot was curled under her while the other dangled toward the floor. He head lolled back and to her left. Her hands rested on the tables to either side of the chair.

  The Unisom pack lay beside her left hand. The flat plastic and foil pill card was pushed out of its colorful sleeve. The fingers of her right hand were curled up against a light rum bottle as if she had been holding the bottle and then her hand had simply fallen from it. The bottle was three-quarters empty.

  Arms spread, head tilted, one leg bent, she looked like some sick take on a crucifix with the pills on one side and the rum bottle on the other serving as the nails holding her hands in place.

  Hannibal’s chest imploded, forcing a hoarse, guttural sound out of him. It was somehow less than a scream but more than a crying sob.

  -13-

  Hannibal forced himself to breathe and rushed toward Cindy. But after three steps he pulled up short when her head snapped up and her eyes popped open.

  Fear contorted her features and her mouth gaped wide, pushing out an inarticulate scream. Hannibal stopped and even took a small step backward when he realized that it was his form speeding toward her that had frightened her.

  “What? What?” Cindy stared left and right, eyes wide, panting hard.

  “Easy, babe,” Hannibal said, palms forward. “You scared the shit out of me. Are you all right?”

  “I scared you?” Cindy leaned forward as if to stand. Her eyes rolled upward and she slumped back down into the chair. Hannibal started forward but her raised hand stopped him. Then she looked again left and right, took in the objects that she must have been holding when she passed out and raised her eyebrows.

  “Oh. I see.” She raised a small half-smile and picked up the rum bottle as if to see how much she drank. Hannibal watched her closely, her soft golden face and shoulders caressed by the moonlight. He watched thoughts dance across her face but had no idea how to react to what he saw.

  “Nothing to say?” Cindy asked, her words just a little slurred. “It’s okay. I get it. When you came in I was passed out. You saw the pills and the booze and you figured I couldn’t stand to accept that some little shit killed Jason. Right? You thought I curled up in this chair and committed suicide.”

  When he opened his mouth to speak, she thrust her right palm at him to freeze the words in his throat. Then she picked up the little packet of pills and began to turn it in her hand, examining it as if it were some ancient artifact no one had ever seen before. Then she smiled. Not at Hannibal, but at the pills.

  “I could have done it, you know. I thought about it. I was here all alone and I thought about it. I couldn’t talk to you. I couldn’t even talk to Daddy. It would have meant admitting failure that I had given up. I didn’t want to figure out what to do next, how to
start over. I just wanted to go to sleep and forget the losses. And I had these little beauties.”

  She turned to face Hannibal. “Diphenhydro…dyphun… hmmm…I guess I did drink a bit.” She shook her head and focused on the package in her hand. “Diphenhydramine. That’s what’s in these things. Kind of a mild sedative. Each one is 50 milligrams. Anything over 300 milligrams is considered an overdose. So, with 18 of these and a nice bottle of rum I could have just gone away. No pain, no anger, no guilt, no shame, no embarrassment, just a nap that would never end. I really thought about it. I could have done it so easily.”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t,” Hannibal said, sitting on the edge of the bed.

  “Nope. I just doubled the dosage on the rum side.” She picked up the bottle by its neck and sloshed its contents around. “I looked myself in the face and decided that I wasn’t going to do it. I could have, I just wouldn’t. Know why?”

  He did, but he shook his head. He knew she needed to say it.

  “Because,” she said, leaning forward, “It would have meant admitting failure. That I had given up.”

  Hannibal’s heart swelled then and he stood up and gathered his woman into his arms. She stood to embrace him and he could almost feel the last of the fear and uncertainty seep out of her.

  “I love you,” he whispered.

  “Do you?” When he nodded, she asked, “Will you forgive me for being a baby and blaming you, God and everybody else for my bad time?”

  “Nothing to forgive.”

  After three deep, shaky breaths she asked, “Will you find the bastard who killed my friend?”

  “I promise,” He said, noting with a smile that she made no mention of the lost money.

  She hugged him tighter. “Will you take me to bed and make me forget who I’ve been for the last couple of days?”

  Hannibal lifted, and Cindy slipped her legs up and around his waist. He turned and walked toward the bed.

  “Welcome back, babe.”

  She awakened him by nipping at his chest with her tiny, perfect teeth. The sun, just crawling over the horizon, burst through the window and made the room so bright it blinded him. Hannibal took the two hints and rolled over onto her. His mouth covered hers and she moaned low and opened herself completely to him.