Valley of Bones jp-2

by Michael Gruber

  “And are we going back to sleep?” asked Paz.

  “Maybe we should. My guy there tells me this is high level. That call rang a lot of bells. Your Mr. Packer is one well-connected fellow.”

  Oliphant tossed his bad churro into his waste can, followed by the bag and waxed paper, nice swished shots, and then took a drink from his FBI mug. “National security is a funny business. I never had much to do with it in the Bureau, never much wanted to. Nowadays, of course, everyone running around with their head cut off, I guess every swinging dick is involved in it somehow.”

  There was a pause. Oliphant seemed to be making his mind up about how much to tell Paz about whatever this was about. Paz said helpfully, “What was it you did for the Bureau, sir, if you don’t mind me asking.”

  “Oh, the usual. Bank robberies, kidnaps, fugitives. Bread and butter stuff. Taught at Quantico for a couple of years. I enjoyed that. Then I got interested in computer stuff and I headed up a special task force on kiddie porn. We busted a couple of major traffickers, which gave me a lot of satisfaction. Then I was deputy SAIC in New York, where I met the chief, and here I am. Things have changed, obviously, last couple of years, since the events in New York. And we, I mean the Bureau, is ill-suited to carry out the national security mission. In fact, the last time we tried it we made fools of ourselves, spying on movie stars while the fucking Russians were taking everything that wasn’t nailed down. The reason is that we’re trained to make cases, to collect evidence for criminal prosecutions. That’s where the gold has always been, how you get promoted. Now you say you want us to stop things from happening, a whole different kind of op. Well, how the fuck do you do that?”

  Paz had no idea. After a moment he asked, “So Packer was involved with the victim, and you learned he was a national security menace?”

  “Huh? Oh, no, that’s not the point. My friend wanted me to know that the people who put him on the watch list were kind of a peculiar outfit. You haven’t come across any references to anything called the Strategic Resources Protection Unit? The acronym is pronounced ‘serpu.’ “

  “No. What is it?”

  “Well, strategic resources need protection is the idea. Chemical plants, pipelines, power grids. Transshipment terminals, especially petroleum terminals. If someone had something like six bombs in the right places?the Gulf, Saudi, Canada, Mexico, Nigeria, and so on?they could cut sixty percent of our petroleum deliveries off for months. It’s a fairly vulnerable business, or so I’ve been told. Anyway, this SRPU has that job, both here in the States and overseas.”

  “That makes sense, then. The vic was in the oil business.”

  “Really?”

  Paz related what they had learned from Michael Zubrom, including the odd business of the missing cell phone.

  Oliphant said, “Okay, so this Zubrom suggested that the victim had secret knowledge of an oil find and…what? He was using diverted oil to raise money so he could develop it? That doesn’t make any sense. I don’t know a hell of a lot about it, but I always thought oil fields were developed by oil companies, and they spent in the multiple millions to do it. So a couple of hundred K is not going to make a dent in that. Besides if the Sudanese government knew about a big find, they’d be negotiating openly. I mean oil isn’t like some kind of hidden treasure, with a map,X marks the spot, you go down there with a truck one night and you’re set for life.”

  “Oh, you’re baffled too?” said Paz. “Good. I thought I was losing it. Plus, this new thing. The victim is on a watch list of an outfit that’s supposed to protect let’s say oil fields, refineries, from terrorists. Was he a terrorist? It doesn’t look like it, unless that was what the oil sale was for, money to set up a terror network.”

  “It’s something to think about. Did we find any money?”

  “Not that kind of money. I got Morales checking wire transfers out of that Jersey bank Zubrom sent his payment to, but I don’t have any high hopes. Those guys are pretty tight with their information, and they’re not going to be impressed by a cop from Miami.”

  “No, they’re not that impressed by the FBI either. I hate that you didn’t find a cell phone.”

  “Yeah, me too. Among other things, it casts doubt on Dideroff’s guilt, or at least suggests that she didn’t act alone.”

  “Did she act at all?” Oliphant’s tone had been speculative, collegial; with this last he was a boss again and staring directly at Paz.

  He shrugged and answered, “Sir, you know what we know, except I arrested her and I saw something there. She could have killed him. For a couple of seconds she had that killer look. Whether she did or not…” Another shrug. “She’s not what you would call a regular person.”

  “What about the giant confession she’s supposed to be writing?”

  “Apparently still scrawling away. I’m dying to curl up and read it.”

  “I bet. Look, I’m going to talk to Posada, get you both on this thing full-time. You need to find out more about this victim and our suspect, where they intersected, and we’re no longer just interested in strengthening the case against Dideroff. I want to know the whole story if possible. Use what she writes, but don’t stop there. I want her life story checked and cross-checked. Find out who our Arab was and what he was doing in Miami besides selling a shipload of oil. It can’t just be that. He could have done that from anywhere. He was in Miami for a reason. He was after something and someone was after him, and he knew it, or he wouldn’t have told your oil guy about getting some backup. Maybe he did get some backup?if so, find out what or who it was.”

  “Okay, sir, but would you like to tell me why we’re putting a full-court press on something that looks a lot like a grounder.”

  Oliphant made an impatient gesture. “Oh, hell, you know damn well it’s not a grounder anymore. You ever have a rat die in a wall? It doesn’t matter how much deodorizer you spray, there’s still that stink that sticks in the back of your throat. This thing has a stink like that. People are fucking with us, major players are playing us, and I’m goddamned if I’m going to be played. We need to go into the walls and find the rat.”

  Paz took a breath and asked, “Sir, this wouldn’t have anything to do with why you left the Bureau?”

  Oliphant stared at him so long that Paz was forced to drop his eyes. “That’s really none of your business. But if anything from my FBI experience ever becomes relevant to this case, I’ll bring it to your attention. Are we done?”

  Paz stood. “Yes, sir.”

  Oliphant was still staring at him. “You getting enough sleep, Jimmy?”

  “Sure.”

  “You don’t look like it. You got red rims on your eyes and you yawned three times in the last half hour. Maybe you need to lay off some of that Cuban coffee.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Paz, “maybe I do.” He was in the hallway before he realized that Oliphant had steered the conversation away from revealing why the name David Packer had caused the security gates to slam down at the State Department.

  Ten

  Lorna wise lies in bed and considers her symptoms. It is Saturday, so she can lie in bed doing this for longer than she usually does. A scratchiness in the back of the throat. A twitching in her calf muscle. A sort of deadened area just above her left elbow. She blinks one eye, then the other. Perhaps a slight blurring of vision in the left, or maybe that’s a bit of sleepy dust. Although, it’s worrisome that it’s the left one. The left calf muscle too, bad, speaks to central nervous system malfunction: an ischemia, a smallish brain tumor, the subtle onset of MS. As she lies, she palps her breasts, although she knows she should be upright, and although she will do it again when she showers. Probing for the tumor she knows is lurking, surely her fingers, so competent after all these years, can catch the nodule at the earliest possible stage and she can have the surgeon pluck it out. Although she knows that’s not true, although she is by now a fairly decent amateur oncologist, although she knows there are cancers so treacherous that by the time they show a pal
pable tumor they have spread througout the body. Not the kind her mother had, however, her mother was carrying a tumor the size of a tangerine around before she went to the doctor. Why, Mom, why didn’t you go to the doctor? Because I thought it was nothing. Because I hate doctors.

  Lorna drops her breasts and sits up on the edge of the bed, experiencing a wave of dizziness and perhaps a slight nausea, the infallible sign of a brain wracked with metastases or else mere sickness and disgust at herself. Unlike Mom, Lorna happens to love doctors, occasionally in a sexual way, as with Rat Howie, and for this reason has decided that her personal physician should always be a woman, and so it is. She suppresses an urge to call Dr. Greenspan. But she saw her only thirty-four days ago and does not wish to acquire a rep as a crock. For some reason, she thinks as she starts her Saturday routine, the first minutes of the day are always the worst, the times when she feels most fragile and afraid.

  She breakfasts on grapefruit and health pills and coffee on the little patio in the back, surrounded by flowers and twittering birds. She receives both theMiami Herald and theNew York Times every morning and reads both all the way through, except for the sports sections. TheHerald is an excellent paper, but she does not feel civilized without theTimes; theTimes and theNew Yorker, banners her dad flew, declaring that although he now lived in the New Jersey burbs, he had not surrendered to barbarism. And she likes the crossword puzzle, which she now does in twenty minutes, not as good as her dad but not disgraceful either.

  After that, she sits in a sling chair, sipping the cooling coffee and recounting all the various tasks she has put off until the weekend and now must do or feel like a slacker. The phone rings, and she reaches for the cordless she has brought out with her and it is Sheryl Waits. Who asks if she is ready. Ready for what? It now turns out that Lorna’s mind has erased the appointment she made with her friend to go shopping for a dress to wear to Sheryl’s party, an actual party dress, which I don’t believe you own one of, sugar, because you are not entering my domicile looking like bark. Uh-uh!

  That evening Lorna shows up at Sheryl’s party more than fashionably late in a scarlet spaghetti strap dress with a Saran Wrap cling and a built-in bra that offers her breasts up like twin servings of flan. The place is jumping, cars lining both sides of the street, people standing on the sidewalk and on the front lawn, holding drinks, lights strung among the branches of the pines and around the trunks of the palms on the property, light pouring from every window of the good-size split-level house, and thumping music.

  She finds Sheryl in the kitchen taking a tray of fried chicken wings out of the oven. Sheryl screams how good she looks and requires everyone in range of her voice to see how good. Lorna says, “I hate you. This is the least fabric I’ve worn on my body outside a pool since I was four.”

  “You’re such a fool, child! You look fantastic. Don’t she look fantastic, Elvita?”

  Elvita agrees she looks fantastic. Lorna mugs for them, a pulp temptress. Hilarity.

  In general, Lorna is bored by parties, by the way people act when they are drinking, nor does she like dancing with or being pawed by strangers. At loud parties, she usually finds a quiet corner, sits down with a glass of white wine, and observes the various species at their social rituals, an ornithologist in a rain forest. But because it is Sheryl’s party she feels obliged to be social. She circulates, sipping a wine and soda. Most of the people here are connected to the police, somewhat over half of them black, the rest a mix of Anglos and Cubans. As she expected, the men are standing about in clumps, clutching drinks in big plastic cups and talking sports or shop. The women are in clumps too, talking shop, shopping, vacations, clothes, kids, of which there are large numbers running underfoot and shouting in the yard. Some people are dancing under colored lights on the patio, to the Weather Girls, “It’s Raining Men.”

  A man comes up to her, introduces himself as Rod, identifies himself as a friend of Leon’s. He is muscular, hairy, a cop, has only small talk to offer; he stares at her tray of breasts. Another man, taller, Ben, with the kind of big Adam’s apple she rather dislikes comes and joins them. He also stares at her breasts. She feels like she should be on a rotating platform, like a new model at an auto show. And another, Martin, younger and better looking, and what does he stare at? Not her flawless skin. They are all Miami PD and they engage in a joking rivalry, saying amusing bad things about one another to her, all of them eyeing her body. She can almost hear the saliva gurgle, the blood surging through their genitalia. This is it, then, sexual triumph: she finds she can’t take it seriously, it’s like thinking that a construction worker’s whistle signals the start of a meaningful relationship. Yet she feels obliged to play, to bat back the slightly salacious repartee, tosimper, for God’s sake! And to sweat. A good thing about this outfit is that it doesn’t come close to her armpits. A drink in a large plastic cup is placed in her hand and she drinks: sweet and very cold. Leon must be making his famous frozen daiquiris.

  Somewhat of a blur after this. She dances with several men, feels several sets of genitals against her unprotected belly, several sets of hands on her ass. The dancing is to funk and disco, music she does not care much for. Then, suddenly, the music changes, a Latin beat, but unlike any Latin music she has heard before. It is layered, multivoiced, with rhythms that are incredibly complex yet still engaging of the groin area. Now she is dancing with a man who is leading her in steps she doesn’t know but seems to be able to do fairly well, or perhaps that is a result of the rum. He has steady hazel eyes set in a face that’s the caramel color of a Coach bag she owns. He is just her height in heels.

  “What’s this music?” she asks.

  “It’s a machine for the suppression of time,” he says.

  “Pardon?”

  “Levi-Strauss.”

  “Levi-Strauss?”

  “Yeah. Plays third base for the White Sox. How about those Marlins?”

  “You’re Jimmy Paz,” she says.

  “And how do you deduce that, Dr. Wise?” A grin now, small white teeth shining, like a cat.

  “Sheryl said you were brainy. I don’t think many men at this party would respond to a question with a quotation from Levi-Strauss.”

  “Only those on the structural anthropology softball team.”

  “Of which you are a member.”

  “I am. Leftbricoleur. We play ball, we down a case of cold ones, and sit around the locker room discussingTristes Tropiques.”

  “Seriously, what is this music?”

  “It’stimba. A Cuban record, a band called Klimax.”

  “What are they singing about?”

  “Yo no quiero que mi novia sea religiosa. I don’t want my girlfriend to be religious. Speaking of which, how’s our girl?”

  “Oh, no, not shop! And here I thought you were dancing with me because you liked my dress,” Lorna says, not really believing that she has let this slip from between her lips.

  He flings her out and leads her through an elaborate break and then snaps her back close. He smells of tobacco, not a smell she is used to on the health-conscious men she tends to hang with. Not unpleasant, though. Spicy. He throws her out again to the beat and now he gives her a long appreciative look that she feels running over her skin like heat. He says, “No, it was mainly the dress. Mainly the nondress zones, to be honest. Creamy. It makes me wish I had a long spoon.”

  “I think we could use another drink,” she says.

  Somewhat later they are sitting side by side on a somewhat ratty Bahama couch in the Waitses’ Florida room with that drink, Lorna’s a second foolhardy daiq and Paz with some dark brown liquid on ice. Lorna sees Sheryl zoom by with a tray of nibbles. Sheryl spots the two of them and rolls her eyes while licking her lips dramatically. Lorna sticks out her tongue.

  Paz catches this action but declines to comment on it. Instead he says, “So. What do we have?”

  It takes a second for Lorna to recall what he is talking about. Then she hears herself talking, the words sl
ow and only a little slurred. She listens to the person speak, as from a great distance. “Two interviews and one notebook full of writing. From the interviews, nothing much. She’s a hard case, very smart, doesn’t want to give anything away. There’s a…I don’t know how to put it, a split in her, somewhere deep. Her usual persona is mild, saintly, lots of religious references. But occasionally, if she feels pressed…”

  “Out comes the spider woman,” says Paz.

  “You’ve seen it too?Her, I should say.” Lorna feels a rush of grateful relief. She has not discussed this aspect of her client with Mickey Lopez.

  “Oh, yeah. I saw something when I interviewed her after the arrest. A look in her eyes. That’s when I knew we weren’t dealing with the Little Flower.”

  “Excuse me, the little…”

  “A saint, Teresa of Lisieux. I guess you’re not Catholic.”

  “No. But I’m sure it’s not simple malingering. I’ve seen a lot of that and it’s fairly easy to tease out. We have tests that…anyway, not to get technical, but she’s for real, there really is something bent in there. That confession you got her to write tends to confirm that. She had a horrendous childhood.”

  Paz listens as she summarizes the contents of the first notebook, professionally sympathetic, not particularly shocked; he has heard and seen worse. Studying the woman as she speaks, he sees something unsaid flickering behind her bland professional delivery, and he knows that she has seen the same kind of inexplicable transformation he’d seen himself. It wasn’t just a look in Emmylou Dideroff’s eyes, but what it actually was he cannot say, doesn’t want to think about, and for damned sure is not about to bring up just now.