“And what will the bush Nazi next door have to say about that arrangement?” she asked.
“Probably that it’s about time,” he replied. “But I don’t want you out of my sight until we know these people have been taken off the boards.
Depending on what Vann can do, we may be going up against some seriously big guns.”
“What can Vann do? He can’t just arrest them.”
“I know that, Grace. The Hardin case is a federal matter, remember?
Vann’s bosses told him to turn loose of it. He can get something going after the fire last night, but he has to find the bad guy before he can possibly move on the flags. Right now, the people with jurisdiction are the NIS, and, as we know, the vice chief can make them do whatever he wants.”
“It was a federal case, until last night,” she snapped.
“Vann can make that into attempted murder and arson, to name just a couple of charges. Making the case and proving it might be tougher, but Vann can surely get their attention.”
“Let’s find out.”
He called Vann’s number, but, as usual, the captain was in a meeting.
Dan left his home number and asked the secretary to have Vann get back to them as soon as possible. He hung up and told Grace to start making a list.
“A list?”
“Of what you need for a set of clothes—sizes, brands.
There are some shops around the corner where I think we can put at least one outfit together. After that, if we still haven’t heard from Vann, I think we have to go to Georgetown.”
Two hours later they were in a cab heading for Georgetown.
Dan had taken Grace’s list and done his duty, even the part where he had to stand somewhat red faced at the lingerie counter giving monosyllabic answers to the salesgirl’s helpful questions about what style of panties he was interested in, much to the amusement of two women waiting behind him. Grace had looked into the packages, given him an arch look, and gone upstairs without comment. Dan had changed into some wash khaki trousers, a long-sleeved white uniform shirt that had been retired from naval service, and a khaki windbreaker. Grace was wearing a mid length gray skirt, a white blouse, and a dark red jacket.
A brand-new lightweight London Fog raincoat was on her lap.
They talked in the cab about how she would get into her safe-deposit box at the bank without keys—both sets of keys had been, of course, in the house. The local television news had given them a glimpse of what they were going to see when they arrived, but even that did not prepare them for the absolute devastation they found when the cab pulled up on P Street. A single fire truck was still there, its two-man crew probing through a blackened mound of debris with occasional shots from a hose. A small crowd of students from the university stood around gawking at the smoldering hole where the house had been. Half the street and the entire perimeter of her property was circled by fluttering bands of yellow police tape. Of the house, only the bricks of the side walls were recognizable. The heat from the blaze had been intense enough to burn all the leaves off the nearby trees and blacken the paint on both adjoining houses. They could see all the way to the back garden gate from the street; the garden looked somehow indecently exposed without the house. Grace’s car was squatting on its tire rims in a bed of broken glass. The body had been burned down to its metal shell, parts of which were already showing a rusty brown patina after being drowned in firefighting water. Dan’s Suburban was still parked across her driveway, and they could see that some of the paint on its hood had been blistered.
Grace stared at the steaming mound that had been her home and fought back tears as Dan paid the taxi bill.
A uniformed cop got out of an unmarked car across the street and came over as they got out.
“You the owners?” he asked.
“I am,” Grace said, her voice not entirely in control.
“Okay, lady. The arson squad’s on the way out. I’ve got some forms we gotta get filled out.”
“Have you spoken with Captain Vann?” Grace asked.
Dan had walked over to his car and was now on hands and knees, checking out the Suburban.
“Vann? No. What’s Captain Vann got to do with a house fire?” The cop, a pudgy Hispanic-looking individual who needed a shave, looked faintly annoyed. The brass tag on his shirt said his name was Lopez.
“There’s some background to what happened here, Officer Lopez,” Grace said patiently. “The arson people should talk to Captain Vann before they start here.”
“Okay, I’ll tell ‘em. But I still hafta get this paperwork done. You wanna come over to my car or what?”
Grace accompanied the officer to the cop car and they sat together in the front seat. The stink of burned insulation, water-soaked, charred wood, and melted plastics permeated the entire street. Some of her neighbors were out on their front porches, and two of them waved tentatively to her as she got into the cop car.
After twenty minutes of filling out police report forms, Grace saw what she presumed to be the arson squad pulling up in a police van. Four men dressed in dark blue overalls got out of the van and began to assemble their equipment. A middle-aged white man with sandy red hair and an enormous handlebar mustache came over to the cop car and introduced himself as Detective Sergeant Cowans. It turned out that he had already been contacted by Vann and knew what had started the fire. He had a message from Vann for Grace.
“He said he’d like to see you and Commander Col lins downtown around three-thirty, four o’clock.”
“We tried to call him this morning,” Grace said.
“Yeah, well,” the sergeant said, looking faintly embarrassed, “he’s got a whole day of department-wide sexual-harrassment seminars to go to, and they’re not letting anybody skip out, not even the captains. It’s been scheduled for weeks.”
Life goes on, Grace thought, looking over at the small knot of college students. “We’ll be there,” she said. “I’ve got a lot to do this morning. That’s four o’clock at the Municipal Center, right?”
“Yes, ma’am. Sorry about your house. Was there anything of especially high value in there? Like jewelry, and particularly diamonds? Sometimes we find them.”
Grace held up her hand, where she still wore Ren me’s engagement ring as a buffer against single men on the prowl. “This is the only diamond, Sergeant Cowans.
The rest of my jewelry was gold, and I suppose that’s all melted.”
“We’ll keep an eye out, Miss. Snow. Sometimes we get lucky. But usually—”
“I understand, Sergeant. Thank you.” The sergeant asked her a few more questions about the layout of the house and whether or not there had been any guns or ammunition in it and then he went back to the van. The uniformed cop tagged along, leaving Grace sitting in the passenger seat of his car, trying to take stock. The house and furnishings had been insured, but she had lost every one of her possessions in the fire: furniture and heirlooms from her parents’ house in Boston, the only pictures she had of them, all of her clothes, her favorite books, childhood mementos.
It was as if her past had simply disappeared. She looked around for her purse to get a tissue, but of course her purse had gone, too—wallet, checkbook, credit cards, driver’s license, everything. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand as a wave of dread seized her then, as the image of that horrible man bent over her in the bedroom came back, the total helplessness she had felt when he had cut her clothes off, the nightmare sight of his maimed body. That man was still out there. Maybe not that far away, maybe out there watching them even now. She knew that Dan had been lucky to have even made it up the stairs after that karate chop in the front hallway, and even more fortunate to have been able to drive the man off. Dan was right: That man had planned to kill them both. She began to tremble again, her mouth working, her vision blurring as her eyes concentrated on Dan, who was only twenty feet away, half in, half out of his car, rooting around for the hidden spare ignition key, his movements made clumsy because of
the neck brace. She called his name, but no sound came out. And yet he turned around, as if he had heard her anyway, from all the way across the street. He closed his car door and came over to her, opening the door of the cop car and taking her hands. She sagged against him, trying not to cry.
“Hey,” he said. “Hey, it’s gonna be all right. The Suburban’s okay.
Let’s get out of here. Let’s go back to my place. You can contact the insurance company and everyone else by phone. Come on.”
He helped her out of the car and into the Suburban, both of them stepping through a slushy mat of burned leaves and standing water at the curb. Dan checked out with Officer Lopez, who seemed indifferent, and then drove back to Old Town. The paint of the Suburban’s right side had been blistered, and the air in the car had a faint smell of char to it.
Dan ran the air conditioner to try to get the smell out of the car.
Grace concentrated on looking at the familiar scenery along the GW Parkway to keep her mind on an even keel. Then she remembered what the sergeant had said.
“Vann wants to see us this afternoon,” she said.
“Four o’clock at the Municipal Center.”
“Not until then?” Dan said. He seemed to be annoyed.
Grace realized then that, in her misery over the house, she had shut the Hardin case out of her mind.
She sat up straight in her seat. Pull yourself together, she thought. We both got out with our skins intact. Her mind shied from the thought of what it would have been like if she had survived and Dan had not. But then her Yankee practicality asserted itself. You can’t do anything about the house. But you better start thinking about the possibility that Malachi Ward might try again.
“Are you going to tell him what you suspect?” she asked as they drove into Old Town.
“Hell yes,” Dan replied. “Vann’s the only outside guy who can confront the Navy on this. But he’ll need my help. And your testimony—that bastard didn’t seem to want to talk to me last night. But it will take both of us, because the NIS sure as hell isn’t going to do anything.
That’s why I’m worried about time—if the vice chief and his ace EA, Captain Randall, put two and two together, they can move against me.
They could probably stiff the District police if they could neutralize me.”
“If they did that, could Vann do it with my help?”
He laughed, then recited: ” ‘Disgruntled former employee of the NIS levels accusations against the number-two officer in the Navy. Charges two-year-old hit and-run accident linked to admiral’s love life. Accuser resigned under pressure from NIS top management.
Questions surface about how she got the appointment in the first place.’ No, I think they could taint any testimony you gave claiming it was the result of a grudge.
I’m the one who can testify about being pressured to stay out of the Hardin case after they gave it back to NIS. But if they send me to a weather station in Patagonia, working the case gets real tough.”
“They wouldn’t be that stupid,” Grace said.
“Wouldn’t they? You’d think that really senior officers wouldn’t be caught within a hundred miles of a three-day flyboy orgy in Las Vegas, where junior officers traditionally tear the clothes off of young women in public hotel hallways, all in the name of a professional seminar, mind you. And it looks like this guy, who’s married by the way, was dumb enough to have a sexual relationship with an Oh-three right there on the Navy staff. If they thought they could keep this under wraps by shipping me out, you better believe they’ll put my ass on Antarctic ice in a heartbeat. The only way we can stop it is to confront them first—Randall and his boss. But we need Vann for that.”
When they returned to Dan’s house, there were two messages waiting. The first was from Vann’s office, confirming what Sergeant Cowans had told them. The second was from Summerfield.
“Dan, this is Ron Summerfield. I think we have a serious problem here—the vice chiefs office wants a meeting with you and me at seventeen-thirty in the vice’s office. I told them you were on leave because of the fire, but Randall was, shall we say, less than sympathetic.
So I’d recommend you come back to the building, say around seventeen hundred. I’m afraid some shit’s about to hit a fairly large fan.”
Dan sat down in a chair as the machine beeped off and rewound itself.
“Well, oh shit, oh dear,” he said.
“Looks like my dance card is filling up, Miss. Grace Ellen Snow.”
“Fortunately, we’ll see Vann before you have to go do this. You will let me go with you, yes?”
Dan thought for a moment. “That’s not going to be a very friendly session, Grace. On the other hand—”
“Screw that,” Grace swore. “That was my house that was destroyed last night, and, if you’re right about Randall, by his hired hand, who, by the way, was probably going to kill us in the process. I think we need to ask Vann if we shouldn’t be seeking police protection instead of attending meetings with these people.”
Dan got up and began to pace around the living room. “These people,” he said slowly, “are my legal superiors. It’s not as if I have some open-and-shut case against the vice chief or even his EA. Vann’s probably going to remind us of that in no uncertain terms. So until we do have a clear case, I have to follow orders.
When an Oh-ten says, ‘Come see me,’ an Oh-five doesn’t ask, ‘Gee, do I have to?’” He stopped in front of a window.
Grace could see that Dan was having a hard time believing his own theory, because it meant that a system and a profession he believed in utterly was very rotten at the very top. She went over to him.
“Look,” she said. “One thing at a time. Let’s go talk to Vann, see what his take is on all this. Maybe he can find a hole in it. Maybe there’s another explanation for what happened last night. His people should have finished with their search of that guy Ward’s house by now, so maybe he has new data. But if it all hangs together, even circumstantially, then we all three go to the Pentagon this afternoon and confront these people.”
Dan sat back down and put his head in his hands, the brace sticking out like an Elizabethan ruff collar under his arms. Grace sat down beside him.
“If nothing else,” she said, “the Washington system will begin to work.
You know what the Navy does when there’s a major scandal brewing— they isolate the major players. This vice chief can’t tell the NIS to bury this once there’s been a public confrontation with the District police present.”
“You’re right. // Vann will play.”
malachi awoke with a start on his couch. He could sense but not clearly see waning daylight streaming in through the balcony windows, and there were sounds of traffic out in front of the apartment building. For a moment, he could not figure out why he couldn’t see, but then it all came back. He felt his face. His right eye was puffy and hot. The clear liquid that had been leaking from each corner had dried into a sugarlike crust on his cheek. There were striations of pain running along the side of his head from his right eye back toward his right ear. He had to rub his left eye to get it open, but then at least he could see. He looked at his watch and swore.
Four-thirty in the afternoon. Damn it! He had lost the entire day.
He swung his legs off the couch and his right shin reminded him that all was not well down there, either.
He tried to stand, but he could not put weight on his right leg. He hobbled into the bathroom to relieve himself, then turned on the mirror light to survey the damage.
The right eye looked about as bad as it felt. A rolling pin. The son a bitch had done him with a rolling pin. His left eye was operational, but the panda-bear circle was even more pronounced. He sat down on the toilet seat and examined his shin. The knot was still there, and there was extensive blood bruising up and down his leg. He felt the bone area around the hit and winced, but it did not actually seem to be broken. He could still recall that blinding, nauseating pain when N
avy had whacked him in the leg. It had actually hurt more than the eye—a lot more.
He gingerly washed his face and then went into the bedroom to find the makings for an eye patch, which he ended up fashioning out of two shoelaces and an oval shaped swatch of fabric from his black windbreaker. He cut a four-inch-square patch out of a towel and used it for padding, then tied it on. The entire rig immediately fell right off.
He needed some elastic. He cut the elastic waistband from a pair of undershorts and joined the two ends of the shoestrings together on the back of his head with a section of the white elastic. This time, the patch stayed in place. He took some more aspirin and then limped out to the kitchen to see if there was some ice available. He was suddenly very thirsty. He finished the half container of orange juice that was in the refrigerator, adding a dollop of Harper to the last inch of juice to get his heart going again. He made up an ice pack, using a kitchen towel and the meager pile of ice cubes in the freezer, and went back into the living room. He flopped down on the couch again, lit up a cigarette, and pulled the tape recorder over, putting the ice pack back on his leg. The patch over his eye had for some strange reason lessened the pain. Maybe it was the pressure. He had no medicine for an eye injury, nor any idea of what to buy for it. After tonight, he would head for West Virginia, maybe find some country doctor out there to work on his eye. But first, the tapes.
He examined the two tiny tape cassettes. One was still showing its clear plastic leader. The other had run all the way out. He stuck the second tape into the machine, plugged in earphones, and put it on his chest. He listened for almost thirty minutes to the sounds of what seemed like three men walking around his house, opening drawers, shifting furniture, and talking to each other about the house and the basketball championships and the new lieutenant’s promotion list. There was nothing about why they were there until almost the very end of the tape, when one of the men asked about the duplex next door. It sounded as if he was speaking from the next room.
“Hey, Sarge, we gotta hit the twin next door?”
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