by John Case
‘No.’
Riordan chuckled like a kid. ‘You tell me how that one worked – and you can go.’
‘Her “clock was ticking.” Her words. And since there wasn’t a guy in the picture – well, she said she didn’t need one.’
*
In fact, Kathy hadn’t put it quite so blandly. The day she told him about her intention to pursue motherhood was her birthday. Number thirty-seven. He’d taken her to dinner at the Inn at Little Washington, booked rooms for the night, and there’d been a certain amount of drinking. Kathy didn’t drink much, as a rule, but that night, after a glass of sherry, some Dom Pérignon, and an Armagnac, the effects were obvious. She sat across from him with a secret little smile on her face, running the tines of her fork around in the raspberry sauce that was all that remained of her coeur de crème. Suddenly, she tossed her head and looked up at him. She took a last sip of liqueur and set it down. ‘There’ll be no more of that for a while.’
Lassiter was puzzled. Alcohol had never been one of Kathy’s problems.
‘Health kick?’
‘In a way.’ She ran her finger dreamily around the rim of the glass until it produced a sudden loud, ringing tone; she withdrew the finger and giggled. ‘What if I told you I’m planning to get pregnant?’ she said. Her face was flushed rosy.
He hesitated. What he didn’t want to say was anything about her past failure to get pregnant, even when she and Murray were ‘trying.’ Or her teenage bout with anorexia, when she’d dwindled to seventy pounds and, according to doctors at the time, might have permanently damaged her reproductive system. ‘I’d say who’s the lucky guy? And then I’d ask why half of the Alliance has been kept in the dark about him.’
Across from him, Kathy licked the tines of her fork. Her eyes flashed. ‘What if I told you there is no guy?’
‘I’d say the plan was flawed.’
Kathy giggled, and careened on. ‘Not that it’s any problem getting fucked, of course – but, “without protection”? These days? And at the right time? And then if you do manage it, maybe the guy comes after you, maybe he sues for joint custody – maybe he wants to move in. Trust me, guys can be a big complication. But, luckily, this is the nineties. There are more efficient ways to get knocked up.’
‘Wait. You’re telling me –’
She nodded. ‘Uh-huh. I have an appointment tomorrow.’ She smiled. ‘This one’s just to talk – actually, to be “counseled” about the procedure.’
At the time, Lassiter hadn’t approved of Kathy’s sudden enthusiasm for motherhood, although he tried not to show it. She was so impatient, so antisocial. He couldn’t imagine her as a mother. But in the end her instincts had been right. All the trouble – and it took almost four years and a string of expensive and wrenching disappointments – had been worth it. Motherhood transformed her, lifted her free from the guarded and defensive self-involvement that had defined her since childhood. He didn’t think it was Brandon’s total and unqualified love for his mother that accomplished this. It was more that Kathy fell in love, for the first time – with her son.
Across from him, Riordan actually blushed. He was shocked. ‘Your sister went to . . . one of those places? A clinic? She had, what – artificial insemination?’ Disapproval squeezed his features into a knot and he shook his head. Then he took a sneaky look around and leaned closer to Lassiter. ‘You know, we don’t watch out, women are going to take over. No, no, you’re smiling, but I’m serious. We’ll be like the fucking bees.’
Lassiter realized he must have had a surprised look on his face, because Riordan felt compelled to explain.
‘Drones.’ He nodded his head decisively. ‘Bees can’t get along without them, but what do they get? I’ll tell ya what they get – winter comes and they get tossed right out of the fucking hive – freeze their asses off.’ Riordan paused, and nodded sagely to himself. ‘This seriously could happen to the human race.’ Another expression came sweeping over his big face, a quick worried look, as if he might have said too much. ‘Nothing against your sister,’ he mumbled. And then a big sigh passed through him, a cascade of weariness that ended when his chair scraped back over the floor. He stood up and stuck out his hand. ‘Thanks for coming in.’
‘Hey. I appreciate the effort.’ They shook. ‘Sorry if I was –’
‘Nah – forget it.’ Riordan looked distracted. ‘Not that you were a lotta help. I mean your sister –’ His big head seesawed sadly. ‘I got nothing to go on.’ He patted under his arm and did a strange little shimmying move to settle the gun into a more comfortable position. ‘It ain’t love, it ain’t money, it ain’t family. I don’t know. Maybe the guy is a toon.’
‘Mind if I ask you a question?’
Riordan shrugged into his sport coat and tightened his tie. ‘What’s that?’
‘The Comfort Inn. He make any calls from there?’
The detective tapped the edge of a cigarette pack against his wrist, extracted a cigarette with his teeth, and slapped his pockets for matches. The moment they left the building, he lighted up, inhaled, and blew a stream of smoke at the gray sky.
Finally he said, ‘I don’t know. I don’t think we checked.’ He took a prolonged drag from the cigarette and added, ‘But we will.’
11
A FEW DAYS after the funeral, Lassiter started listening to the car radio again. For a while he’d kept it off because, right after the murders, he was switching from one station to another, trying to find the jazz program on WPFW – and was ambushed by a short news story. It wasn’t anything new, really – nothing but a recitation of the facts, and a sound bite from Riordan. Even so, there was something dark, and very disturbing, about listening to the details of your own family’s catastrophe, broadcast as a thirty-second news segment between Howard Stern and a traffic update.
I’m tellin’ ya, Robin, I was so horny this morning – no, really! / The little boy’s throat was cut from ear to ear / There’s a fender-bender on the outer loop of the Beltway . . .
Now, as he drove down the parkway, he listened to a piece about a woman whose body had been discovered in the trunk of a car, parked in one of the satellite lots at National Airport. A police spokesman was interviewed. It was the unusually warm weather, he said; it was the smell that drew attention to the vehicle. They’d identified the woman. Lassiter hoped her relatives weren’t listening.
Then the news gave way to the traffic. ‘You’re on the brakes southbound on the G.W.,’ the voice told him, ‘all the way from Spout Run to Memorial Bridge.’ No kidding. There were red lights as far as he could see.
Almost two weeks since the murders, and the truth was, he was beginning to get used to it. His mind had made some kind of adjustment. The fact that his sister and nephew had been slaughtered in their beds no longer shocked him. They were dead, just dead, and that was the way things were. It reminded him of the way he felt when his parents were killed. After a while it was hard to remember them. After a while it didn’t seem like they’d ever really been alive.
He got off at the Key Bridge and beat his way down the Whitehurst Freeway to E Street.
He’d been at his desk for about an hour when Victoria buzzed and said that there was a reporter from the Washington Times on the line, and ‘it’s about your sister’s case.’ It seemed ironic that a reporter should be calling him – after his reflections on the drive into town. And he was surprised. Press interest in cases like Kathy’s had a short shelf life, blown off the pages and airwaves by more recent and equally gruesome disasters.
The voice was female, young, and nervous. Southern accent. She had that habit of expressing statements as if they were questions.
‘Johnette Daly?’ she said. ‘I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Lassiter, but I’m on deadline? And I –’
‘How can I help?’
‘Well, I’d like to get your reaction – I mean if you would have a comment on what happened?’
He was puzzled. His comment on what happened? Another button on h
is phone lit up, so he knew he had a call of some importance – or Victoria would have taken a message. ‘What is this,’ he asked Johnette Daly, ‘some kind of follow-up story?’
There was a pause and then the reporter spoke in a hushed, breathy voice. ‘Ohmygod. You mean – you don’t know?’ She didn’t wait for an answer, but rushed on. ‘I was sure they’d call you right away. I don’t know if –’
‘What’s this about?’
‘I don’t like to be the one to tell you this – but . . . at the Fairhaven cemetery? Someone dug up your nephew – dug up your nephew’s body, I mean. Some vandal or something. And I –’
‘What? Is this a joke?’
‘The police won’t speculate on the incident, sir, and I wondered if you –’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I can’t talk to you right now.’
He stared at the phone in his hand.
After a minute he called Riordan – who fell all over himself apologizing that a cub reporter, listening to the police radio on a scanner, had been the one to deliver the news.
‘I didn’t hear about it right away,’ Riordan said, ‘because, you know, nobody puts two and two together, that this is the grave of a homicide victim. So it’s treated like vandalism. I’m sorry. Someone should of called you. Someone fucked up.’ He sighed. ‘Probably me.’
‘What the hell happened?’
‘Far as we can tell,’ Riordan said, ‘it was sometime between midnight and seven A.M. There’s a guard there at night, but he’s in his little building, you know? Watching the tube. Didn’t hear anything. Didn’t see anything. It’s a big place. Anyway, some guy visiting his mother’s grave, first thing in the morning, he’s the one reports it.’
‘What’d they do? They dug up Brandon’s body. What for? Did they – Jesus Christ! Did they take it?’ A word crashed into his head: grave robbers.
There was a pause and then Riordan cleared his throat. ‘I guess . . . the reporter – I guess he didn’t tell you the whole . . . the whole deal.’ He spoke slowly, squeezing out the words one by one. ‘Your nephew’s body was . . . exhumed . . . and then removed from the casket. And then, according to the lab – I’m reading, now – “the perpetrator used a magnesium fuse –”’
‘What?’
‘I’m reading the lab report: “The perpetrator used a magnesium fuse to ignite a mixture of powdered aluminum and iron oxide, commonly known as –”’
‘Thermite.’
‘Exactly. Thermite. And, uh . . . he set fire to the remains. Again. He burned him again.’ Riordan paused. ‘Gives me the fucking creeps,’ he said.
Lassiter was completely nonplussed. ‘Why would anyone do that?’
‘You got me.’ Riordan said something about checking the surrounding jurisdictions for any similar events. ‘But there’s nothing so far. Sometimes we get, you know, desecration of graves. Hate crimes, that kind of thing. Kid stuff, actually. But this?’
‘A magnesium fuse? Thermite?’
‘I know what you’re sayin’! There’s a lot of weird ideas being tossed around – most of ’em out to lunch.’
‘Like what?’
‘Oh, c’mon –’
‘Like what?’
‘Like someone’s after some part of his body, it’s Satanists, that kind of stuff. Which is a load of crap. What I want to know is: How does this connect to the murder? Because we don’t know that it does.’ He coughed and then cleared his throat. ‘Of course: one thing we do know.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It wasn’t John Doe.’
Later that afternoon, Lassiter went for a run, hoping to clear his head, but all he could think of was the carbonized mask that had once been Brandon’s face. When he finished the run, he got back in the car and, without thinking about it, drove to the cemetery, where he found a small area cordoned off with yellow tape. A uniformed officer leaned against a nearby gravestone, smoking a cigarette. He flicked the butt away and stood straight up when Lassiter approached.
‘It’s my sister’s grave,’ he said. ‘And my nephew’s.’
The officer looked him over, shrugged. ‘As long as you don’t cross the tape.’
Lassiter stood there, looking. Kathy’s grave was still covered with heaped-up wilted flowers. White ribbons rattled in the breeze. Next to that, Brandon’s headstone was lying on its side, marking what was now a raw hole in the ground. There was a big mound of dirt to the side. It looked like more dirt than could fit in the hole. He could see the residue of evidence kits. Powder all over the gravestone, and blotches of white here and there on the ground – where casts had been made of footprints, shovel marks, and the like. And then there was another, shallow excavation to the foot of the original graves – clearly where Brandon’s body had lain. The forensic crew had obviously tried to recover all of Brandon’s remains. But they had not succeeded. What persisted were just a few black streaks and some small dark chunks of ashes. The sprinkling of ashes reminded him of cinders, of when he was a kid, and the big house in Georgetown and how the help used to throw cinders out on the front steps when it snowed.
The sight of those black streaks and that sprinkling of ashes disturbed him in some deep way. The residues made it real – that someone had actually burned Brandon’s little body. Dug it up, removed it from the casket. According to Riordan, the child’s body was drenched in gasoline, ignited, and incinerated to the point where nothing was left but what Tommy Truong called ‘bone litter.’
When he got home, the house seemed too big and too silent. He called Claire, and she said she’d come over, and then he called her back. He told her what had happened and added that maybe he’d be better off alone.
He woke up in the middle of the night trying to remember something that he’d thought of in his sleep. It seemed so important. It was something about Brandon’s body, and he wanted to call Riordan, he had to call Riordan, and tell him. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t remember what it was. It was there, in the back of his head, but the more he thought about it, the further it receded, until in the end he didn’t even have a feeling for it. Finally, he wondered whether it had really been an insight, or just a dream. Frustrated, he tossed and turned the rest of the night.
In the morning there was a story in the Washington Post. He didn’t want to read it, didn’t even want to see it – but he couldn’t help catching the headline.
MURDER VICTIM’S GRAVE VANDALIZED
In the afternoon, he received a strange telephone call from the Evans Funeral Home – which had handled the arrangements for the funerals.
‘I was asked to get in touch with you by the police department,’ a man said, in what seemed to be a perpetually hushed and sympathetic voice. ‘Once the, ah . . . forensic examination of the remains is completed and the, ah . . . body is released – do you wish us to handle the reinterment?’
He said yes.
‘Would you prefer to select a new casket? The police are, ah . . . finished with the original, but it was somewhat damaged, you see.’
He asked for a new casket.
‘Just one more thing, Mr. Lassiter. Ah . . .’ And here even the funeral director faltered slightly, as if he were stepping onto untested terrain. ‘Would you . . . would you like to be there when we, ah . . . lay the body to rest?’ He coughed. ‘When we re-inter? I mean – would you want a new ceremony?’
Lassiter got that feeling in his chest again, of his heart on the loose. ‘No ceremony,’ he managed. ‘But I do want to be there.’
‘Very well,’ the man said. ‘We’ll let you know.’
Two days later it was another brilliant day and he was at the cemetery again. It was surreal, watching an identical tiny casket being lowered into the identical hole in the ground. But this time there was no minister, no uplifting words, no mourners other than himself and Riordan – who showed up midway through the process. He and Riordan shoveled in the dirt themselves. The physical labor felt good to Lassiter, but it was a small grave and it didn’t ta
ke long enough. The two of them stood there for a minute, and then Lassiter turned away.
‘Hell of a thing,’ Riordan said, shaking his head. He pulled out a cigarette, but waited until they were well away from the grave before lighting it.
After Brandon’s second ‘funeral,’ Riordan called him every couple of days. ‘I got to tell you, Joe – we got nothing. I mean, we got a good cast of the shovel blade, we got some great shoe prints – Nikes by the way, Chieftain model, new ones, size ten. And only one kind of shoe prints – which suggests only one individual. But other than that? We got squat. No fingerprints on the casket, nothing on the headstone. Whoever it was wore gloves.’ He paused. ‘Which in itself is interesting.’
Apart from Brandon’s grisly exhumation, the homicide investigation plodded along with few interruptions and no important developments. Riordan made a point of making sure that he was kept well informed, hoping in that way to keep him off his back. In these phone calls, they fell into the habit of going over the evidence.
Fingerprints: ‘Guess whose?’
‘I don’t have to guess.’
It was no surprise that John Doe’s prints were all over the knife, the car, and the wallet from the Comfort Inn. It was useful evidence, but it said nothing about his identity: he was still John Doe.
‘The guy’s not in the system,’ Riordan said, referring to the FBI computer that held more than a hundred million sets of fingerprints – including those of anybody who’d ever been arrested, for anything; anyone who’d ever applied for a security clearance or a weapons permit; anyone in the military; cabdrivers; bus drivers; government workers.
‘Everybody’s in the system,’ Lassiter said.
‘Just about.’
‘I know. They got a lot of people. They got me, they got you. What they don’t have – they don’t have John Doe.’
Blood, hair, tissue: ‘Perfect match. The prints on the knife are his. The blood on the knife is theirs. The hair was like you said: Brandon’s. And the skin –’
‘What skin?’