Imposter

by Davis Bunn

  “The FBI’s bomb specialist called this a signature device. I was wondering if you could check and see if any other murders have been committed using decommissioned claymores.”

  “Consider it done.”

  “There’s no rush.”

  “Rule two, Kelly. In this town, it’s either urgent or it’s buried. Back to you soonest.”

  Matt microwaved a ready-made dinner he bought in weekly installments from the Whole Foods market. A healthy bachelor’s answer to a fast-food world. As he sat down to eat, the standard evening crowd thumped through the upstairs front door. Matt ate, read the paper, and watched television.

  Waited.

  Eventually the front door began opening and shutting. Matt turned off the television and listened to a final voice. His apartment was well insulated. But upstairs was floored in pegged heart-of-pine, more than a century old, which his mother had painstakingly restored. She had declared it a crime to cover such artwork with carpet. Matt’s father walked heavy and talked loud, particularly when he was in his politicking mode, which these days was Paul Kelly’s only forward gear. Matt waited for the front door to thunk a final time. Sol’s footsteps rounded the house and headed for the carport. The house upstairs went quiet.

  Matt came out of the apartment and watched the faceless headlights speed away. He went around to the front door and used his key. “Pop?”

  “In the back.” The kitchen lights glared upon the ruddy waxed floors. The central hallway was ribbed by bas-relief pillars a shade darker than the floorboards. He glanced into the living room, his mother’s favorite chamber. The main floor’s only carpet was in there, an antique Isfahan one tone warmer than blood. His mother had brought it home and spent hours congratulating herself for finding a rug that brought out the subtle richness of the wood. Matt tried to push away the memories as he asked, “How was your day?”

  Paul Kelly took a cut-crystal tumbler from the cabinet and filled it with ice. He uncapped a blue bottle of Italian sparkling water. Poured the glass full. Downed it. Sighed. “I’ve been dreaming of this all afternoon. Standing in my own kitchen. Alone. Drinking this water I yelled at your mom over buying. You remember?”

  “Four dollars a liter for water.”

  “This is the last bottle. I count things like that. It’s probably a bad sign. Like beneath the television makeup and the power ties I’m coming apart inside.”

  “I’ll buy us a case of the water tomorrow, Pop.”

  Paul Kelly refilled his glass. “You don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

  Matt slipped into his protective mode, calm and faceless.

  His father drank the second glass more slowly. Gauging his son over the rim. He sighed. “This a courtesy call?”

  “No, Pop. Something happened today.”

  “Sol told me you phoned. I told him whatever it was, it could wait.”

  “The investigation has turned up something you need to know about.” Matt gave his father the ninety-second version.

  Paul Kelly heard his son out to the end. A first when it came to anything tied to Matt’s profession. “They were after Megan? You’re sure?”

  A band of tension Matt had been unable to acknowledge until that moment unclenched his chest. “This could be a very important development.”

  Paul Kelly shut his eyes and rolled the chilled crystal against his forehead. “I suppose I should thank you for letting me hear this from you.”

  Matt knew enough not to ask his father for contact with the opposition candidate. That would have to come from some other source. “You’re welcome, Pop.”

  “Well, this old soldier’s off to bed. Sol is coming for me at five. He told you about the television gig?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Paul Kelly waited until his son was in the hallway to add, “What I said about you not understanding, that wasn’t . . .”

  Matt halted and turned back. Paul Kelly had planted both his hands upon the kitchen counter. He looked down at the glass resting between them, his back bowed from the weight of the past few days. “And how I spoke to you after the funeral. That was way out of line.”

  Paul Kelly straightened. He smoothed his tie down the front of his shirt. Lifted the glass. Stared at it. Then set it down again. “Sure, I was drunk. But that doesn’t excuse what I said.”

  So many responses came to mind, they lodged in Matt’s throat. He swallowed against the rough-edged slab and reflected on how it felt to hear his father apologize without Megan Kelly urging him on. How there were so many other times, episodes beyond count, when his father’s cutting edge had sliced deep. But Matt’s years of training kept him silent. He was so good at holding back that he could not speak at all, even when all he really wanted to say was thanks.

  Paul Kelly started down the hall. As he passed Matt, he touched him on the shoulder. A light gesture, easy to ignore. “Good night, son.”

  Matt stood and listened to his father’s heavy tread up the stairs. Rubbing at the spot on his shoulder. Wishing he had found a way to return the gesture.

  The nightmare woke Matt a couple of hours before his body was ready. As tired as he was, Matt knew he would sleep no more. The recent shooting and yesterday’s discussion with Connie formed a cauldron of toxic thoughts. His dream contained a rawer edge than usual, ending with him being blown repeatedly across a line of parked cars. Watching it happen from outside his body. Everything etched in helpless detail. Matt rose from his bed, the crystal chimes taking forever to fade.

  He went for a predawn run. The hour before sunrise was Baltimore’s quietest. No siren sliced the star-flecked night. Martin Luther King Boulevard was empty of Escalades with sound systems like compressed gunfire. Matt ran down the middle lane, taking a route he had laid out in high school. In those days he’d run to Fort McHenry and back, a ten-mile push. Today his thigh sent warning signals as he entered his father’s newest development project. Matt leaned against a nineteen-story relic of boarded windows and soot-blackened stone, stretching slowly. The dream’s tendrils found him again, their reach greater than his ability to flee. He propped his leg on the building’s front step, bent over his thigh, and saw himself fly free of his body while crystals chimed a softly lurid tune.

  His grandmother, his father’s mother, had been Matt’s only connection to a Fells Point heritage. All his other forebears were long gone. In his very early years, Matt had found comfort in the old lady and her porch swing. She had always been there when the family returned to Baltimore, treating his absences as little more than a breath in length. They both knew it was myth, but for a young kid jerked around so much he could lay claim to no home at all, a grandmother’s illusion seemed better than any reality. They had often sat on her back porch for whole afternoons. Matt read to her from a collection of religious books she kept there just for him, enclosed in a world whose boundaries were neighbors’ fences and a flower garden and wind and the chimes. When Matt was twelve, she had died, as silent in passage as in life. Three weeks later he had entered Vic Wright’s dojo and found a different means of dealing with a disjointed life. The chimes were so distant a memory he had no idea what had happened to them, or why they would become woven into a nightmare so vivid it veiled his waking vision.

  When his leg was ready, he ran home. The day strengthened to reveal a weather-beaten gray sky. Matt waved to the campaign staffers sharing coffee and war stories in front of the carriage house. Sol’s car was already parked out back.

  Matt showered and made coffee and reopened the sanitized case file. He waited until seven o’clock to place the call. Pecard’s phone rang and rang. Matt hung up and tried his mobile.

  Pecard answered on the first ring. “What do you have for me, Agent Kelly?”

  “According to the police file, all the items either stolen or broken were trophies,” Matt said. “The bomber entered three rooms. Unless one person ransacked the house while the other armed the device.”

  “Most bombers are total loner
s. Didn’t the detective tell you anything?”

  Matt heard the front doorbell overhead, then the soft rumble of his father’s voice and a burst of laughter. “The bomber took my first karate trophy. My mother’s study was harder to check because a lot of the stuff along the wall connected to the back hall got shattered. But the report says one silver tennis cup was missing. And another was wrenched apart. My dad lost his army medal, and the trophy cabinet was all torn up.”

  “What does that suggest?”

  Matt heard the front door overhead close. Voices and footsteps clattered around the house, heading for the cars out back. “What if the only trophy of importance here was my dad’s medal? What if the other stuff was just taken for emphasis?”

  “You are forgetting something.”

  Matt shifted slightly so that he could track his father and Sol. As they rounded the corner and entered the carport, Sol hesitated and glanced back. Staring hard at the spot where Matt assumed he was hidden. Matt said, “The fingerprint.”

  “One thumbprint, left where it would be found in each of the three rooms. I would class that as part of the bomber’s signature. Wouldn’t you?”

  “But the file says they ran it through the federal system and came up with nothing.”

  “One moment.” There was the sound of the phone being muffled. Then, “Do you know the Vietnam Memorial?”

  “No.”

  “A serious lapse. Cherry Point, above the harbor. I’ll expect you there in twenty minutes.”

  “I’m supposed to be at a television studio for my dad at nine-thirty.”

  “Then you had best hurry.” Pecard hung up.

  Lucas was deep into his weekend routine when the telephone rang. When he thought back on it later, the moment had a sharply defined edge. “D’Amico.”

  “Lucas, this is Hannah Bernstein.”

  To his recollection, he had never heard the chief say her own first name. Or, for that matter, speak in such a hesitant manner. “Yes, Chief.”

  “I hate bothering you on your weekend off.”

  “I was just making pancakes for Katy and myself. You should come over.”

  She had the decency to pretend at a laugh, even tried for a little small talk. “Katy is your daughter, correct? Is that who I hear singing?”

  “Yes, that’s my darling girl.” Katy was bent over a coloring book, working hard to stay inside the borders, singing a song about butterflies and rainbows. Just like any five-year-old.

  “Aw, look. Maybe I . . .”

  “Hang on a second.” He pushed the receiver into the sweatshirt over his pounding heart. He had a sensation of the morning tightening down. He had known the feeling a thousand times before. Every time he entered a bust, an arrest, a parked car with darkened windows and an overamped sound system, an apartment building with gunfire and screams. But never in his kitchen on a gray Saturday morning. He made sure his voice was calm before he said to Katy, “Honey, can you be a big girl and turn the pancakes over in a second?”

  “Okay, Daddy.”

  “Thank you, sweetie.” He carried the phone into the living room, letting the swinging door shut behind him. “Okay. Let’s have it.”

  “That’s just it. I may be raising alarms over nothing at all. This whole thing stinks.”

  “Hannah, calm down. Is it okay if I call you that?”

  “Eight-fifteen on a Saturday morning, you kidding? I’d be expecting a lot worse names than that.”

  “Hannah, just tell me what you know. Then we’ll take it from there. Together. How does that sound?”

  She expelled some of the tension. It carried across the wires. Through the air. Entered via his eardrum. Lodged in his gut. “Seven-thirty this morning, I get a call from the deputy commissioner. My principal ally in the hierarchy. Only now he’s cold as steel. Wants me downtown. Mayor’s office. Nine-thirty.”

  “Is this normal?”

  “Not the order, not the timing, not the tone.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “He gave me nothing. I made a couple of calls. Either nobody knows or they’re too worried about their own hides to talk.”

  D’Amico lived in the house his own parents had bought back when the mills were rolling and the town’s working stiffs walked proud. His front windows overlooked Eastern Avenue and Patterson Park. When he was a kid, on hot summer nights all the families along this stretch carried their bedding across the street and slept in the park. Watching the stars, the adults chatting while the kids raced around until they collapsed. Good times. Now the park was gang territory, the laughter replaced with terror.

  “Are you there?”

  D’Amico refocused on the here and now. “You think this has to do with the Kelly murder?”

  “I’ve been racking my brain. We’re not working another politically sensitive case.” She breathed out another shard of tension. “This is crazy. I shouldn’t have bothered you.”

  “No, no.” D’Amico knew his gut well enough to listen when it screamed. Like now. “This is real, Hannah.”

  A pause. “You think?”

  “We’re finally making progress. Why? Because the kid and the feds have delivered. Somebody has gotten wind, and they’re worried. Which means the culprit could be mixed up in the campaign.” D’Amico’s pacing drew Katy through the connecting doorway. He told her, “Go back inside, honey.”

  “The pancakes are getting cold.”

  “You shouldn’t have waited.”

  “But they’re not so good if you don’t do the butter for me.”

  “Not now, Katy. Please.”

  Hannah said, “I’m really sorry about this, Lucas.”

  “You were right to call.”

  “How do you think I should play it?”

  He liked her being strong enough to admit when she needed help. “They’d find it harder to railroad you if you didn’t go in there alone. I’ll meet you at headquarters in fifteen minutes.”

  The Vietnam Memorial stood above Middle Branch Park, overlooking the rowing club, the Cherry Hill Marina, and the Patapsco River. Matt rose from the car and stared out over the steel-gray waters to the Harbor Hospital and the Times’s production center. As he climbed the pebble-stone walk spiraling up the hill, a silver Lincoln LS pulled from the lot. Matt tracked the car’s progress until it took the bridge’s entrance ramp and sped back toward the city.

  At the crest, the POW-MIA flag flew at permanent half-mast between the American and the Maryland flags. The memorial itself was a circular granite wall, a sweeping tombstone listing all of Maryland’s lost. Pecard sat on the wall, staring out over the empty gray day.

  Matt asked, “Was that Bryan Bannister I just saw drive away?”

  Pecard did not look up. “The first man listed here to my right died in ’59. Just having a look while the French desperately sought to rid themselves of the entire mess. The last casualty perished in your final tragic push to escape.”

  It was the most emotion Matt had ever heard Pecard express. “Why would a Brit care about our war in Vietnam?”

  “Because I was there, Agent Kelly. Nine sordid months, as counted by outside time.”

  “Bannister too?”

  “He and I worked a case together.”

  Matt did not know what to say. To his right the harbor cranes stood in rusty salute, while bridge traffic drummed the constant refrain of people too busy to remember.

  Pecard rose to his feet, came to attention, and snapped off a salute of his own. “Rest well, brothers.”

  The still day made for a somber backdrop as they headed down the hill. Pecard did not speak again until he unlocked his car, an immaculate Jeep Grand Cherokee. “You need to be somewhere; did I understand that correctly?”

  “WTBF. My dad wants me for a television interview.”

  Pecard slid the case file out of the way. “Why don’t I drive you over? We can talk on the way.”

  Pecard took the harbor ramp onto the I-95 bridge, then asked, “Why do you imagine they c
ouldn’t get a match on your print?”

  “The bomber wasn’t in the database.” When Pecard shook his head, he added, “Either he’s never committed a major crime or he’s never gone through a government vetting. That seems pretty straightforward.” “Sorry. I don’t buy that.”

  “And I don’t see an alternative.”

  “Think about what you said on the phone. Prizes. Trophies. Used to emphasize your father’s stolen medal.”

  Matt glanced at the file on the console between them. He knew the data by rote. He studied Pecard. The man had resumed his stone visage, a tightly enclosed coffin of flesh for whatever emotions he chose not to share. “You’re saying the fingerprint is part of the message. But if there’s no ID—”

  “You’re not looking in the right place.”

  “Say again?”

  “People who are dead, Agent Kelly. Some felons’ records are kept for a time, along with military MIA cases and missing persons. Otherwise, so far as the federal databanks are concerned, once a person is declared legally dead, the individual might as well never have lived.”

  Headquarters on his day off. One of the vows D’Amico had made to himself when June died was to keep his free time for Katy. But there was nothing he could do about this. Hannah Bernstein was not a time waster. Not of her people, nor of herself.

  The sky was the color of a fire long dead. The autumn day was void of wind. The stillness heightened his unease. Upstairs was scarcely any better. Hannah’s office door was open. She was seated behind her desk. Crowder, the duty lieutenant, stood to one side so he could see both the squad room and Bernstein. Crowder was African-American, a thirty-year vet with a gaze of pure iron. The kind of man who didn’t leave an open door to his back even on his own home turf.

  Bernstein started in, “Lucas, I can’t tell you—”

  “My gut tells me you were right to call.”

  “Your gut,” Crowder repeated. “You need a packet of salts, I believe I got some in my desk drawer.”

  “Funny.”

  “I wasn’t trying to be.”