Free Fall

by Kyle Mills

  As near as he could tell from talking to various climbers in West Virginia, the two hadn’t arrived at the New River Gorge till around three the next day, so they probably spent the night in this apartment and slept off the alcohol before driving off in Darby’s van.

  Beamon walked into the even messier bedroom and found long dark hairs on one of the pillows on the bed. He reached for one, but then stopped himself. He had no access to a lab anymore. He’d just have to assume they were Darby’s. He grabbed hold of the blanket and was going to pull it back, but decided that looking for sex stains on sheets was a little lower than he was willing to stoop at this point. Wouldn’t prove anything—based on the pictures he’d seen, there would have been any number of women willing to generate stains with Tristan Newberry.

  Beamon stepped over two bath towels lying on the floor and stopped in front of a collection of framed pictures on Tristan’s dresser. The theme seemed to be outdoor adventure: him with groups of similarly athletic-looking people standing on top of mountains, in forests, alongside kayaks, on skis. Darby was in three of the seven, but in only one was she even standing next to Tristan.

  On the edge of the dresser was a pile of cards that looked like they’d been recently emptied from Newberry’s wallet. A library card, a social security card, a Blockbuster Video card, a punch card from the Sub Czar promising a free sandwich, a national park pass. All things he wouldn’t have needed on a long weekend excursion to West Virginia and wouldn’t want to lose. Beamon did the same thing himself when he went on trips.

  He opened the drawers of the dresser and pawed through them, but found nothing more interesting than an unusually thick stack of postcards held together with a rubber band. Most were from foreign countries, depicting spectacular vistas and partially covered with brightly colored stamps. Beamon read through them quickly, finding that most concisely related an adventure the writer was embarking on or had just completed. He separated out the four from Darby. The messages were short and not particularly personal—generally reports on the quality of climbing where she was. Gasherbrum sucked. Lost some of my nose but still have all my fingers. Could have been worse was about as sappy as she got, supporting Carrie’s theory that the relationship between them wasn’t exactly what one would call frenzied.

  Beamon wandered back out into the living room and sat down at a computer set up in front of the only window in the apartment. He pulled up the answering machine software and found no messages. It took a few minutes, but he managed to find the message-recording screen and hit Test.

  “This is Tristan,” a young, cheerful voice said from the two speakers set up alongside the monitor. It was kind of startling. The only contact with Newberry that Beamon had was looking at pictures—most of them depicting not Tristan Newberry but what was left of him.

  “I’ve got the ringer off because I’m not feeling well. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.” An obvious plant, in case the office called while he was off climbing.

  Beamon minimized the answering machine and clicked on the address book icon, discovering that Tristan had had a lot of friends but that most of them were spread throughout the country and the world—not a single local number. The only D.C. exchange was under the heading “Business.” No address had been recorded.

  Beamon dialed the number. Maybe a talk with Tristan’s coworkers would shed some light. One thing he’d learned in his years as an FBI agent was that the acquaintances of murder victims just loved to theorize.

  A machine picked up on the second ring. “Please leave a message after the tone,” was all it said. The information he had suggested that Newberry had worked for the government, but that seemed a bit concise for a federal organization. He considered leaving his name and number, but something told him it would be a mistake.

  After an unproductive search of the rest of the files contained on the computer, Beamon stood and started in on the tiny living space. Another twenty minutes ended with more questions than answers. Most of the dust that uniformly covered the apartment had been scraped from the overfilled bookshelves along the wall, suggesting that most, if not all, the books had been recently removed. Of course, there could be a number of mundane explanations for that. Beamon dropped to his hands and knees and crawled around on the cheap carpet for a few minutes. The indentions made by the legs of the furniture were mostly dead on. But a few were off a good half an inch.

  He retrieved his beer from the kitchen and lay down in the soft cushions of the sofa, trying to let the kinks fall out of his back muscles. Even in first class, this constant plane travel was taking its toll.

  He hadn’t thought much about the fact that the apartment’s only corkscrew seemed to be at the bottom of a drawer and that there were two uncorked wine bottles on the counter, thinking that Darby had probably opened it with a Swiss Army knife or something. But combined with the bookcase and furniture, it seemed to suggest that the place had been recently searched. Not by the West Virginia cops, though—he was sure they hadn’t been there yet, and cops were never this neat anyway. Who, then? Beamon’s own enigmatic employer? Vili Marcek and his to-be- named-later companion? The out-of-state cop who had been sniffing around Conrad, Maryland? There was no lack of options.

  Beamon picked up his beer and brought it with him into the bedroom, where he stuffed the sandwich shop punch card on Newberry’s dresser in his pocket It was time to quit screwing around. He needed to find this girl and figure out what the fuck what was going on before one of them got themselves in trouble.

  twenty-seven

  “Yeah. I’ll take one of those turkey ones but no sprouts, okay? I hate those things.”

  The young black girl behind the counter went to work on his sandwich without a word. It was late in the afternoon and the Sub Czar was empty except for the two of them. Beamon watched her assemble his sandwich with quick, deft motions, then followed her along the counter to a cash register. “I’ll take a bag of chips and a Coke with that, too, please,” he said, fondling Tristan Newberry’s sandwich punch card in his pocket. He considered pulling it out and getting the last punch needed for a free sub. After some thought, though, eating a dead man’s sub for dinner didn’t seem right. He’d already tested the gods by drinking the kid’s beer.

  “Eight seventy-three,” the woman said.

  Based on the punch card, Beamon was assuming that Newberry often ate at this broken-down deli in the middle of an equally broken-down D.C. industrial park. It seemed likely, then, that he worked somewhere close. Unless these sandwiches were a hell of a lot better than they looked, the Sub Czar just wasn’t a destination restaurant.

  “You know, I was supposed to meet a friend of mine here for lunch,” Beamon said, digging a ten out of his wallet. “Obviously, I’m a little late.”

  The young woman’s mouth hung open, effectively displaying her utter disinterest in his dining arrangements.

  “I think he comes here a lot,” Beamon continued, holding up his wallet so that she could see a picture of Newberry that he had cut down and nestled in one of the plastic flaps next to a photo of Emory. “He didn’t tell me which building he worked in, though. You wouldn’t know him, would you? His name’s Tristan.” He had to maneuver the wallet in front of her face as she painstakingly ignored it.

  Finally, she gave the photo an annoyed glance. “Yeah, I see him in here. But I don’t know where he work.”

  “Could you maybe tell me which way he goes when he leaves? I could probably find him.”

  “What way he goes? Hell, I don’t know.”

  Beamon glanced down at the picture and then behind him at the large glass window that looked out on the street. “If I were a woman, I think I’d definitely want to watch him walk away from me.”

  She snorted loudly and a smile spread slowly across her face. “Yeah, he ain’t bad for a white boy. Real sweet, too.” She pointed out the window. “He go that way.”

  “Mark Beamon. I was with the FBI,” Beamon said quietly to himself as he wandered up
the broken sidewalk, munching on the last of his potato chips. He’d almost perfected the slurring of the word was in the sentence and tried it a few more times as he approached yet another rusting metal warehouse.

  So far, nearly every building he’d been to was empty and locked up tight, a testament to the less than wonderful economy. Of the two occupied spaces he’d come across, one housed a company that rented port-a-potties and the other a group of men who had damn near started projectile sweating when he’d spoken the letters FBI. Some kind of stolen merchandise storage facility, he guessed. Two utterly recession-proof businesses.

  Beamon tossed the potato chip bag into a loose pile of garbage along the curb and pushed at a heavy door in the side of Warehouse 4-G. While there was no sign identifying the occupant, the door wasn’t locked, so he stepped inside.

  The office/reception area he found himself in was a tiny, faded green room with a low counter along the back and an ancient-looking security guard standing behind it This was looking a little better. The government had apparently gotten a deal on this particular shade of green paint sometime back in the seventies and covered nearly every wall they owned with it.

  “Hey, you’re that FBI agent I saw on TV,” the guard said as he approached.

  Beamon smiled engagingly, happy not to have to test his artful slurring again. He held out a hand to the old guard, who took it excitedly.

  “Name’s Mark Beamon.”

  “Sure. Beamon. That’s it. Damn. Carl Whitlock.”

  “Nice to meet you, Carl.” Beamon looked around him. “Maybe you can help me with something. I’m looking for the place a guy named Newberry worked.”

  Whitlock’s deeply lined face seemed to suddenly take on a few more years. “This is it This is where he worked.”

  “I guess you heard what happened, then.”

  “Yeah. They came and picked up his personal stuff a few days ago. Guess they’re gonna close this place down now. Probably as early as this week. Just as well.”

  “What did Tristan do here?”

  “Here?” the old man said, as though there was no way Beamon could be interested. “It’s just a warehouse. Government keeps a bunch of old files here. Tristan worked on them.”

  “Worked on them?”

  Whitlock shrugged his bony shoulders. “It’s part of that new declassification thing.”

  Beamon nodded. It was possibly the only piece of legislation David Hallorin had ever been able to ram through Congress, and a good one at that. It had been too easy to classify documents and keep them classified without thinking. Beamon himself had been guilty of that—no one had ever gotten a kick in the ass for being too careful.

  “Listen, Carl. I’m looking into Tristan’s death—”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, really. Maybe you could help me. Is there anyone here that Tristan knew well? That he talked to a lot?”

  “Well, I’m the only one here, but we talked all the time. We were good friends.”

  Beamon thought he had misunderstood the man. “Good. Then I’ll need to get some information from you too. But what about the people Tristan worked with directly? The people—”

  “There are no other people. Just us.”

  Beamon scrunched up his brow and leaned forward across the counter, which allowed him to see through the open door that led to the warehouse section of the building. Not much was visible, but from what he could see of the file-stacked shelves, it would be a hell of a job for one person to go through them all and sign off on declassification.

  “Okay, fine,” Beamon said, still a bit perplexed. “Did he ever talk about a girl named Darby Moore?”

  The old man’s eyes narrowed perceptibly. “That’s the girl who murdered him.”

  “Allegedly murdered him, Carl. Allegedly.”

  The old man seemed already convinced of her guilt, as was everyone who didn’t know her. “I’ve been trying to think since I heard,” he said. “My memory’s not as good as it used to be. I don’t know. He might have.”

  “So it’s possible that in your entire relationship with Tristan … how long?”

  “About four months.”

  “Four months. It’s possible that Tristan never once mentioned her in all that time?”

  Whitlock looked uncomfortable. “It’s possible, I suppose. I don’t know. He used to talk about all the places he’d been and things he’d done with lots of different people. She could have been one of them. In fact, she probably was.”

  More corroboration for Tristan and Darby’s lack of a relationship. “And he didn’t mention that he was going climbing for a few days.” It seemed unlikely that he would, since it had been obvious from his answering machine that he was playing hooky.

  The old man shook his head. “Called in sick Tuesday. He was in a hurry to get out of here on Monday, though. We were supposed to have a beer after work.”

  That was interesting. Accounts seemed to agree that Tristan and Darby didn’t arrive at the New River Gorge until Wednesday. Of course, it was possible that he was actually sick, but Beamon doubted it.

  “Okay, Carl,” Beamon said, shoving his hands in his pockets and nodding toward the entrance to the warehouse. “You mind if I take a quick look at where he worked?”

  Whitlock flipped up a section of countertop and let him through. The warehouse that opened up behind the office/reception area was even more expansive than Beamon had expected. “It would take one person three lifetimes to get through all this stuff,” he said, looking down the seemingly endless rows of overflowing shelves.

  “More than that for Tristan.”

  Beamon glanced over at the old man. “What makes you say that?”

  Whitlock suddenly looked a little guilty. He lowered his voice to a volume more suitable for speaking ill of the dead. “I’ve worked in other places, too, you know. There were more people on staff, for sure, but well, each one went through box after box, you know? Sometimes I wondered if they really even read any of it. Not Tristan; he went through everything real careful. Every day, I’d help him pull a couple of boxes from here or there, and he’d stick his head in them for hours. He was real thorough.”

  Beamon walked over to an empty table and glanced up at a video camera that looked too new and high-tech to belong in this dump. “Is this where he sat?”

  The old man nodded.

  “So you say he didn’t go through the stuff in order?”

  “Nope. He’s been all over this place. Just takes them from wherever he feels like.”

  Beamon ran his palms across the table and tried to picture Tristan sitting behind it. None of it seemed right. Beamon had worked for the government his entire adult life, and he could say with some certainty that this wasn’t the way things were done. “Tell me, Carl. Do you remember where the last box Tristan was working on came from?”

  The old man nodded and pointed toward the back of the building. “He’d been working on some stuff from back there for a while, and then went back to where we got it from and pulled a bunch of the boxes off the shelf. I heard the racket and went back to check on him. He was sitting on the floor throwin’ stuff around. Didn’t even notice I was there.”

  “Did he normally do stuff like that?”

  “Not that I ever saw.”

  “Could you show me where?” Beamon said.

  Whitlock seemed anxious to cooperate as they walked down the narrow aisle, but started to look uncomfortable when Beamon began peeking in the tops of the boxes that Tristan had been so interested in before he died. When he pulled one of the boxes onto the floor, the old man finally spoke up. “I don’t know if you should be doing that, Mr. Beamon. I mean, I know you’re an FBI agent and all, but, well, maybe I should call for authorization….” His voice trailed off. He was obviously waiting to be talked out of that particular action, either because he wanted Tristan’s killer brought to justice, or because it would cause more work for him. Beamon was about to oblige when he realized that Whitlock might be his ticket
to meeting the man in charge of this rather odd little government backwater.

  “I wouldn’t want you to get in any trouble, Carl. Why don’t you do that.”

  Beamon dug a handful of files and loose papers from the box at his feet as the old man started dejectedly back to his office.

  About ten minutes, and forty or so tedious government documents later, Carl came rushing back holding his hand over the receiving end of a cordless phone.

  “Mr. Beamon!” he said breathlessly. “They say you have to leave here immediately!”

  Not an entirely unexpected reaction. Beamon reached up and pulled another box off the shelf. He grabbed a piece of paper from it and wrote on the back in bold letters.

  TELL THEM I’M ARMED.

  Whitlock stared at the message and seemed to still be staring after Beamon had dropped it on the floor and started digging through the new box.

  “Uh, sir?” he heard the old man say into the phone. His voice was hesitant. “He says he’s armed.” The shouting over the other end was clearly audible, though indecipherable from where Beamon sat.

  Whitlock held out the phone. “He wants to talk to you.”

  Beamon waved his hand dismissively, not bothering to look up from the documents he had spread across the floor.

  “He won’t talk,” Whitlock said into the phone. The click as the person on the other end slammed the handset down seemed to echo through the building.

  “They’re coming.”

  “Thanks, Carl,” Beamon said absently, concentrating on the problem taking shape before him. “You wouldn’t happen to have any hot coffee back in your office, would you?”

  Thirty minutes later, Beamon was leaning his cramping back against an empty shelf with six boxes and countless pages of government documents piled up around him. Newberry had obviously been through those particular six and had apparently been excited. Papers and files had been stuffed haphazardly back into them, in stark contrast to the neatly packed boxes surrounding them.