by Jake Needham
“Anything?” August whispered when they all reassembled in front of 31B with Woods.
Claire shook her head.
“Me neither,” he said.
“Are you done with all the spy bullshit now?” Tay asked and reached out with his forefinger to press the doorbell.
August grabbed Tay’s hand before it reached the button and shook his head.
“Go ahead,” he whispered to Woods.
Woods removed a coiled black cable from the leather valise, took his iPhone out of his pocket, and plugged the cable into the phone. Then he went down on one knee and threaded a few inches of the other end of the cable underneath Rebecca’s front door. On the screen of Woods’ iPhone, Tay saw a worm’s eye view of the apartment. It was surprisingly bright and clear and, as Woods rotated the cable and moved it from side to side, Tay was able to see clearly that the room was empty.
“Wow, that’s something,” Tay said in a low voice. “You Americans really do have all the best toys. If I wanted to get something like that, where—”
“Amazon,” Claire and Woods said almost simultaneously.
Tay didn’t know whether they were pulling his leg or not, so he said nothing.
Woods looked back over his shoulder at August. “If it’s an ambush, they’re not waiting in the front room.”
“Okay, Sam, then go ahead.”
“Go ahead and do what?”
“Ring the doorbell like you were about to.”
“You’re not going to grab my hand again?”
“Ring the fucking doorbell.”
As Tay put his finger on the bell and pushed, August and Claire flattened themselves on either side of the door with their right hands on the butts of their handguns.
After a few seconds, Woods said, “Nothing.”
Tay glanced down at the screen of Woods’ iPhone. The front room of the apartment showed no activity.
“Ring again,” August said, and Tay did.
Woods watched for a moment, then said, “Still no movement.”
“Okay,” August told him. “Open it.”
Woods pulled the black cable out from under the door, unplugged it from his phone, and stood up. He put his phone in his pocket, pushed the roll of cable back into the leather valise, and removed the lock-picking gun. Rebecca’s front door had a normal knob and keyhole lock as well as a separate deadbolt lock just above it. The keyhole lock took Woods two or three seconds to open. The deadbolt took longer. Maybe five or six seconds.
Woods turned the knob and pushed the door open.
And that was when everything went to hell.
Chapter Forty-Two
Tay knew what they had immediately.
Death has a distinctive odor that is both instantly recognizable and impossible to forget. And God only knew how often he had smelled it in his lifetime. It is a sickly-sweet funk that seeps into everything, a combination of rotten eggs, spoiled garlic, boiling cabbage, vomit, and shit.
As Woods closed the door quietly behind them, August and Claire drew their handguns and cleared the apartment with a thoroughness and efficiency that came from long experience.
“Back here,” Claire called quietly from down a hallway that ran off to the right just beyond the small kitchen.
When Tay got there, Claire was on one knee, her fingers feeling for a pulse. She looked back over her shoulder at Tay and shook her head. It really wasn’t necessary. Tay had no doubt at all that Rebecca Sternwood was dead.
She was on her back just past a bathroom. Her feet and most of her body were in the hallway, but her head was just inside the doorway to what appeared to be the master bedroom. There were dark smears in several places on the gray carpet, bloodstains, but the smears were not large and there was no pooling of blood.
The right side of her face and her neck were mottled with gray-green bruises and her neck was covered with short, red scratches.
She did not look peaceful.
Claire stood up and stepped back, and Tay moved forward. He did not want to move forward, but after decades as a homicide investigator it was an automatic thing for him to crouch down and examine a body.
“How long?” August asked from somewhere behind him.
Tay lifted Rebecca’s left arm slightly and examined the underside of it.
“Rigor is probably at maximum and lividity is fixed. I’d guess twelve to eighteen hours.”
“So yesterday afternoon or last night?”
“Yes. Something like that.”
All at once it occurred to Tay that Rebecca Sternwood was wearing the same clothes she had been wearing when he had ambushed her at breakfast yesterday. At least he thought she was. Tay wasn’t good about remembering women’s clothes. As observant as he was about almost everything else, he normally drew a blank when it came to remembering what some woman had been wearing the last time he had seen her. He wasn’t sure if he had a blind spot for clothes or if he had a blind spot for women, but he thought he could guess.
“Can you work out how it happened?” August asked.
Tay rose to his feet and stepped back. He let his eyes work the area while August and the others remained silent and waited to hear what he had to say.
He took two steps toward the open bathroom door and leaned inside without touching anything. His eyes immediately went to a pair of tall candlesticks on a shelf above the bathtub. They looked to be brass, and Tay didn’t have to go any closer to see the patches of dried blood and skin scrapings smeared over the base of the one on the right.
“Someone was hiding in here when she came into the apartment,” Tay said, pointing into the bathroom. “She walked down this hallway, probably going into the bedroom, and he stepped out and hit her in the side of the head with a metal candlestick. He hit her twice. When she went down after the second blow, he turned her over and straddled her. He pinned her arms to the floor with his knees and then strangled her with his hands. Then he put the candlestick back and left.”
“Was he right-handed or left-handed?” Claire asked.
“Right-handed.”
“I was just kidding.”
“Kidding? What were you kidding about?”
“About how you can see all that. You’re just standing here.”
“It’s what I said before,” Tay shrugged, “I’m a detective. I detect.”
“But what do you detect? All I see is a dead body lying on the floor.”
“Look at the bruising to the right side of the face and head. The blows came from behind. Her attacker was almost certainly right-handed because no one would try to knock someone out with a candlestick by swinging it backhanded.”
Tay stepped back and mimed first a right-handed swing, then a left-handed backhand.
“And as for the rest,” he continued, “it’s pretty obvious. There are bruises on the inner side of her arms from where he pinned her down with his knees, and you can see his finger marks on her neck.”
“That’s a shitty way to die.”
“Every way to die is shitty.”
August stepped past Tay and began moving silently around the body taking pictures with his telephone. Tay wondered why August was doing that, but something stopped him from asking. It shouldn’t make any difference to him one way or another, but he still wondered about it.
Tay didn’t want any pictures, but still he couldn’t take his eyes off her body lying there on the gray carpet of her apartment. He wanted to look away. He really did. He just couldn’t.
He had no doubt that Rebecca Sternwood had been killed because of him.
He told her Interpol had linked her to the bombing, and she must have told someone else that Interpol knew she was involved. And that someone else was almost certainly whoever it was at the CIA who had given her the instructions to do it.
Then they had killed her. With her dead, the connection to them was cut. Permanently.
Tay couldn’t look away because he knew he was responsible for Rebecca Sternwood’s murder. And bearing witness
to what he had done was all he could do now.
“The call to the police probably ought to come from you, John. It would get messy if a former homicide investigator from Singapore is the one to tell the local cops they’ve got a body here.”
August looked at Tay like he had begun speaking in tongues.
“Call the police? Are you out of your fucking mind, man?”
“I don’t understand. What else can we do?”
“You and Claire are going to get the hell out of here right now, then Woods and I are going to wipe down anything we might have touched and we’ll be right behind you.”
“But, John, you can’t just leave her—”
“Like hell I can’t, Sam. You think I’m going to let the Band get sucked up in a local homicide investigation? Forget it.”
“That’s not right, John.”
“Maybe it isn’t, but that’s the way it’s going to be. You were never here. None of us were ever here.”
“I can’t go along with that.”
“Look, I get it. You solve crimes, you bring justice for the dead and all that good shit. But that’s small potatoes. This is a whole different league, pal.”
“John, there is an innocent woman lying—”
“Not so innocent. She set the three of us up to be killed.”
Tay took a deep breath and looked away. “That doesn’t mean she deserved to be beaten and strangled.”
“No, it doesn’t, but that’s what happened. That doesn’t make us responsible for solving—"
“There’s nothing to solve,” Tay interrupted. “You know who did this.”
“Of course I do, and that’s exactly why we’re not calling the police. What do you expect me to tell them?”
“Just tell them the truth.”
“The truth? The truth? Good God, Sam, don’t be so naïve!”
“I don’t see anything naïve about that.”
“You want me to tell the local homicide cops that the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency almost certainly had his executive assistant instruct Rebecca Sternwood to arrange for the killing of the three of us because he thought the President of the United States was starting to rely on the Band instead of the CIA and he wanted to put a stop to that by crippling the Band? And when we tried to flush them all out by claiming that Interpol had connected Rebecca Sternwood to the bombing in Hong Kong that was supposed to kill us, that then they killed her to keep Interpol from tying it back to them if she talked? Really? You expect me to tell that story to some local homicide cop?”
“I don’t see what choice you’ve got.”
“Get your head out of your ass, Sam. Do you really expect me to tell the cops that I’m a member of a super-secret organization that reports directly to the President of the United States, that the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency tried to use this woman to murder me, and that then he killed her to keep her from telling the truth to a fake Interpol cop? If I told them that story, they’d lock me up.”
“Then what are you going to do?”
August took a deep breath and let it out in what was unmistakably a sigh of exasperation.
“Not a fucking thing,” he said. “I’m not going to burn the Band over this.”
“You’re just going to walk out and leave this woman’s body lying here on the floor?”
“Yep. Exactly. Just like she was willing to walk away and leave our bodies lying in the rubble of the Cordis Hotel in Hong Kong.”
Tay understood how August felt about that, he even understood August’s reluctance to tell the local cops about the Band, but still…
August walked over and draped an arm across Tay’s shoulder.
“I know this doesn’t sit well with you, Sam, but it’s the only way. We can’t go to the cops about this and tell them only part of the story. We can’t be a little bit pregnant.”
“Is this the part where you tell me there are bigger things at stake than a local murder?”
“I know you don’t want to hear it, but there are. This is the big time, Sam, the top of the mountain. You can’t even see one local murder from here.”
“I can. I can see it plainly.”
“I understand,” August nodded, “I really do. But things are still the way they are. We’re not here to solve local murders.”
“So, they’ll just get away with what they’ve done? This guy Reed and his boss and whoever else was involved in murdering Rebecca Sternwood can just go back to their lives and nobody will ever know what they’ve done?”
August dropped his hand from Tay’s shoulder and walked over to the window. The back of Rebecca Sternwood’s apartment looked out toward the glass office towers of Rosslyn, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from Washington. August stood looking at the Capitol dome, impossibly white, peeking out from between two of the towers.
“I know it’s not going to make you feel a lot better to hear this,” he said without turning around, “but in my experience these things have a way of sorting themselves out. We know what these people have done. We know that they tried to murder us and killed three innocent people instead, and we know that they murdered Rebecca Sternwood to protect themselves. We know and we’re not going to forget.”
“But you’re not going to do anything about it.”
August turned and looked at Tay for a long moment in silence.
“Bigger things at stake, Sam,” he said in a low voice. “Bigger fish to fry. Just remember what I said. These things have a way of working themselves out.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“Neither do I,” August admitted. “Not really.”
The silence that fell after that was uncomfortable, but no one broke it. Not until August eventually cleared his throat and pointed at Woods.
“Find a dishtowel or something and wipe down all the surfaces that any of us might have touched, then bring the towel with you and we’ll get rid of it.”
Woods nodded.
“Okay,” August finished. “Now let’s get the fuck out of here.”
And that was the end of it.
Well… almost.
V
Toccata
Chapter Forty-Three
August told Tay he had a couple of things to do before they flew back so the plane wouldn’t be leaving for a day or two. That meant that Tay could either go back on a commercial flight or hang around Washington until he was done and fly back with them.
Tay had more or less decided to take a commercial flight back to Singapore when Claire spoke up and offered to show him around Washington while they were waiting for August. All at once the hanging around thing sounded rather more appealing than it had before.
After all, he was in Washington D.C., a city filled with museums and monuments that he had seen in photographs all his life. Tay had never really been a traveler so he hadn’t really been to all that many places. It wasn’t that he lacked curiosity, certainly not, but he had always thought curiosity should be focused on a productive end of some sort, not squandered on slogging here and there in the world peering at landmarks for no reason at all other than that they were famous.
On the other hand, what else do I really have to do? Tay asked himself. Isn’t that what retired old farts are supposed to do? Travel pointlessly to places they don’t have any reason to be and say they’re seeing the world when they’re really just killing time until they die?
It was such a depressing thought that Tay immediately put it out of his mind.
“A couple of days?” he asked August.
August nodded.
Tay looked at Claire.
“We’d visit the museums and some of the monuments while we’re waiting for John to finish whatever he has to do?”
Claire nodded.
“Okay,” Tay said. “Why not?”
Tay smoked a cigarette that night before he went to sleep and used his phone to trawl through some websites and think about the places in Washington where he might like to go.
The Smithsonian, of course, and the Library of Congress to see the Gutenberg Bible. The Mellon Gallery appeared to be worth a look, too, and he certainly would like to see the Lincoln and the Jefferson Memorials. He might even visit the Supreme Court building just to feel the sense of history there, but the Capitol and the White House he would just as soon skip. He was sick of hearing about American politics and he certainly didn’t want to go to places that were about nothing else. He sometimes wondered if Americans weren’t just as sick of hearing about American politics as he was and, if they weren’t, why they weren’t.
Tay made a list of the places he wanted to go and it immediately made him feel better. Not the places. The list. He liked lists. Lists were islands of tidiness in an untidy world.
The next morning, Tay and Claire started out right after breakfast. Claire had come up with a white SUV from somewhere and they drove north along the Potomac River directly toward the Washington Monument. Perhaps it was because he had seen so many photographs of the place before, but there was something about Washington that didn’t feel real to Tay. Now that he saw the sun gleaming on the white marble of its monuments and buildings just across the river, everything appeared smaller than he thought it ought to be. It was all too clean, too white, too perfect. It looked artificial. Like a theme park for people who wanted to visit Washington without having to cope with the bleak authenticity of the real thing.
They had a fine time wandering through the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and the Natural History Museum, then they walked up the Mall and across the Capitol grounds to the Library of Congress. Tay stood mesmerized under the great dome of the main reading room in this greatest of all the temples to the printed word and wondered what would become of places like this now that most words were more often electronic than printed. He looked at the Gutenberg Bible in its sealed glass case, the atmosphere a carefully controlled mix of oxygen and hydrogen to improve its preservation, and wondered if that was what all printed books would be in another century or so. Not words woven into magical canvases of ideas and emotions, but nothing more than curious artifacts left over from a long-forgotten age. Maybe it was good he wouldn’t be around to see that.