The Reflecting Pool

by Otho Eskin

  “You want to see my badge and ID?” I ask.

  “Not necessary,” she answers. “I know who you are.”

  “Can I buy you a drink then, Agent Lovelace?” I ask.

  “I’d love one.”

  I gesture to Roberta who comes to take our order. Roberta is much too courteous to register any reaction to my companion’s appearance. “Miss Lovelace, meet Roberta.”

  “A pleasure to meet you, Roberta.”

  “Roberta is an outstanding bartender,” I explain.

  “Can you make a decent whiskey sour?” Agent Lovelace asks. She pushes her eyeglasses up onto the bridge of her nose.

  “Of course.”

  “Straight up,” the FBI agent says. “No egg white, please. And no maraschino cherry.”

  “Of course not.” Roberta moves away.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?” I ask.

  “Sandra Wilcox,” the FBI lady says, then stops, apparently expecting me to say something. When I’m silent, she goes on: “You’re the lead investigator in the Wilcox murder case. Right?”

  “Before I answer that, I’d like to know where I stand with the Bureau. Is the FBI investigating the Wilcox murder? Or investigating me?”

  “The FBI is interested in Sandra Wilcox. Not you.”

  The woman I’m sitting next to is not beautiful. Not in a conventional sense. Not the star of the movie. More like the attractive, wisecracking, funny sidekick, best friend. The face you remember when you forget the star.

  “Does Carla Lowry know you’re here?” I ask.

  “Of course she does. She knows everything. She’s the head of the FBI Criminal Division.”

  “I’m not a criminal.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Do you work for Carla?”

  Agent Lovelace shakes her head. “Not technically. I work out of the FBI Washington headquarters with a task force dealing with domestic terrorist groups.”

  “But Carla knows you’re seeing me.”

  “She sent me. She told me you can often be found here drinking by yourself.”

  “Did she tell you anything else?”

  “She told me not to trust you. Not for one moment.”

  Roberta arrives with a chilled old-fashioned glass she places on a white linen napkin in front of Arora Lovelace, fills the glass from a silver shaker beaded with condensation. There is a tinkling sound from the shaved ice. Roberta reverently places a lemon slice in the drink.

  Roberta tops off my drink.

  “Okay,” I say. “I confess. I’m investigating the death of Sandra Wilcox. Why does the FBI care?”

  Special Agent Lovelace sips her whiskey sour. “Because Sandra Wilcox is on our radar,” she tells me, putting her drink carefully back on its napkin. “And her violent death has raised red flags all over town.”

  “And you want to share information?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Why didn’t this request come through channels?”

  “I’m a channel.”

  “Why didn’t you just come to my office? Why meet me surreptitiously?”

  “It’s not surreptitious. It’s a goddamn restaurant.” She sips her drink. “I would have tried to meet up with you tomorrow but I understand you’ll be out of town.”

  “And you know this how?”

  Agent Lovelace shrugs off my question.

  “I don’t get it. For some reason, the FBI, or Carla Lowry, doesn’t want anybody to know you’re working with the police—with me—on this case. Why is that?”

  She smiles at me enigmatically. “Can I have some olives, please?” she asks Roberta who nods and goes off.

  “Tell me what you know, Detective Zorn.”

  “I don’t know anything. My investigation just started this morning.”

  “All right, you don’t know anything. Carla Lowry says you’re a smart fella. You’re supposed to have good instincts. What do you think you know? Strictly off the record.”

  “And in return,” I say, “you’ll tell me why the Bureau’s interested in Sandra Wilcox.”

  “Deal,” she says. “Strictly off the record.”

  Roberta brings a dish of olives. Some are dark green. Some are light green. They glisten in their oily bath reflected in the lights from behind the bar. Agent Lovelace selects one.

  “Sandra Wilcox was found murdered this morning in the Reflecting Pool,” I say.

  “Why do you think she was murdered?”

  I know I’ll regret this but I take the plunge. “Because Sandra Wilcox told me.”

  Agent Lovelace looks at me sharply, an olive suspended a few inches from her lips. “You’re kidding. Right? The dead victim told you she’d been murdered?”

  “I know that sounds weird.”

  “Weird? It sounds worse than weird. It sounds seriously creepy. Do you often talk to dead people?”

  “No. This is the first time.”

  “I hate it when police investigators go all mystical on me.”

  “It’s more complicated than that.”

  “How can anything be more complicated than you talking to the dead?”

  “Finding the victim this morning was a bad shock to me.”

  “You’re a homicide detective. You must have been involved with many violent deaths.”

  “More than you might think.”

  “What was special about this victim?”

  Why am I telling this woman this? I ask myself. A woman who’s a stranger. A woman who probably does not have my best interests at heart. Maybe it’s the Van Winkle. Maybe because I need somebody to talk to and Roberta is closely watching the man at the other end of the bar trying to get his date drunk. Maybe because I have a weakness for attractive women.

  “When I found Sandra Wilcox, I thought I recognized her. I was wrong about that but I experienced a synaptic short circuit. In that first moment I thought she was someone I was once very close to a long time ago. I thought she was asking for help. Later, when I saw Sandra Wilcox in the medical examiner’s office, I knew she wasn’t the woman I once knew. But the eyes. They were Rose’s eyes.”

  “Rose?”

  “My oldest sister—her name was Rose—died almost twenty years ago. She was raped and murdered.”

  “How awful.”

  “Rose was found in a lake. In a pine forest in northern Maine. When I first saw Sandra Wilcox, I thought … I don’t know what I thought.”

  “If you’d rather not talk about it, that’s okay. I understand. It’s none of my business.”

  “This morning, standing in the Pool, looking at her, it all came back. The rush of feelings. The horror. As if it had all happened yesterday. Trust me, I’ve not gone crazy. And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t include what I’ve told you in your report to Carla Lowry. She might take it the wrong way.”

  Miss Lovelace pops one olive into her mouth and waits for me to go on. When I say nothing more, she looks disappointed. “Do you have anything more substantial than a conversation with a dead woman as proof Sandra Wilcox’s death was murder?”

  “Okay, here’s what I think happened. Sometime last night Sandra Wilcox was taken or escorted, probably by force, to the Reflecting Pool. There she was drowned, then dumped into the Pool, presumably to make it look like it was some kind of accident.”

  “What makes you think the victim was taken or escorted? Maybe she was alone.”

  “There’s the shoe.”

  “Explain the shoe.”

  “We found one of her shoes not far from the Pool. I’m assuming it fell off or the victim kicked it off on her way to the Pool.”

  “And?”

  “What happened to the other shoe?” I ask. “We’ve searched the area. The other shoe’s missing. Somebody collected that second shoe and removed it. That tells me there was probably at least one other person involved. Maybe several. What woman walks alone across the Mall in the middle of the night wearing one shoe? Her outfit indicates she came directly from
work. She had no ID. No cell phone. No coil Secret Service agents wear in their ears.”

  Lovelace selects another olive. “Go on.”

  “She pulled off her medical identification bracelet.”

  “Tell me about the identification bracelet.”

  “Sandra Wilcox was allergic to peanuts and wore an ID alerting medics to her condition. She pulled the bracelet off her wrist as she got near the Reflecting Pool.”

  “What makes you think she pulled off her ID bracelet? Maybe it fell off.”

  “She had a small wound on her wrist. There are small spots of blood on the bracelet. I think she pulled her bracelet off violently and cut herself.”

  “Why do you think she would do that?”

  “I believe she realized she was in great danger and wanted to leave a message.”

  Arora Lovelace stares at her glass. “That’s awful,” she whispers, more to herself than to me, and adjusts her glasses. “You think she knew she was going to die?”

  “I’m certain of it.”

  “Why are you so sure Sandra was forced into the Pool?”

  “She had abrasions on her knees,” I say.

  “Maybe she stumbled crossing the Mall.”

  “There were abrasions only on her knees. When someone stumbles or falls forward, they’ll break the fall with their hands. She had no abrasions on her hands or arms. Her killer or killers must have been holding her arms when they forced her to her knees on the stone edge of the Reflecting Pool. Then pushed her head under water.”

  Lovelace looks at me intently.

  “That’s it. Now, your turn,” I say. “Tell me about Sandra Wilcox.” She takes a deep breath and does the nervous gesture with her eyeglasses. “As you already know, Sandra was a Secret Service agent. She was in the military before that. Had an outstanding record. Then she left the Army.”

  “Why?”

  “She told her commanding officer she didn’t want to be assigned outside the continental US. For family reasons, she said. She joined the Secret Service six months after she left the Army. She seems to have done well in the Secret Service. She was assigned to the Presidential Protective Division only a few years after she became an agent.”

  “What’s the Bureau’s interest?”

  Arora takes a deep breath. “Ten days ago, a man walked into the FBI field office in Denver and told the duty officer he was a member of an organization called the Brotherhood of the Aryan Dawn and he wanted to give the FBI information about the organization in return for protection. I flew to Denver that afternoon.”

  “Why you?” I ask.

  “The Brotherhood is part of my portfolio.”

  “What’s the Brotherhood?”

  She studies my face cautiously. “You should understand that information about the Brotherhood and about our sources and methods are highly sensitive and are of no business of the DC police department.”

  “But you think this organization has something to do with Sandra Wilcox’s murder. That makes it my business.”

  “What I tell you must remain confidential. The FBI and the Secret Service are engaged in a major investigation into this group. We don’t want any more screwups.”

  I decide not to ask her just yet what she means by “any more screwups.” “Tell me about the Brotherhood of the Aryan Dawn.”

  “It’s a domestic terrorist group with a core membership of around a thousand but it has contacts with like-minded groups—every lunatic racist mountain man and urban guerilla in the country. Whites only, as you can imagine. The Brotherhood assassinated a federal judge in Austin because he was Jewish. They blew up a church in Pennsylvania.”

  “What do they have against churches?”

  “Mostly their activities are to gain attention and recruits. But some are meant to raise serious money. They’ve carried out two major bank robberies, an armored car holdup and a warehouse robbery at LAX. We believe they now have a huge war chest. Until my trip to Denver, we had no idea what this money was for. I think we now have a pretty good idea.”

  “Tell me about the man who turned himself in.”

  “His name was Solly Nelson. I met with him in our Denver office. For almost three days—ten, twelve hours a day—we talked. The man was crazy scared. I’m afraid it did not end well for him.”

  “It often happens that way.”

  “He was born and raised in West Virginia and joined the Marine Corps when he was eighteen but washed out and was dishonorably discharged. He was a big man. Very muscular and strong and had tattoos on his arms with intertwined red and blue snakes. And a swastika tattooed on his left wrist.”

  “How did he get involved with the Brotherhood of the Aryan Dawn?”

  “Nelson did time for armed robbery in Lewisburg. It turns out the federal prison system is the beating heart of the Brotherhood’s recruitment efforts. While in Lewisburg, some prisoners told Solly about an organization which plans to overthrow the government after which a new order will be ushered in and its members would become ‘Princes of the Earth’.”

  “Your informant swallowed this crap?”

  “Probably not. I think he was in it for a regular paycheck and a place to sleep. One of the prisoners at Lewisburg gave Solly a telephone number of a contact. On his release, Solly was broke and unemployed, with no prospects and he called the number. A few days later a man contacted him and they met one night in a bar in Durango. The man called himself Sweet Daddy.”

  “What’s Sweet Daddy’s real name?”

  “Solly would never give me a name. All he said was that this Sweet Daddy had once been an officer in Special Forces with the rank of light colonel. He gave me the impression that this Sweet Daddy had been court-marshaled and dishonorably discharged.”

  “What was this Sweet Daddy court-marshaled for?”

  “Nelson didn’t know. Understand, my interviews with Solly were chaotic—a few fragments of information interrupted by harangues about the unfairness of life, pleas for protection, demands for money, self-justification for a wasted life, tearful expressions of regret.”

  “Did you get a description of Sweet Daddy?”

  “Nothing helpful. He’s maybe fifty. Sixty. He has thick, curly white hair and always wears a white suit and a bow tie.”

  “So your guy joins this lunatic group. Then what happened?”

  “For a while it went fine. Solly even worked on a project with Sweet Daddy.”

  “What was the project?”

  “Sweet Daddy was in the market for military-grade weapons. That was the point of the war chest. Because of Solly’s military background, Sweet Daddy thought Solly could help. They found an arms broker here in the Washington area who arranged a major sale. This was part of the strategy: buy weapons, distribute them to like-minded zealots, start a war.”

  “You say ‘part of the strategy.’ What’s the other part?”

  “There was supposed to be an event that would initiate the revolution.”

  “What sort of event?”

  “The Brotherhood plans to assassinate the President and, according to Solly, Sweet Daddy had found the man to do it. When Solly heard that, it all became too real for him. Until then all the talk of revolution and insurrection had been a fantasy game, but when he heard the killer had actually been recruited, Solly lost his nerve. Solly wasn’t a complete idiot and he knew what would happen if there was an attempt on the President’s life—a lot of people were going to be killed and he wanted no part of it. But there was a hitch. The assassin the Brotherhood had recruited suddenly disappeared. It seems the man wanted to see his son one last time. Sweet Daddy located the assassin and brought him back and Solly knew his time was up. The assassination was imminent so he decided he’d ask the FBI for protection.”

  “I take it he decided wrong.”

  “Solly slipped away from the Brotherhood’s compound and hitched a ride to the local bus station and from there took a bus as far as Denver. That was as far as his money would take him. He arrived in Denve
r late at night and found a small café near the bus station. He waited in the café until nine the next morning, then walked into the FBI field office and turned himself in.”

  “Did you get anything of substance from your interrogations?”

  “One critical piece of information. On our last day, Solly became panicky. He was desperate to get the Bureau to agree to bring him into the witness protection plan and he offered me a name in return: the name of the assassin. That was Solly’s death warrant.”

  “What is the assassin’s name?”

  “Wilcox.”

  “You mean? … Just like … ?”

  “The same name.”

  “Any first name? Any identification?

  “None. Just Wilcox. That’s all Solly knew. The Bureau immediately turned over everything we had to the Secret Service.”

  “You take this Brotherhood organization seriously?”

  “We have to take it seriously. The US Government considers the Brotherhood of the Aryan Dawn one of the most dangerous domestic terrorist group in the country.”

  “And the FBI believes Sandra Wilcox is somehow connected?”

  “Her murder can’t be a compete coincidence.”

  “What did you mean by Solly’s ‘death warrant’?”

  “My last interview ended at three forty on Tuesday afternoon. Solly was becoming hysterical and incoherent, and I terminated the interview, instructing him, as I did at the end of each session, to stay in his room. We’d put him up at a motel across the street from the FBI offices where he was under twenty-four-hour armed guard with an agent posted outside his door.

  “I wrote up my notes for the day and transmitted them to headquarters. An hour and a half later one of the agents reported that Solly and his guard were both missing. They found our agent in the motel storage room with his throat cut. The chief of the FBI field office initiated a search, calling in the Denver police for help. We spent the night looking for Solly and our agent’s killer. At four in the morning, the Colorado Highway Patrol reported finding an unidentified body in a ditch on the side of the road about two miles outside of Denver and thought it might belong to us. The director of the field office and I went to the scene where we examined what was left of the body. It was clear the victim’s legs had been chained to the rear bumper of a car or truck and he’d been dragged, face-down, along country roads for hours. By the time we found him the victim had no face. But I recognized the tattoos—the intertwined red and blue snakes. And the swastika on his left wrist.”