When we were in the rental and driving away, I said, ‘Pierce is going to be pissed.’
‘“Pierce.”’ I heard his wife call him Lou one night.’
‘Figures.’
‘You find anything?’
‘Something. I don’t know what it is yet.’
‘Poor Jimmy. The last time I saw him, he was wearing that stupid Captain America jacket I bought him.’ She sounded as if she couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry. She made a sound that was a mixture of both.
We drove back to the hotel in silence. She found a radio station that was apparently all rap all the time. I had my Glock in the glove compartment. I wanted to kill that station real, real good.
After I pulled into the hotel parking lot, I said, ‘You’ve been a big help.’
‘Will you let me know what you found?’
‘I will.’ But I didn’t say when.
‘By the way, I saw his aunt or whatever she was at the press conference. She’s hilarious.’
‘That seems to be the consensus.’
She started to slide out the door. ‘My mother said that my father wrote Burkhart a thousand-dollar check last night and so did most of the people at the country club. I hope you can nail his ass. He’s even creepier than Pierce.’
I smiled. ‘You mean Lou?’
‘Yeah,’ she said and was gone.
As I was driving back to campaign headquarters I passed a billboard that came to me with the force of a religious revelation.
There she was in living black and white. Burkhart had his arm around her and it was only appropriate. The copy read: ‘Help me and my wife take our country back.’ BURKHART FOR CONGRESS.
It was the woman I’d seen snapping photos of Jim Waters.
ELEVEN
I got a cup of coffee at a Starbucks’ drive-through and then sat in the parking lot taking the duct tape off the package with my pocket knife. Was this what Jim Waters had died for? Had he been given the chance to tell his killer where it was? Or had the killer simply meant to kill him and wasn’t concerned with this small taped package? Then again — long shot — there was the possibility of a random killing.
I got it open. Inside the package was another package. This was wrapped in plain brown paper. But from the edges of the merchandise I had a pretty good guess what was waiting for me. One of two things.
The brown paper required only my fingers. I set it on the pile of duct tape and exterior paper. And there it was. I’d guessed a CD or a DVD. Turned out to be the latter. Nothing was written on the clear plastic container or on the DVD itself.
What had Waters gotten involved in? There are ops on both sides who break the law whenever they feel it’s necessary. Had Waters been spying for one of them on the other side?
I started thinking about the dinner I’d planned to have with Waters. Had he been going to tell me something about spying or this DVD? For most amateurs involved in crime there comes a point where panic sets in. Second thoughts, doubts, terror. For the career criminal and the professional political op, the game has rewards that are both monetary and psychological. It’s pretty cool pulling off stuff and getting away with it. A few years back an op from the other side had been charged in federal court for numerous violations of law. He was a past master at brochures that gave his clients deniability. They just magically appeared. Mostly they were sexual innuendo. He went in for quotes from people who claimed to have known the opponent at various times in his life. Both the quotes and the names were bullshit. But they kept the drumbeat of sleazy whispers going strong.
In a sleepy little town in Georgia he hired two white men gussied up in some kind of uniforms to misdirect the battered buses from a local black church. They told the drivers that there was a detour between the church and the polling places in town. They were directed to a dirt road that was laced with nails and broken glass and sharpened pieces of metal. The buses never made it to the polling places for the people to vote.
His greatest hit was phone jamming one of our candidate’s lines for a day and a half so our man couldn’t get his calls out. The election was decided by sixty-seven votes and the other side won. When the prosecutor started listing all the crimes the guy had committed the op couldn’t help himself. He broke out in this grin that the jury could plainly see. He was proud of himself. The jury found him guilty on six counts and he was sentenced to eight-to-ten in a federal slammer.
I called my hotel on my cell. ‘Is it possible to get a DVD player in my room?’ I had an older Mac that couldn’t play DVDs.
‘Of course, sir.’
‘I should be there within a half hour. I’d appreciate it if it was waiting for me.’
‘No problem, sir.’
I spent ten minutes on the phone to the home office in Chicago.
‘So you’re not coming back tomorrow?’ Howard, who runs the day-to-day far better than I ever could, said with a fair amount of exasperation in his voice. I prefer to be on the road.
‘I know you owe Tom Ward a lot, Dev. But we really need to sit down with Finney and tell him to get his act together. He’s desperate and it really shows. We need to help him.’ Finney was a one-term congressman on our side who’d had, to be honest, a completely undistinguished first term. The word was he liked Washington nightlife a lot more than he should have and the newspaper back home had started printing the gossip right from the start. Now he was floundering, damaging himself with pontifical speeches about the rights of all mankind and the greatness of America that lay just ahead, neither of which he gave a flying fuck about and neither did anybody else. The amazing thing was that he was only trailing a few points behind his opponent, another John Wayne-type who was always seen on the tube fondling his rifle with a suspiciously sexual pleasure. Finney could still pull it out but he didn’t have much time. He’d dumped his previous consultant three months ago and signed on with us. Unlike Jeff Ward, he hadn’t accumulated enough gossip to do him terminal damage.
‘How about a Skype meeting?’ I said.
‘That’d be all right.’
‘Go ahead and set something up and I’ll be there.’
‘That murder of yours is all over the fucking place.’
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘But I like that granny.’
‘I’ve got an in with her. How about I line you up, Howard?’
He laughed. ‘Actually, she is kinda cute.’
I was just about ready to leave the Starbucks’ parking lot when my cell toned again.
‘Hi, Dev. It’s Kathy. I’m glad I caught you. There’s a detective by the name of Fogarty who wants you to stop by the police station as soon as you can. She said it’s important.’
‘But she didn’t say why, of course.’
‘Cops never say why. They have a badge. They don’t have to.’
‘Remind me to get one of those badges for myself.’
‘Get me one, too, while you’re at it.’
I’d never seen so much glass on a police station. The architect had made it so friendly and accessible I almost thought I’d gone to the wrong place. Kathy had given me simple directions but maybe I’d misread them. But no, there above the wide glass double doors were the words POLICE STATION. And on the sloping landscaped lawn were hedges clipped with such fuss a king would have been pleased.
The interior was bright and open and the front desk was more corporate than law enforcement. An attractive thirty-something blonde in a short-sleeved blue uniform shirt was typing on her computer. When she heard me she immobilized me with a white smile straight from a toothpaste commercial.
I know men are supposed to have sexual fantasies every few minutes or so but I divide mine between sex and romance. I’d had a number of affairs since my divorce but none had led to anything lasting. My fault, I’m sure. So when I see somebody as fetching as this policewoman, sex and romance commingle in my mind and romance often wins out. Yes, I’d like to go to bed with her but first I’d like to get to know her. I gave up one-night stands after about two years of them following the divorce.