'We'll give it another day, anyway.'
'Call me the night before. I'm three hours away: I'd like to be there when you do it.'
'No problem. Anything else?'
'One other thing… one of the victims, Rolando D'Aquila, used to be a heavy drug-dealer. The word from our drug people is that he bought his coke out of St.
Louis, a Mafia connection down there. Not Colombian or Mexican, but old-line
Mafia. And this shooter, his woman, she seems to tie in down there.'
'Damn,' Mallard said, 'I'm letting something happen here that I've never let happen before.'
'What's that?'
'I'm getting my hopes up.'
Then for two days, nothing happened. Carmel didn't get a call-back. She stayed close to the magic phone, but she never heard from Rinker. Was there a problem with the contact phone? Was it tapped?
The FBI was equally frustrated. There were no more calls to Tennex: nothing. At the end of the second day, Mallard called Lucas back. 'We're going in tomorrow, if nothing happens to slow us down. We want to get in before the end of the week.'
'I'll get a flight out tonight.'
'We can cover that, if you want,' Mallard offered.
'No thanks, I'll do it from here.'
'All right. Anything new?'
'I sent one of my people, Marcy Sherrill, down to St. Louis to schmooze their organized crime people. There's nothing going on up here.'
'If SherrilPs the one I remember from the meeting, she oughta schmooze pretty well.'
'One of her many talents,' Lucas said. 'See you tomorrow.'
Lucas called his travel agent, got a business-class ticket on the nine o'clock
Northwest flight into National and made a reservation at the Hay-Adams. He liked the Hay-Adams because, the half-dozen times he'd stayed there – even the first time – the doorman said, 'Nice to see you again, sir.'
Then he called Donnal O'Brien at D.C. Homicide and said, 'Hey, Irish.'
'Jesus Christ, the outer precincts are heard from,' O'Brien said. 'How'n the hell are you, Lucas?'
'Good. I'm coming to town tonight. I'd like to get together tomorrow, if you've got the time.'
'Want me to get you at the airport?'
'I'll be really late,' Lucas said. O'Brien had four kids to take care of. 'I'll get a cab down to the Hay-Adams. I'll do my thing with the Feebs tomorrow morning, and make it over to your shop by when? Three o'clock?'
'I'll plan on three. Maybe go out for a couple beers, huh?'
'See you then,' Lucas said.
The flight to Washington was a nightmare: nothing wrong with the plane, the flying conditions were perfect, and the trip was on schedule, but airplanes – winged planes, not helicopters – were the only really phobia that Lucas was aware that he had. He dreaded getting on one, sat rigidly braced for impact from the time the plane backed away from the departure gate until it nosed into the destination gate, and was never really convinced that he'd survived until he was walking through the terminal at the other end.
As they came into Washington, he had a postcard view of the Washington Monument.
He ignored it. There was no point in looking at the view when you were only seconds away from flaming death. Somehow, the plane got down, and the stewardesses suppressed their panic well enough to smile at him and thank him for flying Northwest.
The Hay-Adams was excellent, as usual. The White House, framed in the window over the desk, looked like an expensive 3-D photo reproduction, of the kind found in commercial aquariums – until you understood that it was real.
He slept very well, having been properly welcomed back.
Mallard arrived at ten o'clock in the morning in a blue Chevy, followed by another blue Chevy carrying three more agents. Lucas was waiting just inside the door, and when he saw Mallard step out of the car, pushed through to the sidewalk: 'Nice hotel,' Mallard said, looking up at the Hay-Adams facade. 'I once got to stay in a Holiday Inn with suites. I didn't get a suite, but I walked past the door to one.'
'If you guys treat me right, I'll let you stand in the lobby while I have dinner tonight,' Lucas said.
'You're all heart,' Mallard said. He was wearing a blue suit with a dark blue necktie with tiny red dots on it. He had a stainless-steel cup full of coffee in the Chevy's cupholder. He took a sip and said, 'If you want some, we can stop at a Starbuck's.'
'I'm fine,' Lucas said. 'Why all the troops?'
'There are five of them – the two receptionists, the two women on the switchboard, and the manager -so I thought there ought to be five of us.'
'Yeah? Well, if they charge, go for the lead one,' Lucas said, as he got comfortable in the lumpy front seat. 'If you can turn the lead one, the rest of them usually follow.'
'You'd be dead in an hour, in Washington,' Mallard said. 'In Washington, the leaders are at the back of the stampede.'
The office suite was off Dupont Circle, a nondescript granite building that might, on close inspection, pass as ordinary. Lucas, Mallard and the other three agents went into the building like a mild-mannered rugby scrum – a tight little group of conservatively dressed, short-haired men, all reasonably large and athletic, who, if they were mistaken for anybody at all, would be mistaken for the Secret Service.
Lucas had seen FBI scrums before, but had never been part of one.
Mallard held up his ID to the receptionists, one bottle redhead and one real blonde, and said, 'We're from the FBI. We'd like to speak to Mrs. Marker.'Two of the agents had peeled off from the group as Mallard stopped at the desk, and gone through a door into the back. Covering the switchboard, Lucas thought.
The blonde receptionist was a carefully coiffed middle-aged woman whose glasses had blue-plastic frames with silver sparkles embedded in the plastic. When she saw Mallard's credentials, her hand went to her throat: 'Well, yes,' she said.
'I'm not positive that she's in.'
'She's in,' Mallard said. 'Dial 0600 and ask her to come out.'
The receptionist asked no more questions: She picked up her phone, punched in the numbers and said into the mouthpiece, 'There are some gentlemen from the FBI here to see you.'
'Thank you,' Mallard said.
Louise Marker was a chunky young woman with only one eyebrow, a long furry brown stripe that sat on her brow ridge above both eyes. She had exaggerated cupid's bow lips, colored deep red, beneath a fleshy, wobbly nose. In Alice in
Wonderland, she would have been the Red Queen.
Tennex had been a customer for seventy-two months, she said, and paid the rent and phone bill each month with a cashier's check or a money order. She kept the recipient's receipt for all seventy-two checks in a green hanging file. Most of the checks and money orders came from different banks in each of the cities of
St. Louis, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Kansas
City, Missouri. Four checks came from Dallas-Fort Worth and three from Denver.
Two checks came from Chicago and from Miami, one each from San Francisco, New
Orleans, and New York.
'How does she find out how much she owes?' Lucas asked. 'The phone bills are always different?'
Marker shrugged: 'We add them up and put a message on the voice mail, on the twenty-ninth of each month. A few days later, the check comes in. End of story.'
'And the voice mail goes through the phone company, so you wouldn't even handle that call.'
'That's right.'
'Why would you bother with your service at all? With a receptionist?'
'Well, you gotta have a phone – the phone company won't let you in on the service if you don't have a phone,' Marker said. 'We're the phone.'
'That's nuts,' one of the FBI agents said. 'They pay you all this money for a phone?'