“Ultimately, you know, Parkhall’s the dumb fuck who blew this for us. Doesn’t he have any notion at all how a jet engine works? Jesus, how’d he ever get a job in this business? Why didn’t he put more of the stuff in the flow-through areas? Why didn’t he look for broken fan blades?”
“I asked him. He said he didn’t think of it; he just wanted to be done and get lost.”
“Well, he’s lost, all right.” Greenwood paused. “If he should disappear, does that cut off the trail to the rest of us?”
Davis closed his eyes in despair. He knew what was coming next. He’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but he knew it had to.
“Besides Bonaro and Stock, he’s the only link to the rest of us.”
“Then he’s gotta go.”
“Oh, man,” Davis moaned. “With Bonaro and Stock gone, who’s gonna do it?” He knew the answer before he asked.
“A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do,” Greenwood said.
“Mr. Greenwood, when I started working for you and Senator Marshall, murder wasn’t part of the contract.”
“The only contract we ever had was if you did what we told you to do, nobody would find out about the dead bodies or the drugs or the point-shaving in your past—”
“That was years ago. Nobody’s gonna give a damn today.”
“Is there a statute of limitations on murder one? Even if you’re not charged, what will the allegations do to your bright future in politics? Think about it.”
Davis had thought about it, even as dread of this very phone call weighted him down all day. He knew he wouldn’t say no. Why did he bother to struggle?
“Do it, Chappy,” Greenwood said calmly. “Just do it. Nothing showy. We’re not sending any messages this time. We want Mr. Parkhall to disappear.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Today.”
“I… I’ll try.”
“Call me when it’s over.”
“Yes, sir.”
That night Davis picked up Parkhall at his Virginia apartment on the pretext of going for a drive to talk about how to handle the new direction of the NTSB investigation. Earlier, the Senate aide had gone deep into northeast Washington, to a place where an old friend sold whatever was needed on the streets, and bought a hot .38-caliber snub-nose that he tucked into the back of his waistband. His jacket hid it well.
He and Parkhall drove south, in what apparently was a random direction, for Davis went to great lengths to pretend he wasn’t paying attention to where they were going. At one point, Parkhall asked why they were going so far, and Davis acted startled, saying he wasn’t even sure where they were. But he knew. They were in the upper Tidewater area, a place of bogs and swamps and poverty. Davis pulled onto a dirt road and stopped.
“I think we’re going to have to double back to get home,” he said. “But I’ve got to take a leak. How about you?”
“Not really,” Parkhall said.
“Well, do me a favor and try, okay? I don’t want to have to stop again on the way back. It’s getting late.”
“Okay,” Parkhall agreed.
They groped their way to neighboring trees, and while Parkhall had his pants open, concentrating on not splashing himself, Davis walked up behind him and put two bullets in his head. He pulled a small flashlight out of his jacket pocket and hoisted the dead body under the armpits. He cursed himself for not remembering he would be walking backward at this point, but by twisting his upper body around and holding the flashlight so it shone behind him, he was able to reach one of the mud bogs his mother always warned him not to get close to when he was a kid growing up around here. The bogs were graves for hapless animals, and probably for a few people, too, who fell into them accidentally and couldn’t get out before they were sucked into oblivion. He watched until Parkhall’s body disappeared completely, then threw the hot .38 in after him and started walking slowly back to his car.
He stopped halfway, at the same tree where Parkhall peed and died, to be sick.
42
Pace would always remember this morning because it was the day everything hit the fan and sprayed in all directions. It was as Avery Schaeffer had predicted. When the story broke, it cracked in places he hadn’t imagined. Everyone wanted an investigation. There were inquiries at the NTSB, of course, but also at the Justice Department and within one federal and one state grand jury. The Transportation Committees in both the House and the Senate were making noises about hearings, and there were calls from Hill Democrats for a Senate Ethics Committee examination of the involvement of Harold Marshall. In addition, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced it was looking at the trading of Converse shares on the New York Stock Exchange. A lot of reporters were getting bits of the story, but Pace still had the hottest piece.
Television news and every major newspaper in the country led with the amazing disclosure that the NTSB was now treating the bird-strike theory as a botched attempt to cover up the real reason for the ConPac crash. Wister decided the night before that Pace’s two big stories should be separate, and they made one beautiful package. The page-one headline was a rare two-line banner:
The press-conference story ran down the right side of the page; the grand-jury story down the left. Both carried Pace’s byline. He stashed a dozen extra copies of the front section in his desk to add to his clip file. He didn’t have many days this good.
If the grand-jury story staggered Chronicle competitors, it also staggered Stanley Eastman Travis III, United States attorney for the District of Columbia. He had stormed into the newsroom half an hour earlier, and Pace could see him engaged in heated discussion with Avery Schaeffer in Schaeffer’s office with the door closed. Travis was steamed about the Chronicle story on the grand juries. When Pace called him the night before, he adamantly refused to discuss anything—not even to confirm or deny that an investigation was in progress.
When Travis left a few minutes later, he looked as indomitable as when he came in. Schaeffer didn’t come out to report on the meeting so Pace supposed it wasn’t of consequence to him although he was powerfully curious.
Given Travis’s attitude, Martin Lanier wasn’t likely to give up much information connected with the federal investigation, and Pace suspected Helm would say nothing about the Virginia grand jury.
He called Maryland DMV about the license-plate number Jill Hughes had taken from the blue van on Capitol Hill. The vehicle was registered to Eugene Tolliver of Baltimore. When a reporter from the Baltimore bureau checked the address, he found it was a vacant lot. He also could find no living Eugene Tollivers in Baltimore. One in Lanham was too poor to own a Ford van, another in Chaptico had moved there only a week earlier from West Virginia and drove a Toyota Tercel, and one in Frederick owned a van, a brown Plymouth Voyager, and his neighbors said they’d never seen him with a blue Ford of any body type. Hours of work produced only the certain knowledge that the two men seen in the blue Ford van were professional muscle who didn’t use their real names.
On the Hill, fully seven committees of the House and Senate were considering different angles of pursuit. Jill Hughes and Glenn Brennan were juggling those. Someone had to check the annual financial-disclosure records all members of the Congress and their top aides must file each May. If Marshall had a personal stake in Converse, financial statements at the Secretary of the Senate’s office were the public documents in which that interest would show up. Pace called the Senate Press Gallery to tell Jill and Glenn he would check the records that afternoon. When they didn’t answer his page, he left a message.