“I can relate,” he says.
“Considering how explosive some of this stuff is, maybe I’m doing you both a favor by not burdening you with too much. Have you considered that?” They clearly haven’t, and I know it’s a lame excuse to make. I concede as much with a smiling shrug. “But hey, the important thing is, we may have linked these two cases, assuming you can find something concrete to go on.”
Bridger goes over the John Doe autopsy report quickly, refreshing his memory, then returns to the Argentine report, squinting through his glasses and mouthing more words. Tense with anticipation, I have to force myself to breathe. He goes back and forth again, comparing lines, examining photographs, keeping his thoughts entirely to himself.
“The suspense is killing me,” I say.
He doesn’t look up. After another minute, he pulls a photo from the John Doe report and compares it to the one with Macneil’s hands blacked out. His lips part.
“Yes?” I ask.
“Come with me.”
He leads us back to the cold storage, where I’d had him take Bea the morning she looked at the body. He hands me the photos before donning a pair of gloves. After consulting the register, he opens the right refrigerator unit and cantilevers the sheeted corpse out for examination. He glances at Cavallo before pulling the sheet back, forgetting that she’s seen worse, much worse.
Glimpsing the corpse again, I get a flash of memory, a snapshot of the concrete basketball court where we first encountered him, Lorenz and me. The wounds had seemed fresher then, more shocking to behold. The stylized pose, the skinned finger extended.
“Are you okay?” Bridger asks.
“I’m fine.”
“This is what we’re looking at,” he continues, lifting the left arm. Using his pinkie, he draws a semicircle in the air above the wrist, indicating the discolored flesh where some kind of restraint was used to secure the hand during torture. “Tied to an armchair, most likely. See underneath? The marks are on the top of the wrist, but not the bottom, like it was resting on something. Now take a look at the Argentine photo. See that mark there, just below the part that’s blacked out? What does it look like?”
“The same,” Cavallo says.
“You’d want to make a real comparison, obviously, or at least work from a better photograph, but what that suggests-and this is only speculation-but it suggests Macneil may have had similar injuries to his hands.”
I look at the picture again, then the body. Once the ligature mark in the photo has been pointed out, it’s impossible not to see it, not to interpret it as a restraint. Before, it was invisible, bordering so close to the black box. Cavallo double-checks the comparison, too.
“It’s really there,” she says.
“I think so.”
Bridger puts the sheet back in place, rolls the body back into storage. Halfway in, he stops and rolls it back out. “There’s something else,” he says. “Bad news, really. But since this is your case now, Theresa, I thought you should know. Detective Lorenz, before his death, had asked about the marks on the back of the victim’s leg-”
“What marks?” I ask.
He cocks his eyebrow in surprise. “That’s right. You weren’t there. This was at the scene, after you went off on your wild-goose chase into the woods. But it’s in my full report-you have read the full report, haven’t you?”
“I don’t remember anything about marks on the leg.”
He exchanges a look with Cavallo, then extends the body tray all the way out so he can access the legs. “There are three dark streaks running parallel, here on the back of the calf. Like he swiped against something while being moved. Looked like oil to me, and I was right. It’s a 5W-30 motor oil. Nothing to help you there. If the body was transported in a car trunk, maybe a van, there are a thousand ways to get marks like that. Lorenz hoped it might be something more exotic, to help pinpoint a murder scene.”
I hunch down for a closer look at the marks. Three faint swipes across the back of the calf, maybe two inches in length.
“Is there anything else you’re holding back?” I ask.
Cavallo laughs. “Holding back is your specialty, March.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
While Bridger returns the body to the refrigerator, Cavallo and I go into the corridor. She’s biting down on her bottom lip, waiting for me to acknowledge the fact that she’s done good work. I give her shoulder a pat. “Nice job. Do you think there’s any chance of getting the full autopsy report through official channels? That’s what we need to make this stick.”
“It might be possible,” she says.
“Ask Bascombe. He’s good at that kind of thing.”
“If I did that, I’d have to tell him what I’m working on.”
Now it’s my turn to laugh: “He already knows.”
When I left Hilda and her files in Bea’s hands for safekeeping, it was an acknowledgment that her resources were greater than mine. But I did not walk away empty-handed. Hilda gave me a detailed outline of the process Brandon Ford used for making contact with Inferno to collect his raw intelligence. She’d never made the journey herself, of course. But Ford had apparently relied on her experience when it came to making operational dispositions. I trusted that her information would prove accurate.
Setting up a watch on the route on the off chance that Ford might make a trip to Matamoros was beyond my capabilities, though. So was hunting down the men in Hilda’s files. With Bea’s team of experienced drug intelligence officers, she could do more on both counts. I had to take it on faith that if anything turned up, she would keep me in the loop.
Bridger’s tip leaves me thinking that faith was misplaced.
I try to call Bea and find out what’s going on, but I keep getting her voicemail. The last time I paid a surprise visit, she wasn’t expecting me, which made following her from the field office parking garage to her suburban cowboy bar a piece of cake. I’m not in the mood to take so much trouble now. Besides, I like to shake things up.
After parting with Cavallo, I drive downtown to Bea’s office, showing my badge at security and explaining who I’m there to see. Nobody bats an eyelid. Phone calls are made and a stout woman in pinstripes with an electronic earpiece assures me that Special Agent Kuykendahl will arrive momentarily. Instead, the door to her basement lair opens to reveal a broad-chested All-American with a blond crew cut and perfect teeth. He beckons me through, leading me down the same path I took the first time, explaining in the corridor that Bea is his boss.
It’s a strange thing to realize that someone as young as Bea, someone who looks so adolescent, can command such men. The All-American speaks of her in hushed tones and with great respect. There’s a note of pride at being a member of her team, reminding me of the esprit de corps that Wanda Mosser once inspired in her tough-guy subordinates.
“Did you know Brandon Ford?” I ask him.
He swipes us through the security door. “I’ll let you talk to her about that.”
Last time, the bullpen was empty. Now half a dozen officers are gathered around the conference table with Bea at the head. Behind her, a large portable whiteboard is covered in photographs and handwritten notes. When she sees me, Bea flips the board over to conceal their work, but not before I see the faces of the six paramilitaries whose new identities Hilda kept on file: the curly-haired Brandon Ford, James Lodge of the skull-shaped ring, and four others. One of the four is circled in red, a question mark next to his face.
It’s a reasonable assumption that one of these men could be John Doe. Six to begin with, then subtract Lodge, who murdered my partner and was killed in turn. That would leave five, but the night they descended on me in the Hummer, there were only four, including Ford himself. So where was the missing man? Could he have been dead all along, cooling off in Bridger’s refrigerator with some oil stains on his leg?