“I’ve been trying to reach you,” I say.
“Everybody, I’m sure Detective March needs no introduction. As you know, he is assisting us on this one, though unofficially thanks to a certain altercation with one of our targets.”
With the exception of one agent who appears to be in his forties, Bea’s team looks as young as they do eager. Like her, they don’t fit my idea of the G-man mold. Maybe that’s because they work in a specialized field, or maybe she chooses underlings who resemble herself. The outlier is the older guy, who has enough starch in his shirt and steam on his creases to make J. Edgar Hoover proud. He stands to shake my hand. When Bea leads me back to her office, he follows behind us, pausing at the door.
“You need anything, boss?” he asks.
“March might want some coffee. No? Then I guess we’re fine.”
He looks me over before pulling the door shut.
“He seems like a very accommodating guy,” I say.
She slumps in her chair like a teenager, crossing one leg over the other, stretching her hands behind her neck. “If it was up to him, he’d be sitting at my desk.”
“So that’s how it is.” I take a seat.
“That’s how it is. Now, what are you doing here? We agreed that I’d call if I needed anything from you.”
“I remember our agreement a little differently, but never mind. I assume Hilda is tucked away somewhere? The thing is, Dr. Bridger says you paid him a visit. Now he’s wondering what’s going on. You should have included me in that conversation.”
“He told you why I was there?”
I nod. “I assume, looking at your board out there, that the visit was successful.”
She sits up straight, tucks her legs under the desk. “You saw that, huh? It doesn’t matter. I’m not trying to keep you in the dark. In fact, I’m pretty proud of the way my people have come through on this. I doubt Houston’s finest could have done any better.”
“How so?”
“Dr. Bridger was not such a big help,” she says. “He couldn’t match any of the files up to the body on his slab, said there wasn’t enough to go on. But he did throw out an idea. The John Doe died of cardiac arrest, but apparently with the kind of torture he went through, that’s not a given. You can endure something like that without your heart giving out, I guess. This guy may have had a heart condition-”
“Is there anything in the files about that?”
“They’re not that thorough. But we did some checking and we found out that one of these guys, Robert Johnson, was admitted to the hospital two years ago, complaining about an irregular heartbeat.”
Johnson, Ford, Lodge. Such generic names. Designed so their owners could pass unnoticed through life.
“They put him on a monitor and diagnosed it as stress,” she says. “That’s good enough for me. According to his stats, he’s about the same height as Brandon and they’re in the same age range. I think Johnson is who you found on the basketball court.”
“Then why did the database say it was Brandon Ford?”
“Here’s my theory: Brandon saw an opportunity and he took it. None of his paramilitaries were on my radar screen, but he was. If that body was identified as him, he could walk away and none of us would even know to look for him, because we’d think it was him we buried. But after his ‘death,’ he must have gone back to his office for some reason-maybe to pick up the money we gave him. He figured out you were there-maybe you tripped some kind of signal without realizing-and he knew he had to get everything out of there or you’d realize it couldn’t be him dead on the slab.”
“So you’re saying that Ford killed his own man and planted the body to make us think it was him?”
“I’m not saying that. I don’t know-”
“And Ford on his own wouldn’t have the juice to rig that DNA match.”
“Like I said, it’s theory.”
“Here’s something else to put in your hat. There’s an earlier victim, a man by the name of Chad Macneil. He was murdered last year down in Buenos Aires. The cops there didn’t release all the details, but we’re working on that. What we do have suggests that Macneil’s hands were skinned just like Robert Johnson’s-assuming you’re right about him. So the question then becomes, can you place Brandon Ford in Buenos Aires when that murder occurred?”
“Can you give me the dates?”
“I can do better than that.” From my briefcase I produce a photocopy of the autopsy report on Macneil. “We’re working on getting an official copy of this. Maybe you’d have more pull as a Federal agent?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
She flips through the pages, her face clouding. Before I walked in, she was confident she had a handle on things, and now that handle’s yanked itself right off. There are questions I’d like to ask her. I’d like to know how much her team knows about what’s going on, if she’s leveled with them about her relationship with Ford or not. From what I saw earlier, there don’t seem to be many secrets in here. Maybe she’s found a way to cover her exposure, or at least to limit the fallout. If it’s true the old man of her team wants her job, she wouldn’t put everything on the table unless she was fairly certain neither the inappropriate relationship nor the missing quarter million could come back to bite her.
“Was there anything else?” she asks.
There is, but I’m not going to ask. I already know the kind of answers she’d give and how far I could trust them. When you’re in the dark and you suspect there’s a brick wall, there’s no point running into it just to prove you’re right.
On my way out, though, I make a point of pausing at the big whiteboard. With a glance in Bea’s direction I flip it back over, taking a long look at the man she’s identified as Robert Johnson. He has a long, thin face with dark eyes and a cleft chin. His jet-black hair is cut short. A thick, muscular neck with a prominent Adam’s apple. I can imagine him swallowing. I can imagine the axe falling across his throat.
“The face that launched a thousand ships,” Bea says.
“Maybe so. I just want to know why he was killed.” I touch the edge of the photo, some of the red marker coming off on my finger. “There’s something you should know. When Chad Macneil was killed, a lot of people thought it was Reg Keller who did it. You know about Reg, I assume. If he’s connected to this somehow, then I need you to realize this: he’s mine.”
“He’s yours,” she says. “Message received.”
My eyes trail across the board, resting on Lodge’s face. I remember him turning at the sound of my voice, his legs planted on either side of Lorenz, my pistol in his hand. I remember his eyes, the mask hiked up over his forehead, the millisecond’s worth of surprise before he was hidden behind the Krinkov’s flash.
Bea puts her hand on my arm. “Don’t let it get to you. It had to be done.”
I’m conscious of everyone in the room, their eyes on me, but when I turn, they are all looking away. All except for the outlier, the older man, who stands apart from the rest with his arms crossed, barely concealing his disgust.
CHAPTER 23
Leaving the field office and its air-conditioning via the front entrance, the sauna effect hits me outside, steaming my sunglasses at the bridge of the nose. As I walk, I’m conscious not only of a twinge down my leg but also a leftward tilt brought on by the weight of my briefcase. Even empty, the bridle leather is a handful, but now it’s stuffed to capacity with all the gear and paperwork I lug around on a daily basis, mostly without being conscious of the load. Remembering the doctor’s words about heavy lifting, I tell myself it may be time to retire the old bag, or at least dump some of the ballast.
“Hey, you,” a voice calls.
I wheel around to find the outlier from Bea’s squad breathing down my neck. “You got a problem with me?”