As we stepped outside, she asked, “Will you let me know what you find out?”
I wasn’t sure, but I still said, “Absolutely.”
As I walked away, I decided I would. I couldn’t help feeling like I was trying to learn the truth for her as much as for my mom and myself.
I checked the clock on the dash as I got in the BMW and called Gigi and Kurt. I asked them to redouble their efforts on Camacho. Clearly, he was key to figuring out what happened to my dad.
Kurt said he had some news for me: he’d managed to hack into the computer in the office of Rossetti’s boss and pull out his online search history for the days leading up to his death. There was a lot there, as you’d expect for a newspaper editor, one working for a top paper. I said we’d look at it together when I got back and I made myself comfortable as I set out on the two-and-a-half hour drive down to Bethesda, Maryland and the second ghost from a murky past that Kurt and Gigi had unearthed for me.
It was time to have a chat with Dr. Ralph Orford and see what he had to say about my dad’s state of mind.
Sandman arrived at Reagan National at twenty past nine in the morning. He’d slept for almost the entire two hours and twenty-five minutes, waking only as the jet touched down. There was a car waiting for him at Garage A, key in the usual place, a field kit locked in the trunk.
He hadn’t bothered waiting for the EMT, Fire Rescue and Miami PD to descend on the crash site, hadn’t needed confirmation that Siddle was dead. The building that now housed the Lamborghini was so damaged by the collision that the senior Fire Rescue officer had immediately declared it unsafe and evacuated the apartments on the second and third floors. In terms of collateral damage, it was a less than fitting tribute to a man who had killed so many without blinking.
By the time Sandman had driven back to Miami International it was after four in the morning. He used the two hours before check in to read the file on his next assignment.
He knew the psychiatrist by reputation, if not personally. As he always did, Sandman would get inside the head of his target, but in this case it would be quite impossible to achieve this at a level anywhere approaching the capabilities of the target himself.
44
Bethesda, Maryland
My early start was paying off and it wasn’t yet noon as I rode the ramp off I-495 and headed into Bethesda. Traffic was light and before long, I was rolling down Old Georgetown Road, which was where Ralph Orford had his office.
It was time for the third stop on my magical mystery tour of the past. Mother, lover, psychiatrist-it was like a three-card spread from the Woody Allen Tarot deck.
From what Kurt and Gigi had learnt, Orford’s life had barely altered across thirty years, the only adjustment being a reduction in the number of hours spent seeing patients, both at his office and across a short list of hospital psychiatric departments. As of five years ago Orford spent at least ten hours every Monday at Walter Reed where he took a strong interest in the more complex cases. Tuesday through Thursday he was at the office. He rotated around several private psychiatric hospitals on Fridays, keeping the weekend free for golf or hunting, a fact which sparked my interest in light of what Rossetti’s editor had tried so hard to conceal.
In fact, I was still unsure about what Orford would turn out to be. Was he my dad’s shrink, and had he genuinely diagnosed him as depressive and treated him before he died? Or was he a CIA plant who had been parachuted in after the fact to pad out the coroner’s report and lay any suspicions about my dad’s death to rest?
Of course, I was leaning toward the latter, and for someone I suspected of being a key part of whatever conspiracy I was starting to unravel, his public life had been an almost entirely open book-at least it was if you had a couple of talented hackers working with you who could follow the digital breadcrumbs and map out his movements as accurately as if he’d swallowed a tracker. There were gaps-sometimes lasting a few days-that were consistent with someone traveling under any number of cover identities, and Gigi hadn’t managed to pinpoint any of them. If he had been working for Corrigan, then this made sense, because he would have had the full resources of the CIA at his disposal when it came to creating watertight legends.
As it had been in the 80s, his practice’s client list included congressmen, lobbyists, journalists, Fortune 500 executives and university professors, and it struck me this was a source of confidential information that would just keep on giving. If Orford was indeed dirty, he and his handlers had clearly been careful about how they used what they discovered, evidenced by Orford not having so much as a question mark hanging over his entire professional life.
The small office building in which Orford’s office suite had been located for the last twelve years also housed two dentists, an OB-GYN, a family doctor and a dietary nutritionist-all on the first and second floors above a high-end travel agent, pretty much the only kind that had survived the almost total exodus of the business from the real world to online.
I passed the row of cars parked on either side of his street and pulled in around the corner, behind the building. I got out and headed back and I had just reached the corner when my eyes snared something that froze me in place.
A man in a baseball cap and gloves was walking up to the building.
Sandman was parked fifty yards down the street from Orford’s office. He’d been there since eleven, running over the plan in his head while he waited for the clock to hit something approaching an early lunch hour.
As he waited, he wondered where this crisis would take him next. If it all went according to plan, then only Roos and Tomblin would remain. Sandman wondered which of them would blink first-if indeed either of them did. They hadn’t survived more than seventy-five years in the secret world between them without knowing how to stare down a threat, but Sandman had a strong feeling this was perhaps one of the most potentially catastrophic situations they had faced. In Sandman’s experience, even the most battle-hardened soldier was capable of losing control when faced with something outside their operational experience, and although he trusted both men whose bidding he performed without question or complaint, he suspected that one of them was more likely to lose a game of chicken than the other.
He checked his watch-five to twelve-and pressed the dial button on his smartphone just as a white BMW drove past. He couldn’t see the driver’s head from the tinted windows and the fact that the driver had his head turned away from him, but it wasn’t something that registered as a threat on Sandman’s radar in any way.
After a couple of rings, Orford came on the line.
Sandman said, “The season’s over for sika deer, but a limited cull will continue. Considering our mutual interests, we should discuss this at the earliest opportunity.”
Sandman could hear Orford processing this in the silence that followed.
“I’ll send Violet out for an early lunch.” Orford’s voice was calm but focused.
“Good.”
Two minutes later, he watched as a young woman wearing a smart coat over a pencil skirt-hair, makeup and posture all perfect-exited the building and headed toward a strip of restaurants three blocks to the south.
Sandman checked his face in the mirror, climbed out and walked up the sidewalk toward Orford’s
It was the baseball cap and gloves that gave him away.
As I held back and watched him approach the building, an instinctive memory meshed with what my eyes were sending to my brain. Although the man was clean-shaven and no longer wearing glasses-his face was half-obscured by the turned-up collar of an old-style waist-length coat-I instantly recognized him as the bearded man from Kirby’s. And I figured the odds were pretty slim that he was here to buy an all-inclusive tour of Italy’s opera houses.