“Beats me,” Price said equably. “But I guess we do have ourselves a homicide.”
I thought she was going to brain him, so I intervened. I explained what Allie had been doing in Wilmington, and that there was no plausible link between a pending divorce case and radiation poisoning.
“That all makes sense to me,” she said, “but inquiring federal minds are going to explore that notion in some detail. So I’d recommend you stick around here in Wilmington, Mr. Ex-police-lieutenant. And now I need to speak to the detective sergeant here in private, if you please.”
Price came out a few minutes later and shook his head. He put his finger to his lips until we were in the elevator. “Full-scale Lebanese goat-grab spooling up in the ME circles,” he said as we rode down. “Jacksonville is yelling at New Hanover for sending up a radioactive DOA, and New Hanover is yelling back that they had no way of knowing, et cetera, et cetera. You sure you’ve told me everything you know about this?”
“All I know is that Allie is dead. How she came in contact with radiation is beyond me. So now what?”
“The state chief medical examiner’s called in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The NRC has called the Bureau. The federal host is inbound, as we speak.”
We went out to his car and climbed in. He sighed and looked around the peaceful parking lot, which we both knew wasn’t going to stay that way much longer.
“She give you any details?” I asked. “Like radioactive what?”
Price said no. She had told him they wouldn’t know the “what” until a lab very different from the state facility reviewed the case and the corpse. “She mostly wanted to vent, and I was the nearest cop. We’re the ones who sent the body to New Hanover, so somehow, this is all our fault.”
“That sounds familiar,” I said. What the fuck, Allie, I thought again. I’d felt like washing my own hands on the way out.
“So where do they sell radioactive fluids in beautiful downtown Wilmington, North Carolina?” I asked as we drove out of the lot and headed back to the city police building.
“We’ve got the Helios nuclear power plant over next door in Brunswick County,” Price said. “Did your legal lovebirds have any connection to the nuke industry?”
“Hell, I don’t know,” I said. “All lawyers look alike to me, and, besides, Allie wasn’t taking pictures of them at work.”
Price’s cell phone rang as we stopped for a red light. He picked up, listened for a minute, grunted an okay, and hung up. “They’re he-e-e-re,” he chanted. “Boss wants me back downtown ASAP. You really want to dance in this cow pie?”
“No way,” I said. “Gave that shit up when I retired.”
“Retirement’s starting to look real good.” Price sighed longingly.
Ten minutes later, he pulled into the parking lot. “I’ll let you out here, if that’s okay. You stayin’ overnight?”
I grinned at him. “As in, don’t leave town, there, stranger?”
Price shrugged. “Naw, not really. The federal suits will want to talk to you at some point, but otherwise…”
“Yeah, sure,” I said, immediately thinking of Mary Ellen Goode. “I’ll stay over another night. Anything I can do to help, you holler. They going to be able to keep this out of the media?”
Price shook his head. “Probably not,” he predicted. “Specially if somebody ties that radiation shit to the power plant over in Brunswick County. Which would be a real surprise-those folks have damned good security, and the guy who runs it is downright scary. What’s your cell number?”
I gave it to him, and he promised to stay in touch.
Two hours later, the phone at my bedside rang. I picked up. It was Bernie Price again.
“Lieutenant Richter?” Price said, speaking formally, which told me immediately he was probably calling from a room full of feds and other undesirables.
“Having fun yet, Bernie?” I asked.
“Not at all, sir,” Price said, without an audible hint of humor. “Would you be available to meet with two special agents from the FBI this afternoon?”
I looked at my watch. There wasn’t all that much left of the afternoon. “I’ll be in the hotel lounge in an hour,” I said. “Got names?”
“Special Agents Caswell and Myers,” Bernie said.
I smiled. Creeps Caswell and Missed-it Mary Myers. This could be interesting.
“I can’t wait,” I said. “I’ll fill you in after I see them.”
“Probably not, sir,” Bernie said, and then paused. I got the message.
“You’ve been told to sever all connections with itinerant ex-cops meddling in city business, have you?”
“That’s absolutely correct, sir,” he said.
“Gosh, Bernie, this really hurts my feelings. But maybe when all the dust settles, I can buy you a beer, hunh?”
“Count on it, sir,” he said. He sounded relieved that he hadn’t had to spell it out for me.
I thanked him, hung up, and went out onto the balcony to do some stretch exercises and try to wake up. For some reason I suddenly missed my shepherds. Then, looking at the other chair, I realized I also missed Allie. Had she been the victim of some random act of God, or had someone done this to her? The angry pathologist had used the word “ingested.” So she drank radioactive… what?
The Hilton’s lounge was spacious, modernistic, and relatively empty. There was a nice view of the Cape Fear River as the sun started down. The dark gray bulk of the battleship USS North Carolina, parked now as a World War II museum across the river, filled up the downstream windows. I got myself a beer and took a corner booth away from the main bar. The two FBI agents showed up fifteen minutes later, and I smiled when I caught the bartender staring at them.
I had encountered Special Agent Caswell and his partner only once during my active-duty career, and he had provoked the same reaction from me. He was a supervisory special agent, now in his late forties, with a spare, six-foot-six, permanently stooped frame. He had long, intensely black hair plastered straight back from his forehead, hooded eyes, an elongated, bony nose, large teeth, the original lantern jaw, and undertaker’s white hands and fingers, which seemed to protrude unnaturally from his suit jacket. He was a man who moved silently, and he tended to rub those porcelain hands together a lot. He had a soft, whispery, almost unctuous voice, reinforcing the funeral director impression. I didn’t know who’d given him his unofficial nickname, but I suspect it was one of the female agents over in the Bureau’s Raleigh field office. He was reputed to be a challenging interrogator, who, as I recalled, specialized in science and technology crimes.
Special Agent Mary Myers had apparently come to the Bureau with a high creep threshold if she was still partnered up with Brother Caswell. She was a well-fed, late-thirty-something blonde, five-seven or -eight, with watery blue eyes, a bunny rabbit nose, and round, horned-rim Wall Street eyeglasses, which framed a permanently puzzled and near-sighted expression on her otherwise unremarkable face. I figured she probably had an accounting degree and was one of those tenacious detail miners the Bureau used in complex white-collar financial crimes. Her Missed-it Mary nickname had arisen in the course of a stakeout incident during her first and only assignment as a street agent. Mary thought she’d been fired upon from a parked car and had emptied her service weapon in return, hitting three other parked cars and managing to set two of them on fire, while leaving the suspect vehicle untouched and her fellow agents watching in awe from beneath their own vehicle.
“Special Agents,” I said as they approached my corner table. I had not actually worked with either of them before, so they introduced themselves, flashed the appropriate picture-plastic, and sat down.
“So, how can I help you?” I asked, addressing myself to Caswell. Even sitting, he seemed to tower over me and the table, and I’m six-foot-plus. He began rubbing those undertaker hands together.