Man in the Middle (4 page)

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. Tim glanced over his shoulder at the body and replied, “Well, it’s interesting. What I think is—”

“Tim . . . did I ask what you
think
? Facts.”

“Oh . . . all right. For starters, the sheets on this bed are changed and washed weekly. The maid informed us. This is relevant and important information. It establishes time frame. The particles and residue on this sheet were deposited within the last seven days.”

I flipped open my notebook, scribbled, and said, “Time frame . . . yes, yes, always important . . .” Actually, I began sketching Tim, standing perfectly erect, tottering on a chair, noose around his neck, arms straight, extended and . . .

“There are a lot of the victim’s hairs on the pillow,” Tim continued, “and sweat residue. But you expect that. Everybody sheds and sudates when they sleep. But there are other hair particles and strands as well.”

I erased the chair, Tim’s legs were kicking furiously, and—I looked up—“Not
his
hair?”

“Well . . . you can see that his hair was gray, coarse, and cropped very short. There are some red hairs, and also some very fine blonde hairs. Both are quite long, which suggests they could be from females . . .” He turned tentative again, and added, “That’s a hypothesis on my part. A chromosonal analysis is needed before a firm conclusion can be reached.”

“More than one woman?”

“Well . . . I would say at this point—”

“Yes or no.”

“Uh . . . yes.”

Goodness. Despite Tim’s pathological aversion to declarative phrases, this suddenly took an interesting turn. I asked him, “Have you finished the bathroom yet?”

“I did that first. Bathrooms are always gold mines.”

“And what did we find there?”

“More hair. Both black and red, as well as some of the victim’s hair in the sink, probably from shaving. And the usual pubic traces on the toilet seat.”

“Further confirming the presence of more than one female?”

“It appears . . . yes, perhaps as many as three.” He knew what my next line of questioning would be and added, “I ran an infrared light over the sheets. There are interesting traces . . . probably semen. I don’t know whether these traces are new or old.”

Like that, Cliff Daniels went from the ubiquitous man in a gray flannel suit to something far more complicated and mysterious. This raised a number of evocative questions, not to mention a few dark and dubious possibilities.

Anybody who beds two different women inside one week likes to live on the edge. This guy didn’t have to whack himself—just arrange for the two or more women to show up together and they’d take care of things for him.

Indeed,
that
, or some variation thereof, might be what happened here. I looked at the corpse on the bed and asked myself the obvious question: What was Clifford doing in the hour before the trigger was pulled? Did he die alone? Or with company?

To Tim I asked, “Is there
any
indication he was having sex at the time of, or shortly prior to, his death?”

“It does seem an obvious conclusion, doesn’t it? I intend to take epidural traces from his penis for the lab. However, from what I’ve seen . . . or didn’t see—specifically, no visible traces of sperm, or crust of vaginal fluid on his penis—it’s possible the victim was stimulating himself.”

Tim looked at me expectantly as I weighed whether to ask him another question or just kill myself. When I remained silent, he said, “Can I return to my work?”

“What’s stopping you?”

“Well . . . you are.”

“Nonsense.”

“Oh . . . that’s a joke.” He emitted a sort of high-pitched laugh.

I looked at him and said, “If anything interesting pops up, call me immediately. I’ll be in the living room.” I turned and started to walk away when I was struck by an afterthought, and turned back around. “Uh . . . ?”

He stared at me.

“How many suicides have you investigated?”

“I don’t know. A good many. This is a high-stress area code. Within the county, we experience more suicides than homicides.”

“How many of those suicides involved guns?”

“A few. Perhaps three this past year. Overdoses and slashed wrists are the norm. A majority of our suicide victims are teenagers who can’t afford—”

“I understand . . . thank you.” I asked Tim, “Did you observe any blood splatter on the gun?”

“Yes, some. It was fired from very close range, and there was a volume of blowback. Also, even visually, I can detect powder residue on the victim’s left temple. That means—”

“I know what it means.” I asked, “Have we confirmed if the pistol belonged to the victim?”

“Not yet. The serial number is unobservable until we turn it over. We don’t rearrange the evidence until after I’ve finished my site inspection.”

I pointed at the silencer on the end of the pistol. “Have you ever seen a suicide where the victim used one of those?”

“Uh . . .”

I remembered to specify, “Yes or no?”

“No.”

“Does the silencer strike you as odd?”

“I leave the conclusions to the detectives.”

“As you should. Except I’m asking your opinion.”

“Yes. It is unusual.” In fact, I was sure Tim regarded it as more than unusual—even suspicious—though, sucked inexorably back into his orbit of qualifiers and modifiers, he suggested, “You could postulate, I suppose, that the victim didn’t want to disturb his neighbors. A final act of courtesy, so to speak. Or he didn’t want to be discovered. I’ve seen suicides where the victim went to great lengths to avoid attention.”

“I see.” Sometimes it’s the little things. Essentially, in almost every way this
looked
like a suicide; that is, every way but two. To begin with, that petrified expression on Daniels’s face—eyes wide open, mouth contorted, a mixture of frozen shock and amazement. It’s my impression that most people, in the millisecond before they blow a bullet through their own flesh, reflexively shut their eyes, purse their lips, and contract their facial muscles—this is going to hurt, a lot, and the mind and the body respond instinctively, even reflexively, toward the anticipation of pain.

Ergo, shock and surprise seemed wrong. After all, the act of suicide was
his
idea. Relief, anger, sadness, pain—these, or some combination of these, are the expressions one would expect on his death mask.

Plus, the silencer
was
weird. If I assumed the pistol was Clifford’s weapon, silencers are hard to come by, expensive, and, even for radical gun lovers, an unusual accessory. I mean, gun nuts live for the big booms. No, silencers are an instrument of assassins.

Neither of these incongruities was entirely dissuasive of suicide, and neither alone implied murder. Taken together, however, they raised doubts, and doubts are like termites; ignore them at your own peril.

I was about to ask Tim another question when I heard footsteps. I turned around in time to see Major Bian Tran, accompanied by a tall, lanky black gentleman in a tweed blazer, walk through the doorway into the bedroom. The gentleman looked amazingly like that actor who played Alex Cross in
Along Came a Spider
, down to the pockmarked face, high cheekbones, salt-and-pepper hair, and thoughtful brown eyes. Weird.

The gentleman was staring at me with a pissed-off expression. Major Tran, also with an eye on me, had an amused squint.

CHAPTER THREE

T
he gentleman marched straight up to me and asked two direct questions I did not want to hear: “Who the hell are you? And what in the fuck are you doing at my crime scene?”

I withdrew my creds and flashed them in his face. “Special Agent Drummond.”

He snapped the creds out of my hand and studied them for a moment. I had the impression he knew I was full of shit.

“Who are
you
?” I asked.

“Detective Sergeant Barry Enders. This is my investigation.”

I shifted my attention to Major Tran. She was apparently preoccupied, because she avoided my eyes.

Enders pocketed my creds and said, “Look, Drummond—if that’s your real name—you logged into a crime scene using a phony federal ID, you entered the premises, and lied to my investigators. Let’s see, that’s”—he began drawing down fingers—“impersonating a federal officer . . . trespassing . . . interfering with a police investigation, and . . . give me a minute—I’ll think of three or four additional charges.”

He reached down to his belt and whipped out a pair of metal cuffs, apparently not needing another minute.

I looked at Tran, and this time she returned my stare; actually, she smiled.

“What’s going on here?”

Tran informed me, “No veteran agent comes to an indoor homicide without disinfectant. Rookies make that mistake—once. Cause for suspicion, right? So when I stepped out, I asked Barry what he knew about you.”

Enders said, “And guess what, smart-ass? There is no FBI liaison at the Arlington Police Department.”

To Tran I said, “You’re sharper than you look.”

“Actually, you just weren’t that clever.” She added, “We called FBI headquarters and asked them to confirm the employment of Special Agent Sean Drummond. Would you like to guess what they said?”

I did not need to guess, and anyway, Enders weighed in again. “So let’s start with your rights. You have the—”

“I have the right not to hear my rights.”

“Ah, hell . . . a funny guy. Who are you? A reporter?”

I ignored that insult. “Write down this number.”

“Why?”

“Do as you’re told, Detective. Now.”

He stared back. Clearly he and I were in a macho pissing contest; we would either stare at each other forever or somebody had to take a swing. Women are better at this; they smile, say something nice and conciliatory, and get revenge later.

But Tran withdrew a pencil and notebook from her pocket and said, “Give me the number.”

She copied as I said, “Local, 555-4290. Call and ask what you should do with me.”

Enders, taking a threatening step in my direction, insisted, “The next call anybody’s making around here will be you—from lockup. Hands up for the cuffs.”

“Don’t be stupid, make the call.”

Tran, who had already shown she was clever and alert, put a hand on Enders’s arm and advised, “I don’t see how it can hurt.”

Reluctantly, he took a step back, then flipped open his cell and dialed as Bian read him the number.

I waited patiently as he listened to the phone ring, then somebody answered, and he identified himself, then explained his problem—moi—and, after a long moment, he said, “And how do I know you’re who you claim . . . Uh-huh . . . okay . . . Yes ma’am . . . Uhhuh.” He looked at me and listened for a long moment. “No, no need, ma’am . . . Yeah, that would be acceptable . . . Yes, in fact, he’s standing right here.”

He handed me the phone and rubbed his ear. To Tran he said, somewhere between impressed and annoyed, “This guy’s CIA. That was the assistant to the Director.” Then, to me, “She wants a word with you.”

Shit
. I took the phone from Enders and stared at it, while I toyed with the idea of just punching off.

The lady on the other end, Ms. Phyllis Carney, was my presumptive boss, an elderly lady with the looks and bearing of a fairy-tale grandmother and the avuncular temperament of the Big Bad Wolf. About eighty, and thus long past mandatory retirement, which showed she was either irreplaceable at her job, or she knows the apartment number where the chairman of the House Intelligence Oversight Subcommittee keeps his mistress. Probably both—Phyllis doesn’t like loose ends.

Her official title is Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence, an amorphous designation, which seems to suit her fine. I had been working for her for six months and had yet to figure out exactly what she does, or who she is. You feel you know her, and on the surface you do. At the same time, something about her is chronically elusive, a maddening mystique, as our writer friends might say. But partly her job is to cover her boss’s butt, a Sisyphean task in a democratic land such as ours, where the head spook is always distrusted by the President, despised by the press, pilloried by the left, demonized by the right, and at any given moment is the object of no less than thirty ongoing congressional investigations and inquiries.

It said something about Phyllis that her boss chose her for this punishing and thankless task. It said something more that she accepted it when her high school classmates were either six feet under or dodging skin cancer and hurricanes in America’s elephant dying grounds.

She must’ve been a good choice, however, because her boss was already the second-longest-serving Director in a job where few occupants are around long enough to have overdue books at the library.

Enders reminded me, “Drummond . . . the phone. Your boss.”

I actually like Phyllis. She’s courtly and well-mannered in that nice, old-fashioned way, and also businesslike and intelligent. At times, too, I think she actually likes me. However, spooks and soldiers have a relationship that, to be charitable, is best characterized as complicated. Partly this is because Army folks, when not covering their own butts, live by the soldier’s code, a credo that frowns upon such mannerisms as betrayal, deceit, sneakiness, and moral hedging. These of course are the very qualities that make the CIA the world-class organization it is. But mostly, I think, we just don’t trust each other.

Actually, I had no real cause to doubt this lady. And neither could I think of a single reason not to.

“Drummond,” Enders barked, “you’re wasting my county minutes.”

I cleared my throat and put the phone to my ear. “Sorry for the wait. I was killing an international terrorist.” Pause. “I strangled him with my bare hands. He really suffered. I knew you’d like that.”

She made no reply, though I could hear her breathing heavily. I hate when women do that.

After a long moment I suggested, “Why don’t I just hold this conversation with myself? At least I’ll like the responses.”

She answered, very tartly, “This is no laughing matter, Drummond. Do you know the cardinal sin in our business?”