The Archimedes Effect (18 page)

He used his gloved fingertip to wipe the button clean, then worked the spring into the edge of the door.

To people passing by on the sidewalk in the cold, he’d look like he was using a key.

Using the flat spring, it took all of four seconds to slip the latch and open the door. Hell, it might as well have
been
a key. . . .

He grinned as he started up the stairs.

Simmons’s door was unmarked, save for the office number—4—all the way at the end of the hall to the right. All the doors were solid, no glass, and no windows into the hall, so nobody saw him pass. There didn’t seem to be a security cam in the hall.

Simmons’s door was unlocked. Carruth opened the door. “Hello? Mr. Simmons?”

The smell hit him as he stepped inside. It was that sickly-sweet, something-spoiled odor that, once you’d sniffed it, you never forgot.

He didn’t bother to pull his gun, but moved into the outer office, down a short hall toward a closed door. If there was a corpse that had been there long enough to stink, there wasn’t gonna be a bad guy standing around watching it rot and waiting for visitors.

The inner door was also unlocked, and it opened to reveal, sure enough, a dead man lying on the floor next to a big wooden desk.

The guy was maybe fifty-five, bald, heavyset. He wore slacks and a sport coat, with a pale blue shirt open at the neck. One of his loafers had come off, revealing a pale gray sock.

There was a window behind the desk, but a set of blinds covered it.

Carruth bent down. Two, three days, probably. No obvious bullet or knife wounds. No blood.

He leaned the man’s head back a bit—gone past rigor—and spotted ligature marks around the man’s neck. Throttled, with a thin piece of rope or maybe wire. Not an amateur’s weapon. Getting ripe in the heated building. Another day or two, the neighbors would notice big-time.

He found a wallet in the man’s back pocket. It had maybe two hundred bucks in twenties, and some odd fives and ones. He also wore a nice-looking watch. So, it hadn’t been a robbery.

“Hello, Mr. Simmons,” he said, looking at the driver’s license. Actually, there were three licenses—from D.C., Virginia, and—of all places—Oklahoma. Also a gun permit for the District—that was impressive, those weren’t easy to get. Plus some very official-looking cards with photo IDs for the FBI, CIA, NSA, and Metro Police. Very interesting.

Carruth replaced the contents and slipped the wallet back into Simmons’s hip pocket. When he did, he noticed a small pistol holster on the man’s belt, but the gun it had contained was gone.

There was a computer terminal on the desk. He sat in the chair and touched the keyboard. The terminal was in sleep-mode, and it swirled to life.

He found the mail program and lit it. When he tried to access the in-box, it asked for a password. Carruth wasn’t a computer nerd who could break into files. He looked in the desk drawers, found a box full of blank C-DVDs. He inserted one into the computer’s drive. He copied the mail program and as many of the other files as would fit on the disk, ejected it, and slipped it into his pocket. Repeated the same thing three more times, copying the entire hard drive. Lewis knew how to fiddle with stuff like that, let her play with it.

He set the computer’s program to “Reformat Disk,” and started it. He hoped that would wipe the files so the cops wouldn’t be able to get them.

He picked up the phone and touched the controls. The man had a Cable Packet Service, including call-waiting, caller ID, and forwarding. Carruth thumbed the recent-calls button, and got a list of the most recent ones. He pulled a small notebook from his pocket and copied them down. He erased them with the delete button. The cops would be able to get a record of calls from the phone company, but no point in making it any easier for them.

There were a couple of file cabinets, and he went through those, along with the desk, but other than a checkbook in the desk’s center drawer, showing an account with forty thousand dollars and change in it, there wasn’t anything useful he could see. Probably anything important was on the computer and password-protected.

It was tempting, but he left the checkbook where he’d found it.

He stood. Somebody had killed Mr. Simmons here, and while a man in his line of work might have made all kinds of enemies and it didn’t necessarily have anything to do with Lewis and Carruth’s business, making that assumption was probably not a good idea. Could have just been coincidence, but then again, maybe it wasn’t. Which way of thinking would get you in the most hot water?

In the Navy, Carruth had been taught to assume the worst-case scenario and prepare for it until you had more accurate intel. If you thought there might be fifteen enemy soldiers and it turned out there were only five, well, then, that was a good kind of surprise. If you were figuring on five and there were fifteen? That could get you killed.

Whoever had garroted the late Mr. Simmons—who had been a pro and very likely armed when it had gone down—was a dangerous person or persons. And if Simmons had information in his possession that might allow the killers the slightest chance of being able to locate Captain Rachel Lewis, then that ought to be the working assumption. If they could, they would, and how best to deal with that when it happened?

Time to leave. There wasn’t anything else to be gained by staying here, and much to be lost—given he was home again and carrying a gun that had killed two Metro cops. Any more surprises like this, he would have to rethink hanging on to the piece. When this all got done, he’d have a ton of money—he could buy a matched pair and go off to hunt lions, if he wanted. Maybe he should at least hide his gun somewhere it wouldn’t be found until he got rich? After all, it wasn’t as if he didn’t have other guns he could carry.

Well, worry about that later. First, he had to get out of here unseen.

Carruth checked the hall. Nobody around. He hurried out and down the stairs, then into the cool afternoon. He walked quickly away from the building, not so fast as to draw attention, but he didn’t dawdle.

Lewis was probably not going to be happy to hear this, but better she knew it than not.

And what was it going to mean for their business?

Lewis had gone over the list of numbers Carruth had given her. That, plus the files he’d copied—no trouble breaking into those, Simmons had used his birthday for the password—gave whoever had killed him at least two fingers pointed vaguely in her direction. One of her one-time phones was on the list a couple times, and there was an e-mail drop.

The one-time phone she crushed under her heel and dumped into a garbage can on a street corner. The e-mail address was a spoof, and she zeroed it out. End of trail.

Maybe whoever tapped out Simmons had nothing to do with her, but it was better to be safe than sorry. There was no way to trace her from what had been in his files. The phone she’d bought for cash from a Best Buy electronics store on a busy Saturday; the e-mail addy was at a server in Hong Kong, paid for by a credit card that went no further than a post office box rented under a fake name. She wouldn’t be going back to it.

But:

There was one thing. She and Simmons had met a couple times. She hadn’t given him her real name, of course, but he did know what she looked like. If whoever had killed him had been looking for her—and there was no reason to believe that, but just in case—then he could have given them a description, if pressed.

If they killed Simmons to get to her? Probably he had done that much.

Of course, “a blond young woman” covered a lot of territory, and if that was all they had, they could look for a million years and never find her. But even so, it bothered her. What did it mean?

Carruth didn’t even bother to sip at the coffee he’d ordered, just left it sitting on the scratched, green plastic table, going cold.

“So, is this going to be a problem for us?”

She shook her head negatively. “I don’t think so. Whoever killed him, it isn’t connected to us. And even if it was, there’s nothing here that would lead them to us.” She hoped.

Carruth nodded. “Good enough. What next?”

“We—you—hit another base.”

“Won’t the Army have changed all the codes and other stuff by now?”

She smiled. “I
am
the Army, remember? Gridley might think he’s closed those loops, but he can’t be sure, and neither can anybody else. I’ve got the new codes to our next target.”

“Which is . . . ?”

She told him.

He smiled. “I like it. Finally something we can pick up a few bucks on. When?”

“No time like the present. How long do you need?”

“Day or two to run the scenario, get my boys up to speed. Travel to Kentucky. We can roll on it pretty quick, I’d say.”

“Good. Let’s do it.”

After he left, she sat there watching her own coffee cool for a few minutes. She didn’t like it that Simmons was dead, but he wasn’t the only op who could serve. She’d find another snoop and keep checking things out. It was still on track.

It was all about the hat, Jay knew. There were dozens of stories and versions of how it happened, scores, maybe even hundreds of versions of who did what to whom, but at the heart of it, it was the hat.

Some said it was a hat formed of human skin, made by the Devil Himself to seal the deal for the pimp Lee Shelton’s soul, but from what Jay had found, largely due to the excellent scholarship of Cecil Brown, who had written a book about the whole affair, it was no more than a pale, blocked-felt, cowboy-style hat. A milk-white broad-brimmed, five-gallon Stetson . . .

Christmas Night 1895, and the Curtis Saloon was smack-dab in the middle of the St. Louis black vice district, surrounded by bars, bordellos, and billiard halls.

The place was full of cigar and pipe smoke and noise, the air thick with them, and the smell of spilled alcohol. There were men drinking or eating pickled boiled eggs, and women of less-than-sterling character offering their less-than-sterling virtue for short-term rent. While Jay didn’t usually change his race in scenarios, he had done so for this visit—a face as pale as his wouldn’t blend in here. Here, he was—in the terminology of these times—a Negro; and one large enough in stature to forestall casual trouble, dressed in a plain brown suit and shoes, minding his own business.

Billy Lyons and Henry Crump, two well-dressed black men, stood at the bar, among men who were of somewhat lower stripe and caste. It was a bad man’s bar, mostly, and Lyons had borrowed a knife from Crump, just in case he had to take care of business. Jay knew the history: The two men had been in better establishments earlier in the evening, but they had come to Bill Curtis’s to wind down, even though they knew it was dangerous.

Alcohol didn’t make most men smarter, Jay also knew.

It was a cold and windy night, and Billy and Henry moved close to the stove by the bar. A ragtime band noodled in the background, playing rinky-tink piano, banjo, and guitar, a Christmas song, then something by Scott Joplin, maybe. There were occasional shouts from men shooting craps on the wooden platform in the back, and while not very crowded, the place was busy enough for a holiday when most people stayed home with their families.

Billy and Henry, already feeling little pain from earlier libations, commenced to drinking beer, talking about Christmas and the coming New Year.

Jay stood nearby, sipping at his own beer, watching the two men. He pulled his pocket watch and looked at it. Just about time . . .

Lee Sheldon, aka “Stack Lee,” aka “Stagolee,” arrived, and even in the dim light he was a sight to behold. He wore tailored leather shoes, “St. Louis flats,” with low heels, curved toes, and tiny mirrors on the tops that reflected the light. He had gray spats, gray striped trousers, and a box-back coat over a yellow embroidered shirt with a high celluloid collar. A red vest, a gold-headed ebony walking stick, and the Stetson hat—with a picture of his favorite girl and wife, Lillie, embroidered on the hatband—completed the sartorial splendor of Stack’s outfit. He was a high-rolling pimp and dressed to be seen—one of the elite “macks,” as they were known locally—as well as owner of his own club, so the story went. Why he wasn’t there instead of here on this night was a question never answered.

Other stories had him as a waiter, a bartender, or a cab driver, take your pick. All agreed he was a sporting man, with plenty of folding green in his pocket, and at least four or five women in his string, including his wife.

Jay watched as Stack—so-named for a riverboat or its captain, depending on who you asked—lit a big cigar and stopped to chat with somebody nearby. Jay wasn’t close enough to hear, but the story was that Stack was asking who was treating that night.

And it turned out that it was Billy Lyons who was being generous on that cold Christmas, and so Stack ambled over that way, allowing everybody to see his finery.

Being locals forever, Stack and Billy knew each other. There was one story that there was bad blood between them—that Billy’s stepbrother, Charlie Brown, had killed Stack’s friend Harry Wilson, and that Stack meant to take his revenge—but on that night, they stood drinking together, laughing and talking. For a while, anyhow.

Jay edged a little closer, to listen. The talk had turned to politics, and had grown heated.

“You don’t know nothin’ ’bout it,” Stack said, shaking his head.

Billy took a pull from his drink. “I guess I know more about it than you—I was
there,
I heard the man’s words from his own mouth.”

“You say you did?”

“You just heard me tell you so, you ignorant son of a bitch.”