Cape Disappointment (42 page)

“This is fine. I got things to do.”

“Keep in touch.”

“You don't seem too happy about this, Thomas.”

“Like he said, they're never going to stop looking.”

It was a creepy feeling to realize I needed to be looking over my shoulder for federal agents over the next few weeks, or maybe the rest of my life. And then, of course, the niggling doubts began to ooze in. I was convinced I hadn't given my identity away to Hoagland, nor had Bert, but that didn't mean Bert wouldn't do something else patently illegal and get arrested for it. I began thinking of small details I should have considered earlier. For instance, had we left tire prints at Cabin Creek? If we had, there was a possibility they could track the make and model of my car. Had Bert left fingerprints on the duct tape he'd used to truss up Hoagland?

I drove to Capitol Hill and found Deborah's building, the front door unlatched; I went in and knocked on her door in the first-floor hallway. Nobody answered.

It was an old building with carpets in the hallways, recently refurbished but still smelling old. Except for the faint sound of music emanating from one of the units on the first floor, the hallway was silent. I called Deborah's cellphone and left a message when she didn't answer. The events of the afternoon had put me into a depression, my first since Kathy turned up alive. I started thinking about all the things I'd done wrong in my life and how much of it had been done in the past few hours. I wondered what the hell I was going to tell Kathy. Hey, baby, bet you'll never guess who I kidnapped today? That's right, we beat up a federal official and dumped him in the next county after wrapping him in a tarp. Just to make sure he was really pissed, we shocked him with a Taser.

Deborah had called my cellphone when Snake had it and said she wanted to talk to me. Was she beginning to suspect the truth of what I'd been claiming, that Sheffield's death was murder? While I strongly suspected Deborah had been accepting privileged information from the Sheffield campaign, there wasn't any room in my mind for thinking she had taken it any further than that. After hearing about Ruth Ponzi's accident, maybe she was getting scared. She
should
be scared. We should all be scared. It was a dangerous business. Everybody in the damned country should be scared.

As I paced the hallway, I thought I heard music again and realized it was coming from Deborah Driscoll's living room. I knocked on the door again. This time the door popped open of its own accord. Apparently, it had been barely latched, same as the front door to the building. Somebody had been in a hurry. I pushed it wide with my fingertips.

“Hello? Hello?” Emmylou Harris was singing “The Pearl” in her plaintive voice. There was no sign of an occupant, although the lights were on. “Deborah?” The bathroom door was closed, and I could see a light beneath it. A small puddle of water was spreading from under the bathroom door onto the hardwood floor like an inkblot test. The unlocked front door worried me, but the water worried me more. I knocked. I couldn't hear anybody. The door was locked. I put my shoulder against it and muscled it open.

The room was full of warm moisture, the shower curtain stretched across the tub enclosure. “Deborah!” I said. “Deborah?”

I stepped into the puddle. None of the towels had been disturbed,
but there were shoe prints on the sopping wet throw rug. I called her name one more time and pulled the shower curtain aside.

Deborah Driscoll lay on her back, half floating and half submerged, her pretty face above the surface. She was dead, her long red hair spread out around her bare shoulders like seaweed. Her eyes bulged. Except for her face, her skin was even paler than I remembered. There were no obvious marks indicating foul play, so the story wasn't immediately clear. This could be an accidental drowning, a suicide, or a homicide. I searched for the petechial hemorrhaging around her eyes that would indicate strangulation but didn't see it. The stupidest thought came to me right then, that everybody had been right about her hair being dyed.

She wasn't stiff yet, so rigor mortis hadn't set in. I rolled her partway over to look at her buttocks— lividity had colored them, which meant the blood had had time to settle— and she was well beyond saving. Gently, I put her back as she had been. I turned the dribbling water off.

I walked to the hallway. Once the police arrived, I knew I wouldn't be allowed to look at anything, but three or four minutes of delay in reporting the death wouldn't hurt. In stocking feet, I padded around the condo. I found Deborah's cellphone in the kitchen. Her number list in the phone included me, dozens of professional contacts, as well as her mother in Portland, and a woman I presumed was a sister in Scotland. Timothy Hoagland's name and number were in her phone, but taking into account her position in the Maddox campaign, that was to be expected. A search of all of her recent outgoing calls revealed she'd called Maddox, then Kalpesh, then me, except she'd gotten Snake, who had my phone.

The kitchen was tidy. A peek in the garbage under the sink revealed one empty wine bottle and some frozen-dinner packaging. Nothing else. The bedroom was at the end of the hallway beyond the bathroom. As I proceeded toward it, I realized the killer might still be here. I hadn't exactly done a thorough check. Nor was I up to par for meeting a panicky killer hell-bent on covering his tracks. The front door had been unlocked, and while Deborah had been dead for a while, it was still possible I'd surprised somebody inside.

I pushed the bedroom door open slowly, then looked through the crack to make sure nobody was behind it. I peeked under the bed. In the closet. None of the windows were unlocked. The bed was mussed.

A set of her clothing, presumably from that day, was laid across a chair: panties and bra on top, shoes neatly lined up under the chair. Deborah told me once she'd gone to an all-girls boarding school and this looked like one of the habits she'd learned there. There was nothing under the bed except a small discarded tin-foil wrapper that had once held a condom. No dust balls and no unfinished books. On the other side of the bed I spotted the prophylactic that went with the wrapper. She had had sex with somebody in this bed not long ago. While it wasn't a mini condom, I was relatively certain it was the sort of exotic brand Kalpesh would carry.

I didn't spend a lot of time in each room, just enough to be satisfied I hadn't overlooked anything obvious. I was looking for any hint as to what Deborah had been planning to tell me, or an indication of who else she might have told about our meeting. Had Kalpesh killed her to conceal his own involvement in the death of a senator, or had somebody else come into the building after he exited? Was it possible Deborah had more than one lover and the condom wasn't Kalpesh's at all? Unless other factors intruded, the first suspect in a murder was usually the last known person with the victim. I had every reason to believe that person was Kalpesh, but the DNA evidence under the bed would eventually give the police the right name.

I went back into the bathroom and sat on the closed lid of the toilet, looking around the room for anything I'd missed. I needed to think about this for a few minutes before I called anyone else in. The bathroom door had swung closed on its own.

I'd only known her five weeks, but they were weeks filled with chitchat, business, and turmoil. I recollected her kindness in driving me to Sheffield's funeral and making dinner for me, remembering I'd treated her shabbily afterward. She'd been a smart, ambitious, hard-driving woman with a streak of kindness and fun underneath. She was about the same age as Kathy and similar to her in many respects. They both commanded a room when they entered it; they both turned men's heads. Both were committed to a political credo. They had something else in common, too: They'd both died by homicide. Adults didn't drown in the bathtub. It was a shame Deborah wouldn't come back to life the way Kathy had.

“YOU SURE THERE WAS
a loaded condom in here fifteen minutes ago?” asked Hampsted, who was the shortest police officer I'd ever met.

“I saw it.”

“It's not there now.”

“You said that before. I don't see how that's possible.”

“Unless
you
took it.”

“Like I put it in my collection? You're welcome to check my pockets.” I'd zipped my jacket up over the blood-streaked shirt I'd rumpled while tousling with Bert.

“Don't get snippy with me.”

“Don't accuse me of putting a used condom in my pocket.”

“You say you've been in the apartment for twenty, twenty-five minutes, that as far as you know, nobody else was here, and yet that condom vanishes into thin air. Are we supposed to think it got up and walked away by itself?”

“You ask the first officers who came in?”

“They didn't see it. You think there was a possibility the killer was in here and took it when he left? Could you have missed him?”

The thought that somebody had been hiding in the condo, tiptoeing around the apartment while I'd been there alone, spooked me. I knew from my struggles with Bert that I was in no condition to ward off an
attack. I was even weaker and more beat-up now than in that barn with Bert.

“She's a big girl,” said Hampsted. “There aren't any signs of a struggle. The shower curtains haven't been torn down.”

“Right. But a strong man, catching her unaware, could hold a woman under in the tub and drown her before she knew how to stop him.”

“Maybe. Tell me something, Black. Did you have a sexual relationship with the victim?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“I would remember.”

“With that lady? Who wouldn't? Did you want to have a relationship with her?”

“I'm married.”

“I own a couple of horses, but that doesn't keep me from wanting to ride the neighbor's horse.”

“I didn't want a relationship with her.” I wondered how long it would take for him to figure out my wife was dead, or was supposed to be dead.

All I could figure was somebody had reentered the condo after I went into the bathroom to sit with Deborah's body. I hadn't timed it, but I'd probably been in there five or six minutes. I'd been in a funk and my hearing was compromised from the bomb, so it was possible somebody had come in the front door and walked past the partially closed bathroom door without alerting me. How bold would you have to be to come back to a murder scene after the body had been discovered? Maybe the owner of the condom hadn't known I was there. Or found out only as he was passing the bathroom. It was unnerving: If he'd had a gun and we'd run into each other, the police could well be looking at two bodies instead of one.

If he was as implicated in feeding information from the Sheffield camp to outside sources as I thought he was, Deborah's meeting with me wouldn't have pleased Kalpesh. But would he have killed her over it? Not unless he was in a lot deeper than I suspected. In all likelihood, I didn't have a clue— supposing that he'd killed her— why he might have done it. For a myriad of fatuous, imagined, and real reasons, lovers killed loved ones every day. They'd had sex. Maybe they'd quarreled
about her planned meeting with me. She decided to take a bath. He waited until the tub was full, then stepped into the bathroom and pushed her under, keeping his weight on her head until she stopped struggling. It would have been a ghastly but relatively simple operation.

On the other hand, Kalpesh may have been gone when she was killed. Hoagland comes up missing— his spooks go out and start tying up loose ends. Was Driscoll a loose end for them? If that was the case, they might be out to kill Kalpesh, too. Or maybe they already had. Bert and I might be next on the list. Even if they didn't know who'd taken Hoagland, we'd spoken to Ponzi. We'd asked questions. I'd made allegations, maybe too many allegations. Bert had caused a scene at Cape Disappointment and gotten himself arrested.

Hampsted and a tech were in the bedroom poking around. I could tell Hampsted didn't completely believe my story, but as long as he couldn't think of a reason for me to be lying, he was going to bide his time. “She have a dog?” he asked.

“Not that I know of. Why?”

“Dogs'll eat anything.”

Following me through the condo to the doorway, Hampsted looked up at me and said, “You're not the guy who got blown up at the Mad-dox rally, are you?”

“One of them.”

“Shouldn't you be in the hospital?”

“I got out today.”

“Shit. First the bomb, and then you walk in on this. You lead an adventurous life, Mr. Black.”

“So I've been told.”

“Wait a minute. If you're the guy from the bomb blast … your wife died in the plane wreck, didn't she?”

“So I've been told.”

“You said you weren't going to sleep with the lady in the tub because you're married?”

“No, I said I wasn't interested in a relationship with her.”

“Because you're married.”

“That plane went down, what? Fifteen, eighteen days ago? Give me a break.”

He mulled it over, trying to find something wrong with it. Finally, he said, “I'd like you to go out and write a statement. After that you can go. Oh, yeah. One thing. Do you know anybody who had any reason to harm her?”