Glass Tiger (7 page)

What if she was wrong in her analysis? Then she was indeed playing Russian roulette with Thorne’s life. But what could she do about it now?

Thorne wandered, ended up on the Georgetown Dock at 31st and K Streets. A Coast Guard patrol boat slapped bow-wash against the sides of expensive anchored private yachts. A military helicopter whup-whupwhupped by overhead.

Set back from the walkway behind several levels of outdoor tables was a sparkling glass-clad restaurant three stories high. He got a beer in a plastic glass from the awning-covered drinks kiosk at street level, sat down, sipped it, stared out over the Potomac toward the Pentagon.

He wanted to be pissed off at Dorst, but couldn’t be. She had her job, as he had his. And she was very good at it, very tough-minded, willing to roll the dice – he grinned sourly – with his life. On New Year’s he’d wished for a quest, a hunt, a vital, necessary trackdown. Now he had it. Could it be that she was right? Could finding Corwin be his salvation?

He finished his beer and wandered, restless. Behind the kitchen entrance to the restaurant a cook in a white apron was smoking a cigarette. An echoing, not-yet completed galleria brought Thorne out above a bowl-shaped mall area. He stood watching the massive fountain spout water high into the air.

According to Dorst, Hatfield could never have access to what he had told her about his nightmare; forget about Hatfield.

—

Hatfield’s coat hung over the back of his chair, his tie was loosened, his coffee mug squatted on the right front corner of his blotter. He could smell his armpits. His floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building was after-hours silent. He tossed aside Dorst’s written report and rubbed his eyes. He sighed.

He and his team had been trained to use the gun to rescue hostages. Thorne had been trained to use the gun to kill people. He had not only the sniper’s eye, he had the assassin’s mind. So was killing a woman and child in Panama by mistake enough to make him disintegrate the way he had? Or was he faking it? Angling for the chance to take Corwin out himself, beat Hatfield to the power and the glory? Nothing in fucking Dorst’s report answered that vital question about Thorne’s emotional state. She’d blown it. Jaeger wanted Thorne aboard, Hatfield didn’t. Dorst should have found him unfit because he’d run off to Kenya.

Right now, without consultation, Thorne was flying off to California to ‘get into Corwin’s mind’ before coming up with a scenario. Or was he really serving notice that he was one independent son of a bitch with balls the size of grapefruit? When Thorne came back to D.C., Hatfield would put men on the fucker to monitor his movements and contacts.

Meanwhile, he needed a hell of a lot more than Dorst’s official report on Thorne. He needed her session notes. Better schedule an appointment with her out of the office.

He checked the clock. Christ, ten. He speed-dialed.

‘Hatfield residence.’

Cora. Trying to make people think they had a maid. He put all the warmth he could into his voice. ‘Hi, sweetheart. It’s me. We had a meeting that just broke up. I’ll bring takeout. Chinese? Thai? Whatever you—’

‘I’ll be in bed when you get here. Asleep.’ She hung up.

‘Well, shit!’ he snarled at the dead phone. He blamed his troubles with Cora in D.C. on Thorne out in California.

It was dawn when the red-eye dropped Thorne at Oakland International. Long-eared jackrabbits hopped in the grass beside the runway, ignoring the lumbering jetliners. His ‘undercover’ car turned out to be a souped-up Police Interceptor Crown Victoria with the extra-capacity gas tank that Ford made only for law-enforcement agencies. Fucking FBI. The Crown Vic would make him as inconspicuous as a dancing bear at a ballet class.

He threaded his way through East Bay traffic toward the Delta’s sprawling Medusa-head of twisting, intersecting sloughs, its thousand miles of waterways, its hundreds of miles of levees, its islands reachable only by boat.

The Sunset Bar and Grill where he had his appointment with a San Joaquin County Sheriff’s deputy was attached to the Tower Park Marina near a place called, appropriately enough, Terminous. Thorne reached it by a blacktop access road across California 12 from the tiny Terminous General Store. There was a tall black water-tower, a trailer park as big as a suburb, and a guard shack with nobody in it.

Thorne parked near the foot of the marina’s boat ramp next to a Sheriff’s cruiser with a light bar on top. It was a beautiful California spring day with drifting white puffs of cumulus cloud; even this early in the season there were tourists in shorts and t-shirts, boaters in light wind-breakers they’d need out on the water.

The cafe was built right on the dock. Inside, dust motes danced in the late-morning sunlight. To his left, a family of four was eating a late breakfast in front of one
of the wide windows that overlooked the guest boat-docking slips. Powerboats and sailboats could be lowered right off the dock into sparkling but cold-looking Little Potato Slough.

At the round table closest to the door was a husky early-thirties Latino in a tan Sheriff’s uniform. The creases of his sleeves and pantlegs could cut paper. A miniature purple heart and mid-East service bar were pinned above his ESCOBAR nametag.

He stood. ‘Special Agent Thorne?’ His voice was ice.

‘Just Brendan Thorne. Forget the Special Agent tag.’

‘Just Escobar.’ After a pause, he grudgingly took Thorne’s hand. They sat down. ‘Okay, so why are the Feebs sucking around now, five months after the fact?’

‘Routine. The Bureau likes to see if anything—’

‘I wasn’t on it long enough to screw anything up.’ Escobar was an obviously tough, brainy Latino cop with an even more obviously built-in shit detector. ‘The sheriff’s department got the call, me and my partner were in the barrel that night, we got to the crime scene just after the shootout with the suspect. He was long gone, you Feebs showed up, took over. End of story.’

‘Please, relax. I’m a day-tripper, not a lifer.’

After almost thirty seconds, Escobar settled back into his chair. Thorne regarded him thoughtfully.

‘Iraq?’ he asked casually.

Escobar’s sudden change of expression transformed his hard, bony face. ‘Afghanistan. Thirteen months, Army Reserve – I wanted to make a few extra bucks to supplement my cop’s pay and look what it got me. A Purple Heart. I loved it. And unless I miss my guess, you’ve been in the shit somewhere yourself.’

‘Rangers, then a contract killer for the CIA in Panama.’

‘Okay, no more bullshit. Why are you here? Really?’

‘Really? The federales aren’t really sure the guy who did it died that night. They’re afraid he might be a political with a personal hard-on against somebody in the new administration.’

‘I can guess who, us getting called in by the guy who’s now Wallberg’s Chief of Staff. Who then slams the door in our face.’

‘I’m surprised you’re even talking to me.’

‘You’re not like those regular FBI fucks. You and me, we can do a trade: what I know for what you know.’

‘Okay,’ said Thorne instantly, ‘what do you know?’

Escobar grinned, stuck with it. ‘Yeah. Well, me and my partner got the call-out at two-thirty a.m. Lots of fog. Jaeger had two plainclothes black security guys with him, said the suspect started shooting as they approached the houseboat. His guys returned fire – Jaeger didn’t have a weapon. No shots were fired at us. We worked the bullhorn, no response, so we put in teargas, went in. Two dead vics. White male, mid-thirties. White female, late twenties. Multiple gunshots. A Python .357 Magnum was on the floor near the bodies. Empty. I presume it was the murder weapon. I was afraid the civilians might corrupt my crime scene, so I took blood and fluid and tissue samples before I went back up on the levee to call it in.’

‘Presume? What about ballistics?’

‘Before I could call SIU, two carloads of feds showed up. I told them the perp must have slithered off the stern of the houseboat while Jaeger’s guys were shooting the shit out of the front of it. Told ’em he’d be bottled up in the slough – his car was half a mile away at the levee gate.’ His mouth twisted bitterly. ‘That’s when the Big G. dropped the hammer on us.’

‘Do you think the perp was wounded?’

‘There was a blood trail to the stern, but was it his blood? We never even got a courtesy call afterwards.
Never got any DNA, never saw the results of the autopsies or tox screens, never were given any possible i.d. of the suspect, never learned the names of the vics. Never learned why a guy like Jaeger was out there. Never learned if the Magnum was the murder weapon or who it was registered to. All we got was a big load of national security bullshit. I’ve got the blood and fluid samples I didn’t tell the Feebs about, and nothing to compare ’em with.’

‘Victims, Nisa and Damon Mather,’ said Thorne. ‘Husband and wife. They’d been staffers on Wallberg’s election campaign until they quit and hid out here in the Delta because they were being stalked by someone. Wallberg’s people didn’t know anything about it until Jaeger got a phone call from Nisa on election evening. That’s why the FBI is on it instead of the Secret Service – the vics were no longer on Wallberg’s staff.’ Thorne told his lie smoothly. ‘The perp’s name died with the victims.’

Escobar nodded. ‘Thanks for telling me. I’ll drive you to the scene and bring you back afterwards.’ At his Crown Vic, he paused, then handed Thorne a three-ring binder from the back seat. ‘I always keep a personal Murder Book. Better read it on the way. Whoever the perp is, he’s one sick son of a bitch.’

‘How do you mean?’ asked Thorne, surprised.

‘Just read the Murder Book.’

As they went east on gun-barrel Cal 12, Thorne read. Damon Mather was found lying on his back in the middle of the room in the classic death pose, arms and legs splayed. Loosened bowels and bladder. A single shot to the chest with a heavy-caliber slug consistent with the .357 Magnum on the scene.

Escobar slowed the Crown Vic, put on his right blinker.

‘It’s a half-mile walk from the White Slough Wildlife Area gate on Guard Road to where their houseboat was
moored on Disappointment Slough. We can climb over the gate.’ Nisa had been pounded up against the bulkhead by the other five rounds. Unlike Damon, she had fought for her life: broken nails, dermis under two of them, head at an angle, eyes open and glazing, tongue out one corner of her mouth. Blouse ripped down.

Contact wounds, powder burns around each of them. One in the stomach, one into each breast, the final two rounds into her mons veneris. Her clothing was soaked in blood and urine. And something else. Corwin had masturbated on her body after he had killed her. The first, heaviest spurt into her face, the rest onto her bared breasts like some obscene pornographic film.

His own daughter. Thorne felt a wave of nausea. Nisa was long dead, but he still wanted to protect her from Corwin.

‘One sick son of a bitch,’ he agreed.

They walked along the raised levee road. Grass grew between the ruts. To their left was Disappointment Slough. To their right, sunken stubble fields waited for spring planting. A jackrabbit hopped up on the levee in front of them, afternoon sunshine turning his long erect ears red, almost translucent.

‘When you see a rabbit with light shining through his ears, you’ve entered the land of enchantment,’ said Thorne.

‘I could use a little enchantment.’

A cold breeze had risen, rustling the thistles flanking the track.

Herring-bone clouds stretched across the sky. A brace of mallard whistled by overhead. Across the channel was a brushy oval uninhabited land mass called King Island. Escobar stopped beside a knee-high thick-stemmed bush with a single white four-petal flower.

‘I used this bush as a landmark to come back after the feds left.’ He gave an embarrassed chuckle. ‘I was really pissed.’

‘You find anything?’

‘No place to hide with searchers just minutes behind you.’

Across the channel a two-trunked dead tree lifted stark, naked arms to the sky as if in prayer. For the souls of the dead Nisa and Damon?

‘I see what you mean,’ said Thorne. ‘Nothing to find. I’m through here.’

Sharon Dorst entered the Department of Commerce building from 15th Street. An American flag hung over the entrance. She was wearing her black power suit with a string of pearls around her neck and a small gold American flag pinned to her lapel. Without government i.d. she was meat for the scanner, her purse and briefcase meat for the x-ray machine. Nothing beeped.

In the echoing, nearly-deserted basement cafeteria, she doctored decaf with Equal and milk, paid the cashier, and carried her coffee out to the south-side courtyard. She sat down at a wrought-iron table near the big stone fountain. Right on time. Hatfield wasn’t, but she was glad of the time alone.

She had done three evaluations for him before Thorne’s, but when he had said he wanted to meet her here, all her alarm bells had gone off. Why here? She could give him her evaluation, all that he was entitled to by law, in her office. Did he want her out of the way so he could send in a black-bag team to rifle her files for her private session notes on Thorne? She knew the FBI sometimes did things like that. So, at the last minute, she stuck the sessions notes in her briefcase. She was being irrational, but she felt better having them safely out of the office.

When a scowling Hatfield finally arrived, twenty minutes late, he plunked down across the little table from her. He wore the standard FBI uniform: white shirt,
Brooks Brothers suit, dull tie. He slammed his cup of coffee down in front of him, slopping some into the saucer. She tried to read his face. Had he searched her office or not?

‘Okay, let’s have it.’ She stared at him in astonishment. He snapped his fingers. ‘Your evaluation. Of Thorne. Let’s have it. I’m on a tight schedule here and I’m running late.’

She ostentatiously checked her watch. ‘I noticed.’

‘Don’t give me any crap, lady.’ He took a gulp of coffee. ‘Okay, we’ll play it your way. What did the tests suggest about Thorne’s mental and emotional states?’

‘I didn’t run any tests. We just talked.’