House Secrets (3 page)

“Shit. So now I have talk to this Frank guy to find out what Terry was working on.”

“Well, unless you got a hotline to hell, you can forget that.”

“What?”

“Frank’s dead.”

“Dead? When did he die?”

“A week ago, about two days after Terry.”

“Jesus,” DeMarco said. “Was there anything mysterious about the way he died?”

Reggie took his time finishing his last drink as DeMarco waited impatiently for his answer. Finally, he said, “Frank was sixty-three years old. He was five-seven, weighed two-fifty, and smoked unfiltered Camels. He thought high cholesterol was the name of a race-horse. The only mystery is that Frank didn’t have a coronary when he was forty-three.”

“Are you feeling lucky, punk?” DeMarco muttered, his lips twisted into an Eastwood snarl—then he fired the gun, a .357 magnum.

“Stop doing that,” Emma said.

DeMarco ignored her and looked at the man-shaped paper target. There were five holes in it, and although no hole was closer than six inches to any other hole, all of his shots had hit the punk.

“Well, pilgrim, what do you think of that,” he said to Emma, switching from Eastwood to Wayne.

“I think you’re jerking the trigger instead of squeezing it,” Emma said.

“Let’s try the Glock now,” DeMarco said. “I’m gonna use the two-handed, cop’s grip this time.”

“I give up,” Emma said.

Emma was tall and slim. She wore her hair short, and it was colored a blondish shade with some gray mixed in. Her profile was regal, like a Norse queen on a coin, and her eyes were light blue, cool, and cynical. She was at least ten years older than DeMarco, maybe fifteen, but in such good shape that she would have run him into the ground had he ever been dumb enough to challenge her to a race. She was wearing jeans, a long-sleeved navy-blue pullover, and black Reeboks. Clipped to her belt was a holster and in the holster was an automatic with a worn grip.

DeMarco had decided it was time to learn something about firearms. He was a firm believer in gun control—meaning that the only people who should be allowed to have guns were cops and soldiers, and himself, of course, if he thought he ever needed one—but a few months ago he came close to being killed because he didn’t know where the safety was on a weapon. So though he had no immediate plans to buy a gun, and hoped sincerely that he would never need one in the future, he figured a little basic education couldn’t hurt. And there was another thing: he thought it’d be kinda fun to shoot a few guns, which it was.

So under Emma’s less than patient tutelage, he fired three weapons that day: a 9mm Glock; a .22 automatic that Emma said was the firearm often preferred by professional killers; and the .357 magnum. He had wanted to shoot the Glock and the .357 because those were the guns they always mentioned in the movies.

DeMarco put a fresh target on the target-hanger, sent it down-range twenty yards, and picked up the Glock. He liked the way it felt. He spread his legs in what he considered to be a shooter’s stance, gripped the gun in both hands, said “Freeze, asshole”—and pulled the trigger six times. When he finished there were six holes in the target, three of them bunched fairly close together in the paper guy’s left shoulder. Other than the fact that he’d been aiming for the heart, not bad, he thought. Emma thought differently.

“Joe,” she said, “if you’re ever attacked, and if you have a choice between a bat and a gun, use the bat.”

“Well, let’s see you do better,” DeMarco said.

Now why in the hell had he said that? It must have been all the gun smoke in the air, the fumes short-circuiting those brain cells that caused him to actually think before speaking.

Emma was now retired but she had worked for the DIA—the Defense Intelligence Agency. She was, however, a person who rarely, and then only reluctantly, talked about her past, and consequently DeMarco had no idea what she had done for the military for almost thirty years. He did know that by the end of her career she’d been a
senior player in the intelligence community in Washington, and that early in her career she’d been some sort of spy. And there was one other thing he knew—he knew that she could shoot a gun.

She hit a button that pushed DeMarco’s target ten yards farther away, pulled the automatic from the holster on her hip, and then, without appearing to take aim, she fired. BAMBAMBAMBAMBAM. Five shots fired so rapidly it was hard to distinguish one from the other. When the smoke cleared, DeMarco looked at the target.

The paper man had a two-inch-diameter hole where his nose had once been.

Emma’s reward for instructing DeMarco was dinner at a place of her choosing, and she surprised him by selecting a mid-priced restaurant in Alexandria that specialized in soft-shelled crab. She may have chosen the place because of the way they were dressed but DeMarco suspected that she was being kind to his wallet. Emma was rich; DeMarco wasn’t. As they waited for their dinners, Emma sipped a glass of white wine and looked at the ragged, water-damaged napkin that Dick Finley had taken from his son’s wallet.

“So what do you think?” DeMarco asked.

“I would guess that these are people’s names followed by a year,
but who the people are and what the dates signify . . . well, your guess is as good as mine. As for the numbers, they look like a D.C. phone number minus the last three digits.”

“Yeah, I figured that. How ’bout the ‘egg’?”

Emma shrugged. “Maybe part of a shopping list, but I doubt it. He would have written ‘eggs,’ not ‘egg.’ And it looks like there’s some word that comes after ‘egg,’ but I can’t even make out the first letter.”

“That’s the best you can do? I thought in your old job you decoded encrypted messages.”

“Not me,” Emma said. “The people who do that sort of thing have PhDs and use really big computers. I did other stuff.” This last statement was followed by an enigmatic smile. Emma had a really good enigmatic smile.

“Great,” DeMarco said. “So that’s it? You don’t have any bright ideas about what I should do next?”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” she said.

“Emma,” DeMarco whined, “why can’t he just fax me the damn information? We’re dealing with names on a
cocktail
napkin, for Christ’s sake, not plans for a missile defense system.”

“Fax you! You must be joking,” Emma said. “Neil’s so paranoid he never puts anything sensitive into a computer connected to the net, he doesn’t even own a cell phone, and he never, ever sends information out on lines that can be tapped.”

It was for this reason that Emma and DeMarco, the day after their session at the shooting range, were now sitting in a room on the Washington side of the Potomac River within sight of the Pentagon. Neil was an associate of Emma’s from her days at the DIA and he called himself an “information broker”—which really meant that he hacked and bugged and spied, then sold whatever he acquired to the highest bidder. DeMarco had always found it disconcerting that a man with Neil’s skills should have an office so close to the Pentagon.

Neil sat behind a cluttered desk in a chair engineered for his girth. He was in his early fifties and growing bald on top, but he gathered his remaining gray-blond hair into a thin ponytail that hung down from the back of his head like the tail on a well-fed rodent. As usual, he was dressed in a loose-fitting Hawaiian shirt, baggy shorts, and sandals. DeMarco had no idea what Neil wore when the temperature dropped, but as he rarely left his office, the issue was academic.

“Emma, you look lovely as always,” Neil said.

“Thank you,” Emma said. “And you look as if you’ve lost some weight.”

DeMarco looked over at Emma to see if she was serious. Neil was the size of the Chrysler Building; if he lost a hundred pounds it wouldn’t be apparent.

Neil, however, was pleased by the compliment. He beamed a smile at Emma and said, “Thank you for noticing.”

DeMarco cleared his throat.

“Yes, Joe,” Emma said, “we’ll get to it in a minute. You know, it wouldn’t hurt you to develop a few social skills, such as the ability to make small talk for more than sixty seconds.”

“It’s all right, Emma,” Neil said. “I need to get going. Cindy and I are going dancing tonight.”

Cindy was Neil’s wife—and the fact that Neil had a wife and DeMarco did not was proof of God’s dark sense of humor. But Neil
dancing
? The image that came to mind was the hippo in
Fantasia
, not Travolta in
Pulp Fiction
.

“Well, good for you,” Emma said. “Maybe if Joe took his girlfriends dancing he might be able to keep one.”

Neil smirked at Emma’s comment then pulled an unlabeled manila file folder out of a stack of identical folders sitting on one corner of his desk. DeMarco didn’t know how he knew which folder to select, but knowing how Neil liked to show off, he wouldn’t have been surprised if the files were marked like a crooked deck of cards.

“To begin,” Neil said. “We have five names, five apparent dates, and a partial phone number. The phone number I’m still working
on. I’ve checked Finley’s home and cell phone records but he didn’t call anyone with a number matching the seven numbers on the napkin. He may have called the number from a public phone, in which case I can’t tell who he called. So, since there are three missing digits from the phone number, and therefore a thousand possible phone number combinations, what I’m doing now is cross-checking those combinations against existing phone numbers to see if I can find anyone connected with what else I’ve learned. Which brings me to the names on the list. The obvious thing to do was to see if there was any common factor linking them. And there was.” He paused, then said: “The common factor is Paul Morelli.”

“Paul Morelli?” DeMarco said. “Do you mean
Senator
Paul Morelli?”

Senator Paul Morelli was, according to every political pundit on the planet, the man most likely to be the Democratic candidate for president in the next election.

“I do,” Neil said. “In 1992, Marshall Bachaud was the district attorney of the fair isle of Manhattan. In January of that year, he was in a car accident which kept him hospitalized for twenty-six weeks and required three surgeries to rebuild various parts of his anatomy. Over the protests of many, the governor of New York appointed a young assistant DA named Paul Morelli as the acting district attorney until such time as Bachaud could resume his duties. As acting DA, young Morelli became a visible public figure.

“In 1996,” Neil continued, “Morelli became the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City. His opponent was a popular fellow with a good record named Walter Frey. Frey was the New York State attorney general at the time, and four months prior to the election he was accused of throwing a major case involving a company in Albany. Emails between Frey and the company were discovered, the emails indicating that Frey had been providing helpful information to the defendant’s attorneys. Then, and although unrelated to the case, it was also discovered that Frey was having an affair with a young lady who worked for him. Frey eventually admitted to the affair but he claimed, and looked quite stupid doing so, that the young lady had
been hired by someone to seduce him. And if you look at photos of Walter Frey, it
is
hard to imagine why the woman would have succumbed to his charms. Ironically, the affair damaged him more politically than the case-fixing accusations because Frey had always been such a big family values guy.”