Multiple Exposure A Sophie Medina Mystery (18 page)

I slid open the mirrored closet door and felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. The two padlocks were hanging open by their hasps. But when I knelt and opened the cases to check the contents, everything was exactly where it belonged except the Hasselblad, which hadn’t been placed correctly in its fitted compartment. I held my breath, removed it and the Leica, and pulled out the false bottom in the case. Nick’s grandmother’s exquisite Fabergé snuffbox was still there in its pink velvet bag wrapped in tissue paper and protected by a layer of bubble wrap. I left it where it was, put back the false bottom and the cameras, and closed the case.

He’d searched the closet and the dresser, rifled through my clothes and lingerie, and even examined my makeup bag in the bathroom. In fact, the whole apartment had a weird off-kilter feeling to it like I’d suddenly discovered that the floors sloped down at the edges of the room, causing all my things to shift ever so slightly out of place. I shuddered, imagining his hands running over my clothes, and walked back into the bedroom, pulling everything out of the drawers and throwing all of it on the bed. Then I stuffed as much as I could in the washing machine and turned it on.

There was only one reason why he had searched the entire apartment but taken nothing.

Because what he wanted wasn’t here.

Nor was he a run-of-the-mill intruder who happened to choose my apartment. He’d been looking for Nick’s well logs, and he thought I might have left them under my bras or next to the shampoo bottle in the bathtub.

Had Arkady Vasiliev learned where I lived and sent him here?

I got my phone and found Napoleon Duval’s card. Halfway through dialing his number I hit End Call. What was I going to tell him? That I saw someone in the hall whom I suspected had been in my apartment? That I found the dead bolt unlocked and the padlocks to the cases where I kept my camera equipment unlocked, but nothing was missing? And, no, I hadn’t forgotten to lock those locks.

Already Duval had doubts about my credibility, maybe even my sanity. Telling him this story would only confirm them.

After Nick disappeared, I had stayed in a hotel in Maida Vale paid for by the CIA until Scotland Yard took down the crime scene tape at the front door to the cottage and cleaners and painters had erased every trace of blood and violence. Friends urged me to find another place, but I’d insisted on going home because I felt closer to Nick, connected to him, if I stayed there.

This time felt different. I didn’t want to stay at the Roosevelt anymore. I found Grace’s e-mail with India Ferrer’s phone number and called her. India had a sweet high-pitched voice and a bridge club date this evening with friends. She told me she was free tomorrow morning at ten o’clock to show me the apartment. I told her I was looking forward to meeting her and would see her then.

After I hung up, I threw my clothes in the dryer and phoned Father Jack O’Hara.

“I was just about to call you,” he said. “Grace called and said she had lunch with you today.”

“A picnic at Dupont Circle.”

“You sound funny. Is everything all right?”

“Not really,” I said. “Someone broke into my apartment. Do you think you could put me up for the night?”

Jack didn’t seem surprised by the request. “Sure. Both guest rooms are free, so no problem. Did your intruder get anything?”

“No, but I saw him as he was walking down the hall afterward. I called out and he took off down the fire stairs. I lost him outside.”

“You went after him?”

“Of course I went after him.”

“Good God. What would you have done if you caught up with him and he had a gun?” he asked.

“Well, I didn’t and he wasn’t waving anything around. So it doesn’t matter.”

“Did you call the police?” he asked.

“And say what?” I said. “I can’t prove anyone was actually in here. Plus nothing was stolen and no one was hurt. The police won’t bother with a case like this—they probably wouldn’t even file a report. And, Jack, do not tell Grace about this. I mean it. She’ll throw a net over my head and take me home to Middleburg and leave me with my mother.”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “I can keep a secret. When they gave me the funny clothes it was part of the job description. Come on over and I’ll make us dinner, too. I’ve got a new recipe a parishioner gave me, if you don’t mind being experimented on. Italian sound okay?”

“Italian sounds great.” He always cooked Italian, ever since his days in the seminary in Rome.

“I’m still in my office on campus. How about if I meet you at my place in half an hour?” he asked.

“Sure. I’ve got to finish some laundry, then I’ll be on my way.”

“Speaking of laundry, bring your running gear,” he said. “We’ll need to work off dinner. It’s artery clogging but worth every calorie.”

When my clothes were dry, I got my big suitcase out of the closet and put everything in it, except for a nightgown, my running clothes, and a blouse and dress slacks for tomorrow at Hillwood. Those I put in an overnight bag to take to Jack’s. It wouldn’t take long to pack up the rest of the apartment, probably less than an hour.

On my way out, I stopped at the front desk and told the assistant day manager that I would be terminating my lease at the Roosevelt when it ran out in a few days. She seemed surprised at the abruptness of my decision, but she put the red glasses on, pulled out the book of leases, and made a note in my file.

Then she wished me well and told me she hoped I’d be happy wherever I was going next.

12

Jack lived in Gloria House, which took its name from the Jesuit motto,
Ad majorem Dei gloriam
: For the greater glory of God. A four-story redbrick building overlooking Stanton Park on the edge of Capitol Hill, it had once been someone’s grand nineteenth-century mansion, but over the years a hodgepodge of additions with no particular vision transformed it into something that couldn’t be characterized by any architectural style. The facade still looked Victorian, but the back of the building, thoroughly modernized with gated parking underneath and rows of nondescript balconies, reminded me of a generic motel off the interstate. The Jesuits bought the old building after they built Georgetown Law School over by Union Station and also because it had been near St. Aloysius Catholic Church, which had been one of their parishes until the church closed. Then they renovated it, added a chapel, and turned it into a house of religious studies for about twenty or so seminarians and a few professors on the law school faculty.

The gate to the parking lot was open so I chained the Vespa to a metal post that supported the balconies and went around to the front entrance. Jack answered the door, a broad smile on his handsome face as he pulled me to him for a kiss and smothered me in a hug.

It had been two years since we’d seen each other, but he hadn’t changed. To be honest, he hadn’t changed since we were at St. Mike’s and he’d won the senior superlatives for “best eyes” and “best hair.” He also got “worst car” and “heart of gold.” He deserved all of them. Eyes the intense blue of sapphires and dark wavy hair that he still wore a bit long—he looked like a Shakespearean actor—but now going gray at the temples. Worst car—I’d been in it dozens of times when it died, so enough said. And the kindest and most compassionate soul I knew. Grace’s other nickname for him behind his back was “Father What-a-Waste.”

“He’s so damn gorgeous in that delicious dark Irish way,” she said to me more than once. “Why’d he have to decide to be a priest? What a waste of a good man. What a loss for womankind.”

He picked up my bag after that bear hug and looked me over. “You look great,” he said. “I’ve missed you.”

“Thanks. You don’t look so bad yourself and I’ve missed you, too.”

I followed him into the foyer, where a grand spiral staircase with a hand-carved railing coiled up four floors. The Jesuit IHS emblem hung on a shield above the stairs and a statue of the Virgin Mary stood on an altar table across the room flanked by flickering devotional candles in ruby hurricane glasses. Through the open doors to the chapel, the stained-glass silhouettes of the four Evangelists in the chancel window were backlit like a vision in the afternoon sunlight.

My breathing slowed as I followed Jack up the steps. Here I would find peace. We reached the second-floor landing and he opened a door on which a plain wooden cross was fastened below a sign that said
GUEST
.

“Here’s your room. Want to change so we can go for a run? I’m across the hall. Come on in when you’re ready. Door’s unlocked.”

My room was functional and spartan: a bed with a white matelassé coverlet, a dresser, a desk, a chair, a crucifix, and a window that overlooked Stanton Park. I had my own bathroom—no sharing—with a tiny stall shower. Jack’s suite, which I’d never seen, was also quite simple: living room, bedroom, and bathroom. An antique oak bookcase that I remembered from his parents’ home was filled with books on theology, ethics, law, and spirituality. A carved crucifix that looked African and an icon of Our Lady of Vladimir hung on the walls. A well-worn blue recliner I guessed was a favorite chair had a floor lamp next to it and a small table beside it with his leather breviary and St. Ignatius’s
Spiritual Exercises.
He also had one of the building’s original west-facing arcaded balconies, which reminded me of a Florentine loggia.

“Rank has its privileges, I guess,” I said. “That’s a great balcony.”

“Yeah, I feel like the pope looking down on the crowds in St. Peter’s when I go out there.” He grinned. “It’s pretty cool.”

“Nice little garden you’ve got, too. Who knew you had such a green thumb?”

“I don’t. When those plants die, I buy new ones. If God intended geraniums to live forever he would have made them out of cast iron. But I do grow all my own herbs for cooking.”

I opened the balcony door and stepped outside. His hanging planter baskets of geraniums looked overgrown, parched, and leggy.

“You might try watering these sometimes. It does help, you know. But you do have cilantro, three kinds of parsley, chives, dill, sage, rosemary, and oregano. And a statue of St. Francis of Assisi.”

“My secret weapon,” he said. “He’s the only reason everything’s not dead.”

He got two water bottles out of a small refrigerator and tossed one to me.

“I haven’t been running much lately,” I said. “Except from gunfire in war zones—and that was a while ago. Be kind to me.”

“You look good,” he said. “You look like you’re in great shape.”

I turned red. “So do you.”

He grinned. “Don’t be such a girl, Medina. I’m not cutting you any slack.”

“Father,” I said, “that’s not a very charitable thing to say.”

We clomped down the stairs and went outside. The traffic light turned red at Massachusetts Avenue and we jogged across the street.

“Why don’t we make a big loop, head up Mass Ave for a few blocks, and then cut over and come down East Capitol so we finish in front of the Capitol by the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court?” he said. “We ought to make it in time to watch the sun go down behind the Capitol.”

“ ‘Where you lead, I will follow,’ ” I said. “Who said that?”

“Ruth. And Carole King. Ruth said it first, but Carole King got paid a bundle for saying it.”

I laughed and said as we ran toward 6th Street, “Now I’m going to have that song stuck in my head for the rest of the day.”

He seemed to be deliberately keeping a slower pace—Jack ran the Marine Corps marathon every year—to give me the opportunity to start the conversation. For a couple of blocks we ran side by side and I thought about how much I’d missed him, his unvarnished way of distilling a situation to its basic components, his clear-eyed sense of justice and why it was important to do the right thing, to be true to your values, to act with integrity and compassion for others.

“Want to talk?” he said after a while. “Or do you really want me to put on my stole and we can do this back at the house with all the bells and whistles?”

We turned onto East Capitol Street at 8th Street by Morton’s Pharmacy. Ahead of us, the Capitol dome filled the rosy evening skyline.

I smiled. “It’s not that. There are things I’m not supposed to tell anyone.”

“Anything you say stays with me,” he said. “I made a deal with the man upstairs when I became a priest.”

“It’s so complicated I don’t even know where to begin.”

Jack reached over and threw his arm across my shoulders in a brotherly hug. “Yes, you do, Soph. Just start talking. It’ll come out the way it’s meant to.”

Something in that sweet, comforting gesture undammed all the bottled-up secrets and loosened the constricted vise around my heart. He never would—or could—reveal a single thing I said, even if I’d just committed murder. We slowed to a walk and I told him everything, beginning with Nick’s clandestine work for the CIA, the truth about his disappearance, Colin’s death, and Crowne Energy’s problems with the increasing menace and threats from the Shaika in Abadistan. By the time I got to the rainy meeting with Baz Allingham in Westminster Abbey, we had reached 1st Street in front of the Capitol. To our left was the Library of Congress; the Supreme Court was on the right.

“There must be something going on at the library this evening,” Jack said. “All those people milling around . . . I think it’s the last outdoor concert of the season. Why don’t we go over to the Supreme Court and find someplace to sit where we can keep talking?”

We turned right and climbed the low steps to the sprawling plaza with its inlaid gray-and-white marble pattern of circles and squares that had been copied from the Pantheon in Rome. I’d read somewhere that the Vermont marble chosen for the plaza and the building’s exterior purposely had a high content of mica so the stone would shimmer with a near-blinding brilliance on sunny days. Directly in front of us at the top of the one-story marble staircase was the templelike entrance to the Supreme Court, the words
EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW
carved into the frieze below the pediment. Two flags on either side of the plaza fluttered in the light breeze, flanking identical fountains whose turquoise water looked tropical.