Murder in the Supreme Court (Capital Crimes Series Book 3) (18 page)

“Could be. I’d have to see a picture.”

Teller went to his car, took an eight-by-ten glossy photo of Clarence Sutherland from his briefcase in his trunk and returned to the bar. He led Robbie into the kitchen, where there was more light. Robbie examined the photograph.

“Well?”

“Yeah, I think it’s the same one.”

“You think?”

Robbie looked at Teller. “Come on, Marty, this place isn’t a lineup. Lots of guys come through. I can’t be
sure
, but if I had to lay a bet on it I’d say it’s the same guy.”

Teller leaned against a sink, drew a deep breath. “Don’t tell anybody about this, Robbie.”

“Why should I?”

“Just don’t.”

The chef, an illegal alien named Juan, grinned at Teller. “Hey, detective, you want something to eat?”

“Yeah, fries and a Julieburger, medium, and easy on the anchovies. But not too easy.”

***

Vera passed the all-night diner and saw George, the computer executive, get out of his car. She didn’t want to disappoint him, go back on her word, but any guilt about that took second place to a compelling need to be home. She accelerated, and the diner became a red neon dot in her rearview mirror.

Chester Sutherland decided as he approached his house in Chevy Chase to drive around the back and then enter through his office. He noticed as he came up the long driveway that all lights in the house were off with the exception of his bedroom.

He did not immediately get out of his car. The last seven hours were a blur to him. After leaving the two-hour meeting with Bill Stalk at CIA Headquarters he’d gone to his club, where he had dinner alone. He then did something he had not done in years, went to the movies. He hadn’t liked the film, an attempt at comedy by names he was only vaguely familiar with from having once watched “Saturday Night Live.” The young people in the audience loved it though. It didn’t matter, though, whether he liked the film or not.
It was something to do, a way to blot out what had happened during the two hours with Stalk.

The meeting had started pleasantly enough, Stalk again telling of his fascination with video electronic games and how he’d decided to take a few days off in the future and spend them practicing so that he could better compete with his son. Sutherland had listened politely, even offered comments of his own on the subject, but he knew the badinage would soon be over and the serious subject that had brought him there would take its place.

“So,” Stalk said as he sat behind his desk and propped his feet on it, “you wanted to talk to me, Chester. You sounded upset on the phone, although I suppose if someone had broken into my office I’d be upset too.” He laughed. “It’s a good thing for us that you never did keep files on the MKULTRA Project. If you had I’d be concerned that whoever broke into your office might have taken a peek.”

Sutherland knew Stalk was playing with him. If he’d had any doubts earlier about who had broken into his files, they no longer existed.

“Did the Company do it, Bill?”

Stalk assumed an expression of surprise, shock. “The Company? Why would we do such a thing to someone who’s been an important, trusted part of our operation?”

Sutherland, who hadn’t eaten since breakfast and then had only partially finished because of Vera’s call, suddenly was hungry and would have liked a drink. He was, he knew, in a touchy position. If the CIA hadn’t taken the files, his admitting that he had in fact kept them, despite his constant denials, would brand him a liar and, worse, a fool. Still, if it hadn’t been someone from the Company, he felt obliged to report it to the man and the agency most jeopardized by the theft.

He decided to admit he’d kept files and that they were now missing, hoping that his candor would bring a parallel
honesty from Stalk. It did not work that way… After Sutherland finished telling Stalk the truth, the director stood, brought his fist down sharply on the desk. “Damn it, I knew it.” He quickly went to the expanse of windows overlooking the woods, and for a moment Sutherland thought that he was going to put his fist through the glass. Instead he rolled the fingertips of both hands over the pane.

“I’m sorry, Bill,” Sutherland said, standing and coming halfway across the room. “You must understand that I had several motives for involvement in the project. I do care about serving the country when and as I can, but I’m also an individual. I’m a scientist, or at least I’m involved with science, and for someone like me the payoff is in the excitement of discovery, of breaking new ground, creating understanding where it hasn’t existed before. I couldn’t devote all that time and knowledge without having something to show for it personally. I’ve never talked about it to anyone, and the files have been secured in my private office for as long as they’ve existed. But it was important to me that I at least had them.”

“Like Nixon keeping the tapes,” Stalk said. He was not amused. In fact, his face looked like granite. He went back to his desk, opened a drawer and pulled out a sheaf of file folders. Sutherland recognized them immediately as the ones taken from his office.

“It
was
you,” Sutherland said.

“Of course it was us, Chester, and a damn lucky thing it was. A few years ago if we’d known these files existed we’d have done the same thing, only we would have been rather less discreet about it. The American public has seemed to demand more discretion these days with their break-ins.”

Sutherland leaned forward. “But why take them now? I told you that no one has ever seen them except me. Every entry was made personally by me.”

Stalk slapped the files back in the drawer and closed it hard.

Sutherland sat in a chair and drew a deep breath. He was afraid he knew what was coming.

“You weren’t the only one to have access to those files Chester, and you know it. Your son did too.”

Sutherland looked at the floor. “Whatever my son might have been, or might have done, he’s paid for it, Bill. Do we need to attack him now? Whatever he knew… about people, other things, whatever he might have done to hurt… God knows, he’s been punished, and with no chance for appeal, no chance of parole. My son, sir, is dead. Isn’t that
enough
?”

Stalk nodded. “I do sympathize with you, Chester. I was thinking about your son this morning while I was playing that video game with my boy. I suppose there’s no greater loss than the death of a child, no matter the age.”

Sutherland felt his stomach clutch.

“Are you all right, Chester?”

“Yes… I’m not happy with what your people did, but I suppose I can understand it—”

“Chester, it’s been a very difficult period for us. We’ve been hit on from all sides, which does not exactly make our mission any easier. There have been so many leaks that damaged us, and we were forced to release some of MKULTRA under the Freedom of Information Act. Sure, we sanitized everything we could and held back more than some think we should have, but you know as well as anyone how compromised this nation would be if the entire project had been laid open. When we realized that material we hadn’t released was beginning to surface, we became, to put it mildly, concerned. Our first assumption was that the leak was within the division, and we went to a good deal of trouble to find it and shut it off. But then we looked outside and uncovered that
your son
was making it known in certain
places he had access to his father’s files. Naturally, I can’t reveal the source of that information. What a shame, was what I said, and felt, when the picture became clearer. What a damn bloody shame.”

Along with everything else, Sutherland found himself annoyed at Stalk’s use of the British usage. That was something he’d always noticed about CIA brass, the tendency to affect the language and manner of their British counterparts.

Stalk locked Sutherland’s files in the drawer, dropped the key into his jacket pocket, stood, came around the desk and slapped the psychiatrist on the back. “You know, Chester, this is a strange world we live in, and it sometimes takes extraordinary people, and acts, to inject some sanity into it. There is no clear-cut good or bad, Chester. Mostly it’s a matter of survival. Some understand that, some don’t.” He removed his hand from Sutherland’s back and went to his door. The point was made, the meeting was over.

At the door Stalk shook Sutherland’s hand. “I’d be happy to have you back in the program, Chester, but I would understand if that should prove rather too difficult for you. If that is the case, I think it best that you never come here again.”

The notion of ever returning to the CIA’s top secret research program almost made Sutherland laugh. Still, he needed to ask, “Why would you invite me back into the program in the light of what’s happened with the files?”

“Well, Chester, no offense, but once a man has made the mistake you have, he does tend to become rather more easy to control. I’ve enjoyed knowing you, Chester. Good luck in all your future endeavors. By the way, I’d heartily recommend getting one of those video games. A wonderful way to get your mind off real problems…”

Sutherland now got out of his car and went through the back door to his office. As usual, Vera had left a night-light on, a large translucent plastic goose he’d given her as
a gift five years ago. A small bulb in the base illuminated the entire figure and cast a warm glow over the room.

He flipped on the overhead lights, took a key from his pocket and opened the file drawer marked MNOP. He touched the top of a folder marked
Poulson, J.
, almost removed it to read its contents, then closed the drawer and locked it. He made his way to the house, glanced at mail that had been left on a table near the staircase, then slowly climbed the stairs to the second floor, where he opened the door to his bedroom.

His wife Eleanor was on the chaise, reading.

“You’re home,” Chester said. “I thought the fundraiser would go later.”

“I didn’t go,” she said, removing her glasses and looking up at him through narrowed eyes.

“Why not?”

“I couldn’t get up the interest or strength.” She didn’t sound weary, her voice was strong.

He took off his jacket and hung it in the closet, took off his shoes and sat on the edge of their king-sized bed.

“Where were you?”

“I had a meeting, grabbed some dinner at the club and then went to the movies.”

“The movies? You went to the movies? You haven’t been to the movies for as long as I can remember.”

“I needed a little diversion,” he said as he unbuttoned his shirt.

“I’m impressed.”

“Impressed with what? What’s so unusual about going to a movie?”

“I don’t mean the movies, Chester, I mean the need for diversion. I’ve never known you to express such a human need.”

He understood too well that she was looking for an argument. He went to a bathroom off the bedroom, closed
the door, took a fast hot shower, put on a terry-cloth robe and returned to where Eleanor stood in front of an eighteenth-century French escritoire. She held in her hands what she’d been reading on the chaise, a thick batch of letters. She was especially beautiful at the moment, her face etched with a sadness that had been perpetual since Clarence’s murder. Champagne blonde hair was pulled up into a loose chignon on the top of her head, stray tendrils framed a full, lovely face.

“What are you reading?”

She answered so quietly that he didn’t catch it. He asked again.

She turned. “Letters from Clarence, Chester, letters he wrote while in college and that you never had the time to read.”

He abruptly crossed the room to his bureau. “Nonsense,” he said over his shoulder, “I read everything he ever wrote us—”

“Only because I insisted on it. You’d sit and pretend to take in his words, pretend to respond to what he’d said, but the fact is none of it really mattered to you. You were never interested in your own son… Too bad he wasn’t one of your patients—”

“That’s enough, Eleanor. We’ve gone over this too many times before.”

He watched as she lowered the letters to the desk, as though putting them in a fire. There was a discernible trembling to her hands as she gripped the edge of the writing desk for support. When she turned and faced him her blue eyes shone with anger. “He’s dead, Chester, and I think you killed him—oh, you didn’t have to pull the trigger, Chester. There are other ways to assassinate a human being without being the one at the other end of the gun—”

“I’ve heard
enough
, Eleanor. Have you been drinking?”

“Isn’t that typical of you, Chester, and how
unanalytic
, to look for an external reason for something that displeases you. Have I been drinking? Should I be literary and say that I’ve been drinking the words of the son that I no longer have, that I’m drunk with the loss of him?”

“I’m tired, Eleanor, we can discuss this in the morning—”

Her action took him by surprise. She swept the letters from the desk, ran across the room and pushed them in his face. “Read them, Chester,” she shouted. “Read them now that it no longer matters. Listen for the first time to what was in your son’s heart.”

The corner of one of the letters nicked his eye. He put his hand to it, turned and crouched in pain. “What
heart
?” he said.

She came up behind him, placed her hands on his shoulders and spun him around. “Why did you hate him so?” she asked. Tears now flowed down her cheeks.

He straightened, his hand still over his eyes. “I didn’t hate him, Eleanor, I loved him, damn it… no, damn
him
. He was no good…”

“Is that an appropriate way for a psychiatrist to talk?”

“Maybe it is. Sometimes I think we do a disservice using so much jargon to describe behavior. There are people in this world, Eleanor, who are no damn good, and as much as it breaks my heart to say it, our son was one of them—”

He knew it was coming, didn’t avoid it. Almost welcomed it. She brought her right hand across his face. When he didn’t react she did it again, then grabbed his neck with both hands and dug her nails into his flesh. He took hold of her wrists and pulled himself free. Tiny rivulets of blood sprung from where her nails had broken the skin and ran down to the collar of his robe.