Seven Grams of Lead (4 page)

The hospital bed suddenly felt like a witness stand. Thornton had been aware that Musseridge would fill out the FBI’s requisite record-of-interview form—the infamous FD-302. Its categories included
WITNESS
, used when the interviewee may have seen the offense committed,
INFORMATIONAL
, for an interviewee lending assistance to the investigation, and
SUBJECT
, meaning the interviewee is believed to be involved in the offense. The abruptness with which Special Agent Lamont stopped pacing the hall and cocked an ear toward the hospital bed declared
SUBJECT
.

Thornton tried to tamp down his indignation, if only because the Feds took petulance as indicative
of guilt. “We got on the ferry because she was afraid that she was being followed. We were close together to minimize the chance that the suspected tail would overhear us.”

“Whose idea was it to go to the Au Bon Pain?” Musseridge pronounced the French word for “bread” like the English synonym for suffering.

“Mine, on the fly.”

“And an assassin just happened to be waiting there?”

“Where are we going with this, Agent Musseridge? Jilted ex-flame?”

“Is that it?”

“There is no
it.
”

“I want to believe you, bud. The thing the Bureau keeps stumbling over is, even if Peretti had a hundred tails on her, how could the shooter have known to wait in that one out-of-the-way men’s room?”

“That’s a good question. I wish I knew. Maybe he or his team had planted a mic on one of us?”

“We went over her handbag, the coffee shop, and pretty much everything in the vicinity with a fine-tooth comb. We also tore up your clothes and shoes looking for a tracking device.”

“It could have been knocked off as I went down. When I came out of the terminal, the getaway driver shot me with some kind of heat ray.”

“Heat ray, huh?” Musseridge wrote on his pad with unwarranted force.

Thornton said, “As in an active denial system, a directed energy weapon that—”

Musseridge cut him off. “I know what an active denial system is. You ever seen an ADS?

“On the Web.”

“Well, I have seen one of them in real life. Used for crowd control. The thing was almost as big as the flatbed truck hauling it.”

“I take it you didn’t see one on the security camera footage.”

“Nope.” Musseridge rose, hefting the overcoat from the back of his chair.

Thornton was hit with déjà vu. “Wait.”

Musseridge only slowed. “Yeah?”

“How about the placard from the table?”

“The what?”

“At Au Bon Pain, there were tented advertisements for a new soup on each of the tables. When the shooter bent over to pick up the bullet casings, he knocked the ad off the nearest table. It looked like it might have grazed his cheek.”

Musseridge resumed his course for the door. “We’ll look into it,” he said with too little conviction.

Two hours after
the FBI agents left his hospital room, Thornton braced himself against a cold metal handrail leading to Track 13 at Penn Station. The snorts and grunts from the engine of the Washington-bound train told him to hurry, but he could barely walk. He heaved one leaden leg ahead of the other. His ribs weren’t broken, just bruised, they’d told him at the hospital. Yet once he was seated, every one of the train’s lurches during the ensuing three-and-a-half-hour ride was a hot poker to his side. His head was worse. Still, all things considered, the painkiller’s effectiveness bordered on magic. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to leave the hospital. Or he would have collapsed halfway up the three flights of stairs to his apartment, where he’d stopped to change into something suitable for a wake.

An hour of stop-and-go traffic in a taxi from Union Station to Maryland didn’t help matters. The good news, he thought, was that his injuries gave him a valid excuse to miss the black-tie society event he’d been obligated to attend next weekend.

The taxi left him at the corner of a quiet downtown street over which a moonless night had settled. Halfway down the block, he found the Potomac Memorial Chapel, which looked like a boutique hotel. Stately Federal architecture, impeccable furnishing, soft lighting, cherrywood polished to high gloss—all of it providing him with an ironic reminder of the difference between a hotel and a funeral home: You check out of a hotel.

He gazed through one of the tall leaded-glass windows. A set of French doors on the far side of the lobby allowed a partial view of a mahogany-paneled reception room. At least twenty mourners waited in line to view the casket. Thornton wanted to see it too. But it was only 6:36. He would wait for the crowd to reach its thickest. Just after seven, he reckoned. He wanted to mitigate the chance of being recognized.

He continued down the deserted block, digesting an assortment of pains with each step, bunching his lapels together to counter the nor’easter rattling bare branches all around. The five-buck woolen watch cap he’d bought at Penn Station was perfect for a night like this, even if he hadn’t needed it to obscure his appearance. Steering clear of the streetlamps, he headed for a café at the end of the block.

The café door swung open. A prematurely gray man wearing a smart black pinstriped suit hurried out. He had the earnestness of a student body president to go with courtly looks, so the hollowness around his eyes and the slight stoop were jarring. This was the widower, Richard Hoagland, Thornton realized. Shuffling out of the café after Hoagland came a pair of downcast little girls in black dresses. They were younger versions of Catherine Peretti, especially the smaller one. Emily. Catherine’s ghost would probably have shaken Thornton less.

Keeping his reaction hidden, he hunched so that his coat puffed out, making him appear stockier. A decade in which a slice of pizza on the run ranked among his more substantive meals had reduced his fullback’s physique to that of a placekicker, and, he guessed, he’d dropped another ten pounds in the hospital. He slowed to avoid crossing paths with the family, pretending his attention was elsewhere, nodding reflexively in greeting only when they were within a few feet. Hoagland responded in kind, continuing up the block, toward the funeral home. “Go on ahead, find Aunt Bea,” Thornton heard him tell the girls. Peretti had a sister, Beatrice. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

Then Thornton heard just two sets of footsteps on the brick sidewalk. He peered over his shoulder to find a pair of sharp eyes aimed at him.

“You shouldn’t have come, Mr. Thornton,” Hoagland said.

Thornton steeled himself. “Mr. Hoagland, I know it’s natural to suspect the worst of a guy who used to go out with your wife, but—”

Hoagland thrust forth a palm to cut him short. “Let me start over. What I ought to have said was: You shouldn’t have left your hospital room, given what I’ve heard of your injuries. But I’m positive that Catherine would appreciate your being here.”

Hoagland appeared appreciative as well. But this was D.C, where genuine affection was conveyed by a deal memo. So Thornton remained on edge. Accepting Hoagland’s hand, he said, “I wish we were meeting at a better time.”

“Actually, the timing couldn’t be better.”

On that puzzling note, Hoagland turned to watch Emily follow her older sister into the funeral home. Thornton saw in Hoagland a softer version of himself. No surprise, Thornton thought. A woman who as a child enjoys a positive relationship with her father—Peretti had—is more likely than not to be attracted to men who remind her of him in some way.

Returning his attention to Thornton, Hoagland said, “I’m glad you’re here now because I want to find out who killed Catherine.”

They were alike in that too. Except one of them understood that it was out of his hands. “I told the FBI everything I know,” Thornton said.

“Frankly, I’d have been happy if it had been you who arranged for the hit man to ambush her,” Hoagland
said, “because it would give me someone to blame. But there’s too much mitigating evidence, not least of which is that Catherine always thought the world of you. She was a great fan of your work, too. As am I. In fact, I think Russ Thornton on the case is the best chance of the killer being caught. The FBI has nothing.”

“I wish I had more than the FBI.” Thornton was starting to like Hoagland and wished he could help him. He had no plans to investigate, though. His curiosity had already contributed to Peretti’s death. Forgetting the impracticality of investigating a story that involves oneself, if he were to stick his nose further into the matter, the death toll stood to increase.

“I told Agent Musseridge and Agent Lamont everything I know, too,” Hoagland said. “That took all of five minutes, I’m afraid. There was a time when Catherine and I talked shop every night, but then we had a baby, then a second, and then months would go by without our having time to discuss anything more substantive than the need for more diapers or a half gallon of milk. I don’t have the faintest idea what type of damning information she could have found. Do you?”

Thornton felt like an AA member standing outside a pub. “It’s hard to speculate.”

“I’d be happy with even a half-decent for-instance.”

“Could be anything,” Thornton said, trying to shrug off the subject.

But Hoagland waved for him to go on.

“Well, as chief of staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, as I’m sure you know, she read reams of classified material. It’s possible that she happened on a report that wasn’t supposed to be released to the committee, or she could have pieced together something that no one else did when she read reports from two different services who hadn’t shared information.”

Hoagland shook his head. “So far, based on what I’ve heard, the intelligence committee knows less than you.”

“Or they’re keeping it to themselves.”

“Is there someone you suspect?”

“No, not at all. And you can be sure the Bureau will debrief everyone who might know anything, then polygraph anyone they suspect isn’t being forthcoming.”

“The ‘box.’ Do you believe those things work?”

“With a good examiner, they’re effective enough of the time that they’re more than worthwhile.”

“But not nearly as effective as you, I’m betting, after all your experience with politicians and other professional liars.”

“If only that were true. In any case, I don’t have access to the classified material Catherine read that could offer clues. Also I don’t do investigations; I only chronicle them. Most of the time, I’m just sitting around my apartment looking up stuff on the Internet.”

Hoagland stared at the sidewalk. “So what do we do?”

Thornton had no good answer. Seeking to provide a dash of optimism, he said, “It would help to have an idea of what Catherine wanted to tell me.”

“She told me she was going up to New York for a meeting on commercial shipping security. Obviously a cover story, right? That’s what the FBI thinks.”

Thornton shrugged. “You never know.”

“You think it means something?” Hoagland asked.

“It might,” Thornton said, but only because the guy’s wife had just died.

The train doors were closing. Hobbling and stumbling, Thornton leaped into the last car and careened into a bulkhead seat. Without the energy to wriggle free of his coat, let alone stow it in the overhead rack, he sank into the cushions. Watching Union Station recede, he enjoyed the soothing rhythm of the wheels banging the rails. He loosened his tie, let his eyelids sag, and slid eagerly toward sleep.

But the image of Peretti’s younger daughter, Emily, intruded. Her black dress had been much too loose. Was it because it had been a hand-me-down from her big sister? Or because she hadn’t been able to eat for the past five days? Which again made Thornton wonder what the hell Peretti had died trying to tell him.

After a visit to the bar car, he succeeded in sleeping, in a position that would have been unattainable without the three bourbons: legs folded against his chest, the left side of his head against the window, his right hand wrapped around the back of his head.

He woke to a blindingly lit train already parked at Penn Station. He saw just a few passengers, all hurrying onto the platform or up the stairs to the terminal. His skull felt like it had been filled with cement. His limbs were too painful to be merely asleep; they were seemingly poked from within by barbs. In trying to rise, he found himself pitching forward. He grabbed the headrest on the seat in front of him. The only other passenger still aboard, an elderly woman at the other end of the aisle, shot him a disapproving look.

Propping himself into an upright position, he released the headrest. His right ring finger stung, and when he looked at it, he noticed a slight depression in the base of the fingertip. He wrapped the hand around the back of his head, placing the ring finger where it had spent the last couple of hours of the train ride. There was a small lump there, behind his left ear. Something beneath the skin. A sebaceous cyst, he guessed. Normal and utterly harmless. He’d had five or six of them over the years.

This one was unusually symmetrical, though. Like a Tic Tac. An absorbable suture? Probably not. It was nowhere near the incision.

He propelled himself to the end of the aisle and
jerked open the sticky sliding door to the small bathroom. A fluorescent cylinder above the mirror rattled on, revealing mustard yellow plastic walls imprinted with tiny fleurs-de-lis. He angled his head and folded his left ear forward to get a view of the lump. But even when he stretched the skin as far as he could, he saw no sign of the thing. Given the same treatment, a sebaceous cyst would be as plain as a rivet.

He detached a square of toilet tissue, moistened a corner with a drop of water, and adhered the soft paper to the area behind his left ear. Next he pulled at the corners of the square to conform it to his head. Then he squirted spearmint-green liquid soap from the dispenser and painted it onto the square, directly over the lump. He hoped to produce an impression of whatever was in his scalp.

When he held the paper up to the light, he saw a pale green image of a capsule with staplelike handles top and bottom and a perfect circle rising from the center of its face.