The Clouds Roll Away (5 page)

“But your group believes in God.”

“My group? The Kiwanis?”

“I thought those crosses were supposed to put the fear of God in a man's soul.”

“It's right there in the Bible, God don't want the races mixing.”

“And you believe the Bible.”

“'Course I believe it. Heard of Job? That's me. Festering wounds and all.”

“With one big difference.”

“Job was a Jew.”

“God said Job was blameless.”

He pointed his finger at me, the handcuff clanking against the bedrail. “Don't come in here high and mighty, toots. Everybody's got something they're ashamed of. Everybody. That includes you. I'll bet you—”

“Give me a name.”

“Give me a cure.”

“Who burned that cross, Mr. Lasker?”

“Who cares? Those people are gonna wipe out their own race. Shooting so-called brothers in the streets, sticking crack needles in their own children.” He drew a wheezing breath, exhaling a fetid stench. “That's where we went wrong. We should've been watching the Mexicans. Those people will eat us alive.”

“I'm offering you one last chance. Do something right. Tell me who burned that cross.”

He closed his eyes and breathed as though the white blanket was a lead apron. He lifted his right hand, the metal cuff slithering down the bedrail. His bony fingers stroked the air.

“Leave.”

I stared at his eyelids. The skin looked as tenuous as parchment.

“Every one of us gives a full accounting in the end,” I said.

“You don't know.”

“I know you might beg for a hellhole like this.”

The eyes shifted under the papery skin but my jab didn't open them. After several minutes of heavy breathing, he seemed to have fallen asleep and I walked over to the steel door, pressing the black button to notify the guard. His reply sounded like words bouncing through a tin can.

I turned to look at Hale Lasker, his eyes still closed, the pauses lengthening between his breaths.

An electronic buzz released the steel locks. The door slid open.

Thomas nodded.

“Ready?”

But suddenly he grabbed his nightstick.

Lasker sprang up, pressing himself forward. The gooseflesh tightened in his neck as he cried, “Take this sinner away! Take her to burn in hell!”

His head dropped and the hospital gown sagged over his concave chest. Slumping on the bed, he rolled his head from side to side, moaning.

I looked at the guard. His brown eyes churned with silt. He replaced the nightstick, lifting the radio. “Tell the nurse, infirmary needs more morphine,” he said.

I glanced back as we left.

Hale Lasker was still rolling his head, moaning, staining the white pillow with a greasy halo.

chapter six

M
y drive back to Richmond felt even longer because the K-Car's AM radio played only static-filled country songs and the heater blew like an air-conditioner.

By the time I pulled into town, I was shivering through Friday afternoon rush hour. I pumped coins into the meter on Seventh Street, covering the twenty-two minutes that remained before free parking kicked in, and jogged past the usual odd mixture of folks standing outside the federal courthouse. Lawyers, defendants, prosecutors, and families—black and white, lawkeeper and lawbreaker alike, all doing that curious tense dance of the South. It took eighty years after the bloodiest war on American soil for Richmond to allow black men to join the police force. And that was because a different war, World War II, drained the still-struggling pool of Southern white men, leaving the first black officers to hold accountable the very people who controlled their freedoms, from drinking fountains to schools to jobs.

Today, sixty-plus years later, Richmond's police force was predominantly black. And so was the criminal element, something I left to the sociologists to figure out.

In the police annex's compact lobby, I showed my credentials to the receptionist while two officers—one white, one black— listened to an elderly black woman. She wore a ragged wool coat and her rebukes sliced like knives.

“Right on your car it says ‘Serve and Protect,'” she was saying.

“So how come I never see you when bullets are flying past my grandbabies? You want to tell me where you at?”

The receptionist buzzed the door and I walked down a hallway lined with softball trophies. A police cliché, but softball was the game for this job, leaving time for deceptive small talk. You hear about the old woman who wouldn't leave? Claimed her family's blood was on our hands. She's crazy, right? Right?

Just after the vending machines, I found the pebble glass door with one name removed. It said D
ETECTIVE
J. N
ATHAN
G
REENE
.

I knocked, waited for word to come in, then got the look salesmen get used to.

“You don't look happy to see me,” I said.

“I'm surprised,” he said. “They let you come back?”

Since the last time I saw Detective Greene, his thick mustache had sprouted gray and new lines etched his brown face. Though not yet forty, he looked old, especially around the eyes. Six months ago his partner, Detective Michael Falcon, plunged six stories to the sidewalk. Another man fell too, both killed on impact. The detective was white, the other man black, and the city divided on race. The mayor called in the FBI to decide if the white cop threw the black man off the roof or the other way around. I was the agent heading up the civil rights case. I was suspended while working it.

“Got a minute?” I asked.

“No.”

I stepped inside.

He sighed. “Nothing's changed.”

I sat down in a chair so old the wood cried. The cold-case detectives had furnished the small office by diving into Dumpsters behind city schools, and the concrete block room was just big enough for two dilapidated desks.

“Do you have any old files on the Klan?” I asked.

“Why?”

I told him about the cross burning at Rapland and my visit with Hale Lasker. “Lasker's the last thing in our files on the KKK. He went to prison eight years ago. I was hoping you had a cold case with a newer name.”

“You need it right now?”

“It's a hate crime.”

He nodded, wrote a note, and pushed it over by his phone. It was an old phone, the numbers rubbed off. “How was Oregon?” he asked.

“Washington.”

“Whatever. Now you're back. Working another civil rights case. Really moving up in the world.”

“I'm working a task force too.” I felt pride rising to my defense. And I felt stupid the moment the words left my mouth.

“Which task force?”

“Southside gangs.”

“I'm working that.” He frowned. “I haven't seen you at any briefings.”

“I just started. What's your connection to our task force?”

“Gangbangers create half my cold cases. Nail these guys, I might close twenty cases. Plus I've got the informant you Feds need.”

Richmond's cold cases numbered in the hundreds. The files were stored in dented metal file cabinets that stretched behind Detective Greene's desk. One of those files was my dad's unsolved murder and every time I walked in here, I tried to forget it. And failed.

“What part are you working?” he asked.

“Surveillance.”

“Whereabouts?”

I stared at the floor. It was the cheapest vinyl, scuffed. “Okay, I'm on the phones.”

“Man, she
really
doesn't like you,” he said, referring to Phaup.

I didn't trust my voice, or my words, so I didn't say anything.

“Okay, Klan info,” he said, changing the subject. “That it?”

“I also need a dictionary.”

“For what?”

“For what I hear on the phones.”

He pawed his mustache, considering the geometry of things. Finally he said, “You wind up in Poughkeepsie, leave me out of it.”

“Totally unofficial translation.”

“What don't you understand?”

“I heard something last night that sounded like a prayer. But it was twisted.”

“Did it go, ‘Now I lay me down to sleep, two shotguns folded at my feet'?”

I nodded.

“We think the local gang's getting recruited by a national group. Something called the Gangster Disciples. Thirty years ago some prison degenerate started lifting pieces of the Bible for his ‘book of rules.' Today it's run like a corporation and they pick up local gangs like franchises, do some kind of profit sharing. The locals funnel drugs into small towns and schools. You might hear stuff that sounds like Proverbs but believe me, it's not. And some stuff Gabriel said about respect and freedom.”

“Gabriel—the angel?”

“The slave. As in Gabriel's Rebellion?”

I shook my head.

“There was a slave named Gabriel Prosser. Back in the summer of 1800, he planned to attack Richmond, slaughtering every white man, woman, and child. But another slave ratted him out. They hanged him. But this gang worships him. Or they used to. Now it's all about cash. We think the money's coming from the Gangster Disciples, but we can't say for sure. Yet.”

“Drugs?”

He nodded. “My snitch buys from them. Who are you reporting to on the task force?”

Shame washed up my throat. Under normal circumstances, I'd report to the agent in charge of phone surveillance, who then reported to the agent in charge of the task force, a guy named Pollard Durant. Pollard reported to Phaup. Normal chain-of-command stuff.

“I report directly to Phaup. On everything.”

“That's some tight leash,” he said.

I feigned nonchalance. “I'll be fine.”

“Sure you will,” said the detective. “Eventually.”

chapter seven

O
n a cold Saturday morning in December, the monoliths that lined the streets of Washington, D.C., looked like Advent panels nobody would want to open. The frosty wind off the Atlantic Ocean tunneled down streets choked with dirt-caked yellow cabs that honked as black limos slithered past with darkened windows and diplomatic license plates.

I made my way through the maze of a declining capital and parked under the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, between Ninth and Tenth. After passing through security, I rode the employee elevator to the Materials Analysis Lab.

My old stomping grounds.

I felt a twinge of envy passing the lab's toys. X-ray defractor. Ion scanner. Mass spectrometer. At one time I thought it was the world's greatest job. Hunt for answers, plug in data, fight crime.

And minerals didn't have personality disorders.

At the far end of the lab a young woman waited for me. She wore a white lab coat with faded jeans and wool socks with Birkenstock sandals.

“You must be Annette.” I extended my hand.

“No. I'm Nettie,” she said. “Don't ever call me Annette.”

Her firm grip felt callused as a rock climber's. She had replaced my favorite colleague who retired while I was in Seattle. Last night she left a message on my cell phone. She had results for the cross-burning soil; she worked Saturdays.

“You said the soil was peculiar,” I said.

“No, I said there were two compounds within the soil that were peculiar.”

I smiled. She was exactly what you wanted in a lab tech. Not just accurate, but precise.

“Can you take me through it?”

Nettie Labelle pulled on safety goggles and rubber gloves and picked up a sterile syringe. My paint can containing the soil from Rapland sat on a steel table. She inserted the syringe's tip into a small puncture hole in the can's lid, drawing a sample of air, and turned to the large instrument set on the steel table. Its Plexiglas panel revealed an extended capillary tube. As she injected the syringe's invisible contents into the machine's capillary tube, I heard a starting gun go off in my head.

The great race of Gas Chromatography Mass Spectrometer.

“This is my fourth run on these volatiles,” she said. “Just so you know I didn't pull these results out of thin air, so to speak.”

“Four runs?”

“I thought something was wrong.”

Inside the instrument a small furnace heated the vapor within the capillary tube, exciting the compounds and breaking their bonds. As they separated into individual molecules, the smaller elements sprinted through the capillary tube, while the larger molecules lumbered for the finish line. Nettie pushed the safety goggles up on her forehead and keyed up the computer monitor.

Within moments colored bar graphs started rising and falling on the monitor, showing individual weights and speed of travel for each molecule. Call me a nerd; I loved how GCMS was like a track race with no names on the runners. Like being told there's a 119-pound female who does the hundred-yard dash in thirteen seconds. Your job was to figure out her name.

Back in the early days, we matched molecules by combing through chemistry textbooks. These days computers did all the work.

“That's what I'm talking about,” Nettie said as the mass spec painted its final graph, tossing names on the monitor. “The accelerant used to light that cross was mustard gas. And something called lewisite.”

“Mustard gas?” I leaned forward, staring at the results. “From what, World War I?”

But she was already walking back to her desk down the hall from the instrument room. The smallest forensics department in the lab, mineralogy was tucked into the building's north side. Nettie dropped into a swivel chair, stubbing her Birkenstock into the floor to pivot and reach under her desk, pulling out a folder.

“Mustard gas isn't even the most peculiar compound,” she said. “Wait until you meet lewisite.”

“Mineral?”

“Deadly chemical compound,” she said cheerfully. “All by itself, lewisite is nasty stuff. But add in some mustard gas and the toxicity goes off the charts. Whoever used these chemicals wanted to make sure that cross burned.”