The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (103 page)

“And don’t let anyone near this scene unless I give the o.k.,” Bryce said.

“How come this guy’s in charge?” the talkative beat cop asked O’Reilly.

O’Reilly grinned. “Because he’s a feebee.”

“I’m sorry,” the beat cop said automatically turning to Bryce. “I didn’t know, sir.”

Feebee was an insult – or at least some in the Bureau thought so. Bryce didn’t mind it. Any more than he minded when some rookie said “Sack” when he meant “Ess-Ay-Cee.” Shorthand worked, sometimes better than people wanted it to.

“Point me in the right direction,” he said to the talkative cop.

The cop nodded south. “One block down, sir. You can’t miss it. We got guys on those scenes too, but we weren’t so sure it was important. You know. We coulda missed stuff.”

In other words, they hadn’t buttoned up the scene immediately. They’d waited for the coroner to make his verdict, and he probably hadn’t, not with the three new corpses nearby.

Bryce took one last look at James Crawford. The man had rolled down his window, despite the cold, and in a bad section of town.

He leaned forward. Underneath the faint scent of cordite and mingled with the thicker smell of blood was the smell of a cigar.

He took the flashlight from O’Reilly and trained it on the dirty snow against the curb. It had been trampled by everyone coming to this crime scene.

He crouched, and poked just a little, finding three fairly fresh cigarette butts.

As he stood, he said to the beat cops, “When the scene of the crime guys get here, make sure they take everything from the curb.”

O’Reilly was watching him. The beat cops were frowning, but they nodded.

Bryce handed O’Reilly back his flashlight and headed down the street.

“You think he was smoking and tossing the butts out the window?” O’Reilly asked.

“Either that,” Bryce said, “or he rolled his window down to talk to someone. And if someone was pointing a gun at him, he wouldn’t have done it. This vehicle was armored. He had a better chance starting it up and driving away than he did cooperating.”

“If he wasn’t smoking,” O’Reilly said, “he knew his killer.”

“Yeah,” Bryce said. And he was pretty sure that was going to make his job a whole hell of a lot harder.

Kennedy took the elevator up to the fifth floor of the Justice Department. He probably should have stayed home, but he simply couldn’t. He needed to get into those files and he needed to do so before anyone else.

As he strode into the corridor he shared with the Director of the FBI, he saw Helen Gandy hurry in the other direction. She looked like she had just come from the beauty salon. He had never seen her look anything less than completely put together but he was surprised by her perfect appearance on this night, after the news that her longtime boss was dead.

Kennedy tugged at the overcoat he’d put on over his favorite sweater. He hadn’t taken the time to change or even comb his hair. He probably looked as tousled as he had in the days after Jack died.

Although, for the first time in three months, he felt like he had a purpose. He didn’t know how long this feeling would last, or how long he wanted it to. But this death had given him an odd kind of hope that control was coming back into his world.

Haskell stood in front of the Director’s office suite, arms crossed. The Director’s suite was just down the corridor from the Attorney General’s offices. It felt odd to go toward Hoover’s domain instead of his own.

Haskell looked relieved when he saw Kennedy.

“Was that the dragon lady I just saw?” Kennedy asked.

“She wanted to get some personal effects from her office,” Haskell said.

“Did you let her?”

“You said the orders were to secure it, so I have.”

“Excellent.” Kennedy glanced in both directions and saw no one. “Make sure your staff continues to protect the doors. I’m going inside.”

“Sir?” Haskell raised his eyebrows.

“This may not be the right place,” Kennedy said. “I’m worried that he moved everything to his house.”

The lie came easily. Kennedy would have heard if Hoover had moved files to his own home. But Haskell didn’t know that.

Haskell moved away from the door. It was unlocked. Two more agents stood inside, guarding the interior doors.

“Give me a minute, please, gentlemen,” Kennedy said.

The men nodded and went outside.

Kennedy stopped and took a deep breath. He had been in Miss Gandy’s office countless times, but he had never really looked at it. He’d always been staring at the door to Hoover’s inner sanctum, waiting for it to open and the old man to come out.

That office was interesting. In the antechamber, Hoover had memorabilia and photographs from his major cases. He even had the plaster-of-paris death mask of John Dillinger on display. It was a ghastly thing, which made Kennedy think of the way that English kings used to keep severed heads on the entrance to London Bridge to warn traitors of their potential fate.

But this office had always looked like a waiting room to him. Nothing very special. The woman behind the desk was the focal point. Jack had been the one who nicknamed her the dragon lady and had even called her that to her face once, only with his trademark grin, so infectious that she hadn’t made a sound or a grimace in protest.

Of course, she hadn’t smiled back either.

Her desk was clear except for a blotter, a telephone, and ajar of pens. A typewriter sat on a credenza with paper stacked beside it.

But it wasn’t the desk that interested him the most. It was the floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets and storage bins. He walked to them. Instead of the typical system – marked by letters of the alphabet – this one had numbers that were clearly part of a code.

He pulled open the nearest drawer, and found row after row of accordion files, each with its own number, and manila folders with the first number set followed by another. He cursed softly under his breath.

Of course the old dog wouldn’t file his confidentials by name. He’d use a secret code. The old man liked nothing more than his secrets.

Still, Kennedy opened half a dozen drawers just to see if the system continued throughout. And it wasn’t until he got to a bin near the corner of the desk that he found a file labeled “Obscene.”

His hand shook as he pulled it out. Jack, for all his brilliance, had been sexually insatiable. Back when their brother Joe was still alive and no one ever thought Jack would be running for president, Jack had had an affair with a Danish émigré named Inga Arvad. Inga Binga, as Jack used to call her, was married to a man with ties to Hitler. She’d even met and liked Der Führer, and had said so in print.

She’d been the target of FBI surveillance as a possible spy, and during that surveillance who should turn up in her bed but a young naval lieutentant whose father had once been Ambassador to England. The Ambassador, as he preferred to be called even by his sons, found out about the affair, told Jack in no uncertain terms to end it, and then to make sure he did got him assigned to a PT boat in the Pacific, as far from Inga Binga as possible.

Kennedy had always suspected that Hoover had leaked the information to the Ambassador, but he hadn’t known for certain until Jack became president when Hoover told them. Hoover had been surveilling all of the Kennedy children at the Ambassador’s request. He’d given Kennedy a list of scandalous items as a sample, and hoped that would control the President and his brother.

It might have controlled Jack, but Hoover hadn’t known Kennedy very well. Kennedy had told Hoover that if any of this information made it into the press, then other things would appear in print as well, things like the strange FBI budget items for payments covering Hoover’s visits to the track or the fact that Hoover made some interesting friends, mobster friends, when he was vacationing in Palm Beach.

It wasn’t quite a Mexican stand-off – Jack was really afraid of the old man – but it gave Kennedy more power than any attorney general had had over Hoover since the beginnings of the Roosevelt administration.

But now Kennedy needed those files, and he had a hunch Hoover would label them obscene.

Kennedy opened the file, and was shocked to see Richard Nixon’s name on the sheets inside. Kennedy thumbed through quickly, not caring what dirt they’d found on that loser. Nixon couldn’t win an election after his defeat in 1960. He’d even told the press after he lost a California race that they wouldn’t have him to kick around any more.

Yet Hoover had kept the files, just to be safe.

That old bastard really and truly had known where all the bodies were buried. And it wouldn’t be easy to find them.

Kennedy took a deep breath. He stood, shoved his hands in his pockets, and surveyed the walls of files. It would take days to search each folder. He didn’t have days. He probably didn’t have hours.

But he was Hoover’s immediate supervisor, whether the old man had recognized it or not. Hoover answered to him. Which meant that the files belonged to the Justice Department, of which the FBI was only one small part.

He glanced at his watch. No one pounded on the door. He probably had until dawn before someone tried to stop him. If he was really lucky, no one would think of the files until mid-morning.

He went to the door and beckoned Haskell inside.

“We’re taking the files to my office,” he said.

“All of them, sir?”

“All of them. These first, then whatever is in Hoover’s office, and then any other confidential files you can find.”

Haskell looked up the wall as if he couldn’t believe the command. “That’ll take some time, sir.”

“Not if you get a lot of people to help.”

“Sir, I thought you wanted to keep this secret.”

He did. But it wouldn’t remain secret for long. So he had to control when the information got out – just like he had to control the information itself.

“Get this done as quickly as possible,” he said.

Haskell nodded and turned the doorknob, but Kennedy stopped him before he went out.

“These are filed by code,” he said. “Do you know where the key is?”

“I was told that Miss Gandy had the keys to everything from codes to offices,” Haskell said.

Kennedy felt a shiver run through him. Knowing Hoover, he would have made sure he had the key to the Attorney General’s office as well.

“Do you have any idea where she might have kept the code keys?” Kennedy asked.

“No,” Haskell said. “I wasn’t part of the need-to-know group. I already knew too much.”

Kennedy nodded. He appreciated how much Haskell knew. It had gotten him this far.

“On your way out,” Kennedy said, “call building maintenance and have them change all the locks in my office.”

“Yes, sir.” Haskell kept his hand on the doorknob. “Are you sure you want to do this, sir? Couldn’t you just change the locks here? Wouldn’t that secure everything for the President?”

“Everyone in Washington wants these files,” Kennedy said. “They’re going to come to this office suite. They won’t think of mine.”

“Until they heard that you moved everything.”

Kennedy nodded. “And then they’ll know how futile their quest really is.”

The final crime scene was a mess. The bodies were already gone – probably inside the coroner’s van that blocked the alley a few blocks back. It had taken Bryce nearly a half an hour to find someone who knew what the scene had looked like when the police had first arrived.

That someone was Officer Ralph Voight. He was tall and trim, with a pristine uniform despite the fact that he’d been on duty all night.

O’Reilly was the one who convinced him to talk with Bryce. Voight was the first to show the traditional animosity between the NYPD and the FBI, but that was because Voight didn’t know who had died only a few blocks away.

Bryce had Voight walk him through the crime scene. The buildings on this street were boarded up, and the lights burned out. Broken glass littered the sidewalk – and it hadn’t come from this particular crime. Rusted beer cans, half buried in the ice piles, cluttered each stoop like passed-out drunks.

“Okay,” Voight said, using his flashlight as a pointer, “we come up on these two cars first.”

The two sedans were parked against the curb, one behind the other. The sedans were too nice for the neighbourhood – new, black, without a dent. Bryce recognized them as FBI issue – he had access to a sedan like that himself when he needed it.

He patted his pocket, was disgusted to realize he’d left his notebook at the apartment, and turned to O’Reilly. “You got paper? I need those plates.”

O’Reilly nodded. He pulled out a notebook and wrote down the plate numbers.

“They just looked wrong,” Voight was saying. “So we stopped, figuring maybe someone needed assistance.”

He pointed the flashlight across the street. The squad had stopped directly across from the two cars.

“That’s when we seen the first body.”

He walked them to the middle of the street. This part of the city hadn’t been plowed regularly and a layer of ice had built over the pavement. A large pool of blood had melted through that ice, leaving its edges reddish black and revealing the pavement below.

“The guy was face down, hands out like he’d tried to catch himself.”

“Face gone?” Bryce asked, thinking maybe it was a head shot like the others.

“No. Turns out he was shot in the back.”

Bryce glanced at O’Reilly, whose lips had thinned. This one was different. Because it was the first? Or because it was unrelated?

“We pull our weapons, scan to see if we see anyone else, which we don’t. The door’s open on the first sedan, but we didn’t see anyone in the dome light. And we didn’t see anyone obvious on the street, but it’s really dark here and the flashlights don’t reach far.” Voight turned his light toward the block with the parked limousine, but neither the car nor the sidewalk was visible from this distance.

“So we go to the cars, careful now, and find the other body right there.”

He flashed his light on the curb beside the door to the first sedan.

“This one’s on his back and the door is open. We figure he was getting out when he got plugged. Then the other guy – maybe he was outside his car trying to help this guy with I don’t know what, some car trouble or something, then his buddy gets hit, so he runs for cover across the street and gets nailed. End of story.”