The Zero Hour (4 page)

“Here you go,” Peter announced. “The body snatchers have come and gone. The ME on call is Rena Goldman. She looks like a resident, but she’s a real doc.”

“Where is she?”

“Over there, talking to your pal Herlihy.”

Valerie Santoro lay on her back, sprawled on her enormous bed. The black coverlet was encrusted with her dried blood. One hand was splayed back coyly as if beckoning one and all into her bed. Her hair was shoulder-length and dyed ash-blond; her lips bore traces of lipstick. Sarah felt her stomach lurch, looked quickly away. “Yeah,” she said, “that’s her. Okay?”

CHAPTER FOUR

In the small parking lot adjacent to a petrol station, the Prince of Darkness located the rented four-wheel-drive vehicle, a Toyota Double Cab with four seats, a canvas cover over the back, and a long-distance fuel tank. A tent was strapped on to the roof rack, and in the back were a gas stove and lamp, a change of clothes, and a pair of sunglasses. A sticker on the back identified the car’s owner as Imperial Car Rental of Cape Town. If anyone happened to stop him for any reason, he’d just be another poor fool on a camping tour of the desert.

He felt the hood. It was warm, which told him the car had not been here long. This was good.

Looking quickly around the lot, he assured himself that no one could see what he was doing. Then he knelt to the ground beside the Toyota’s door and felt underneath the frame until he came upon a smooth, newly soldered patch. Baumann pushed at it until the ignition key slid out from beneath the soldering.

A few blocks away he parked the car next to an international telephone box and removed a handful of one-rand coins from the glove box. He dialed a long series of numbers, fed the coins into the slot, and in twenty seconds had an international connection.

A man’s voice answered: “Greenstone Limited.”

“Customer service, please,” Baumann said.

“One moment, please.”

There was a pause, a few clicks, then a male voice said: “Customer service.”

“Do you ship by air?” Baumann asked.

“Yes, sir, depending on destination.”

“London.”

“Yes, sir, we do.”

“All right, thank you,” Baumann said. “I’ll call back with an order.”

He hung up the phone and returned to the Toyota.

It was almost dusk when he passed through Port Nolloth, on the Atlantic Coast. From there, he headed northwest. Asphalt-paved highways became gravel roads and then dirt paths, which ventured feebly across the parched savannah. A few kilometers down the road, a forlorn cluster of huts sprang up. Beside them nattered a scraggly herd of goats.

When he passed the last hut, he checked his odometer. After traveling exactly four and a half kilometers farther, he pulled to a stop and got out.

The sun was setting, immense and orange, but the air remained stiflingly, staggeringly hot. This was the Kalahari, the great sand veld thousands of kilometers broad. He had just crossed the South African border into Namibia.

The border between Namibia and South Africa is for the most part unmarked, unguarded, and unfenced. It bisects villages where tribes have lived for centuries, oblivious to the outside world. Crossing back and forth between South Africa and its neighbors—Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique—is simple. Thousands of Africans cross in either direction every day.

Wearing his dark sunglasses, Baumann stood beside the vehicle, drinking greedily from his flask of cold water and enjoying the eerie, otherworldly landscape: the cracked, dry riverbeds, the high ocher and russet sand dunes, the gray-green shrubs and the scrubby acacia bushes. The heat rippled up from the striated expanse of sand.

For ten minutes or so he enjoyed the silence, broken only by the high whistle of the wind. Mere hours ago he had been looking through a narrow, barred window at a miserly patch of sky, and now he was standing in the middle of an expanse so vast that, as far as he looked in any direction, he could see no signs of civilization. He had never doubted he would taste freedom again, but now that it was here, it was intoxicating.

The noise came first, almost imperceptibly, and then he could make out the tiny black dot in the sky. Slowly, slowly, the dot grew larger, and the noise crescendoed, until, with a deafening clatter, the helicopter hovered directly overhead.

It banked to one side, righted itself, then swooped down for a landing. The sand swirled around him in clouds, raining against the lenses of his sunglasses, stinging his eyes, bringing tears. He squinted, ran toward the unmarked chopper, and ducked down beneath the whirring blades as he approached the fuselage.

The pilot, in a drab-green flight jacket, gave him a brusque nod as he hopped in. Without a word, the pilot reached down to his left side and pulled up on the collective pitch control lever, which resembled the arm of an emergency brake. The helicopter rose straight up into the air.

Baumann put on the headphones to block out the sound and leaned back to enjoy the flight to Windhoek, the capital of Namibia and the site of the country’s only international airport.

Baumann had not gotten much sleep the night before, yet he was still alert. This was fortunate. For the next few hours he would need to remain vigilant.

CHAPTER FIVE

Valerie Santoro, call girl and entrepreneur, had been a beautiful woman. Even in death her body was voluptuous. She’d worked hard to maintain it for her clients. Her breasts were pert, too perfect: she’d obviously had silicone implants. Only the face was Sarah unable to look at: part of the forehead was missing. Dark blood was caked around the irregular-shaped chunk removed by the bullet at the point of exit. Inconsistent, Sarah knew, with suicide.

The pale-blue eyes looked challengingly at Sarah, regarding her with contemptuous disbelief. The lips, pale and devoid of lipstick, were slightly parted.

“Not a bad-looking babe,” Peter said. “Check out the bush.”

Her pubic hair had been shaved into the shape of a Mercedes-Benz emblem, a perfect, painstaking replica. Who had done this for her?

“Classy chick, huh? The snitch’s snatch.”

Sarah did not answer.

“What’s the matter, lost your sense of humor?”

The photographer from the ID unit was hard at work with his Pentax 645, snapping still photos of the crime scene and the body “in cadence,” as they call it—in sequence, in a grid, providing a photographic record designed to anticipate all of a jury’s questions. Every few seconds some part of her—her right cheek; her left hand, loosely curled into a fist; a perfectly oval breast—was illuminated by the camera’s lightning.

“What was the name of that call-girl service she worked for again?”

“Stardust Escort Service,” Sarah replied distantly. “The poshest call-girl business in Boston.”

“She used to brag she was doing the mayor, or the governor, or was it Senator—”

“She had an impressive clientele,” Sarah agreed. “Let’s leave it at that.”

“Ah, yes.” Peter laughed mordantly. “Eat like an elephant, shit like a bird.” It was the old police refrain: the FBI always asks questions, sucks up information, never gives it out.

In truth, Sarah owed her ex-husband a debt of gratitude for putting her in touch with Valerie Santoro, who’d turned out to be a valuable FBI informant. About a year and a half ago, Peter had mentioned a call girl he knew named Valerie Santoro, who’d been hauled in on a drug bust and “jammed up” by the locals, and wanted to deal.

Prostitutes, because of their unique access, make good FBI informants. But you always have to be careful with them; you can never direct them to commit prostitution, or the case is blown. Everything must be done subtly, many things left unsaid.

Sarah had invited her to lunch at the Polynesian Room, a horrifying pink shrine to bad taste on Boylston Street. Val’s choice. The restaurant’s interior was blindingly pink and scarlet red, decorated with golden dragons and fake-oriental gargoyles. Some of the booths were upholstered in early 1960s red leatherette. Val preferred to sit at one of the straw booths fashioned in the shape of a sampan. Here and there were potted, dried palms spray-painted green.

She was five foot eight, had honey-blond hair, long legs. She ordered a White Russian and the Pu Pu Platter. “I may be good for nothing,” she said, “but I’m never bad for nothing.” She had a client who owned a lounge in Chelsea that was used for drug-trafficking and money-laundering. She figured Sarah might be interested. Another client of hers, one of the highest elected officials in Massachusetts state politics, had mob ties.

So a deal was struck. Following standard procedure, Sarah drafted a memo to get Valerie Santoro into the Bureau’s informant bank, requested an informant number and a separate file number. This was a system devised to keep the informant’s identity confidential and yet ensure she got paid.

Valerie heard enough gossip—enough boasting from the men she serviced, who needed to impress her—to allow Sarah to wrap up several major organized-crime cases. She’d been worth all the White Russians the government had ever bought her.

Running an informant, Sarah had been told by a potbellied good-old-boy supervisor in her first office, in Jackson, Mississippi, is like having a mistress on the side: she’s always giving you trouble, always wanting something. Never put them on retainer, or they’ll spin, invent information, keep you on a string. They bring in a nugget, it’s evaluated, and then they get their chunky nut.

At Quantico they gave lectures on running informants, on what motivates them (money, greed, a desire for revenge, even once in a blue moon a flash of conscience), on how to develop your relationship with them. Unlike local law-enforcement agencies, which are perennially strapped for cash, the FBI has plenty of money to dispense for informants. You’d get as much as five thousand dollars to “open” an informant, more if you were courting a major player. You were encouraged not to be stingy. The more generous you were with the cash, the more dependent upon you the informant became.

You were warned about how tangled the relationship inevitably became. You became a proxy authority figure, a parent or a sibling, an adviser. By the end of the relationship, it was like a love affair gone sour. You wanted to throw them away, never see them again. Yet you had to wean them, or they’d keep calling.

Most of all you had to protect your informants. They placed their lives in your hands; the game you were inducing them to play was often dangerous.

*   *   *

Sarah snapped on a pair of latex gloves. “Was there forced entry?”

“No sign of it.”

“But you printed the door anyway.”

“Sure.”

The photographer, snapping away, called out to Peter: “You check out the hood ornament?”

“Classy broad, huh?” Peter replied.

“Place doesn’t look ransacked,” Sarah said. “Probably not a burglary. Any neighbor report the gunshot?”

“No. A friend of hers called 911, reported her missing, didn’t give a name. District office determined she lived alone, got the key from the apartment building supervisor. Who, by the way, wasn’t exactly grief-stricken about this. Wanted her out of the building.”

“Well, now he’s got what he wants,” Sarah said with a grim half-smile. “Where’s the ME—what’s her name, Rena something?”

“Rena Goldman.” Peter beckoned to a woman in her early forties, with long gray hair, horn-rimmed glasses, a long, pale face, no makeup. She wore a white lab coat. She and Sarah, both wearing surgical gloves, shook hands.

“Do we know anything about time of death?” Sarah asked the medical examiner.

“Lividity is fixed, so it’s at least eight hours, and she hasn’t been moved,” Rena Goldman said. She consulted a small, dog-eared spiral notebook. “No evidence of decomposition, but there wouldn’t be any in this cool weather. She’s out of rigor, so it’s got to be at least, say, twenty-four hours.”

“Semen?”

“I don’t see any, not at first glance anyway. I can tell you for certain in a couple of hours.”

“No, there probably won’t be any,” Sarah said.

“Why not?” Peter said.

“Apart from the fact that Val always, but always, made her clients use condoms—”

He interrupted: “But if it was a rape—”

“No signs of that,” the medical examiner said.

“No,” Sarah echoed. “And it sure wasn’t a client.”

“Oh, come on,” Peter objected. “How the hell can you say that?”

With a slightly chewed Blackwing pencil, Sarah pointed to a folded pair of glasses on the bedside end table. The frames were heavy and black and geeky.

“She told me she never saw clients at her apartment. And she wasn’t wearing these when she was killed. They’re too ugly to wear regularly—I certainly never saw her in them. She wore contacts, but you can see she didn’t have them in, either.”

“That’s right, now that you mention it,” Rena Goldman said.

“Of course, it
may
have been a disgruntled client who tracked her down at home,” Sarah said. “But she wasn’t on a business call. She fought, didn’t she?”

“Oh, yeah. Defense wounds on the body. Contusions on the arm, probably from warding off blows.” Goldman leaned toward the body and pointed a thin index finger at Valerie’s head. “Wound across the face. A curved laceration about half an inch wide, with diffuse abrasion and contusion approximately one inch around, extending from the temple to the zygoma.”

“All right,” Sarah said. “What about the gunshot?”

“Typical contact gunshot wound,” Peter said.

Rena Goldman nodded and tucked a wisp of gray hair behind one ear.

“The hair’s singed,” Peter said. “Probably a big gun, wasn’t it?”

“I’d guess a .357,” the medical examiner said, “but that’s just a guess. Also, there’s stippling.” She was referring to fragments of gunpowder embedded around the point of entry, indicating that the gun was fired at close range.

Sarah suddenly felt nauseated and was relieved that she had no more questions to ask. “Thanks,” she said.

Rena Goldman nodded awkwardly, turned, and drifted away.

In the “efficiency” kitchen area a few feet away, a handsome young black man, attired in a double-breasted Italian blue blazer and foulard tie, gingerly placed an empty beer can into a paper evidence bag. Peter’s partner, Sergeant Theodore Williams, was the best-dressed cop on the force. A few years younger than Peter but unquestionably the better homicide investigator.