Bombshell (AN FBI THRILLER) (4 page)

Delsey tried to sit up but couldn’t manage it. She held out her hand. “Anna, I’m okay.”

Griffin was up, his hand on his gun. “How did you get in here? Anna who? Who are you?”

“Griffin, it’s all right. This is Anna, a great violinist and my best friend.”

Griffin eyed the woman bundled up in a bright green ski jacket and wearing black knee boots over tight black jeans. He saw she was staring at his hand resting on the SIG clipped to his belt. He started to back off a bit, but then she walked up to him and smiled, her hand out. “I know you’ve got to be Delsey’s brother, since the two of you look like mirrors of each other. I’m Anna Castle, and like she told you, I’m her best friend. You’re the FBI agent, right?”

He nodded, never taking his eyes off her face. Dark, dark eyes, nearly black, and that voice of hers dripped as slow and smooth and rich as the syrup he’d poured over his waffles at Jenny’s.

“Yes, I’m FBI Agent Griffin Hammersmith, Delsey’s brother. It appears you already know Ruth.”

“Hi, Ruth. I think Delsey might be safe now, with two cops standin’ over her bed.” She stepped around him, and lightly laid her palm against Delsey’s white cheek. “Sweetie, you don’t look so hot. Can you tell me what happened?”

Griffin said, “There was a guard already outside her room when I came back in. How’d you get past him?”

Anna Castle turned, smiled at him. “Everybody eats at Maurie’s Diner. Do you know, Ruth, that Deputy Claus likes mayonnaise on his hamburgers?”

Delsey said, “Griffin, it’s okay, really, everybody knows and likes Anna.”

Anna looked at Griffin. “May I speak to your sister?”

“Don’t make her laugh,” he said. “It might bust her head open.”

“That might be tough,” Delsey said. “Anna’s funny.”

“Okay, sweetie, here’s the deal,” Anna said. “Rumors are flyin’ all over town ever since Henry started talkin’ to people at the diner about how you were naked and the paramedics were all guys, about how there was blood in your bathtub and someone bein’ there with you. That’s only one of them, admittedly the most interestin’. Believe me, everybody was wild to hear the details. You never mentioned a lover. You didn’t pick one up without tellin’ me, did you?”

Delsey laughed, squeezed her eyes shut at the shaft of pain slicing through her head. “You weren’t supposed to be funny, Anna.”

“I’m sorry. Here, this will help.” Anna smoothed out a dampened hand towel and lightly laid it on Delsey’s forehead. She leaned close. “That better?”

“Yeah, it is. Now, listen, I may have picked up a lover last night for all I know. I don’t remember. It’s like hitting a blank wall. Why did Henry come down to my apartment?”

“He said it was really late and he was hearin’ bumps and bangs, and then he heard you scream so he called 911. He stitched up his courage and went in your place and found you on your bathroom floor, lyin’ naked—he always lowers his voice and whispers it.” She shrugged, smiling. “You know Henry.”

She turned to Griffin. “I’m very glad you’re here. Your timin’ in Maestro is like a miracle. You guys have different last names. Why?”

“She married a loser crook, kicked him to the curb, but kept his last name because she said it made the muses of music swarm into her head. Delsey said you play the violin?”

“Actually, since I grew up in the Louisiana boondocks, bayou country, I played the fiddle first. I could still make you want to polka until you fall in a heap and shout yourself hoarse.” She turned back to Delsey. “You need to get your brain back together and tell us what happened. Exactly.”

West Potomac Park

The Lincoln Memorial

Washington, D.C.

Saturday morning

“Keep everyone back!” Metro Detective Ben Raven yelled to the three WPD officers as he knelt beside Savich at the broken body of a young man. It was hard to tell how long he’d been dead because he was frozen stiff. There was a small black halo of frozen blood around his smashed head. Did that mean he hadn’t died here?

It wasn’t ten o’clock yet and had been snowing hard since early that morning, so there was barely a trickle of traffic. Yet there were already at least twenty gawkers bundled up in their coats looking in on them, attracted by the yellow crime tape and all the police activity.

Ben told Savich a Park Service employee had found the body only an hour before and called 911. When Ben had realized the body was on federal land, he’d gotten hold of Savich as he was babying his Porsche through the ice-covered streets from Georgetown to the Hoover Building.

Savich looked up at the solitary figure of Abraham Lincoln, felt a familiar awe and sadness for the man, wondering as he often did whether Lincoln would have managed to bring the country together again if he hadn’t been assassinated. Savich looked away from the nineteen-foot marble statue and back down at the frozen, broken body. He was a boy, really, no more than twenty, Savich thought, lying close to Lincoln’s statue, one frozen arm flung out toward Lincoln’s chair. Savich knelt down beside him. Why was he naked? Why had his killer added this indignity? Savich found himself studying what remained of his young face. There was something about him that looked familiar. Who was he?

“No ID anywhere around him?” Savich asked.

Ben Raven shook his head. “Nothing, no clothes, no nothing at all.”

His arms and legs were sprawled at odd angles, as if he’d been thrown or fallen from a great height. Savich looked up sixty feet to the grilled ceiling. “We’ve got to check with the Park Service, see about access.” Had someone managed to haul the young man up sixty feet and throw him from the ceiling above Lincoln’s head? He didn’t see anything broken or unusual about the grills.

“Ben, does he look familiar to you?”

Detective Ben Raven studied the face. “Hard to tell, he’s so messed up.” He looked up quickly, said in a sharp voice, hard and clear as glass, “Hey, buddy, back off. No photos. This is a crime scene.”

Savich wondered how many photos had already been snapped with cell phones or even with zoom lenses and uploaded to YouTube and Facebook, emailed to friends and family and
The National Enquirer
. Crime scenes in living color were everywhere now. It made their jobs harder.

“Ben,” Savich said, “look again.”

Ben again studied the young man’s face. “No, I don’t recognize him. I’ve got to say he wasn’t dressed for the weather. Looks to me like most every bone in his body is broken. You think he was thrown from up there?” He jerked his head upward.

They both turned when the four-person FBI forensic team came up the steps of the memorial, with them Dr. Ambrose Hardy, the FBI medical examiner from Quantico.

Hardy was as skinny as his favorite fishing pole, his face covered with a thick black beard, like some underfed mountain man. The few patches of gray in his beard added to the effect.

“Savich,” Dr. Hardy said, not looking at him but down at the frozen body. “Not something I like to see on a beautiful Saturday morning.” He knelt down beside the boy.

“Hey, Dillon, you look both hot and cold. Isn’t it sad how that works?” He grinned up at Ms. Mary Lou Tyler, supervisor of the FBI forensic team. She was tough and smart, and though she was his mom’s age, she was still a seasoned flirt. She knelt down beside Dr. Hardy. “Geez, this isn’t how I planned to spend my Saturday morning, either, Ambrose.”

“None of us did,” Savich said, turned, and saw Sherlock running up the steps toward him. He said, “Ben, do you want to be in on this?”

Ben looked back at the thin shattered body. “Yeah,” he said, “I do. Let me take you to the guy who found him. He’s a longtime employee of the Park Service, name’s Danny Franks. I told one of my guys to keep him warm in his squad car.”

Sherlock had her creds out so the cops in her path parted easily as she walked quickly to Savich and went down on her knees beside Mary Lou Tyler and Dr. Hardy. The two women spoke quietly. Savich watched her take in her surroundings, carefully, completely. It was her special gift, a kind of magic that happened when she re-created a crime scene in her mind. Sherlock said, “This was staged for effect, to focus public attention. Leaving him in front of Lincoln is a touch of drama to serve that purpose. A good choice, really.

“He was dead when his killer tossed him down here. You already realized there’s not enough blood with all his injuries for him to have died here.” She looked up. “So how could this work? I can’t see the killer climbing up access stairs sixty feet up, the boy over his shoulder. It had to be somewhere else. Actually, I doubt there’s any access to the ceiling.”

Dr. Hardy said, “I agree these look like massive deceleration injuries, Sherlock, such as a fall from several stories.”

Sherlock rose and dusted off her hands on her pants. “Yeah, but not here, which means the killer carried him here, to this public stage, where he arranged him just so.” She stared silently down at the broken body. “He’s so young. This is such a waste, such a horrible, needless waste.” She shivered, tucked a hank of curly hair back beneath her wool cap. “Dr. Hardy, can you tell us anything else about him?”

“Not a great deal. I’d say he was placed here within the last twelve hours; that’s as close as I can get since he’s frozen. He was alive when he suffered the visible injuries to his face and head. We’ll know at autopsy whether any of his other injuries were postmortem. I’ll have more for you this afternoon.”

She said, “Thank you, Dr. Hardy. We’ll leave him to you, then. Ben, let’s go see Danny Franks.”

As they carefully made their way through the heavy snow down the steps of the memorial, Savich asked her, “Sean’s okay?”

“Sean’s well occupied with Simon and Lilly. Computer games and popcorn at your sister’s house.” Sherlock shivered. “It’s cold, Dillon; it’s so very cold. What kind of monster would do this? And why?”

Savich said, “A monster wanting to make a statement, though it’s not clear what it is. Picking the Lincoln Memorial was a sure way to make the international news very fast.”

Sherlock said to Ben Raven, “I’ll bet you Callie is already getting photos emailed to her at
The Washington Post
. I see the newspeople are setting up already.”

Ben said, “I got a call from my wife a few minutes ago about the email she got along with a grainy photo shot from the sidewalk—impossible to see anything clearly through the snow. She wanted to know what was happening. Of course I couldn’t tell her.” He grinned. “It doesn’t keep her from hammering at me, though.” He looked up at the fat white flakes pelting down thick from the steel-gray clouds. “We’ll find out who our victim is soon enough, no doubt about that.” He paused, looked out over the Reflecting Pool. “Why are the weatherpeople always right when it comes to predicting the bad stuff?”

Savich looked one last time over his shoulder through the falling snow at the statue of Lincoln. What kind of statement did this horrific act mean to send? Would they be hearing from this killer again? Soon? He saw the media had arrived en masse despite the weather, newscasters speaking urgently into microphones as they stood on steps that began at the edge of the Reflecting Pool, probably leading off by describing the Lincoln Memorial with its thirty-six Doric columns and what it means to all of us. What else would they have to talk about until they learned something about the dead young man up there?

Ben eyed all the reporters. “Don’t let it slip your mind, Savich, that we’re standing on federal land, and that means you’re in charge. And these guys are all yours.” He gave Savich a huge grin and slithered off into a crowd of WPD officers.

Savich manned up and spoke to the reporters. It was nice to tell them he didn’t know a thing yet, and not lie.

Lincoln Memorial

“Makes me sick,” Danny Franks said to Savich and Sherlock as they sat beside him in the Metro squad car. “Awful thing. I haven’t ever seen anything like that, I mean, this poor young guy, frozen dead, and he looked like someone beat him to pieces.” Franks’s voice shook, and he sucked in a deep breath, and focused his eyes on Sherlock’s face. She’d pulled off her wool cap, sending a riot of red hair around her face. Mr. Franks didn’t seem to be able to pull his eyes away from her hair. “I mean,” Mr. Franks continued, “you see dead bodies all the time on TV, even see them medical examiners cutting them open, showing bloody organs, whatever, but it isn’t real, you know it isn’t real.”

Danny looked back up to the memorial. “That young man was so young, barely starting his life.”

“I know what a shock it was, Mr. Franks,” Sherlock said, squeezing his gloved hand in hers. Even if she’d found his outpourings fascinating, she had to bring him back on track. “We need your help, sir. You seem like an insightful person, very visual. Can you tell us what you saw when you found the body?”

“My wife always says I’m clueless, thick as a brick. It’s good to know an FBI agent thinks she’s wrong. I already told a bunch of cops everything, but I know you’re federal, so if the U.S. government wants to have another go, it’s all right with me.” He gave her a big smile. “You guys are at the top of the cop food chain.”

Sherlock grinned back at him. “Start at the beginning, Mr. Franks, if you would.”

He nodded. “It was almost nine o’clock when I climbed all those steps . . . Geez”—he looked down at his watch—“that was less than two hours ago. I didn’t see him at first. I was whistling ‘Yesterday,’ you know, the Beatles? Anyways, I was making sure everything looked like it’s supposed to when I nearly stepped on him.” He swallowed. “I really did nearly step on him. I looked down and couldn’t believe it.
It’s a dead kid
was all I could think, and someone took all his clothes and left him lying beside Lincoln and he’s frozen stiff.”

“Did you see anyone?”

“Not a soul; no one was out yet in this miserable weather. It was real cold, I was huffing my breath into my gloves to keep my pipes from freezing up, and like I said, I nearly stumbled over him.”

Sherlock squeezed Franks’s hand again, kept all her attention on his ruddy face, seamed from years in the sun. He looked nearly sixty, a steady man, straightforward, and he was badly shaken. “It’s all right, Mr. Franks. Take your time.”

“Okay. Like I said, there wasn’t anybody around except for the one guy I saw standing by himself by the Reflecting Pool, looking down at the water. I wondered if the guy was nuts. I mean, why stand there and freeze? I was thinking he wouldn’t want to come trudging up here, not with the wind howling all around the columns and the blowing snow.

“As soon as I saw the kid, I called 911. It took a good five minutes for a couple of squad cars to arrive. I think the squad car we’re in is one of them. Glad they’ve got the heat cranked up. The officers came running up and we all stood around the kid—the body. Nobody could believe it. I mean, the cops weren’t as shocked as I was, but they were surprised, I could tell. One of them said to the other, ‘Call Detective Raven, he’s on.’ And so they did. In twenty minutes or thereabouts, here comes this big young guy, and he looks down at the body and says, ‘Federal land, FBI,’ and he called you guys, then sent his men to interview anyone they could find.”

“So it wasn’t long until people started coming up to the memorial?”

“Folks seem to sniff out when something bad’s happened. I’m sure you know that. They came by ones and twos, and the worst part of it was all of them wanted to rush in and freak themselves out. The cops pulled out crime scene tape, bright yellow, like on TV.

“There were about twenty people, all yapping to beat the band, wanted to know what was going on, and they were snapping photos like you wouldn’t believe, until the cops managed to get them away again. I don’t know if they got any of the kid, though. I sure hope not. You think about his mama seeing her son like that—”

Savich kept his voice slow and calm. “You said you saw a man standing by the Reflecting Pool, Mr. Franks. Did you see anyone else nearby? Anyone hurrying away? Running?”

“No, only that one guy standing by the Reflecting Pool. Like I said, I remember wondering why he was here, I mean, you could freeze your eyeballs early this morning.”

Savich said, “Can you describe him, Mr. Franks?”

“He was all bundled up in a dark blue parka with the furred hood pulled up, nearly covered his face. I couldn’t tell if he was fat or thin, he just looked bulky. I was too far away to even guess how tall or short he was, sorry. I’d guess he wasn’t exactly fat; he gave me the impression he was strong, big, but I could be wrong.”

Sherlock said, “Did you see this man anytime later? Could he still be here?”

“No, and I’ve looked for him. Haven’t seen him anywhere since before the cops arrived.”

Sherlock said, “Mr. Franks, when repairs are needed, how do you access the area above the ceiling in the central chamber where Lincoln is sitting?”

“You don’t; there’s no access. If anything needs attention they’ve got to bring in those really big extension ladders, or put up scaffolding.”

Savich said, “Did you look at the boy, Mr. Franks? At his face?”

Danny Franks lowered his own face to his hands, both his hands still clutching Sherlock’s. “Yeah, I couldn’t help myself. I looked at him good.”

“Mr. Franks, did you think the young man looked familiar?”

Mr. Franks shook his head. “His face was such a mess, I don’t have a clue who he is.”

•   •   •

T
WO HOURS LATER,
Savich and Sherlock were at the Hoover Building when Palmer Cronin, the retired former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, called the FBI to identify the dead boy as his grandson, Tommy Cronin, still on his winter break from Magdalene College. His grandmother had made out her grandson’s white frozen face in a photograph picked up by an Internet news site. Someone had posted it on YouTube.