Cam - 03 - The Moonpool (4 page)

I’d switched to Scotch and was trying not to think about anything while Mary Ellen excused herself and went into the bathroom. Then she was back.

“Ready?” she asked brightly, interrupting my mental drift.

I cowered behind my napkin and tried not to squeak. “Ready?”

“I am
so
glad you called,” she said, that bright stare back in play. “But it’s been a
long
dry spell, and, well, you know. Night’s young, yes?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. Not exactly a squeak, but not entirely authoritative, either. Bad guys would not have been impressed.

She gave me a mock look of impatience. “This is a Hilton—the bathtub in there is a hot tub.”

I hadn’t noticed. I’d been distracted. Now she was slipping out of that useless robe, and I was even more distracted. The cold air did amazing things to her superstructure. I waited for sounds of ships colliding out there on the Cape Fear River.

“Tub will take five more minutes,” she announced. “Why don’t you get us some champagne.”

With that she pranced across the balcony and into the living room, heading in the direction of the bathroom. I sat back in my chair and wondered if I could get oxygen with that.

The new and much improved Mary Ellen decamped the next morning at eight, still smiling. I thought about getting up and going for a walk around the tourist district. Getting up I could manage. Walking was out of the question. I went back to sleep instead. A phone call from Bernie Price woke me up around ten.

“We have developments,” he said.

“Developments are good,” I said, wiggling my toes to make sure they’d still work.

“Not always,” he said mysteriously. “I’ll be down to get you in twenty minutes.”

“Make it thirty,” I said.

“What—you hungover?”

“No, just a long night.”

“Lucky you.” He laughed.

“You have no idea,” I said.

This time he drove us to the New Hanover County medical examiner’s offices. The ME himself was not available, and since he hadn’t been willing to tell Price what the developments were over the telephone, we remained in the mushroom mode while they rustled up a substitute.

Price had given me a long once-over when I got into his unmarked Crown Vic. “Mmm-hnnh” was all he said.

“Jealousy doesn’t become you,” I replied.

“Good thing we’re not walking to the lab,” he said.

“I can walk just fine,” I said.

“You squeak pretty good, too.”

We finally met with one of the assistant medical examiners, a visibly agitated, middle-aged black woman wearing a doctor’s white coat and radiating a disapproving attitude. She swept us into a tiny conference room and asked Price to close the door.

“Who’s this?” she asked him, pointing at me with her chin.

“Closest thing to next of kin and also the DOA’s employer,” Price said. “He’s a retired police lieutenant. What’s the big deal here?”

The doctor thought about it for a moment, looked me over belligerently, but then apparently consented to my remaining in the room.

“The big deal,” she said, “is that your College Road DOA turned out to be highly radioactive.”

I saw Price frown, as if he were confused. “Radioactive” is a term cops sometimes use to describe another cop who has sufficiently pissed off the brass that all the other cops begin keeping their distance. Then I realized she meant literally radioactive.

It turned out that they’d sent Allie’s remains to the state autopsy facilities in Jacksonville, where the requisite cutting and gutting had been duly conducted. When the remains were rolled by the nuclear medicine office on their way to cold storage, three separate radiation monitors had gone off simultaneously. The people in the nuclear meds office had started tearing the place up looking for the problem when the monitors suddenly went silent again—which implied that the highly radioactive something had gone by and was no longer in range.

They caught up with the morgue attendant in the hallway and had him roll his draped gurney back down the corridor. All the alarms went off again. When they explained what that meant to the attendant, the attendant went off. He’d abandoned said gurney and beat feet down the hall, at which point the entire facility had gone to general quarters. The feds had been summoned, and there were lots of questions flying around and apparently lots more inbound.

“You said they did the autopsy,” Price said calmly. Being the good bureaucrat that he was, Jacksonville being in a state of pandemonium wasn’t necessarily his problem. “Do they have an opinion?”

“An
opinion
?” she repeated, almost shouting. “Yeah, they have an opinion, Detective. Severe radiation poisoning. She apparently drank something that was highly radioactive.”

“Literally radioactive?” I asked.

“There’s a damn echo in here,” she snorted. “Whatever it was, it was hot enough to burn the bejesus out of her innards. Mouth, esophagus, trachea, heart, lungs, stomach—the works. First-class case of radiation poisoning. The lab people up there are beside themselves, and, of course, the whole damn world wants to know where it came from.”

“Beats me,” Price said equably. “But I guess we do have ourselves a homicide.”

I thought she was going to brain him, so I intervened. I explained what Allie had been doing in Wilmington, and that there was no plausible link between a pending divorce case and radiation poisoning.

“That all makes sense to me,” she said, “but inquiring federal minds are going to explore that notion in some detail. So I’d recommend you stick around here in Wilmington, Mr. Ex-police-lieutenant. And now I need to speak to the detective sergeant here in private, if you please.”

Price came out a few minutes later and shook his head. He put his finger to his lips until we were in the elevator. “Full-scale Lebanese goat-grab spooling up in the ME circles,” he said as we rode down. “Jacksonville is yelling at New Hanover for sending up a radioactive DOA, and New Hanover is yelling back that they had no way of knowing, et cetera, et cetera. You sure you’ve told me everything you know about this?”

“All I know is that Allie is dead. How she came in contact with radiation is beyond me. So now what?”

“The state chief medical examiner’s called in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The NRC has called the Bureau. The federal host is inbound, as we speak.”

We went out to his car and climbed in. He sighed and looked around the peaceful parking lot, which we both knew wasn’t going to stay that way much longer.

“She give you
any
details?” I asked. “Like radioactive what?”

Price said no. She had told him they wouldn’t know the “what” until a lab very different from the state facility reviewed the case and the corpse. “She mostly wanted to vent, and I was
the nearest cop. We’re the ones who sent the body to New Hanover, so somehow, this is all our fault.”

“That sounds familiar,” I said.
What the fuck, Allie
, I thought again. I’d felt like washing my own hands on the way out.

“So where do they sell radioactive fluids in beautiful downtown Wilmington, North Carolina?” I asked as we drove out of the lot and headed back to the city police building.

“We’ve got the Helios nuclear power plant over next door in Brunswick County,” Price said. “Did your legal lovebirds have any connection to the nuke industry?”

“Hell, I don’t know,” I said. “All lawyers look alike to me, and, besides, Allie wasn’t taking pictures of them at work.”

Price’s cell phone rang as we stopped for a red light. He picked up, listened for a minute, grunted an okay, and hung up. “They’re he-e-e-re,” he chanted. “Boss wants me back downtown ASAP. You really want to dance in this cow pie?”

“No way,” I said. “Gave that shit up when I retired.”

“Retirement’s starting to look
real
good.” Price sighed longingly.

Ten minutes later, he pulled into the parking lot. “I’ll let you out here, if that’s okay. You stayin’ overnight?”

I grinned at him. “As in, don’t leave town, there, stranger?”

Price shrugged. “Naw, not really. The federal suits will want to talk to you at some point, but otherwise . . .”

“Yeah, sure,” I said, immediately thinking of Mary Ellen Goode. “I’ll stay over another night. Anything I can do to help, you holler. They going to be able to keep this out of the media?”

Price shook his head. “Probably not,” he predicted. “Specially if somebody ties that radiation shit to the power plant over in Brunswick County. Which would be a real surprise—those folks have
damned
good security, and the guy who runs it is downright scary. What’s your cell number?”

I gave it to him, and he promised to stay in touch.

Two hours later, the phone at my bedside rang. I picked up. It was Bernie Price again.

“Lieutenant Richter?” Price said, speaking formally, which told me immediately he was probably calling from a room full of feds and other undesirables.

“Having fun yet, Bernie?” I asked.

“Not at all, sir,” Price said, without an audible hint of humor. “Would you be available to meet with two special agents from the FBI this afternoon?”

I looked at my watch. There wasn’t all that much left of the afternoon. “I’ll be in the hotel lounge in an hour,” I said. “Got names?”

“Special Agents Caswell and Myers,” Bernie said.

I smiled. Creeps Caswell and Missed-it Mary Myers. This could be interesting.

“I can’t wait,” I said. “I’ll fill you in after I see them.”

“Probably not, sir,” Bernie said, and then paused. I got the message.

“You’ve been told to sever all connections with itinerant ex-cops meddling in city business, have you?”

“That’s absolutely correct, sir,” he said.

“Gosh, Bernie, this really hurts my feelings. But maybe when all the dust settles, I can buy you a beer, hunh?”

“Count on it, sir,” he said. He sounded relieved that he hadn’t had to spell it out for me.

I thanked him, hung up, and went out onto the balcony to do some stretch exercises and try to wake up. For some reason I suddenly missed my shepherds. Then, looking at the other chair, I realized I also missed Allie. Had she been the victim of some random act of God, or had someone done this to her? The angry pathologist had used the word “ingested.” So she drank radioactive . . . what?

The Hilton’s lounge was spacious, modernistic, and relatively empty. There was a nice view of the Cape Fear River as the sun started down. The dark gray bulk of the battleship USS
North Carolina
, parked now as a World War II museum across the river, filled up the downstream windows. I got myself a beer and took a corner booth away from the main
bar. The two FBI agents showed up fifteen minutes later, and I smiled when I caught the bartender staring at them.

I had encountered Special Agent Caswell and his partner only once during my active-duty career, and he had provoked the same reaction from me. He was a supervisory special agent, now in his late forties, with a spare, six-foot-six, permanently stooped frame. He had long, intensely black hair plastered straight back from his forehead, hooded eyes, an elongated, bony nose, large teeth, the original lantern jaw, and undertaker’s white hands and fingers, which seemed to protrude unnaturally from his suit jacket. He was a man who moved silently, and he tended to rub those porcelain hands together a lot. He had a soft, whispery, almost unctuous voice, reinforcing the funeral director impression. I didn’t know who’d given him his unofficial nickname, but I suspect it was one of the female agents over in the Bureau’s Raleigh field office. He was reputed to be a challenging interrogator, who, as I recalled, specialized in science and technology crimes.

Special Agent Mary Myers had apparently come to the Bureau with a high creep threshold if she was still partnered up with Brother Caswell. She was a well-fed, late-thirty-something blonde, five-seven or -eight, with watery blue eyes, a bunny rabbit nose, and round, horned-rim Wall Street eyeglasses, which framed a permanently puzzled and near-sighted expression on her otherwise unremarkable face. I figured she probably had an accounting degree and was one of those tenacious detail miners the Bureau used in complex white-collar financial crimes. Her Missed-it Mary nickname had arisen in the course of a stakeout incident during her first and only assignment as a street agent. Mary thought she’d been fired upon from a parked car and had emptied her service weapon in return, hitting three other parked cars and managing to set two of them on fire, while leaving the suspect vehicle untouched and her fellow agents watching in awe from beneath their own vehicle.

“Special Agents,” I said as they approached my corner table. I had not actually worked with either of them before,
so they introduced themselves, flashed the appropriate picture-plastic, and sat down.

“So, how can I help you?” I asked, addressing myself to Caswell. Even sitting, he seemed to tower over me and the table, and I’m six-foot-plus. He began rubbing those undertaker hands together.

“We understand,” he began, “that Ms. Gardner was an employee of your company and that she was pursuing evidence of marital infidelity, involving one or more officers of the court?”