Damage Control (5 page)

Chapter Nine

I'd call the next two hours just real nice. Showering together and sponging hot, sudsy water all over each other's bodies. Drying off with almost new Prussian blue towels that we'd bought together. Popping him a good one on the fanny, just for luck. Fixing a Cajun omelet—green peppers, onions, sausage, cheese, the whole deal—and sharing it. Mellow, lingering glow kind of stuff.

There was nothing wrong with the sex in between the shower and the omelet, either. I didn't have to fake a thing. There wasn't quite the zing that tasting forbidden fruit with Jerzy had sometimes generated, but Hell's bells, life isn't all espresso and double bourbons. For grown-ups—lucky ones, anyway—it's mostly lattés and smooth merlots and gently subtle Chablis with nuances that a teenager couldn't appreciate.

As I approached the end-game on my half of the omelet, I noticed Rafe idly spinning his phone around on the table. Then I picked up a naughty-eight-year-old look in his eyes. He'll get that sometimes when he's thinking he might have to take a pol to a “gentlemen's club” where the patrons stuff twenties into g-strings, and he's sneaking up on telling me about it (or not).

“I might have set a better pace for you on our run if I hadn't been fussing with this thing,” he said.

“You had to keep track of the time, honey.” Supportive bride, that's me. “Heaven forbid we wouldn't have quarter-splits on our impulsive fun-run.”

“Actually, I wasn't just checking times.” He couldn't have sounded more sheepish if he'd been scoping out porn while we were pounding the pavement. “I was following up on a hunch. Turned out to be a good one.”

I dropped my fork. Forearms on the table. Full eye contact. “You have my complete and undivided attention, Rafe.”

“The National Solar Power Entrepreneurial Conference is meeting next week. In Denver.”

“Denver.”

“Right. Mile-high city.”

“Next week—when Schroeder was talking about getting me there, supposedly to meet with his wind-power hustlers.”

“Uh, yeah,” Rafe said

“But the odds are a hundred to one that the competing solar power mavens who are
also
going to be there at that very same time will include Sanford Dierdorf—the guy Schroeder and Majority Values Coalition and I were talking about ruining so that Schroeder could glom onto his government subsidy.”

“Yep.” Rafe sketched a shrug. “Could be a coincidence, of course.”

“Sure it could.”

I turned a full-bodied scowl away from Rafe. Looked like Uncle D was right for sure—which meant that the clever, quick-thinking Beltway insider profiled on MVC's website had probably been getting herself gamed like a hayseed fresh off the bus from Bug Tussle, Texas. Plus, I still had no idea of exactly what the game was.

Our land-line picked that moment to ring. Rafe answered and immediately put the call on speaker, mouthing
Danica
at me.

“Have you seen
Rotunda
yet?” Seamus asked point-eight seconds after hello.

“Sure have.” I infused a nonchalant tone into my answer—and that took some work. “Seems to me we just shrug it off, but I'll be in by nine-fifteen if you think we should work up some kind of a counter-attack.”

“Not sure.” No trouble imagining what Seamus did during the next ten seconds; when he isn't sure about something, tobacco stocks spike. “Our ‘no-further-comment' citadel is under full frontal assault from every keyboard-jockey in town.”

“In other words, you've gotten three calls from reporters this morning.”

“Two. But it isn't even nine a.m. yet.”

The pause that followed was “pregnant” if by “pregnant” you mean “nine months along and fully dilated.” I finally spoke up.

“I gave Terry Fielding a tease and promised that my leak was exclusive to him. If we cheat on that he'll cut our balls off. That means we have to keep stonewalling everyone else, no matter what. So…”

“Right. So the only other play I can think of is the helpless-female card.”

“Hate it,” I said.

“Worked for Hillary in New York and New Hampshire,” Rafe said.

“I rest my case.”

“It won't be an easy angle for us to work,” Seamus said. “But maybe we just have to find a way. I know it makes your skin crawl, Josie, but…”

I cringed. Rolled my eyes. Clenched my fists 'til my nails dug into my palms. Got a grip. Deep breath. Okay. Finally trusted myself to speak.

“It's more important to do it right than to do it fast, SD.” I took another breath. “I'll get to the shop as fast as I can so we can talk the options over.”

“You said ‘options' like there's more than one. I hope you're right.”

“So do I.”

Just before I could disconnect, Seamus added the perfect coda.

“One other thing to consider on your way in. Do you think there may actually be something to that potential NRA thing
Rotunda
snarked about?”

Chapter Ten

When I got to the office I found the helpless-female issue on the back burner, thanks to Terry Fielding. He'd come through in a big way: the
Times—
the real one: the
New. York. Times
. Just up, posted online about the time I was pulling into the parking ramp, and slated for page eight of tomorrow's hard-copy edition. Already picked up by RCP: RealClearPolitics, the mother-lode aggregator website for political junkies.

Thirteen blessed paragraphs. The headline alone practically had Seamus drooling:

INVESTIGATORS LOOK AT
POSSIBLE LUXURY CAR SCAM LINK TO D.C.-AREA AMBUSH SLAYING

Seamus and I skimmed the article itself—me for the first time and him for the third—providing each other with murmured running commentary:

SEAMUS: Big-time property seizures and sealed indictments.

ME: The seizures alone make this a huge deal.

SEAMUS: Yep. The two guys the feds seized the property and money from can't be too happy about it.

ME: Jimmy Matsuyama and Stan Surakawa. Think the feds will flip them?

SEAMUS: They'll have to catch them first. Says later in the article that they've apparently fled the country.

We'd been leaning over Seamus' desk with our eyes glued to his computer screen. Now we both straightened up. Seamus looked over at me.

“You clearly weren't Fielding's only source.”

“Yep. Looks like he did some actual reporter stuff.”

“Which means that his colleagues will all now be madly chasing the criminal angle too.”

“Right.” I shrugged. “Which takes the heat off MVC.”

“Off MVC,” Seamus said, “but not off you. You're a prime source on the criminal stuff. They'll be coming after you—and when the Washington media pack is in full cry, you don't want to be the fox.”

Okay, girl, suck it up, now. Curtain going up. No time for stage-fright
. I turned to Seamus and met his gaze.

“Seamus, I am twenty-seven years old. Before I'm thirty-five I want to work in the West Wing of the White House. I want to map out talking points for the President while I'm flying on Air Force One for questions we've just found out will be asked as soon as we land. I can't go in front of cameras and choke up and blink back brave little tears because all these big bullies are being mean to me.”

“I get that, Josie. But what's the alternative?”

“Tough it out through the weekend. See if the story still has legs on Monday. Odds are it won't.”

“What if it does?”

Well that was just a very good question. I didn't have a good answer, so I shrugged and gave a bad one.

“We'll see, I guess. We'll just have to see.”

***

I kind of enjoyed it at first. Calling reporters back, I mean. Got voicemail half the time and just left the can't-comment sound-bite after the beep. When I got into actual conversations, they fell into a pretty standard pattern:

“Now, Jerry [or Tom or Samantha or Caitlin or whatever], you know I can't talk about that while the investigation is going on.”

“You talked to someone about it.”

“It's funny, but I read Terry's piece this morning and it looked to me like his only sources were public records and a U.S. Attorney in a blue state somewhere. But I guess if you want to know Terry's sources, maybe you should ask him.”

“Very funny. Look, Josie, if you wanna stonewall that's up to you, but it's starting to look like you were trying to get into the pockets of a very shady guy, and you're the only one with the other side of that story.”

“Why, Jerry [or whoever], I'm surprised at you! That's blaming the victim if I ever heard it. Shame on you. You have a nice day, now.”

It got old after awhile, but the scribblers weren't drawing any blood. I got some actual work done in between calls, too. Finished a work-up about a lady in Claremont, California, who has one percent of the stock in two Fortune 500 companies and a burning passion to get the United States back into space and on the way to Mars. Sure oughta be able to do something with that. When I logged off my computer and got ready to start the weekend, I was feeling pretty good.

Then I got home.

Chapter Eleven

I had slipped out of my shoes and taken one good sip from my martini when salt-and-pepper showed up for Act II. The black detective had a bolt-action rifle with him. As soon as the front door had closed behind them he pulled the rifle's bolt up and back, then held it out horizontally, laid across his hands just above waist level, so that Rafe could get a good look at it.

“Is this the weapon you sold several years ago, sir?”

“Do you mind if I take it in my hands?” Rafe smiled. “I mean, you've done the fingerprint thing and all that?”

The detectives looked at each other. Without any nod or other bodily signal that I could see, they apparently reached agreement.

“Go ahead,” the black detective said.

Rafe lifted the rifle carefully from the detective's hands. Pointing it diagonally toward the ceiling but without putting the butt on his shoulder, he closed his left eye and looked up the breech with his right. Then he brought the weapon down to chest level and examined the barrel and the bolt as if he were checking the lung X-ray of a forty-year smoker. Gave the trigger and trigger-guard a good look. Worked the bolt twice, snapping it in, then up and back, each time. Now he raised the butt to his shoulder and sighted along the barrel as if he were aiming at a speck in the molding.

While Rafe was going through this, I took a closer look at the two detectives. They must have given their names the first time, and I'm really good with names as a rule, but I guess I was too rattled to absorb them. The black detective had some years and some miles on him. White, not gray, dominated his bristly moustache, and splotches of it dappled his shortish hair as well. A little taller than Rafe, solid build but with a touch of middle-aged spread challenging the lines of his dark gray Men's Wearhouse suit. The white detective was younger but pushing forty even so, about the same height, a little stouter.

The first time I'd seen them I hadn't come away with much more than generic images: black and white, inexpensive suits, basic cop look—like representatives of a sample demographic in a poll I had to analyze. They hadn't really become specific individuals to me until now, with Rafe giving me eighty seconds with nothing to do but look at them and feel their vibe while he messed with the rifle. I suspected that Rafe had picked up all this stuff right away, the first time around. We both have people skills—we pretty much have to—but Rafe's are natural; mine are learned and practiced.

Rafe finally lowered the rifle, shaking his head.

“I can't say I recognize it. It's a Winchester bolt-action and I'd say it's either a three-oh-eight like mine was or maybe a thirty-aught-six, but it doesn't have the feel I remember from the one I owned. That color variation on the barrel tells me that at one time it had mounts for a scope, which I never used. Doesn't prove anything. Just saying. Best guess is no. Does the serial number match up?”

“The serial number has been machined off.” The white detective took the rifle from Rafe and gripped it in his left hand, about halfway up the stock. “
Thoroughly
machined off.”

“Too bad.” Rafe shook his head. “Because, you know, that would answer the question for sure.”

“Yeah.” The black detective sighed, rolling his eyes.

“Listen,” Rafe said, “if you want to talk about this in more detail, how about if we go into the living room? You can get a little more comfortable, and we can maybe find something cold for you to drink. Beer, or ice-water if beer is against regulations.”

They jumped at that. Our living room is cozy, reflecting one of Rafe's Beltway axioms: if you want to entertain more than six people, use an embassy. We'd selected Philadelphia blue and Williamsburg green for the room and furnished it in Early American except for a gas fireplace and an upright piano. Salt lingered on the edge of the room, expecting to accompany me to the kitchen when I fetched Dasani over ice. I think I disappointed him when I whipped it up from our cunningly discreet wet bar.

Seated on the front edge of an Ethan Allen fan-back chair, the black detective had retrieved the rifle from his colleague and was showing it to Rafe again.

“We found this a few hours ago. Some schlub driving a stolen car without plates. The rifle was wrapped in a blanket under the backseat. Not a ghost of a print on it, of course.”

“Why would the killer conceal the gun in a car and then invite police attention by driving around with no license plates?” The puzzled look that Rafe offered was absolutely priceless. “Especially when he went to all the trouble to take the serial number off to make the rifle untraceable?”

“One theory might be that the guy in the car got set up by the actual killer.” The white cop said this, with a scowl suggesting that he was getting a little tired of Rafe's naïve bumpkin routine. “For one thing, we didn't find a scope with the rifle. You mentioned that mark on the barrel that looks like it was made by a scope-mount. Even without that, four hundred fifty yards is a
loooong
way for deadeye marksmanship with just a notch-and-bead sight. Figures there had to be a scope, so where is it?”

“Good point,” Rafe said with an approving nod.

The black detective jumped in. “Killer steals a car, replaces its plates with temporary dealer plates, does the murder, wipes the weapon, stows it in the car, drops the car in a strip mall lot or someplace, and ditches the temporary plates. He figures ten to one it gets stolen. Best case the car goes to a chop shop where they find the gun, don't realize it's hot, and sell it to someone who needs a gun real fast—with the buyer becoming suspect number one if the weapon ever turns up. Not-best case, but almost as good, the car thief gets arrested and we pin the rap on him. Either way, case closed.”

“Sounds plausible.” Rafe bobbed his head sagely—laying it on a little thick, if you ask me. “But you've obviously seen through it.”

“Interesting thing about filing a serial number off metal,” the white cop said. “If you heat the metal and photograph it with infrared film, the number shows up again. Like magic.”

“That'd be great if you could pull that trick off here.” Rafe's face glowed with joyful enthusiasm.

“Yeah, it would.” Black detective. “'Cause if it turned out it had the same serial number as your rifle that'd be, like, an incredible coincidence.”

“I'd be surprised if that happened. The chap I sold it to didn't seem like the shady sort.”

“He's seemed like the dead sort for the last couple of years.” White detective.

“Not foul play, I hope. It would be cruelly ironic if he were killed by a stray bullet in a drive-by shooting, or something like that.”

“Nope, natural causes.” Black detective. “Didn't seem to keep much in the way of archives, either. Most off-premise gun dealers don't keep any more than they absolutely have to, even when they're alive and kicking and in business. So we can't verify your sale to him of the rifle you owned.”

“Well, I'm really glad you can do the infrared trick, then,” Rafe said. “Otherwise there'd be a one-in-ten-thousand or whatever chance that the murder weapon was tied to me.”

The detectives exchanged glances. Then the white one sat down on the twin to the black detective's chair and leaned forward.

“Before we turn the rifle over to the lab, we were wondering if you'd remembered anything else that might help us with the investigation.” He shifted his eyes toward me. “Either of you.”

“We've racked our brains, Detective,” Rafe said.

“Drained our memories,” I added.

“But if we come up with anything else,” Rafe said, “we'll be certain to get it to you as fast as we can.”

“Tell me something, Ms. Kendall,” the white detective said then. “Did your visits with Mr. Schroeder always end in a walk in the area near that fish pond?”

“Not always. Sometimes. I went out to his farm seven or eight times, different times of the day, depending on his schedule. We probably took that backyard walk two or three of those times.”

“What part of the house would you usually meet in?”

“Depended on his mood and the time of day. He often didn't get out of bed until ten in the morning, so once or twice we met in his bedroom with him still in his pajamas and copies of the
Times
and the
Post
strewn all over the bedclothes. He had a Luddite thing about reading newspapers online. Just hated it. Other times we'd meet in what he called the music room, 'cause he played violin and he liked to show off a little. At least once I remember us meeting in his kitchen over mugs of coffee. Plus, he liked to walk while he talked, so we might wander through different rooms or take a stroll outside.”

Without missing a beat, without the hint of a segue, the black cop looked a little harder at me than he had up to then, and shot me a question out of left field.

“Did he have any weapons that you knew of?”

Whoa. Did NOT see that one coming
. Didn't let it throw me, though.

“At least one. A handgun. Revolver. Not sure of the caliber, except it was bigger than the twenty-five-caliber automatic my Mama keeps around the house, and seemed a little smaller than the military forty-five my uncle showed me from his Vietnam days.”

“How did you happen to find out about that one?”

“He showed it to me the second time I came to his farm. Explained later that he liked to go plinking with it sometimes. That's what he called it. ‘Plinking.' We went out back on one of my visits and spent about twenty minutes taking potshots at soup cans. He seemed to get a kick out of watching me do it.”

“You?”

That question came from the black detective, but I had the feeling that, behind his eyebrows, Rafe was asking himself the same thing. I shrugged.

“Oh, yeah. He asked me to try a couple of pops, and I'm a good sport. Bang-bang-bang.”

“How'd you do?”

“Fine. Six shots, six plinks. I'm not world class when it comes to marksmanship, but it doesn't take Annie Oakley to hit a tin can lying twenty feet away.”

“Would your office have known what times you were meeting with him?”

“Not precisely. My calendar would say something like, ‘JS twelve-three,' meaning that I'd blocked out that time for a meeting with him. So they'd know I'd left the office at noon and expected to be back by three, but they'd have to guess about when we'd actually be together.”

The black detective glanced at the white one. The white one glanced back. Then he looked at me again.

“Did you know that Mr. Schroeder had surveillance cameras in every room of his house?”

That
was bullshit, so it didn't get the reaction from me that I think he was hoping for.

“No, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me to learn that he had.”

Pepper swung his eyes back to Rafe. Salt followed him. When he spoke, the black detective's tone was about two fingers short of apologetic.

“Mr. Kendall, you're being very cooperative. We don't have a warrant, but—”

“You don't need a warrant. Look, I get it. Guy gets killed a few feet away from a beautiful woman, the woman's husband gets a good, long look. We're knee-deep in the twenty-first century and women meet men professionally every day, but ‘a kiss is still a kiss,'
et cetera, et cetera
. If I were in your position I'd be doing exactly what you're doing. How can we help?”

The cops exchanged glances. In my mind I whistled in admiration.
Is my guy good or what?

“We were wondering if we could take a look at your shoes,” the black detective said.

“Sure.” Rafe pulled off the same New Balance cross-trainers he'd run in that morning and handed them over. “I have two or three other pairs upstairs in my closet. We can go up together and get them, if you want.”

“Only two or three?” the white detective said joshingly. “You must be a guy.”

“‘Brilliant deduction, Holmes.'” Rafe matched the cop's between-us-boys grin.

In his stocking feet he led the white detective upstairs while the black detective compared the soles of the cross-trainers to a printout that looked to me like it had to be next to useless—but what do I know? When Rafe and the white cop returned, they'd left Rafe's dress shoes—a pair of black Allen Edmonds Park Avenues and a pair of oxblood Hickey Freeman slip-ons—back at the bedroom. The only shoes they brought down were a pair of Rockport waffle-stompers that Rafe used for serious hiking. After a hard look at those, they shook their heads.

“Do you own any other shoes?” the white detective asked.

“I may have a pair in my kit-locker at Capitol Fitness. Can't remember, to be honest. I don't get down there as often as I should, and frankly it's starting to show.” Rafe patted his almost board-flat gut while he unholstered his phone. “Hate to send you on a wild goose chase, but I guess you can't leave any stone unturned. I'll text Johnny to open it up so you can take a look if you think it's worth the trouble.”

The black detective turned back to me. I wouldn't call his eyes hard. Gentle and coaxing, if anything. But I would definitely call them focused.

“Do you know of any other shoes your husband might own, Ms. Kendall?”

“No, I can't say that I do.” I grinned—my winsome grin, the one that would make Pollyanna blush—as I gave the answer without hesitation. “I have an uncle who sometimes says if a man doesn't own shoes older than his wife he's not worth month-old crawfish pie, but Rafe isn't that type.”

“You're sure about that walk in the garden thing, now that you've had a chance to think about it?” the white detective prompted. “That's not something you and he did every time you went out there?”

“Nope, can't say that it was.”

“Thanks,” both detectives said at once as they stood up.