Getting Away Is Deadly (22 page)

W
hen I emerged from the shower, I was still thinking about Lena and MacInally. I’d decided I wouldn’t get any deeper involved in trying to sort out the mess around Jorge’s death, but I could
think
about it. I couldn’t talk to Mitch while I was drying my hair, but as soon as I switched off the blow-dryer and started on my makeup, I asked Mitch, “So, what else did you and MacInally talk about?”

The TV volume went down and I heard the closet door slide down its track. “Oh, you know, how long he’s lived in D.C. Where he grew up. Stuff like that.”

I gave my lashes a few swipes with the mascara wand. “Where’s he from?”

“Arizona.” Mitch appeared in the mirror behind me and braced his arm on the wall, settling in. “I know that look. You want details, don’t you?”

“Of course.” I smiled as I ran some lip gloss over my lips.

“Okay.” Mitch sighed. Details were like torture to him. I wondered if interrogators had ever tried that technique to get men to talk. Drown them in details. They’d break after a couple of hours.

“Let’s see. We talked a bit about Arizona. Not much, since I’ve never been there. He’s lived in D.C. for about ten years. Before that, he was in San Francisco. That was about it.”

“Okay.” Nothing earth-shattering there. Mitch went in the bathroom and started the shower water. I sat down on a chair, slid my feet into my comfortable tan sandals, and dialed Detective Brown’s number while I fastened the straps.

I was hoping for his voice mail, but he answered the phone.

“Detective Brown, this is Ellie Avery, Summer’s sister-in-law.” I paused.

“Yes?” His tone was impatient. I tried not to picture his jowly face and cold gray eyes, but I could imagine his expression of annoyance without too much trouble since his tone conveyed it so well.

“Summer got in touch with you?”

“Yes. Do you need something else, Mrs. Avery? I’m on my way to talk to Summer now.”

“Oh.” Was that good or bad? “You just want to talk to her, right? You don’t have any new evidence, do you? Because even if you did, Summer’s not guilty,” I finished hurriedly.

“I have to confirm a few things. That’s all. Now, if that was all you needed.”

“No. I’ve found out a few things you probably should know about.”

There was total silence on the line and I wished I’d thought about what I was going to say before I’d called him. “I met a woman last night, Lena Stallings. She was on the platform the day Jorge was pushed. She had a relationship with him. I think she might have wanted him dead.”

“And you know this how?” His tone was less impatient, but still had a heavy dollop of reluctance mixed with doubt.

“She told me.”

“Why would she tell you something like that?”

I paused, trying to think fast, but thinking fast on my feet had never been one of my strong points. Basically, I froze. Wasn’t stealing mail a federal offense? I couldn’t tell him about Summer taking Jorge’s mail. And that would be tampering with evidence, too, wouldn’t it? I was suddenly glad I was sitting down, because I felt dizzy. I wanted to help Summer, not get her in more trouble.

“Mrs. Avery, are you still there?”

“Yes. Sorry.” Okay, skip the mail part. Stick to last night. “I met Lena Stallings at a fund-raiser event last night. She’s from Georgia and works for STAND, an organization that wants to keep Taylor Air Force Base open. That’s in Georgia, the base, I mean.”

“Yes, I know.” His voice was less curious.

“Anyway, I know she was on the platform right before Jorge was pushed because my friend took some pictures that day and Lena’s in one of them. She told me Jorge had dangerous friends and that he was blackmailing someone.” There. That was vague enough, wasn’t it? No mention of Summer, but I had given him the link between Lena and Jorge.

“Mrs. Avery,” he began, but silence cut into his words. He was getting another call. Thank goodness. I breathed a sigh of relief as he put me on hold. I plucked at my shirt and went to turn up the air-conditioning in the room. He came back on the line. “I’d like to talk to you more about this. Will you be at your hotel this afternoon?”

“We’re on our way to the Air and Space Museum, but we’ll be back later. We’ll probably stop by here before we go to dinner.”

“Fine. I’ll call you.”

He hung up and I collapsed onto the bed and let the cool air fan across me.
That was nerve-racking
.

“Hey, can you hand me a new bar of soap?” Mitch called.

“Sure.” I unwrapped one and handed it to him.

He stuck his head around the shower curtain. “I remembered one other thing MacInally mentioned. Alan Archer. It’s freezing out there. Have you got the air blasting again?”

“Alan Archer?” I said and went to turn the air off.

Mitch was back behind the shower curtain when I got back to the bathroom door. “Yeah. Apparently, he and Archer go way back. They’ve known each other since the war.”

I leaned on the door frame. Archer was a Vietnam vet. How could MacInally have known him since the war? Steam billowed out of the top of the shower and engulfed me, but I hardly noticed the mugginess of the room.

“Mitch, I’m going down to the business center to look up some bios online.”

I hurried down to the little room located in the lobby, but stopped short in the doorway when I saw a man in a white dress shirt at the computer. I turned to leave, but he said, “I’m done,” and clicked on the box at the top of the screen to close the window. There was something about the way he moved quickly and the way his gaze darted back to me and then to the computer that gave me the feeling that he didn’t want me to see the screen.

He stood up and grabbed several pages as they slid out of the printer. He hurried out of the room, pulling on a brown vest that the hotel employees wore. I frowned, watching him. I’d seen him before. He worked at the front desk, but seeing him out of his brown vest had jogged a memory. I walked over to the computer and swirled the mouse around, still thinking about the man. He was young, tall, with inky dark hair.

The screen was still active, but blank. I clicked on the bar at the bottom and a screen from a free online e-mail service came up. He’d been in such a hurry he must have hit the button to minimize the screen, not close it. I pointed the arrow at the button to close it, but paused as the subject lines of the e-mails caught my eye. “Stop Zionist Aggression Now,” “Your donation equals dead American soldiers,” “End U.S. aggressors.” I couldn’t help but skim down the list, which went on in the same vein with more calls for donations and action.

The e-mails were from groups with names like Humanity Against Zionist Aggression, Save Palestine Now, and End U.S. Imperialism. There weren’t any personal e-mails on the list. All of them were from causes either requesting money or thanking “Faiza88” for the donation. I saw a movement at the doorway and I jumped, my grip tightening on the mouse. I twisted sideways, but it was just a business-woman hurrying through the lobby, pulling her rolling suitcase. I took a deep breath and turned back to the computer, but it was blank.

“What?” I circled the mouse, but the screen was gone. I’d closed it when I jumped. A few clicks brought up a new connection to the Internet, but I wouldn’t be able to get back to the e-mail account of Faiza without a password. Not that I wanted back in. Thinking of what those organizations raised money for made me shudder. It was hard to grasp the fact that people gave money to these organizations with the hope that it would actually contribute to someone’s death, preferably that of a U.S. soldier. I could see the hotel check-in desk and the young man was there, smiling at the woman who’d dashed by the door a moment ago. I watched him. He was the one who’d come over to us when Abby and I had talked to Joe Tickner. Abby had signaled him and he’d hovered in the background until we were sure Joe wasn’t going to do anything more threatening than clear out the breakfast buffet. But there was something else.

The woman left and a family moved up to the desk. The mother turned to scold the boy who’d tossed a foam football in the air. I watched it bounce wildly across the shiny floor and then I had it. The desk clerk had been the man Tony talked to at the reflecting pool on the Mall. His clothes were different, but the face and build were the same.

I shifted my chair to the left so that the family blocked the desk clerk’s view into the business center doorway. It looked like Tony had been telling the truth about his connection with radicals. I felt I should do something about the e-mails I’d just seen. I couldn’t see something that threatened soldiers and Americans without feeling that I should report it. But what was there to report? The fresh connection to the Internet glowed on the screen and the printer hummed softly in the small room. I couldn’t get back to the screen. Would anyone believe me if I told them what I saw? I had no proof that the e-mail account existed and I didn’t even know the guy’s name, except that he called himself Faiza online.

It would take forever to explain what I’d seen to the police. Even Detective Brown had thought I was being rather tedious when I’d called him earlier. I doubted he’d be exactly eager to hear from me again so soon. And there was the little fact that I dreaded calling him again because I knew he’d probably ask more questions about the whole Lena/Jorge connection. I wasn’t that good at dancing around the truth without tripping all over myself. No, Detective Brown was pretty low on my list of people to call.

Tony seemed to be a better choice. At least he would know the guy’s name. Maybe Tony already knew about Faiza’s contact with those radical groups? And Tony would have the resources to call in someone who might be able to find the e-mail account either on the computer hard drive or out in cyberspace.

I rolled the chair closer to the keyboard and ran a quick search on the names I’d been curious about when I first came down, MacInally and Alan Archer. I threw in Lena’s name, too. I had a hard time focusing because I kept checking the front desk, but it was a busy time and there was always a line of people. I paged through the results rapidly and printed a few articles that popped up associated with the names; then, I snatched the papers out of the printer tray. After a quick check of the front desk, which still had a line three people deep in front of it, I zipped across the lobby to the elevator bank. Well, I probably lumbered. I was pregnant and didn’t want to slip on the mirrorlike floor tiles, but I went as fast as I dared.

I squeezed into the elevator beside the kid with the football and his family. As we went up, I scanned the articles. There were more pages about Lena than the other two, with lots of info rehashing her background, which had been on the STAND Web site. Alan Archer only had a few mentions. Vietnam vet and war hero were the most popular descriptions attached to his name. MacInally only had one article about his consulting service, a fluffy piece that ran in the business section of his local newspaper when he started the business.

The elevator doors opened as I flipped to the last page. I paused on the elevator’s threshold. The page didn’t belong to me. It was from Humanity Against Zionist Aggression, one of the groups I’d seen on the e-mail account, and the addressee was Faiza88. The subject line read
Increase in funds urgently needed.

“Are you going up?” I realized the dad in the family group in the elevator had his finger on the button that held the doors open.

“No, I’m sorry.” I stepped into the hallway and almost ran into Tony.

W
e both paused for a second, assessing each other. Thistlewait said Tony was legit. That thought was the only thing that stopped me from darting past him to our room down the hall.

Tony smiled disarmingly and said, “Just the person I was looking for. Don’t worry. There’s no storage closets around here. Could I speak to you for a moment?”

“Okay,” I said slowly and paced down the hall to our door. I inserted the key card and pushed it open. “Give me just a minute.” Inside with Mitch seemed like a better choice than outside in the hall alone.

The room was empty. The bathroom door was still closed. I tapped on it and said, “Tony Zobart’s stopped by.” I suddenly felt a little silly. Clearly, Tony wasn’t here on a social call, but my words sounded like I was about to offer him some juice and a muffin.

“Really?” Mitch’s tone sounded more interested than alarmed. “I’m getting dressed. Be out in a second.”

I went back to the door and let Tony in. He spoke before I did. “Sorry to show up unexpectedly, but this will only take a minute—”

“Here,” I interrupted him. I shoved the printout of the e-mail at him.

Mitch emerged from the bathroom dressed in a dark brown shirt and khaki shorts. I felt better with him in the room. I still didn’t quite trust Tony, despite the fact that Thistlewait had vouched for him. I explained where I’d gotten the printout. Mitch shook his head. “Again, I have to ask, how do you do this? You were gone ten minutes.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Either I’m lucky or I’m cursed. I can’t figure out which one.”

Tony’s gaze flicked down the paper and back up to my face. “Do you believe me now?”

I shrugged. “I’m still not sure who to believe. So, is that his name, Faiza?”

“No,” Tony said and didn’t elaborate.

“And that was him at the reflecting pool on the Mall?”

“Oh yes. That was him.” Tony folded the paper and slipped it into the inside pocket of his dark suit jacket. Apparently, his talkative mood had dried up and he wasn’t going to answer my questions like he had on the night of the fund-raiser. But I figured I could keep asking him questions of my own.

“So, you know about his…” I waved my hand at his suit where the paper had disappeared. I had done the right thing, hadn’t I? Tony was the one to give it to, wasn’t he?

Tony finished my sentence for me. “About his association with groups that raise money for radical causes? Yes.”

“So, he does…what? Sends them money?” Mitch asked.

Tony nodded. “Yes. We know what he’s doing.”

“You’re letting him send them money? And you know he works in this hotel?” My voice became sharper with each question. “He could be dangerous. How can you let him work here? What if he does more than send money? He could endanger people here.”

In contrast to my rather piercing tone, Tony’s voice was low and smooth. “We know what he’s doing. We’re watching him. We’re
letting
him do it.” He said the last line with special emphasis.

Mitch said, “You’re using him to lead you to the groups that are questionable. The ones that are funneling money to radicals?”

Tony didn’t agree with him aloud, but dipped his head in Mitch’s direction. I took that as an acknowledgment that Mitch had hit on the truth. Tony glanced back at me. “We’re watching him and he’s not going to do anything without us knowing about it.”

“But why would he use the business center here at the hotel?” I wondered aloud. “Isn’t that a little risky?”

Tony said, “I can’t say anything about the person you saw today, but I can say, in general, people who don’t want to leave a trail of information that connects them to certain transactions often use public computers.”

It did make sense. Unlike using a personal computer, the computer at the hotel business center was open to any hotel guest. It would be difficult to trace activity on it back to anyone. And Faiza—even if it wasn’t his real name, that was how I’d begun to think of him—could slip in there and log on to his free e-mail account during slow times or right before or after his shift. I didn’t know all the ins and outs of the Internet, but it seemed like his free e-mail account would also give him some degree of anonymity.

“I can assure you that the hotel staff and all public parts of the hotel are under careful scrutiny,” Tony said, then shifted the conversation away from the desk clerk. “Now, the reason I’m so rudely interrupting your vacation,” he said briskly.

“It hasn’t felt like a vacation for several days,” I muttered. “And it’s getting more surreal by the moment.”

Tony continued in his businesslike tone. “I talked to Summer today and she said she took some mail from Jorge’s apartment.”

I said, “Summer talked to you? Obviously, she didn’t listen to me.”

“That’s nothing new. Summer never listens to anyone,” Mitch said.

“She definitely knows her mind.” There was a moment when I could swear the two men sized up each other. I glanced back and forth between the two of them, not sure what was going to happen.

Mitch said, “That’s a pretty accurate assessment of my sister.” The tension eased.

Tony seemed to relax a little as he turned back to me. “She said you might still have the mail that was in Jorge’s mailbox?”

“I’ve got the envelope that held the check from Lena. Summer has the check.” I walked over to the dresser.

“I know. Summer gave it to me.” I must have looked surprised because he added, “It’s evidence. Bagged and tagged. I’m not keeping it. I need the rest of the mail.”

“You want Jorge’s junk mail?”

“I wouldn’t exactly call it junk. You’ve still got it?”

“Yes,” I pulled it out from under a stack of magazines and newspapers on the dresser and handed it to him, but I wished I could look through it again. Why did he want it?

“Thank you very much.” Tony headed for the door. “Sorry to disturb you.”

“Wait. What’s in there? I saw you check his mailbox the other day. You were looking for junk mail?”

“You saw that, did you?” He looked from me to Mitch, seeming to evaluate us for a moment. Then he pulled out the glossy flyer for teeth whitening. “There is no Potomac Dental Center.”

The flyer looked like the countless ones I received and trashed every day. I wouldn’t have glanced at it twice. Tony continued. “It’s a message to Jorge, setting up a time and meeting place, a meeting that I don’t want to miss. You have to have the grille, a piece of paper with holes in it, to read the message. You put the grille over this and then you can read the message.”

“And you’ve got the grille?” Mitch asked.

Tony nodded. “I do. I just needed the message. Thanks.” He shook hands with Mitch and then with me. “Hopefully, I’ll be less rushed next time I see you. Don’t worry about Summer. My…inquiries…are about to wind up. Once that is finished, we’ll inform Detective Brown about Jorge’s real identity and that will help take the pressure off Summer.” The door closed behind him and Mitch looked at me.

I dropped onto the bed. “That was weird.”

Mitch sat down in a chair and pulled on his shoes. “Who would have thought someone would use junk mail to send a message?”

“I know, but it does make sense in a twisted sort of way,” I said. “Junk mail is so annoying that I don’t pay any attention to it. I just toss it, but what if someone called the phone number on the flyer?”

Mitch looked up as he tied his shoes. “It probably isn’t a real number, but I guess someone could set up a phone number and take messages. Or maybe they had one of those phone mail message centers with the automated voice and forty options. I know after a few minutes of that I’d just give up and call somewhere else.” Mitch stood up. “So, are you ready for one more museum?”

“We’re going to a museum? More sightseeing after everything? That doesn’t seem right.”

Mitch picked up his phone and clipped it on his belt. “It’ll be better than sitting around this room all day. Tony’s going to take care of what he needs to with that information, and when he wraps up his end of things, the focus of Detective Brown’s investigation will change.” Mitch held out my purse for me.

I stood in the middle of the room for a few seconds, then reluctantly took my purse. He was right. We’d done what we could. Tony would do his job and bring in the members of the cell—at least, that’s what I thought he meant when he said his inquiry was near an end—and then that would help reveal that there were more people who had a motive to want Jorge dead besides Summer. I sighed. I didn’t really want to look at aircraft and spaceships, but it would be better than looking at the hotel room walls for the rest of the day.

A few hours later, I stood on the wide walkway that bisected the second floor of the museum. I leaned against the railing and gazed at the
Spirit of St. Louis
. Suspended at eye-level with me, it hung above the open-entry atrium where tourists flowed in, swirled around the moon rock and
Mercury 7
. John Glenn had orbited the earth’s atmosphere in
Mercury 7
. Since Nadia was touring Mount Vernon today, she wasn’t here to act as impromptu tour guide. I’d had to read the information card. I flipped to my map of the Mall to see how far we were from the National Gallery of Art. Maybe we’d have time to go by there before the day was over.

Air and space definitely weren’t my things. The museum was interesting, but the place didn’t enthrall me, like some of the other museums had. I gazed at the
Spirit of St. Louis
, thinking how light and fragile it looked compared to some of the sleek modern displays, like the lunar capsule and the missile below it. The small plane I could relate to. It made me think of the Jimmy Stewart movie and the first solo transatlantic flight. The plane looked a little out of place against the lines of the glass and steel atrium.

“Imagine flying all the way across the Atlantic in that little thing,” I said to Mitch.

“Umm.” His head was down as he focused on the map of the building. He glanced up, saw where I was looking, and said, “Yeah. I have to hand it to Lindbergh.
That
was flying.”

“I’m not as interested in the rest of it. The missiles, the moon stuff.”

“That’s okay. Want to catch a show at the IMAX?” Mitch asked.

“No. I have to meet MacInally, but you go ahead.”

“Oh no. Today we stick together.”

“Sounds good.” I checked my watch. “It’s almost three. I figured it would be easier to see him from up here. Do you want to look at anything else later?” I asked.

“No. I’m good. I’ve seen everything. I thought you wanted to see this museum.”

I smiled. “I came because I thought
you
wanted to see it. I figured, planes, you know. That’s your thing. My plan was to hang out with you today and see what you wanted to see.”

“I see planes every day.”

“Yeah. That’s right.” It was a classic case of knowing someone so well that I missed the most basic thing. “Well, what do you want to see? After we talk to MacInally we can go anywhere you want to.”

“The natural history museum sounded interesting. That was the one with the dinosaurs, right?”

“Among other things,” I said. I could happily prowl around there some more. “I don’t see MacInally. Let’s go down a little farther.”

We turned and I let my hand trail along the shiny banister as we walked. “I guess I’m not very good company today. I’m having a hard time focusing. I keep thinking about the whole incident with the desk clerk. Actually, my mind keeps skipping from that to what I read about Lena. It doesn’t match with what MacInally said.”

“And that bothers you.”

“Yes. It does.”

When we reached the end of the banister, we both leaned on our elbows and watched the crowd.

“So, what did it say about her online again?” Mitch asked.

“Her bio with STAND says she grew up in Georgia and graduated from the University of Georgia, where she got a degree in nursing. She was an Army nurse in the late sixties to the early seventies, which was during the Vietnam War, but the Web site doesn’t say where she was sent. Those dates fall during the time that MacInally was wounded in Korea, so she could have been there. She could have met him in Korea.”

“So ask him about it today,” Mitch said.

“I’m going to.”

“There was something else. I didn’t have time to tell you. I looked up Alan Archer, too.”

“And?”

“It was harder to find information about him, but there are several prominent mentions of his time in Vietnam. Lots of medals.” Mitch would have known the significance of many of the names that didn’t mean much to me, but I couldn’t remember all of them.

“Was he career?” Mitch asked, meaning had Archer made the military a career?

“Yes. He retired a full bird colonel. He’s had civil service jobs at the Pentagon since then. Now he’s on the BRAC. That was it.”

We’d been watching the crowd and I said, “Look at that man. That’s got to be the world’s worst toupee. Do you see him?”

“How could I not?” Mitch said. The man had to be at least in his sixties, but his hair was a solid black and the hair above each ear rose straight up in a huge curl. The two rolls of hair met in the center of his forehead and dipped toward his nose. It was like a really bad cartoon sketch of John Travolta’s character in
Grease
.

I scanned the room again. “Oh, wait. There’s MacInally.” He had on a tan windbreaker over a golf shirt. He was the one person who wasn’t moving around on the floor below us.

I waved and caught his eye, motioning that we’d come down the escalator. A few minutes later we’d moved to the food court area and were seated at a table under a very noisy air conditioner. MacInally set a cup of coffee down on a napkin. Mitch handed me a chocolate shake before settling into his chair.

“I probably shouldn’t drink this,” I said and took a long slug on the straw.

“Calcium.” Mitch winked. “You need it. And you’re on vacation.”

“Right. I’ll just tell my doctor the extra fifteen pounds I gained this week is all calcium,” I joked.