Invasion of Privacy (11 page)

Joe’s belongings sat on her dresser where she’d left them the night before. A drawstring bag held his shoes and belt. A smaller zip-lock bag held his wristwatch, tie clasp, and Saint Christopher medal. Mary selected the remaining zip-lock bag, which contained his wallet. It was a standard leather billfold, scuffed and worn. A Christmas present from the girls to their dad three years before, to replace the horrid Velcro one he’d used for years. She removed it and looked inside. As usual, she was amused at how few credit cards Joe carried. There was a government-issued Visa for his work expenses and an American Express card for personal use.

Joe believed in paying off all his debts each month. It was a nice concept, but quaintly outdated in the era of a laptop for every student and prescription medications that cost $600 a month. Consequently Mary was in charge of family finances and merited an honorary degree in juggling balances between her four MasterCards and her bank custom credit line.

She slipped her fingers into the pouches beneath the cardholders. One side yielded several school portraits of the girls, an organ donor’s card, and a business card for a roofer who’d visited the house a week ago to check on a leak Joe couldn’t patch. At the bottom of the stack was a small, folded piece of paper, gossamer soft, fraying with age. Once it had been sky blue, but now it was white. She unfolded it carefully, her chest tightening as she realized what she held in her hands.

A younger woman’s flowery, hopeful script read: “You have made me the happiest woman in the world. I love you. M.”

Mary looked away quickly. It was the note she’d given Joe on their wedding day, hours before the ceremony. She hadn’t thought about it since, yet here it was, soft and frayed, evidently unfolded and read hundreds of times over the years. The sky-blue paper, her youthful, innocent handwriting, the crazily optimistic words, were an indelible
snapshot of one day in her life. It was something to cherish and to treasure. Something permanent. She looked at the words again, then folded the note and slipped it back into the wallet.

That was that.

Mary sighed. She was pleased to have discovered the wedding note but disappointed that Joe hadn’t left her another clue. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected to find…just something to add to the skein of information gleaned from the crumpled paper in Joe’s office.

As an afterthought, she cracked open the wallet to count Joe’s money. She thumbed through a ten, a five, and four ones. There was a receipt, too. It was from the Nutty Brown Cafe and dated yesterday. She stepped out of the closet to read it in the daylight.

The time listed was 2:05 p.m. Items included one cheeseburger, one French fries, one Coca-Cola, one egg-white omelet with green peppers. One coffee.

On the flip side Joe had penned, “SSA FK 7/29.”

Mary forgot her disappointment. There was FK once again. If she was no closer to guessing his name, at least she knew more about him. “SSA” stood for Supervisory Special Agent. FK, whoever he might be, was not the informant. He worked for the FBI.

The walk-in closet was as big as Mary’s childhood bedroom. Two cabinets hung from the ceiling, Mary’s to the left. Joe’s to the right. She opened her husband’s. The smell of him wafted over her. Sandalwood and citrus. The scents were sharp and nearly provoked an onslaught of tears. Mary steeled herself and concentrated on the job at hand. Some spare change and a few golf tees were scattered across the top shelf. A box of matches from Chuy’s, a fun Mexican place downtown.

She started on Joe’s suits. He owned six or seven, usually buying two a year and retiring two. There weren’t too many casual Fridays with the Bureau. She found a napkin from Whataburger in one pocket, a few dimes, a handkerchief, and a bonus card from the local car wash. Her movements grew sloppier in lockstep with her frustration. She stopped returning his slacks to the rack, instead dropping them onto the carpet. The pockets were empty. All of them.

When she’d finished, she put her hands on her hips and sighed. She’d succeeded only in messing up the closet. One by one she picked
up the slacks and hung them. She fixed the jackets on their hangers just so, with a half-inch between them.

“Nothing good comes easy.”

The admiral was having a last laugh.

A pile of dirty laundry lay in the corner. She scooped up the clothing, carried it to her bed, and dumped it there in a heap. Three shirts and a rumpled olive suit. She checked the pants first. A Kleenex. Two pennies. And a napkin from American Airlines with a tomato juice stain, which meant it came from a morning flight.

Memories of Joe flooded her mind.

He was seated next to her on a flight—she didn’t know where from or where to. It was early in the morning and he’d just ordered a tomato juice from the attendant. She looked on as he emptied the can into the plastic cup, then raised his gaze to hers and stared into her eyes, saying nothing, saying everything, saying
I love you
.

Mary saw herself from a distance, shaking her head, smiling warily, thinking to herself, Don’t spill that on your white shirt.

“Me?” said Joe. “Never.”

Mary bolted at the sound of his voice. “Joe,” she said aloud. “Are you here?”

He was there. He was with her in the bedroom
.

The echo of her own words brought her back. The voice was in her head. Joe wasn’t there. He’d never be there again.

Keep moving, she ordered herself. You haven’t finished yet.

Mary ran a hand over the olive jacket. Her fingers delved into the pockets. She took hold of a piece of paper. She pulled and it snagged. She pulled again and came away with a boarding pass stub.

American Airlines. Grant, Mr. J. Flight 83. AUS—SJC. Seat 13D. Date: 6/1

On June 1, Mr. J. Grant had flown on American Airlines Flight 83 from Austin to San Jose.

Alarm bells sounded.

She checked the stub again. Yes…
San Jose
.

Mary ran downstairs to the kitchen and sat at the phone alcove. She opened the family agenda and flipped backward through the pages until she reached June 1.

“JG—San Antonio” read the entry in Joe’s block-letter writing.

Mary looked at the boarding pass. Not San Antonio.
San Jose
. A difference of sixteen hundred miles.

They had a rule. No matter how sensitive the case, Joe must inform her when he was traveling long distance. In return, she promised never to ask why or what it was about. The rule was inviolate.

Honesty was their bond.

Mary closed the agenda as if slamming a door. She wiped at the tears running down her cheeks. Joe had lied.

No, she argued. Not Joe. It was the Bureau. They had forced him to lie.

But she couldn’t accept that either. No one forced Joe to do anything. If he’d lied to her, it was his choice.

Mary slipped the boarding pass into her pocket.

Why, Joe? she demanded, some part of her still wondering if he just might be listening. What case could be so important as to warrant putting your wife’s trust, your marriage, and even your family in jeopardy?

“Don’t do it.”

From her window, Jessie looked on as Grace jumped higher and higher on the Kramers’ trampoline next door. On the fourth bounce she threw a front flip. Her feet landed well, but her forward momentum propelled her into the mesh siding. She appeared to strike the iron support bar and toppled to her side.

“Ouch,” said Jessie. “Get up.”

Her eye went to the Kramers’ kitchen. Of course Mom was keeping an eye on Gracie, too. The sliding door rocketed open and her mom dashed to the trampoline. In their house it was all Grace, all the time.

Jessie pulled her e-cigarette from her pocket and sparked a hit. She wasn’t jealous of the attention Grace got. It wasn’t that. It was just annoying how everyone expected her always to be all right on her own. “Jess has her computers.” Or “Jess doesn’t like to be bothered.” Or “She’s happier by herself.”

Yeah, right.

It didn’t matter anyway.

In fact she was proud of her sister. All that time in the hospital. All the terrible stuff they did to her, the puking, losing her hair. And now she acted as if it had never happened. Saint Grace.

Jess looked on as her sister got to her feet, giggling, and her mom went back inside, white as a sheet.

“Again,” Grace shouted, and started bouncing once more on the trampoline.

Jess shook her head. Her sister was pretty tough. She’d give her that.

She vaped again, then slipped her e-cig into her pocket and lay down on her bed with her laptop. Her wallpaper showed a picture of Def Leppard with all her favorite apps and icons of lots of her (supposed) favorite websites. She hit an encrypt key. Def Leppard disappeared and the Jolly Roger appeared, dotted from corner to corner with icons of her
real
favorite sites.

Jess double-clicked on an icon showing a large
S
. The Sugardaddies.com home page appeared and she felt the delicious tingle of excitement. It was her naughty feeling. She typed in her name, Lolita2000, and her password. Her profile page appeared. There was a picture of a tall, slim brunette in a bikini who was definitely not Jessie. Below it ran her description: “Good Girl Gone Bad. Naughty, but Oh So Nice.” There followed a short tease. “Only the most discriminating gentlemen wanted. I’m a smart, young, motivated woman interested in being mentored by a successful gentleman. Located in northern California but willing to travel and dying to see the world. I love great cuisine, stimulating conversation, and long, deep kisses that make me feel like a woman.”

She wasn’t sure about that last part, but lots of other girls on the site said similar things.

Her mailbox showed that she’d received sixty-seven messages in the past two days. A sample of the headers included “Hey Classy Lady,” from Nantucket Sailor; “Just How Naughty?” from Rich in NYC; and “You Are Smokin’ Hot!” from Julio J. Studley. Jessie was pretty sure that wasn’t his real name.

Halfway down the list she spotted a familiar handle: 40, Rich, and Bored.

Her heart quickened and she opened the message.

“Hi Lexie.” Lexie was her Net name. “Still waiting on that special pic you promised to send. I sent you mine. Did you dig it? Hope you put the five hundred bucks to good use. Consider it a down payment on a good time when we hook up. Did I mention I just picked up a new Benz S Class? Be a good girl—or a bad one!!—and I’ll buy you one, too. Gotta run. Send me that pic, pretty lady!”

She clicked on his handle, and several pictures of an okay-looking guy with dark hair and a tan standing next to a BMW came up. Forty was old, but not that old. Fifty was old. Forty was
almost
old, and this guy looked like he was younger. He even had a six-pack.

She opened another tab and typed in her bank’s address, then logged in to her account. The balance stood at $3,575. 40, Rich, and Bored’s payment of $500 had arrived the day before. At least she knew he wasn’t lying about the rich part. He’d already sent $1,000 the month before. The thought made Jessie nervous and ashamed. She knew it wasn’t right to steal money, but this wasn’t exactly stealing. She asked for it and men sent it. Of course, she promised to send pictures of herself
and also to do stuff to them when they met. Even so, they knew that they were taking a chance. They probably rubbed themselves off in the shower thinking about her. Pervs. If they were stupid enough to send money to any girl who asked, they deserved to lose it.

Jessie got up and glanced through the window, making sure that Grace and her mom were still next door. She walked to the mirror and tried out a few poses that she thought he might find sexy. She lifted up her shirt to expose her midriff. Polar bears were darker. She turned around and stuck her butt at the mirror.
God, no, Jess. Your ass is the size of a tractor
.

Maybe she should just send him a picture like the one he sent her. Totally naked. She picked up her phone and hit the camera app, feeling that naughty sensation, daring herself to go for it…

The front door slammed. Terrified, Jessie froze. Footsteps drummed up the stairs. Jessie threw herself onto the bed. A second later Grace opened her door and bounded into the room. “Jess, guess what?”

Jess hit the encrypt key. The Sugardaddies website disappeared and was replaced by her fake home screen. She looked up, bored beyond measure, even as her heart was exploding. “What now?”

“Mom said we might get a dog.”

“Oh.”

“Wouldn’t that be incredible? I mean, we’ve wanted one for so long. A dog!”

Jessie looked back at her laptop. “Yeah,” she said. “Awesome.”

It was nine p.m. when Tank Potter arrived at the office of the Travis County medical examiner. The doors were locked. A single bulb burned at the end of the corridor. Tank rapped his knuckles against the glass and did his best to stand up straight. He’d kept himself on a tight leash all afternoon. One snort from his backstop an hour, strictly for medicinal purposes. By tomorrow the shakes would be a thing of the past.

A thin, dark-haired man in a lab coat rounded the corner and hurried down the corridor. Tank raised his hand in the Longhorn salute—pinkie and index finger extended, his other fingers curled into a fist. “Hook ’em, Horns.”

“Hook ’em, Horns,” replied Carlos Cantu, raising his own hand in salute as he opened the door. “Hey, buddy. We’re closing up shop. I can give you five minutes.”

“That ought to do.” Tank stepped inside the building and followed Cantu down the hall to the “icebox,” the room where the corpses were stored. The medical examiner shared space with the city morgue and handled autopsies for Travis and five surrounding counties, a geographic footprint that included Dripping Springs. Cantu wasn’t the ME or even the forensic investigator. He was just a morgue assistant whom Tank had known since his playing days, when he’d been a star and Cantu a student trainer who’d wrapped his ankle, laundered his uniforms, and folded his towels. Tank had kept in touch over the years, if only for this purpose.

“Thought you were covering politics these days,” said Cantu.

“I’m back in the saddle,” said Tank, dodging the question. “Wouldn’t miss this one for the world.”

“Something’s up with this guy. No question.”

“Really?”

The morgue looked no different from when he’d last visited, three years ago. Low ceiling, fluorescent lights, white tile floor and walls,
and the inescapable, eye-watering scent of ammonia. Cantu pulled a holding tray out of the wall. The informant lay inside a pale green body bag. “We had the FBI in here all day, asking lots of questions.”

“One of ’em Don Bennett?”

“Who’s he?”

“SAC in the Austin office. Bald, mustache, looks like he has a rake up his ass.”

“He was here. But he wasn’t the one in charge.”

“Who was?”

“Short, gray-haired guy. New Yorker. All business.”

“Name?”

Cantu shook his head. “Ted? Or Ed? All I know is that he was the one ordering Doc Donat around and telling him what to do with the bodies.”

“What do you mean? The ME’s required by law to do an autopsy.”

“That’s just it. They’re sending the bodies to D.C. for the postmortems. I’m supposed to have them ready for transshipment by tomorrow at noon.”

“Both?”

“The guy with half a head and the FBI dude.”

Tank took this in. He was fairly certain that sending a body out of state for autopsy was not standard operating procedure. Postmortems of homicide victims were conducted by the nearest medical examiner. It was a question of cost, convenience, and timeliness. Decomposition began the moment a heart stopped beating and accelerated as time went on.

Carlos Cantu had one hand on the zipper. “Didn’t have a bean-and-cheese burrito for dinner, did you?”

Tank said he had not.

“Fair warning.” Cantu unzipped the body bag. Tank looked, then looked away, sucking down a gulp of air to steady himself. Timidly he returned his gaze to “the guy with half a head.” One eye remained, the lower half of a nose, lips, and a chin. The rest of the skull and brain was gone as cleanly as if a shovel had sheared it away.

The FBI’s press release stated that Special Agent Joseph Grant had been mortally wounded in the course of debriefing an informant but had managed to kill said informant prior to expiring himself. Tank had seen plenty of dead bodies. His time on the murder beat had given
him a lesson in the fine art of gunshot wounds, from .22s that looked like little more than cigarette burns to .44 Magnums that went in big and came out bigger. No handgun was capable of this kind of damage. Tank’s childhood of hunting deer and javelinas told him that only a high-caliber rifle was capable of shearing off that much of a man’s head with a single shot.

“Can I look at the other guy? The Fibbie?”

Cantu dug his hands into his lab coat. “I’m pushing it as it is, Tank. I have to be out of here by nine-fifteen.”

Tank peeled off a twenty and put it in Cantu’s hand. “Would have bought us a case of Heini’s back in the day.”

“I’m good with a sixer of Shiner Bock.” Cantu pocketed the bill, marched down the row, and pulled out the tray bearing Joseph Grant’s corpse. He unzipped the bag and pulled it over the corpse’s shoulders, revealing the mortal wound. It was apparent that the body had come straight from the hospital. There was still tape around the mouth and dried blood all over the chest and torso. Grant had been shot a single time in the chest. The entry wound was the size of Tank’s middle finger, a round black hole.

“Can you lift him up?”

Cantu hoisted the corpse, exposing an exit wound the size and appearance of a crushed grapefruit. Tank had two impressions. First, no handgun did that kind of damage. Second, the diameter of the entry wound was too big to come from a pistol. They added up to a single, undeniable fact: Don Bennett was lying.

It was evident why the FBI wanted to get the bodies into friendly hands and away from prying eyes. Away from reporters like Tank.

“Can I put him down now?” grunted Cantu.

“Sure thing.” Tank walked back to the informant. He was already growing accustomed to the gruesome corpse—getting his sea legs back, so to speak. “No name on this guy?”

“John Doe.”

“Where’s his wallet?”

“All his valuables had been removed.”

“You lift his prints, dental records?”

“What for? The feds knew who he was.”

“Let me see his papers.”

“In the ME’s office with the valuables. Locked.”

Tank looked closely at the body. He tagged him early forties, five-nine
or so, arms and legs like pins, soft belly, no tats, nice fingernails. He lifted one of the hands. Not a callus, scratch, or scar. A man who’d never done a day’s labor in his life. White-collar all the way. He noted that the ring finger on the left hand was creased but was not paler than the rest of the finger. He inferred that the informant had separated from his wife or divorced in the past ninety days. Someone would be missing him soon.

Tank used his phone to take photographs of the bodies.

“No pictures,” said Carlos Cantu. “You know the rules.”

“I’m not putting it on YouTube.”

“Erase them. Please.”

“I can’t do that. Not this time.”

Cantu blocked the door, arms crossed. Tank freed two more twenties from his money clip and extended them, something between a bribe and a peace offering. Cantu took the bills.

“Burning your bridges, Tank.”

“This may be the last one I’m crossing.”