The Aztec Heresy (17 page)

‘‘No, thanks,’’ said Mossberg, cringing slightly. It occurred to him that at every meeting he’d had with the ugly little man, Max Kessler had been eating. He had an oddly obscene habit of dabbing at his lips too often with his napkin, and inevitably cleared his throat after each dab. He looked like a gigantic spider eating flies.

A waitress appeared. Mossberg ordered a Zhujiang lager, which was about as exotic as it got for Harry’s.

‘‘So,’’ said Kessler after the waitress faded away, ‘‘how are we tonight?’’

‘‘As well as can be expected, under the circumstances. ’’

‘‘You still think I’m blackmailing you?’’ Kessler smiled. He used a steak knife to carve a sliver from his open-faced burger and popped it into his mouth. Kessler was the only person William Hartley Mossberg had ever seen who could smile and chew simultaneously.

‘‘I don’t know what else you’d call it,’’ the young man said. His beer arrived along with a pilsner glass. He poured and took a long, sharp swallow. It didn’t do any good at all.

Kessler swallowed. Somehow, two years ago the little ferret had discovered that William Hartley was a regular at Apex and a variety of other gay clubs in Washington, including the notorious Lizard Lounge. D.C. had always been relatively tolerant of sexual predilections of virtually any stripe, but with a hard-line Republican in the Oval Office and tales of airport washroom two-steps abounding, it didn’t do to flaunt it. If William Hartley had been discreet it probably would have been overlooked, but his current main squeeze was a studly fellow on the second floor of the West Wing named Dan Sullivan, an intern in the Communications Office.

Even that might have passed muster in this day and age except for the fact that Daniel was the grandnephew of the current vice president, and that would not do, no indeedy. Monica Lewinsky wasn’t related to anyone in the White House, and look at the trouble she’d caused. A sex scandal of this particular type in this particular White House would be a barn burner, with William Hartley trapped inside the barn as it went up in flames.

Kessler stared at the young man across the table from him, dabbed his lips, and sighed.

‘‘I’ve explained to you before, Will. The information I have is merely a source of leverage. If I was ever to disclose it, lives would be ruined and careers overturned for no good reason. I see our relationship as potentially a mutual one. Don’t forget, I’m a supplier of information as well as a collector of it. Intelligence works both ways. There may come a time when I can help you as much as I can hurt you.’’

‘‘So you’ve told me on a number of occasions, ’’ grumbled Mossberg.

‘‘And meant it each and every time.’’ Kessler paused, surgically attacked his hamburger, and ate another bite. He dabbed his lips again. ‘‘Tell me something,’’ he murmured.

‘‘If I can.’’

‘‘How many satellites are there over Mexico?’’

‘‘Ours?’’

‘‘Yes.’’

Mossberg thought about it for a while, sipping his beer. Kessler ate, dabbed, ate and dabbed again. Mossberg finally answered.

‘‘A bunch. A couple of Geos birds, SeaSat, a NASA orbiter for telemetry. The DEA has at least two in conjunction with its AWACS program. There’s a Joint Intelligence Lacrosse Onyx put up by the National Reconnaissance Office that swings over Mexico when it’s tasked for it.’’

‘‘What can it do?’’

‘‘Anything. It uses something called Synthetic Aperture Radar. Sees through cloud cover. Press the right buttons and it can see under the ground. They call it the Bunker Hunter.’’

‘‘What would it take to task it for southern Mexico?’’

‘‘An intelligence directive.’’

‘‘How difficult is that for you?’’

‘‘As long as it’s not some kind of National Security thing, it wouldn’t be too difficult. A couple of forms to fill out, a phone call or two. It’s optimally in a polar orbit so it can see just about anything, anywhere, anytime.’’

‘‘I need a very close look at a very small piece of jungle. Could you manage that? Pictures?’’

‘‘I guess. If I had the right coordinates.’’

Kessler answered promptly and exactly, referring to no notes.

‘‘Twenty-one degrees twenty-three minutes nineteen-point-three seconds North by eighty-seven degrees forty minutes thirty-four seconds West.’’

‘‘Why there?’’

Kessler smiled blandly. ‘‘That, young man, would be telling."

17

Francis Xavier Spears had found William Huggins the ambulance driver in his apartment over the hardware store, drunk as a skunk and passed out in his narrow unmade bed just two hours after he completed his shift at midnight. According to Sears’s initial research, Huggins often drank while on the job, and there were a dozen empty cans of Budweiser and an empty bottle of cheap Pavlova vodka on the man’s battered old dining room table to give evidence to his continued binge.

Whether Huggins’s drinking habits came about as a result of his long-ago abuse by the bishop or for some other reason was irrelevant to Sears; what counted was the man’s comatose condition. Not only would Huggins be unaware of and untroubled by Sears’s intrusion, but the effect of the insulin would be increased dramatically. Sears checked the time. A quarter to two. Perfect.

The bedroom was a shabby place. There was a cheap chest of drawers, an open stainless steel clothing rack holding several uniforms and some shirts, an upturned plastic milk crate for a bedside table, and an IKEA Arstid-style table lamp with a broken pull chain replaced by a dangling piece of string. There was nothing hanging on the walls, which were painted a sullen pale tobacco color. There was a blackout curtain over the window that looked out onto the street. The IKEA light was on. The other things on the table included a package of discount Monte Carlo cigarettes, a matchbook from Shooters Bar and Grill on Main Street a block away, and an empty forty of orange-flavored St. Ides malt liquor.

Sears was already wearing surgical gloves. He reached into the pocket of his Windbreaker and removed a loaded NovoLog FlexPen. He unscrewed the cap and, using his left hand, gently eased Huggins’s jaw to one side. The man groaned, broke wind, and shuffled his legs but didn’t awaken. Sears was pleased to see that Huggins hadn’t shaved. The insertion site would be invisible among the heavy beard, the large pores, and the old razor burn. The man had the complexion of a pizza.

Sears dialed the head of the pen up to a maximum sixty-unit dose, gently pinched the skin under Huggins’s jaw to find the artery, then inserted the ultrafine needle. Huggins didn’t even flinch. Sears kept the needle firmly lodged in the artery for a full six seconds, making sure that all the insulin had been delivered. Finally he withdrew the now-empty pen, screwed on the cap again, and simply stood there, looking down at the innocent victim.

As far as murder was concerned, Sears had learned many years ago that patience was a virtue, a key one if the murder was to remain undetected. The majority of murderers were eventually caught because they rushed the job and left something behind or something undone.

The fact that the death of William Huggins would go unnoticed for a minimum of twelve hours, allowing the scene to decay, was immaterial; care had to be taken, even though his victim’s passing would be unremarkable and unremarked on. Even the death of a nobody was important, at least to Sears. So he waited.

NovoLog was a fast-acting insulin, and within ten minutes the first signs of distress became visible as the insulin in his brain put him into hypoglycemic shock as his blood sugar plummeted. A cold sweat broke out on the man’s forehead, followed by mild shaking or light convulsions of his arms and legs. Sears reached out and put his finger on the man’s carotid. The pulse was frantic as Huggins descended into tachycardia.

He groaned then, his torso convulsing as he began to vomit, choking on it. His eyes flew open then rolled back, showing only the whites. He began to convulse heavily and then, suddenly, everything subsided. Huggins’s sphincter loosened and the stink of human waste rose out of the bedclothes. From dead drunk to just plain dead in eleven and a half minutes.

Sears gazed around the room, looking for problems, finding none. He checked himself. None of the man’s fluids had reached him. He was already wearing disposable surgical booties and a paper cap. There would be no trace. No suspicion.

He turned away from the fresh corpse and left the room. He walked back through the apartment, touching nothing. The windows here closed, and either Huggins had been too drunk to turn on the air conditioner in the dining room or it didn’t work. Either way the apartment would be a furnace by noon. The blowflies would be hard at work by then, the first maggots appearing within six hours.

If nobody checked on the man’s whereabouts for a day or two the smell coming down into the hardware store might be the first clue, and by then the corpse would be a terrible mess. Sears gave the room a last once-over and checked his wristwatch. Two a.m. The bars would be emptying out. There’d be lots of people on the street, a crowd to vanish into with the police cruisers probably concentrating on places like Shooters a few blocks to the south beyond Courthouse Square. He’d be an insomniac tourist on the way back to his bed-and-breakfast, a traveling salesman for a medical supply company just like his business card and other ID proclaimed.

He reached the back door, carefully removed the strip of tape he’d used to keep it unlocked, and stepped out onto the wooden stairs that led down to the courtyard loading zone behind the hardware store. He took care not to wipe the existing prints off the doorknob. Wiped areas were dangerous. A smudge or two wouldn’t bother anyone, if they even decided to dust for prints at all.

He waited for a moment at the bottom of the steps, peeled off his surgical gloves and the paper booties he’d worn, and put them into his jacket pocket. He walked slowly across the small courtyard and went down a narrow alley, exiting onto Isaac Street. Seeing no one but hearing the echo of some shouts and honking horns from the bar a few blocks away, he went down Isaac Street to Sixth and turned onto Sixth Avenue.

Mrs. Rothwell’s bed-and-breakfast was located across from a hulking old redbrick middle school. It was a big old mansard-roof mansion like something out of the
Magnificent Ambersons.
A dozen bedrooms, wood-paneled walls, and worn old carpets on yellow varnished hardwood floors. The furniture was antique or at least trying to be, and there was a rear brick patio and flower beds everywhere. Three of the guest rooms had private baths and Sears had taken one of them. It was on the main floor at the rear, with French doors leading out to the patio, which suited him perfectly.

Sears went to the long narrow parking lot at the side of the building and unlocked the trunk of his Hertz rental. He took out a medium-sized plastic bag, locked the trunk, and went to the far end of the parking lot then followed the property line of the bed-and-breakfast to the rear alley.

He turned right down the dark alley, counting the garages until he reached the old chain-link fence that marked the alley end of the property belonging to the bishop’s mother. He stopped then, opened the bag, and took out a can of WD-40 with its wand already attached. He sprayed the hinges of the gate and the slip latch, put the can back into the bag, and stepped into the bishop’s backyard. A dog barked a few doors down and he could still hear the distant sounds of car horns, but other than that there was nothing. He checked his watch. Ten past two.

Sears looked up at the rear of the house at three windows on the dormered second floor, two ordinary windows flanking a smaller frosted-glass one in the middle. There was a faint light glowing from the middle room. A nightlight in the bathroom, most likely. Bedrooms on both sides, dark. There were three windows on the main floor as well. All dark. The bishop was in bed, asleep after spending most of the day at the hospital with his dying mother.

Sears slipped across the back lawn and went up onto the narrow back porch. He put the plastic bag down, withdrew another pair of paper booties and a full-body DuPont Tyvek jumpsuit complete with a drawstring hood. He quickly slipped into the suit, put on the booties, and picked up the bag again. He put on a second pair of surgical gloves and found the spare key just where he’d discovered it the night before—on the lintel above the door.

He used the WD-40 again, slid the key into the lock and turned it. The door opened smoothly. He stepped into the bishop’s kitchen. He went through the kitchen and down the hall to the foyer by the front door. Creeping silently to the top stairs, he glanced quickly into the empty hallway, then prepared his trap. He stepped softly back downstairs. There was an old-fashioned telephone bench at the end of the hallway. He stood beside the little table and the equally old-fashioned rotary phone.

He waited, listening for any signs of movement. Then he reached into his bag and took out the disposable Cingular cell phone he’d purchased a week ago and so far had never used. He dialed a number. The old phone on the table gave a jangling ring. He could hear the simultaneous ringing of the extension upstairs. He waited. After five rings he heard the froggy, mumbling voice of the bishop, suddenly jarred from sleep. He’d immediately think that it was the hospital calling, telling him of his mother’s imminent demise.

‘‘Hello?’’

‘‘Come downstairs.’’

‘‘I beg your pardon?’’

‘‘Come downstairs.’’

‘‘What are you talking about? Who is this? Is this about my mother?’’

‘‘Come downstairs.’’

Sears reached out with one hand and gently picked up the extension, hanging up the cell phone an instant later. There was a dial tone on the old rotary.

‘‘Hello? Hello?’’

The upstairs telephone clicked as the bishop hung up. Sears left the rotary off the hook, keeping the line open, just in case. He heard footsteps overhead and a light came on, shining down the stairs. The bishop, in a green silk dressing gown, appeared at the head of the stairs.

‘‘Bishop Boucher.’’ Sears made his voice loud and firm. Commanding. Keeping the man’s attention.

‘‘Who the hell are you?’’ Boucher demanded, blinking, peering through wire-rimmed spectacles. His white hair stood on end. ‘‘What do you want?’’