The Clouds Roll Away (26 page)

But in February 2005, the government built an on-site disposal unit and “neutralized” the last of the lewisite.

Not one drop of the dew of death was ever stolen.

None was missing.

And none was ever reported in any crime committed in the United States. Until now.

Worse, my employer, the United States government, was telling me lewisite no longer existed.

At the very bottom of the third page of information, Hannah Hamer had scrawled a note. With a happy face.

“Hope this helps,” she wrote. “Merry Christmas.”

The late afternoon clouds looked hammered from a blacksmith's shop as I walked down East Leigh Street, the cold wind stinging the tops of my ears. I found Detective Nathan Greene in his office at the police annex, his brown skin dry and frangible as birch bark.

But his eyes . . . his eyes resembled the clouds outside.

“You ruined my source,” he said.

“Sully lies, you know.”

“Of course he lies, he's a snitch. But he won't even lie to me now.”

“I understand. And I'm working on another source for you.”

“You
understand
?” Heat roared into his voice. “Do you
understand
how hard it is for me to get informants?”

“Probably not.”

“My cases aren't cold; they're frozen solid. I finally start to thaw something out and you come along to ice it up again.”

“Sully will come back.” I could sense the subterranean rumble rising up his throat. To avoid the eruption, I kept talking. “He's a born weasel. He won't make it a week on his own. Snitching is too easy. And he gets his drugs at the same time. He'll call you before Christmas.”

The detective stared. It made me nervous.

“Look,” I continued, “if you think it'll help, I'll grovel to him on the phone. I'll let him think he's got the advantage.”

“He does.”

“But after he's done whining, what's he going to do—get a job?”

“He's got a lawyer.”

“Okay. But the lawyer is years from getting Sully money, if he even can.”

The detective narrowed his eyes. “Why are you so eager to help?”

“Guess who the new undercover buyer is.”

He nodded. “You earned it.”

“And I'm ready to pay Sully out of my own pocket.”

News of my punishment appeared to relax him. Reaching up, he massaged his jaw, loosening an ache, and I listened to the big wall clock. It ticked off three seconds. Four. Five. Six. A white analog face with large black numbers, the clock looked like it had been tossed out of a principal's office.

“Have you ever encountered any cold cases with unmarked cartridge cases?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I knew you didn't come here to apologize.”

“I did. But there's more.”

“There's always more with you. Always.” He sighed. “All right. What do you mean, unmarked?”

“No stamps in the brass. No manufacturer, no caliber.”

Like all good detectives, he was an expert at concealing his thoughts. He almost managed to hide the quick light sparking through his dark eyes. “If I find something like that,” he said, “you're going to tell me what the connection is, right?”

“Of course. Don't you trust me?”

“Get out of my office,” he said.

The body only housed the soul, I knew that. The body was not the soul. But as I walked the windy streets from the police annex to the city morgue on South Jackson, I needed reminding. Dead bodies, I told myself, were nothing more than broken shells on a beach. It was just that in the morgue, that beach so often looked like a bad stretch of the Jersey shore.

I showed my credentials to the receptionist at the front counter, clipped a temporary ID to my coat, and walked down the hall. My mortal weakness sensed spiritual mist in the atmosphere, tangible as the condensation entrails produced by high-altitude airplanes. I pushed through the swinging double doors.

Two stainless steel gurneys waited, each draped with a white sheet. Across the room, Dr. Yardley Bauer came through another set of double doors connected to the back offices. She wore clean turquoise scrubs, looking as peaceful as somebody returning from vacation. She hit a light switch on the wall to spotlight the first gurney. Under the pendant light, her blonde hair sparkled like faceted citrine.

The dead man's wrists and arms were bruised deep violet.

“We ran fingerprints,” she said in her sandy contralto. “So far nothing's come up, locally or nationally. And we found some more tattoos, but the images aren't all that clear due to the pronounced swelling.”

She placed both gloved hands under the man's shoulder and lifted, nodding at the image on the back of his shoulder.

The blue-and-yellow ink was as pearlescent as the contusions. But I saw faces and halos over the heads.

“The other guy's got one just like it.” She rested the shoulder back on the gurney. She walked to the end of the table, where his feet tented the sheet.

“Madonna and child,” I said.

“Mm, something like that,” she said dismissively. She lifted the clipboard hanging on the end of the table. “They ate borscht.”

“Pardon?”

“Stomach contents. At first I thought it was blood. But it was beets. Last meal: borscht.”

“May I see their faces?” I asked.

Even without the inflicted damage and swelling, these were homely men. Rough-featured, almost grotesque noses. I moved my eyes down the neck, the chest. An archipelago of blisters had scabbed over, stretching across the sternum.

“Friction?” I pointed to the injury.

“Some kind of burn, but not abrasion. I sent tissue samples to the lab. It's on both of them.”

I leaned down, recalling the photos Nettie Labelle gave me. Compared to what lewisite was supposed to do, this looked minor. “When do you expect the tissue samples to come back?”

“With the holiday?” She walked over to a stainless steel sink stretching along one wall. She yanked off the gloves and hit the soap dispenser with the back of her wrist, lathering to her elbows. “I wouldn't expect anything until after New Year's.”

“I can give you a prediction,” I said. “If you're interested.”

“Oh, I'm always interested in your guesses, Agent Harmon.”

Hard to tell with her—sarcastic, authentic?—but I offered a brief summary of lewisite's blistering capabilities, along with mustard gas. “Somebody around here got hold of these chemicals,” I said, “although our government insists they destroyed all of it.”

“These guys don't look like chemists.” She dried her hands, moving the paper towel between each finger. “Send me what you have. I'll alert the lab.”

For one brief moment, she seemed taken aback by not knowing. But with my next question she reverted back to her old self.

“May I see the bullets?” I asked.

She reached under the sheet draping the first body, offering me a steel bedpan. When she tilted it, the two copper-jacketed bullets and one cartridge case rolled across the metal, a dull pitiless sound.

“One bullet went all the way through,” she said. “The cartridge was stuck in a shirt collar.”

“May I borrow the case and one bullet?”

“I don't see how much good they'll do. They're unmarked.”

“That's exactly why I want them,” I said.

chapter thirty-two

O
ne of fashion's all-time worsts ravaged my years at Mount Holyoke College: pegged jeans.

They fit tight, so tight it looked like we showered in them. But as a teenager far from my Southern home, hoping to fit in with my stylish New England peers, I wore a pair to a mixer down the road at Amherst College. I spent the entire evening standing with my back to the wall, too self-conscious to dance.

I never wore the jeans again, but I was a squirrel who rarely threw things out. Wednesday afternoon, dredging through my closet, I found the jeans next to the flowing white dress worn in Mount Holyoke's laurel parade, the graduating seniors linked together by botany representing classical wisdom.

Now, feeling stupid, I lay flat on my bed trying to squeeze into the jeans. When I stood, I was one Big Mac from bursting the zipper. Pulling on a fire-engine red sweater, purloined from my mother's closet, I slipped my bare feet into my three-inch black heels and wiggled over to the mirror on the back of my bedroom door.

I still looked too healthy.

Wiggling down the hall to the bathroom, I dampened my hair and applied way too much gel, scrunching Zennie's cut into a dysfunctional shape. I traced my lower lashes with a blue eye pencil and applied too much mascara. Throwing on my overcoat,

I carefully made my way down the carriage house stairs. The alley cobblestones were already coated with frost, but I tried to run anyway, jumping into the icebox K-Car because if my mother saw me like this, there would be no explaining how it connected to geology.

I drove out to Parham Road, parked, and went directly to Pollard's office. He had dressed down for the occasion too—the Virginia gentleman's version. Dark jeans with perfect creases, pristine tennis shoes, blue sweater. If Pollard saw what passed for casual in Seattle, he'd have a heart attack.

“I talked to Phaup about the wire,” he said. “She agreed to take it off.”

“But . . . ?”

“How do you know there's more?”

“When it comes to Phaup, I'm like Pavlov's dog.”

“She's giving you ten minutes.”

“Excuse me?”

“Get in there, Raleigh, make the buy, get out.”

“And what if they don't do the deal in ten minutes? I'm supposed to say, ‘Sorry, guys, but my boss at the FBI says I have to go now.'”

“That's her compromise.”

“That's not a compromise, Pollard. That's a death sentence. You know these buys. They're rarely clockwork.”

“It was the best I could do. Come out that door nine minutes fifty-five seconds after you go in, or SWAT comes in.”

“They've got assault rifles, Pollard.”

He gave a tight nod. “I want you to brief SWAT on the layout of the house; we want to know about everything you saw in there.”

“How many SWAT?”

“All six.”

“It could be a bloodbath.”

He didn't bother nodding. “Ten minutes,” he said.

When I pulled up in the K-Car, the Raiders were in jovial moods, laughing about something, and through the cold night they tossed a football, the pigskin arcing under the only streetlight that wasn't shot out.

Pretending to watch the football, I climbed out of the K-Car and let my eyes roam the street. Somewhere, in the dark recesses of abandoned houses and overgrown lots full of dead cars and broken glass, six SWAT guys waited for me to walk through that door so they could start their stopwatches.

“Hey, that ride still going?” one of the Raiders called out.

I smiled with annoyance and wiggled toward the front steps. Taking hold of the icy metal handrail, I heard nylon friction. The ball getting tossed. I climbed the stairs and heard the
thwuck
of a football getting caught. But then it got quiet. Too quiet. I felt their eyes on my back. Or maybe the jeans. Just like that night with Sully, I sensed something slipping out of sync. The happy mood, the casual atmosphere. But I opened the front door, clinging to the foolish hope that uncertain success could repeat itself.