The Dead Man (5 page)

Ammara leaned in toward me, her voice hard but too quiet for Lucy to hear us. "What do you mean it's okay? This is my scene, not yours. Your invitation didn't include a date."

"Understood," I said, my voice matching hers. "I'll handle it."

"Good. Do it now. I don't want your landlady polluting my crime scene."

I raised my hands in surrender. "No problem. One thing. I'd appreciate it if you'd keep me in the loop."

She took a deep breath. "You know the rules, Jack. You're a civilian. I'll tell you as much as I can without compromising the investigation."

"Which means you think that whatever was in that envelope has something to do with the money the Bureau says Wendy stole. You were at her funeral. You saw the date on the postmark. What? You think she rose from the dead and took the bus to New York so she could mail a letter to me confessing to being a thief and telling me where she hid the money?"

"You can make it sound crazy, Jack, but it's what you taught me. Collect the evidence. Follow where it leads. Let someone else higher up the food chain decide what to do with it."

We stared at each other, her face impassive, our friendship trumped by the job, another thing I had taught her. I nodded, conceding the moment.

"Let's go," I told Lucy.

We gave Walter Enoch's gargoyle death mask a last look.

"He was somebody's nightmare," Lucy said. "Glad he wasn't mine."

"What was that about?" she asked me when we were back in the car.

"The dead guy was a mailman who stole mail instead of delivering it."

"What's that got to do with you?"

"He stole my mail—at least one letter anyway. The envelope was found on his body but it was empty. Ammara Iverson, the agent you pissed off, thought I might know what was in it."

"Did you?"

Weak light filtered through the car as we passed strip centers, street lamps and oncoming traffic, shadows flickering across her face like a grainy silent movie. The effect was jarring, fogging my brain.

I was used to the visual triggers that could unleash spasms or inexplicably weaken my legs, sending me to the floor unless I grabbed on to someone or something. Two hours at the movies watching the latest action flick or five minutes in the florescent lighting aisle at Lowe's was a ticket to the funhouse. I'd have to add a black and white strobe light show to my list of things to avoid in the twenty-third hour of a day when my daughter speaks to me from the grave. I closed my eyes. Lucy let her question drop.

I declined the arm she offered me when we got home, using the banister to steady myself on the stairs going up to my bedroom. Ruby followed behind me, scratching the cushion of the easy chair where she slept, curling up without complaining that I was out late and without asking questions I didn't want to answer.

The dog had her bedtime routine and I had mine. One of the last things I did was check my gun even on days when I never took it out of its case. Guns are one of the few things it pays to be obsessive about because they do not forgive mistakes. Mine was always loaded, the safety always on, the case in the corner of the eye-level shelf in my bedroom closet, one end against the wall, the other flush against a stack of books laid flat with the spines facing out that I promised myself I would read before I die. I wedged the gun against the books, making it impossible to retrieve the gun case without disturbing the books. Wendy's stuffed animal, Monkey Girl, claimed the other end of the shelf.

After checking the gun and putting it away, I always restored the alignment of the books, the precision reassuring me that no one else had touched my gun. It was a safety habit I'd developed when my kids were young and curious about a father they sometimes confused with heroes on TV and in the movies who ate bad guys for breakfast and spit them out with the bullets they caught in their teeth.

The second book from the bottom, a Doris Kearns Goodwin biography of Lincoln, was angled away from the ones above and below. The angled book was a small thing, something I may have dismissed in my fatigued state, except for the gun case. It too was an inch out of place, the dust outline marking its spot on the shelf a testament to my housekeeping skills.

I opened the case, the smell of gun oil reassuring and familiar. The magazine of my Glock 23 was full, the safety on; the barrel smooth and polished as if I had just cleaned it. Except that I hadn't. Not since I'd last fired it two weeks ago at the Bullet Hole shooting range. Since then, I'd checked it every night, not concerned that I'd left smudged fingerprints all over it.

I put the gun away, unanswered questions worming their way into my head like snatches of song lyrics that burrow in your brain and won't stop playing. Lucy Trent was the only person who could have been in my closet. What was she doing with my gun? Why did she ignore my instruction to stay in the car? Why did she take pictures of the crime scene at Walter Enoch's house? And, as long as I was making a list of things to keep me awake, how did she get into the house when I was the only one with a key? I lay in bed in the dark as a final flurry of shakes had the last word, forcing me to put these questions off until tomorrow.

Maggie Brennan's name tugged at me in the halfway house between consciousness and sleep. I heard a voice say her name, calling her unbelievable. It was Tom Goodell, a retired sheriff from Johnson County, one of the beer-drinking cold case crew. He'd presented his case at lunch one day last year. It was about a couple that was murdered in their sleep and the daughter that survived. Though I couldn't summon the details, I was glad to have solved the puzzle of her name. Even if she weren't the same Maggie Brennan, I'd at least have an icebreaker to use when I met her.

My last waking thoughts turned, as they did most nights, to my lost children: Kevin, dead at the hand of a predator whose last and only decent act had been to blow his brains out, and Wendy, whose drug overdose had been a long-time-coming self-inflicted death. After all these years, my memories of Kevin were a comfortable touchstone from a better time when nothing seemed out of reach. My memories of Wendy, always hovering behind my eyes, were a raw reminder of how I had failed her.

Tonight, Walter Enoch's warped face was the last one I saw, whether he died of causes natural or felonious, why he was holding Wendy's envelope when he died, and what had happened to the envelope's contents were the last unanswered questions of a too long day.

I'd spent my life answering questions such as these, chipping away at the mystery of murder. The one thing I had learned was that the real mystery was not about who lived and who died or even who did it. It was about how we lived, why we died, and what difference we made.

Lucy's purse was on the kitchen table when I wandered in the next morning, bleary-eyed, blinding sun glancing off the snow in the backyard, ripples of liquid light washing over the windows. A bag of fresh bagels stood next to her purse. The binder Milo Harper gave me was next to the bag, spread open, poppy seeds trailing across a page titled
Executive Dysfunction Using Behavioral Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome in Parkinson's Disease.
Reading it made my hair hurt.

Ruby went outside through the doggie door from the kitchen to the backyard, excavating snow and chasing latent scents and stray birds. I watched her for a few minutes then walked to the foot of the stairs, listening for Lucy, running water rattling in the pipes telling me she was in the shower. I opened the front door. She had shoveled the walk and the driveway, leaving only the packed tracks the car had made the night before, the car now parked on the street, steam rising off the still-warm hood.

It was seven thirty-five and Lucy had already accomplished more than I probably would the rest of the day. I went back to the kitchen, bit into a bagel, and stared at her purse, last night's questions demanding answers, glad that I didn't need a warrant to get them. I emptied her purse onto the table.

She had a Maryland driver's license, the address in Gaithersburg. Her birthday was April 10, thirty-two years ago. She was five-seven, a hundred and twenty pounds, the photo on the license capturing her in one of those is-it-a-smile-or-is-it-gas grimaces.

I found a library card, a Costco card, a photograph of an older couple holding hands, the woman a future image of her, and four twenties, two fives, and a one. There was a receipt from a Starbuck's at Baltimore-Washington International Airport dated yesterday, a pack of Stride chewing gum, a pen, an assortment of other odds and ends, and a single key on a steel ring.

Looking around the kitchen, I found my keys hanging on a hook next to the light switch. The key in Lucy's purse matched my key to the house. The finish on mine was dull from years of use while her key was shiny. I ran my fingers across the teeth, examining my skin for any loose metal shavings from a newly cut key, perhaps made at the drugstore in Brookside that was next to the bagel shop, opened at six A.M. and had a self-service key machine but there were none.

"Find what you were looking for?" Lucy asked.

It was the day after Wendy's fifteenth birthday. She was on probation for a minor in possession charge and had been out all night, breaking her curfew and her probation. Her purse was stashed under a pile of dirty clothes on the floor in her bedroom. I waited until she was in the shower to go through it, finding three joints in a plastic bag.

"I said, did you find what you were looking for?" Lucy repeated.

"Where'd you get this key?" I asked Lucy.

Dressed in jeans and a turtleneck, her hair damp and her eyes on fire, she snatched the key from my hand, scooped everything else back into her purse, and jammed it under her arm.

"From my father. He sent it to me when he knew he was dying. Now get out of my house."

She wasn't Wendy. I was embarrassed but not ashamed at being caught, my gut telling me that I could still be right.

"Get a lawyer. What were you doing snooping around in my bedroom?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

She didn't look away and her cheeks didn't turn red but she swallowed hard and blinked like I'd slapped her.

"You're sloppy. You didn't straighten the books after you opened my gun case and you wiped the gun down. You should have left it the way you found it."

She squared her shoulders, arms tight across her chest. "It's my house. I'm entitled to know who's living in it."

"Why were you taking pictures last night?"

She bit the inside of her mouth. "I didn't think you noticed."

"You're lucky I did and Ammara Iverson didn't. She would have ground you and your cell phone under her boot if she'd caught you."

"But she didn't. And I knew you wouldn't bust me." Her aggravation gave way to a satisfied smile that spread across her face.

"How did you know that?"

"An ex-FBI agent gets called out to a crime scene. There's got to be a reason. Odds are the feds won't tell you everything even if they want your help. That's the way you guys roll. I figured you'd want to know why and that the pictures might help. I downloaded them to my computer. Give me your e-mail address and I'll send them to you."

I studied her, coming up with more questions than answers, then tore a corner off the bagel bag and scribbled my e-mail address on it. She grinned again and stuffed it in her pocket.

"Why take a chance like that to help someone you don't know and who you're kicking out of your house?"

"I don't have a job and I can use the rent money. Besides, I wasn't going to kick you out until I caught you going through my purse. How's that supposed to make me feel?"

Wendy's voice echoed in my head. Lucy's anger was genuine and justified and her read of last night's situation was on the money. The combination was disarming.

"You're not the only one who wants to know who they're sharing a roof with. You show up out of nowhere. I've got questions too."

She pulled a chair away from the table, sat, and stretched her long legs out. "Like what?"

"Like who are you? You act like you've been on the job. What's your story?"

"Montgomery County Maryland Sheriff's Department. I was a deputy for five years."

"Why'd you quit?"

She stood, folded her arms across her chest, and aimed her chin at me. "They're real picky. They make you quit when they send you to prison."

When she bounced off the couch the night before, loose, ready, and confident, I thought that she'd been on the job. Her eagerness to go behind the yellow tape and her refusal to be intimidated by Ammara confirmed it. I saw those things because they were familiar and because it was all she showed me until now. Her eyes narrowed, hard and cold, into a prison yard stare, daring me to push.

"For what?"

"Stealing diamonds, loose stones I found lying on the floor next to a dead body. Victim was a jewelry salesman. Put up enough of a fight to get killed. I got there first. Stuff was scattered all over the room. I didn't think anyone would notice if a few rocks stayed lost."

"But somebody noticed."

"Somebody usually does. The employer had a detailed inventory. We caught the perp the same night before he had a chance to unload any of it. Took all of twelve hours before it got back to me."