The Death Trust (8 page)

Harmony Scott stared at me with a cold ferocity in her pale gray eyes and I saw in them her father, the Vice President: Jefferson Cutter, the man often referred to as “Jeff the Cutter,” “the Ripper,” or “Toe Cutter” by the Washington press corps. At sixty-eight years of age, JC was getting on in life now but he was still supposedly the most powerful man in D.C. In fact, Cutter was also called the Ventriloquist, on account of that’s how far his hand went up the President’s ass. Harmony Scott’s stare was unsettling, the way a viper holds you before it strikes. But only her eyes held anger, danger. The rest of her face was completely devoid of expression, like it belonged to someone else, a mask of porcelain and just as cold. Botox. “You will do no such thing,” she said, taking a step toward me, getting inside my personal space—coiling—so that I had to take half a step back. Then she turned and went inside her home, slamming the heavy front door in our faces.

“A pleasure to meet you, ma’am,” I said. I had a bunch of questions I wanted to put to the widow, but they would have to wait until she was in a more amenable mood to answer them. “Where’s the hired help?” I asked.

“Let go,” said Masters as we walked down the stairs. “Fired months ago. She gets a professional cleaning company in once a week.”

“The woman’s in that big house alone? No friends or relatives?”

Masters nodded.

“What about her mother?” I asked.

“She doesn’t have one.”

“What, ever?”

“I believe her mother died in childbirth.”

“You’re starting to scare me,” I said.

Masters shrugged. Her cell began playing that KC and the Sunshine Band number. She answered it. “It’s for you.”

“Me?” I took the phone and stepped off the porch into the garden, and began to walk slowly back to the front gate.

“What in fuck’s name is going on there, Cooper?” snarled the voice through the speaker. “You’ve been there less than a day and already I’m being pressured to have you sent home.” It was General Gruyere.

“General, I’m just doing my job.”

“That’s not what I’m hearing.”

I glanced at my Seiko. I figured von Koeppen must have called her as soon as he got off the line with his president, a good forty minutes ago. It was just after 0600 back at Andrews. I sympathized with Gruyere’s mood. If someone woke
me
at that ungodly hour, I’d have to shoot them. “Also, I’ve been trying to ring you on your cell for the last ten minutes.”

“It’s in my coat in the car, General. The battery might have expired.”

“Why have you seized General Scott’s records?”

Seized
was perhaps too strong a word. I explained that we had merely secured them and provided the reasoning for doing that, which Gruyere largely accepted, though she added a warning. “Do try to avoid getting that woman angry, Special Agent. She has powerful allies neither you nor I want to mess with. Now, tell me you’ve got the paperwork for this in order.”

“The paperwork in order?” I repeated, loud enough for Masters to catch.

I already knew the answer to that. Masters shook her head, confirming it. My heart sank. “Yes, General. Of course we have.”

“Bullshit, Special Agent,” said Gruyere, calling my bluff. The silence was pregnant.

“I will organize things officially from my end, but this is it, Cooper.” The general’s words were careful and deliberate. She was not impressed. “Remember what I told you before you left here yesterday.”

I remembered:
It’s either the biggest case of your career, or the last.
“Yes, ma’am.” I read her loud and clear.

“Now, tell me what you know,” she said.

I filled the general in on Roach’s findings.

“Damn it to hell…” she said. “And no suspects?”

“No, ma’am.”

“No leads?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Better get on with it, then, hadn’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said as the line went dead.

I took a couple of deep breaths. Out with the bad, in with the good, as a certain colonel used to instruct me and my wife in our relationship counseling sessions before I stopped going—before I caught him in the shower with said wife on her knees giving his erection a good scrub with the back of her throat. The cops were shuttling boxes into the trucks. Masters put General Scott’s computer on the front passenger seat of her car and locked the door closed behind her.

“Thanks,” she said as she walked over. “You didn’t have to do that.”

I handed back her cell. “Do what?”

“Cover for me.”

I wasn’t sure what to say, how to handle this apology. And not because I hadn’t received any positive feedback from the female of the species for some time. I was annoyed with Masters for racing off to secure Scott’s papers without at least warning me. Doing it without getting the proper clearances and authorizations also rankled. Did she think Scott’s widow would just pass his things over happily? It was also probably the sort of thing I’d have done myself had I thought of it. I gave in to my gentler side and said, “Forget it. Let’s just try to make this teamwork thing happen as the big cheese intended.”

“The big who?”

“Never mind. Where are you taking all this stuff?”

“We’ve got a spare office at OSI on the base. I’m going to set that up as an operations room. Do you know where OSI is?”

“No, but I’ll find it. The guy on the front gate and I are on a first-name basis now.”

One of the policemen mumbled something at Masters, saluted, and then headed back to the lead vehicle. The three trucks pulled away.

“I’m going to head back and get Scott’s things behind a locked door. You?”

“I want to talk to the captain who watched Scott’s plane go down. Then I’m going to talk to General von Koeppen’s PA. I’d like to know a bit more about their working relationship.”

“Whose? Between von Koeppen and his PA?”

“No, the relationship between Scott and von Koeppen.”

“Oh, right.”

“Anything more you can tell me about Herr General, other than he dresses in leather chaps and prances around his office with a feather duster?”

“Who said anything about a feather duster?” She laughed, and that surprised me. I’d been thinking that perhaps the scowl on her face was permanent. “Actually, I haven’t had much to do with him. He’s a bit of a ladies’ man, or so I’ve heard—base gossip. So…why don’t I catch up with you after you interview von Koeppen’s PA? That’ll give me enough time to get things organized back at the office.”

“Sounds good.” I liked this new era of cooperation. I was in a NATO facility, after all. It was a pleasant change to be in someone’s good books, even if I had to be chewed out by my boss to get there. Talk of von Koeppen’s reputation reminded me of Roach’s comments on Masters, but I thought, on the whole, it would be best to keep that knowledge to myself, at least while things were going so well between us.

“Okay, I’ll see you later,” said Masters, walking back to my rental.

“Where’re you going?”

She opened the passenger door, leaned in, and came out with my cell and pager. She thumbed them so that I could hear the “on” beeps, and then dropped them back onto the passenger seat.

“Yeah, I was going to do that,” I said.

“Sure you were,” Masters replied.

I got behind the wheel and the gadgets immediately started buzzing and ringing with stored messages. I was further distracted by an awful smell inside the car. Maybe Hertz had inadvertently left something decaying under my seat. I groped under it with my hand, which brought my nose closer to the source of the troubling odor. Me. I looked at myself in the mirror behind the sun visor. I hadn’t had a shower for close to forty-eight hours and my five-o’clock shadow was putting in overtime. On top of this I’d eaten nothing, unless two blister cards of codeine could be considered food, and my breath smelled of something rotting sprinkled with cloves. I was fast becoming a walking biological weapon.

SIX

T
he building that housed logistics was a flat brown block with small, mean windows sheathed in silver heat film. I parked the rental in a visitor’s spot out front and jogged the stairs to the third landing. It was warm inside.

A passing sergeant gave me the directions to Captain Reinoud Aleveldt’s cubicle. I threaded my way through the maze of partitions; most were empty. I glanced at my Seiko: 1315. Lunchtime. After a couple of false turns I arrived at a workspace plastered with photos and torn-out magazine spreads of various gliders. Captain Aleveldt wasn’t in his chair.

“Yes? Can I help you?” asked a voice behind me. I turned and saw a man with hair the color of cheddar cheese, ruddy pale skin, and thick fleshy lips which were red-raw dry and wind-chapped. He licked them. He wore running gear ironed with such precision that the knife-edge creases in his shorts were carried on by the creases in his T-shirt. I took a shot. “Captain Reinoud Aleveldt? You got a minute?”

“Actually, I was just on my way out.” The guy was itching to get away and he kept shifting his weight from foot to foot. If he’d been two, I’d have taken him to the potty.

Who gives a fuck?
As a general rule, I don’t prepare people I want to question with a preemptive phone call. I like their answers to be off-the-cuff, especially when I’m not sure how a witness fits into the investigation, as was the case here. “Special Agent Vin Cooper, OSI,” I told Aleveldt, flashing my ID to further refine his attention. “Just a few questions, if you don’t mind. I’m investigating the assassination of General Scott.” Why sugarcoat it?

The news appeared to hit Aleveldt like a punch under the rib cage. His jaw dropped slightly, his eyes went wide. I could read him so clearly I considered asking whether he’d like to play a few hands of canasta. “Assassination? But—”

“Got somewhere we can talk, Captain? Like a room with a door?”

He led the way to a meeting room, no doubt resigned to missing his jog, or whatever they did hereabouts for exercise. On two of the walls were enormous Whiteboards filled with hieroglyphics and scribbles slightly less decipherable than Greek. Or, given Aleveldt’s nationality, maybe double Dutch. We both took seats at a cheap black Formica boardroom-style table. “Your English is good,” I said.

“We have to learn it in school.” He was in a daze, still struggling to come to grips with the revised reality of the general’s demise. “…Assassinated?” he repeated.

“Murdered, assassinated—take your pick.” I reached inside my coat, pulled out the notebook, and flipped it open. I’ve found that if people think I’m writing things down, it focuses their minds—perhaps because they realize someone further on down the line could well hold them to their answers. “How often did you fly with General Scott?” I asked, getting on with it.

“I’m a soaring enthusiast; so was Scotty.”

“Scotty?”

“Away from Ramstein, we were friends.”

He licked those red lips and swallowed—that nervous swallow people do. “I saw what happened. One of his wings just…broke off. There was nothing he could have done.”

Roach’s terrifying description came back to me with a rush. My balls felt like they were falling, dragging me down with them. I crossed my legs. “You haven’t answered my question.”

“Sorry…which was?”

“How often did you fly with General Scott?”

“Whenever the conditions were right and he was around—A dozen, fifteen times a year.”

“Is that a lot?”

“It is when you consider that we don’t fly often in winter. Once the weather breaks, it’s almost every weekend.”

“Did you talk to him before going up the last time?”

“Yes. We discussed the conditions. We were both keen to get airborne.”

“Did the general seem concerned about anything that day—anything other than the flying conditions? Anything about his behavior that struck you as odd?” These are the sorts of questions you ask when straws are all you can see and you start clutching at them.

“No, sir. Scotty usually arrived tense, on edge, but that wouldn’t last long. Soaring’s a Zen experience. Just you and the elements. I can highly recommend it.”

“Gravity and I don’t get along,” I said. I could tell he was looking at me as if to say, “You could sure use some of that Zen shit, pal.” If I were him, I’d be looking at me strangely, too. Again I reminded myself I should have detoured and cleaned myself up when I had the chance.

“How was his plane sabotaged, sir?”

“A clamp that held the wings on failed. It’d been tampered with.”

Aleveldt shook his head and frowned. “General Scott was a careful pilot. Always did the walk-around—checked everything, sometimes twice. It’s ironic. Is that the right word?”

“Depends what you mean by it.”

“He spent several thousand dollars upgrading his sailplane several months ago, over the winter when not much soaring is done—to make it safer.”

“Yeah, ironic will do nicely,” I said as a tingle went up the back of my neck and shrank the skin on my scalp. This could be a small but important break. Although it was by no means certain, there was a good chance that it was this very upgrade that provided the opportunity for the clamp to be replaced with a faulty unit. “What did he have done?”

“Avionics. A global positioning system for cross-country flying, a better radio set—more powerful, lighter. Had a couple of instruments replaced, too.”

“Do you know who did the work?”

“Sorry. Can’t help you there. I do a lot of the maintenance on my own plane, but the general was in a different league. Some airframe specialist—whoever was on at the time and depending on what was needed—would do it for him.”

I remembered the conversation I had with Roach on this subject and that feeling across the top of my scalp evaporated.

“Do you know why anyone would want to kill the general?” Aleveldt asked.

“That was
my
next question.”

“No, no. I don’t understand it. The general was liked and respected. He flew in Vietnam. A war hero. He knew how to look after his people. I could see that. Everyone could.”

Well, obviously someone couldn’t, I thought.