The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (102 page)

“Neighbourhood, mostly,” McAllister said. “There’re a couple of bars, mostly high-end. You have to know someone to get in. Then there’s the party, held every week upstairs. Some of the most important men in the city show up at it, or so they used to say in Vice when they told us to stay away.”

Bryce nodded, letting it go at that.

“We need your crime scene people here ASAP, and a lot more cops so that we can protect what’s left of this scene, in case these men turn out to be who their identification says they are. You search the bodies to see if this was the only identification on them?”

O’Reilly started. He clearly hadn’t thought of that. Probably had been too shocked by the first wallets that he found.

The younger detective had already gone back to the bodies. The coroner put out a hand, and did the searching himself.

“You think this was a plant?” O’Reilly asked.

“I don’t know what to think,” Bryce said. “I’m not here to think. I’m here to make sure everything goes smoothly.”

And to make sure the case goes to the FBI.
Those words hung unspoken between the two of them. Not that O’Reilly objected, and now Bryce could understand why. This case would be a political nightmare, and no good detective wanted to be in the middle of it.

“How come there’s no press?” Bryce asked O’Reilly. “You manage to get rid of them somehow?”

“Fag kill,” the coroner said.

Bryce was getting tired of those words. His fist had clenched again, and he had to work at unclenching it.

“Ignore him,” O’Reilly said softly. “He’s an asshole and the best coroner in the city.”

“I heard that,” the coroner said affably. “There’s no other identification on either of them.”

O’Reilly’s shoulders slumped, as if he’d been hoping for a different outcome. Bryce should have been hoping as well, but he hadn’t been. He had known that Hoover was in town. The entire New York bureau knew, since Hoover always took it over when he arrived – breezing in, giving instructions, making sure everything was just the way he wanted it.

“Before this gets too complicated,” O’Reilly said, “you want to see the other bodies?”

“Other bodies?” Bryce felt numb. He could use some caffeine now, but Hoover had ordered agents not to drink coffee on the job. Getting coffee now felt almost disrespectful.

“We got three more.” O’Reilly took a deep breath. “And just before you arrived, I got word that they’re agents too.”

Special Agent John Haskell had just installed six of his best agents outside the Director’s suite of offices when a small woman showed up, key clutched in her gloved right hand. Helen Gandy, the Director’s secretary, looked up at Haskell with the coldest stare he’d ever seen outside of the Director’s.

“May I go into my office, Agent Haskell?” Her voice was just as cold. She didn’t look upset, and if he hadn’t known that she never stayed past five unless directed by Hoover himself, Haskell would have thought she was coming back from a prolonged work break.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said. “No one is allowed inside. President’s orders.”

“Really?” God, that voice was chilling. He remembered the first time he’d heard it, when he’d been brought to this suite of offices as a brand-new agent, after getting his “Meet the Boss” training before his introduction to the Director. She’d frightened him more than Hoover had.

“Yes, ma’am. The President says no one can enter.”

“Surely he didn’t mean me.”

Surely he did. But Haskell bit the comment back. “I’m sorry, ma’am.”

“I have a few personal items that I’d like to get, if you don’t mind. And the Director instructed me that in the case of . . .” and for the first time she paused. Her voice didn’t break nor did she clear her throat. But she seemed to need a moment to gather herself. “In case of emergency, I was to remove some of his personal items as well.”

“If you could tell me what they are, ma’am, I’ll get them.”

Her eyes narrowed. “The Director doesn’t like others to touch his possessions.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said gently. “But I don’t think that matters any longer.”

Any other woman would have broken down. After all, she had worked for the old man for forty-five years, side by side, every day. Never marrying, not because they had a relationship – Helen Gandy, more than anyone, probably knew the truth behind the Director’s relationship with the Associate Director – but because for Helen Gandy, just like for the Director himself, the FBI was her entire life.

“It matters,” she said. “Now if you’ll excuse me . . .”

She tried to wriggle past him. She was wiry and stronger than he expected. He had to put out an arm to block her.

“Ma’am,” he said in the gentlest tone he could summon, “the President’s orders supercede the Director’s.”

How often had he wanted to say that over the years? How often had he wanted to remind everyone in the Bureau that the President led the Free World, not J. Edgar Hoover?

“In this instance,” she snapped, “they do not.”

“Ma’am, I’d hate to have some agents restrain you.” Although he wasn’t sure about that. She had never been nice to him or to anyone he knew. She’d always been sharp or rude. “You’re distraught.”

“I am not.” She clipped each word.

“You are because I say you are, ma’am.”

She raised her chin. For a moment, he thought she hadn’t understood. But she finally did.

The balance of power had shifted. At the moment, it was on his side.

“Do I have to call the President then to get my personal effects?” she asked.

But they both knew she wasn’t talking about her personal things. And the President was smart enough to know that as well. As hungry to get those files as the Attorney General had seemed despite his Eastern reserve, the President would be utterly ravenous. He wouldn’t let some old skirt, as he’d been known to call Miss Gandy, get in his way.

“Go ahead,” Haskell said. “Feel free to use the phone in the office across the hall.”

She glared at him, then turned on one foot and marched down the corridor. But she didn’t head toward a phone – at least not one he could see.

He wondered who she would call. The President wouldn’t listen. The Attorney General had issued the order in the President’s name. Maybe she would contact one of Hoover’s Assistant Directors, the four or five men that Hoover had in his pocket.

Haskell had been waiting for them. But word still hadn’t spread through the Bureau. The only reason he knew was because he’d received a call from the SAC of the New York office. New York hated the Director, mostly because the old man went there so often and harassed them.

Someone had probably figured out that there was a crisis from the moment that Haskell had brought his people in to secure the Director’s suite. But no one would know that the Director was dead until Miss Gandy made the calls or until someone in the Bureau started along the chain of command – the one designated in the book Hoover had written all those years ago.

Haskell crossed his arms. Sometimes he wished he hadn’t let the A.G. know how he felt about the Director. Sometimes he wished he were still a humble assistant, the man who had joined the FBI because he wanted to be a top cop like his hero J. Edgar Hoover.

A man who, it turned out, never made a real arrest or fired a gun or even understood investigation.

There was a lot to admire about the Director – no matter what you said, he’d built a hell of an agency almost from scratch – but he wasn’t the man his press made him out to be.

And that was the source of Haskell’s disillusionment. He’d wanted to be a top cop. Instead, he snooped into homes and businesses and sometimes even investigated fairly blameless people, looking for a mistake in their past.

Since he’d been transferred to FBIHQ, he hadn’t done any real investigating at all. His arrests had slowed, his cases dwindled.

And he’d found himself investigating his boss, trying to find out where the legend ended and the man began. Once he realized that the old man was just a bureaucrat who had learned where all the bodies were buried and used that to make everyone bow to his bidding, Haskell was ripe for the undercover work the A.G. had asked him to do.

Only now he wasn’t undercover any more. Now he was standing in the open before the Director’s cache of secrets, on the President’s orders, hoping that no one would call his bluff.

As O’Reilly led him to the limousine, Bryce surreptitiously checked his watch. He’d already been on scene for half an hour, and no back-up had arrived. If he was supposed to secure everything and chase off the NYPD, he’d need some manpower.

But for now, he wanted to see the extent of the problem. The night had gotten colder, and this street was even darker than the street he’d walked down. All of the streetlights were out. The only light came from some porch bulbs above a few entrances. He could barely make out the limousine at the end of the block, and then only because he could see the shadowy forms of the two beat cops standing at the scene, their squad cars parking the limo in.

As he got closer, he recognized the shape of the limo. It was thicker than most limos and rode lower to the ground because it was encased in an extra frame, making it bulletproof. Supposedly, the glass would all be bulletproof as well.

“You said the driver was shot inside the limo?” Bryce asked.

“That’s what they told me,” O’Reilly said. “I wasn’t called to this scene. We were brought in because of the two men in the alley. Even then we were called late.”

Bryce nodded. He remembered the coroner’s bigotry. “Is that standard procedure for cases involving minorities?”

O’Reilly gave him a sideways glance. Bryce couldn’t read O’Reilly’s expression in the dark.

“We’re overtaxed,” O’Reilly said after a moment. “Some cases don’t get the kind of treatment they deserve.”

“Limo drivers,” Bryce said.

“If he’d been killed in the parking garage under the Plaza maybe,” O’Reilly said. “But not because of who he was. But because of where he was.”

Bryce nodded. He knew how the world worked. He didn’t like it. He spoke up against it too many times, which was why he was on shaky ground at the Bureau.

Then his already upset stomach clenched. Maybe he wasn’t going to get back-up. Maybe they’d put him on his own here to claim he’d botched the investigation, so that they would be able to cover it up.

He couldn’t concentrate on that now. What he had to do was take good notes, make the best case he could, and keep a copy of every damn thing – maybe in more than one place.

“You were called in because of the possibility that the men in the alley could be important,” Bryce said.

“That’s my guess,” O’Reilly said.

“What about the others down the block? Has anyone taken those cases?”

“Probably not,” O’Reilly said. “Those bars, you know. It’s department policy. The coroner checks bodies in the suspect area, and decides, based on . . . um . . . evidence of . . . um . . . activity . . . whether or not to bring in detectives.”

Bryce frowned. He almost asked what the coroner was checking for when he figured out that it was evidence on the body itself, evidence not of the crime, but of certain kinds of sex acts. If that evidence was present, apparently no one thought it worthwhile to investigate the crime.

“You’d think the city would revise that,” Bryce said. “A lot of people live dual lives – productive and interesting people.”

“Yeah,” O’Reilly said. “You’d think. Especially after tonight.”

Bryce grinned. He was liking this grizzled cop more and more.

O’Reilly spoke to the beat cops, then motioned Bryce to the limo. As Bryce approached, O’Reilly trained his flashlight on the driver’s side.

The window wasn’t broken like Bryce had expected. It had been rolled down.

“You got here one James Crawford,” said one of the beat cops. “He got identification says he’s a feebee, but I ain’t never heard of no coloured feebee.”

“There’s only four,” Bryce said dryly. And they all worked for Hoover as his personal housekeepers or drivers. “Can I see that identification?”

The beat cop handed him a wallet that matched the ones on Tolson and Hoover. Inside was a badge and identification for James Crawford as well as family photographs. Neither Tolson nor Hoover had had any photographs in their wallets.

Bryce motioned O’Reilly to move a little closer to the body. The head was tilted toward the window. The right side of the skull was gone, the hair glistening with drying blood. With one gloved finger, Bryce pushed the head upright A single entrance wound above the left ear had caused the damage.

“Brunner says the shots are the same calibre,” O’Reilly said.

It took Bryce a moment to realize that Brunner was the coroner.

Bryce carefully searched Crawford but didn’t find the man’s weapon. Nor could he found a holster or any way to carry a weapon.

“It looks like he wasn’t carrying a weapon,” Bryce said.

“Neither were the two in the alley,” O’Reilly said, and Bryce appreciated his caution in not identifying the other two corpses. “You’d think they would have been.”

Bryce shook his head. “They were known for not carrying weapons. But you’d think their driver would have one.”

“Maybe they had protection,” O’Reilly said.

And Bryce’s mouth went dry. Of course they did. The office always joked about who would get HooverWatch on each trip. He’d had to do it a few times.

Agents on HooverWatch followed strict rules, like everything else with Hoover. Remain close enough to see the men entering and exiting an area, stop any suspicious characters, and yet somehow remain inconspicuous.

“You said there were two others shot?”

“Yeah. A block or so from here.” O’Reilly waved a hand vaguely down the street.

“Pulled out of one car or two?”

“Not my case,” O’Reilly said.

“Two,” said the beat cop. “Black sedans. Could barely see them on this cruddy street.”

HooverWatch. Bryce swallowed hard, that bile back. Of course. He probably knew the men who were shot.

“Let’s look,” he said. “You two, make sure the coroner’s man photographs this scene before he leaves.”

“Yessir,” said the second beat cop. He hadn’t spoken before.