Ultimate Betrayal (6 page)

Rolf Bishop’s cellphone rang at 7 p.m.

“It’s done.”

“Good. I’ve got more work for you,” Bishop said.

“The same kind of work?”

“Correct.”

“How much more work?”

“Seven.”

“That’s a lot of work. Very expensive work.”

“I’ll pay your usual fee.”

“Better double it. More risky than usual. Too much exposure.”

APRIL 12

CHAPTER 4

“David, you’d better be careful with that knife,” Carmela Hood chided from the far side of the kitchen of her Bethesda, Maryland home. She moved behind her husband, pressed against his back, and wrapped her arms around his chest. “I don’t want anything to spoil our anniversary dinner,” she whispered.

David leaned back against her. “Nothing will spoil this evening.” He put down the knife and the apple he’d been slicing, turned, put his arms around his wife.

Carmela purred. “You romantic devil.” She ran her fingers through his long black hair. “You get more handsome every day.”

“Yuckie,” three-year-old Kyle announced in his megaphone voice, “Daddy’s smooching Mommy again.”

“Don’t be a troublemaker,” five-year-old Heather said.

David laughed, kissed Carmela on the neck, and moved to the kitchen table where Heather helped her forty-pound wrecking ball-of-a-brother with a puzzle.

Carmela watched David stare at their two children. He had that wide-eyed look of wonder on his face again. As though he couldn’t believe his luck.

“Daddy, Daddy, can you help us?” Kyle pleaded.

“No, Kyle, we can do it ourselves,” Heather said. “You’ll see.”

“O-o-o-kay,” Kyle said.

So grown up, so confident, Carmela thought. Heather had inherited David’s seriousness and her Mediterranean passion. Carmela marveled at her daughter’s quick mind and early maturity. She had naturally assumed responsibility for her younger brother. She always seemed to do the right thing, say the right thing. A “daddy’s girl,” she had already wrapped David tightly around her finger.

Kyle differed from his sister in just about every way. He resembled a linebacker as he fearlessly caromed around the house; a force of nature. He worried Carmela and she wondered with trepidation what the boy would be like when he grew to be a teenager. She shuddered at the thought.

Carmela came over to David and laid a hand on his shoulder. “My grandmother told me you can put the evil eye on a person when you stare at them like that.” She kissed him on the cheek and said, “I love you.”

David smiled. “I’m looking forward to tonight. Can you believe it’s been six years since I met Carmen Long?”

She kissed him again and rubbed his back. “That woman’s long gone.”

“Nice pun.”

Carmela groaned. “Don’t give up your day job. You’d never make it as a stand-up comedian.”

“I thought you liked my sense of humor.”

“More like I humour your sense of humor.” She laughed. “You’d better get ready; the sitter will be here in thirty minutes.”

David nodded. He shucked the tie he’d worn to work, unbuttoned his shirt cuffs, and moved toward the hallway from the kitchen.

“Oh, I forgot,” Carmela said. “Before you go upstairs, would you get a jar of carrots from the cellar for the children’s dinner?”

“Sure.” He reversed direction and headed for the cellar door.

“Can I go, Daddy?” Kyle yelled.

“Me, too,” Heather said.

David knew the kids would slow him down. They’d want to explore the cellar, play hide and seek.

“No, you guys stay with Mom. I’ll only be a minute.”

David flipped the light switch just inside the cellar door and carefully walked down the wooden staircase that had been worn smooth and slippery with decades of use. For the thousandth time, he reminded himself he should put rubber treads on the steps. The cool, damp air assailed his nostrils. When he turned at the bottom of the stairs, he shook his head at the sight of the junk he’d let accumulate down here: an old bicycle; rusted lawn chairs, the webbing long since ripped; an old, leaky garden hose; an antique wooden icebox he’d threatened to repair and refinish. I’ve got to get rid of this stuff, he told himself. He walked across the concrete floor to the old fallout shelter added decades earlier by the previous owner, a Civil Defense contractor—Cold War paranoia. He and Carmela had converted it to a storage room for the vegetables Carmela grew and put up. A smile creased his face at the sounds of Heather and Kyle’s voices that drifted down from the kitchen.

He yanked the door handle, opened the door, stepped up into the shelter, and pulled the chain on the ceiling light. The weighted shelter door closed behind him with a soft
whoosh
.

David selected a glass jar of carrots from a shelf, turned, and took a second to enjoy the quiet of the ten-by-ten shelter. The cellar’s stone exterior walls, combined with the shelter’s rebar-reinforced concrete, made the room a suburban fortress.

He reached for the door handle, but a huge
whump
startled him. The room swayed. The door handle was suddenly, inexplicably beyond his reach. Before his mind could process an explanation, he was thrown back against the wall opposite the door. Glass jars smashed, canned goods thudded on and around him. Wooden shelves cascaded on his head and shoulders. David brushed the debris off him and placed a hand on the floor to push himself up. “Damn,” he shouted. A glass shard had impaled his palm. He pulled out the piece of glass and carefully stood.

Terror seized him. Even within the shelter’s thick walls, he heard and felt the full roar and concussive force of a second explosion. The little room swayed from the concussion. The suppressed sound of the blast was all too familiar. He’d heard and felt enough of them in Afghanistan. He leaned against a side wall and struggled to keep his feet. This belonged to a time and place well in his past—the bombers and fighter jets that unleashed their deadly loads; explosives detonated in Taliban caves and tunnels. He tried to deny what he knew—an enormous explosion had rocked his home.

With the exception of a muted bit of light that came through the Plexiglas window in the shelter door, the room had gone dark. The floor was now littered with wood shelves scattered amidst a syrupy mix of glass, fruit, and vegetables.

David screamed, “Carmela!” He took two steps and pushed the shelter door handle. It didn’t budge. Through the small window he saw dim light stream into the cellar from where a solid wall should have been. Piles of plaster, brick, stone, and insulation were just visible in a dusty fog. His three-story Colonial home had fallen in on itself. More of the house continued to fall—pieces of furniture, wood beams, appliances, a tub. Flying dust thickly clouded the air outside the room and blocked David’s view.

Once the death throes of the house subsided, funereal quiet returned, interspersed with intermittent groans as debris shifted. David felt his hands tremble. His heart beat against his ribs as though it wanted to escape the confines of his chest. “Carmela!” he screamed again. No answer. “Heather! Kyle!” The only answer he got were the sounds of his own voice as it reverberated off the shelter walls.

David again pushed on the door. It wouldn’t move. He braced himself and slammed a foot against it, over and over again, but to no avail. Primordial shrieks echoed off the room walls while grief swept over him. He heard the shrieks, but couldn’t seem to connect them to himself. Trapped inside the tiny shelter, he threw his body against the door until, bruised and battered, he had no more strength. As he collapsed in a corner, his mind filled with images of his wife and children and what the explosion might have done to them.

Time passed in slow motion. David could barely keep his eyes open. Sleep seduced him. He realized the lack of oxygen had begun to affect him. The shelter’s filters must have been damaged in the blast.

With one last effort, he staggered to his feet and threw his body at the door. He bounced back, defeated, and dropped to the concrete floor behind the door. He stretched out and gasped for breath, as the warm blanket of unconsciousness crept over him.

CHAPTER 5

Bethesda Detectives Roger Cromwell and Jennifer Ramsey stood twenty feet from the edge of the crater and watched rescue workers pass debris from the hole to men above them, who loaded it into the scoop of a front-end loader. Ramsey turned away from the glare of floodlights on the front lawn and looked at the group of stunned neighbors behind yellow crime scene tape on the far side of the street. She turned back to the crater and shielded her eyes against the lights, which cast eerie shadows off the workers in the hole. Ramsey checked her wristwatch. It was just past 11 p.m. Almost five hours since the explosion.

“What’s the name of the family?” she asked.

“Hood,” Cromwell answered. “Married couple; two little kids. A neighbor said he’s an Afghanistan combat vet.”

“So there could be one more body,” she said as she glanced at the broken bodies of the woman and two children in black plastic body bags near a rescue vehicle parked on the street.

“Your first dead bodies?” Cromwell asked in the condescending tone she had learned to hate and resent.

Ramsey forced a smile. She knew Cromwell really couldn’t have cared less about her feelings. In fact, he’d probably love it if she puked her guts out. That would give the good old boys something to laugh about back at Homicide.

She turned and looked at Cromwell. Her eyes first went to his bulbous, vein-etched nose and quickly moved to his wet, beady eyes. “No, but thanks for your concern,” she said in a mock-grateful tone.

She forced herself not to tell Cromwell to go to hell. She knew what went through the guy’s mind: The fat creep had tried to undermine her since she’d been paired with him a couple weeks earlier. But she knew she had to kill him with kindness. To not let him bait her into doing or saying something stupid. She’d worked hard—two years as a street cop after college and the police academy, three more years in undercover, two years of graduate school—and had earned her promotion to detective. She wasn’t about to throw it all away. She’d sandbag the sonofabitch until she established credibility as a homicide detective. That’s what Pop had advised her to do. Her father had served with the New York Police Department for thirty-six years. The advice he’d given her had all been good so far.

Ramsey watched the workers burrow deeper into what had once been a basement. Then the sound suddenly stopped.

A man shouted and then another called out, “We found a body.”

A man yelled, “There’s a guy in a small room in the basement. We can see him through a little window in the door. I think he moved.”

“Amazing,” Ramsey muttered. Someone actually survived this horrific explosion. Then Cromwell grabbed her arm.

“Pay attention, Ramsey,” his voice full of belligerence and condescension. “You might just learn something. I can feel it in my gut. How does only one member of a family survive when his house explodes? I got a gut feeling about this. I’ll break this sonofabitch, you watch.”

Ramsey shook off Cromwell’s arm. Quite a speech, you fat, pompous pig, she thought. She heard Cromwell’s heavy breathing and the sour smell that always seemed to hang over him like the dirt cloud around Linus in the Charley Brown cartoon. She watched the rescue workers swing into higher gear as they shoved aside colonial wreckage and opened the door of what appeared to be an old fallout shelter. They pulled out an unconscious man. Two men placed him on a stretcher and carried it out of the hole to an ambulance.

APRIL 13

CHAPTER 6

David woke to near-blackness and gasped for breath—the last physical sensation he’d had before he passed out in the shelter. The only light seeped around the sides of a dark window shade at the far right side of the room. At first nothing made sense. The bed, the chair, the shaded window all seemed out of synch. Then the odor of antiseptic hit him and a steady
beep, beep, beep
came from somewhere. His eyes slowly adjusted to the dark and he noticed the intravenous rack next to his bed. Then pain assaulted his head. The pain built and built until he thought his skull might explode.

He found the call button pinned to the bed sheet and pressed it. When a nurse responded and turned on a light over the head of the bed, he tried to speak, but his throat was parched and all that escaped his lips was a hoarse croak. The nurse guided a straw in a water glass to his lips.

“My family—my wife, my children?” he asked.

The nurse looked at him with mournful eyes and averted her gaze.

David turned his head toward the window. Tears rolled down his cheeks, slowly at first, and then in an anguished torrent. He roared; tried to smother his pain. He didn’t resist the nurse when she injected something in his intravenous tube.

A voice penetrated his sedative-induced stupor. “Mr. Hood, can you hear me?”

David opened his eyes and squinted at the light in the room. The shade on the window to his right was now up and bright light streamed into the room. He slowly turned his head away from the window, toward the sound of the voice. A man and a woman stood next to the bed.

“This is Cromwell, Detective Roger Cromwell,” the man said. He flipped open his wallet to show his badge and identification. “This is Detective Ramsey. We’re with the Bethesda Police Department.”

David eyed the man’s badge and then looked up at his face. He had a first impression that unsettled him. The guy wore a sour look; there was nothing friendly about him.

“I assume you’ve been told what happened,” Cromwell said.

“All I’ve been told is my family . . . is gone.”

“You know there was an explosion.”

David closed his eyes and ever so slightly dipped his head.

“You know what caused the explosion?”

“I assume it was gas.”

Cromwell looked at Ramsey. The muscles in his cheeks twitched. When he turned back to David his piggy eyes were narrowed to slits. “Explosives, Mr. Hood.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” David rasped.