‘You talking about my car? How the paint was chipped off?’
‘We told you what our forensic s people thought,’ said Benton.
‘And there was Ms Lang’s seat belt, the seat belt you were always so sure she would fasten,’ said Benson.
‘What about it?’
‘It was cut,’ disclosed Dingley. ‘Forensic’s first impression was that it had snapped, but after the second autopsy they looked again and changed their minds. They’re saying now it was cut.’
‘What about the second autopsy?’ asked Jackson. He was looking intently between the two FBI men.
‘The medical examiner isn’t sure Ms Lang sustained…’ Benton stopped, coughed and resumed with what he thought better-chosen words. ‘… suffered all her injuries when the car went over the edge.’
‘You mean her broken neck?’ demanded Parnell, bluntly. ‘We know someone went down after her, into the canyon: they had to, to get the keys to her house. Are you saying she was still alive? But that she was cut out and murdered?’
‘That’s the way the technical guys are putting it to us.’
‘That’s planned murder… assassination… a professional,’ said Jackson, still intent.
‘Which brings us back, God knows how, to the flight number and terrorism,’ said Dingley. ‘Terrorists are professional assassins.’
‘And you’ve traced Rebecca’s life back to before grade school,’ reminded Parnell. ‘You know she’s never had the slightest connection whatsoever with or to terrorism. And from your questioning of my mother and friends in England, you know I don’t either.’
‘See our problem?’ invited Dingley.
‘You’re forcing into the jigsaw pieces that don’t fit,’ said Jackson.
‘We’re coming around to thinking that,’ agreed Benton. ‘Which is the wrong piece?’
‘It’s got to be the AF209 flight number,’ insisted Parnell.
‘That’s the reason we’re here – you’re here,’ said Dingley. ‘Until we discover the relevance of that, to everything else, Ms Lang’s undoubted murder is a federal enquiry. And people along the road at the J. Edgar Hoover building are getting impatient as well as pissed off being told by the media what an inefficient, jerk-off organization the Bureau is.’
‘There was something wrong about my arrest,’ insisted Parnell.
‘Metro DC – uniforms particularly – couldn’t find an egg in a hen house,’ said Benton. ‘You were a victim of bad policing.’
‘They’d made their minds up!’ persisted Parnell.
‘They thought they had something being served up to them on a plate, commendations and headlines all round,’ sneered Benton.
‘You had a lot of trouble – obstruction?’ guessed Jackson, smiling expectantly.
‘Let’s say they weren’t overly co-operative.’
‘What about fingerprints?’ Jackson demanded unexpectedly. ‘Did they go along with the elimination?’
‘We didn’t get a match,’ said Benton, to his partner’s sharp look.
‘Match to what?’ pressed Jackson.
Dingley shrugged. ‘We got a half thumb print – a right thumb – from the flight number scrap of paper. It wasn’t Ms Lang’s. Didn’t match the two Metro DC guys, either. Or you, Mr Parnell. We want it kept under wraps, obviously.’
‘You think it could be the person who killed her?’ asked Parnell.
‘We won’t know what to think until we match it,’ said Benton.
‘Judge Wilson made some court orders,’ reminded Jackson.
‘Sir?’ queried Dingley.
‘About civil suits and claims, for wrongful arrest,’ said the lawyer.
‘Which you haven’t pursued?’ said Benton.
‘Not yet. If Mr Parnell chose to sue, there’d legally have to be full disclosure.’
‘Yes, there would,’ acknowledged Dingley, smiling now.
‘I think my client and I should talk about that, don’t you?’
‘Full, legally required disclosure might be interesting,’ said Benton.
‘Anything, beyond what we’ve got, would be interesting,’ said Dingley. ‘Mr Parnell’s in a kind of limbo until we get somewhere with this, wouldn’t you say?’
Parnell hadn’t considered himself to be in any sort of limbo, but supposed he was. He’d definitely have to speak to his mother tonight. And reply to the letters. There’d been two more that morning, one enclosing cuttings of the English media coverage of the case. The extent had surprised him. One article had, quite wrongly, identified him as the leading British research scientist in the genome-mapping breakthrough. He said: ‘If you all think this might break the logjam, let’s do it.’
‘We’ll discuss it,’ cautioned Jackson.
Jackson began that discussion directly upon leaving the FBI field office building. ‘They’re good.’
‘What?’ frowned Parnell.
‘Those guys back there, they’re good. They got exactly what they wanted.’
‘I’m needing some help,’ said Parnell. As usual, he thought.
‘Ed Pullinger, the FBI counsel, was in court, remember? He heard the judge’s orders. The Bureau are getting the closed door. A civil suit might be the way to open it, just a little. It would certainly tighten the media screw on Metro DC police department.’
‘You mean that was a set-up back there! The whole meeting?’
‘I think so. Even to the disclosure about the thumb print.’
‘Jesus!’
‘From their point of view, it’s a good move.’
Beverley abruptly came into Parnell’s mind. He said: ‘You warned me to be careful of police harassment, as well as being a target for whoever killed Beverley. Won’t the risk of harassment increase if we sue?’
Jackson shook his head, positively. ‘Not even Metro DC would dare. It’ll act more as a protection. I should have thought of it earlier.’
‘But is it really likely to get the investigation any further forward?’
‘We shan’t know that until we serve the writs and start demanding disclosure,’ said Jackson.
Dwight Newton had expected an inquisition but not that it would be led by Grant, nor that it would be so scathing. With virtually no defence, he tried to hide behind jargon – talking of hypoxanthine guanine phosphoribosyl transferase instead of HPRT, and mutations and the unpredictability of drug cocktails – but there was sufficient knowledge among some of the board members not to be deflected, and at one stage the white-haired president told him to cut the scientific crap and explain the problem in words they would all understand. Newton tried, too, to shift the primary responsibility onto Russell Benn, minimizing his function to that of a secondary check, but was refused that escape by having to concede – as he had earlier had to admit to Edward C. Grant at one of their private encounters – that if that had been his role, then he’d singularly failed to perform it.
The accusations and recriminations logically gave way to a slightly less hostile – but even more commercially based – debate upon the damage to public confidence – as well as that to be expected from the regulatory authority – that Dubette would suffer from any leaks, publicity or exposure, which brought into the exchanges a renewed use of words like catastrophe and disaster and meltdown. And kept the concentration upon Newton. He tried, in a desperate snatch for recovery, to stress Parnell’s assurance of discretion, to be confronted by two separate challenges from directors, about the loyalty of the rest of the pharmacogenomics unit, who’d demonstrated his blatant scientific inefficiency. Which were the precise words that were used, blatant scientific inefficiency.
It was not so much the final straw that broke the camel’s back, but the final, unendurable bruise from the misdirectedly wielded stick. More loudly than he had intended, Newton said: ‘OK! Let’s take a few things into consideration here. I am-’
‘You’re not,’ Grant stopped him, positively, refusing any awkward defensive outburst. ‘A mistake was made.
