scoped rifle. He didn’t doubt for a second that Moses had both. He didn’t doubt that Moses could shoot. How far away were they and where? Savich never took his eyes off of her as her cell phone rang.
“Agent Sherlock.”
“Sherlock, down! Find cover right now!” But from where would a shot come?
In under a minute Sherlock was surrounded by agents in Kevlar body armor. A few minutes later, Savich, with Sherlock in lockstep beside him, walked quickly toward section 27, where the cemetery records showed that Private Jeremy Willamette was interred. To Savich’s surprise she hadn’t questioned him when he first told her to get down. And now she accepted the impenetrable shield of men and women surrounding her, all of them with guns drawn and held at their sides. When they’d quickly assembled, Savich looked at each of them and said, “Moses Grace called me. He’s here and he’s crazy and I’d bet the farm he’s got a scoped rifle. We’ve all got to be careful. And he talked to me about Sherlock, threatened her.”
Savich didn’t think he’d ever been more hyperalert in his life. He was aware of every sound, every footstep, everyone around him. And Sherlock walked beside him, her eyes continuously scanning, assessing. At least there would be no more playing tourist in the cold; they could all move and focus on finding the monstrous old man and Claudia.
Savich said to his wife, “Mr. Maitland sent the ME over along with a forensic team and another dozen agents to canvass the whole area again. He knows Moses Grace is here and he’s as worried as we are.”
Sherlock nodded. “If they carted Pinky in here early this morning, they didn’t have much time. Maybe they left something,” she said as her eyes searched the horizon, just as his were. The agents ringed the grave of Private Jeremy Willamette. The marker was identical to thousands of others. There were big carved letters that read:
JEREMY ARTHUR WILLAMETTE BELOVED SON
PRIVATE U.S. ARMY KOREA
May 18, 1935 September 10, 1953
No one said a word, but each felt the death of the young man so many years before, each felt he was one of their own.
Agent Connie Ashley, who’d removed the pillow from around her middle, said, “It looks real fresh.”
Savich looked down at the loose snow-dusted black dirt with an obscene bouquet of wilted red roses lying squarely on top and felt a moment of sadness. He’d wanted to save Pinky, but that wasn’t going to happen now. He picked up the roses, tied with a big gaudy gold bow. Another couple of degrees and the roses would freeze. He handed them to Agent Don Grassi. “Find out where Moses Grace bought these roses. He could have picked them up from another grave, but check with the florists nearby.”
Agent Dane Carver said, never looking away from the loose black dirt, “Do you think Moses Grace and Claudia can still see us?”
Savich nodded slowly, scanning every tree in the area. “There are too many places to hide around here. It’s two hundred acres—full of trees, memorials, buildings, monuments.” He said to Agent Ollie Hamish, his second in command, “Ollie, call Mr. Maitland, tell him I’d like to saturate this place. Tell him to ring Fort Myer, get soldiers here to help.”
“Do you think Pinky’s under there?” Dane had asked the obvious, brought it out in the open. Every agent standing there knew Pinky Womack was under that black dirt, but no one wanted to be slapped in the head with the gruesome reality they knew was waiting for them. No one answered. They all stood silently.
Savich realized they were waiting for him to direct them, but the thing was, he couldn’t get his mind off that old monster threatening Sherlock. He met her eyes over the grave.
“I’m so very, very sorry about this, Dillon. Poor Pinky.” Sherlock suddenly leaned down. “Would you look at this? It’s a ball of chewed-up gum.”
Savich remembered the small red bowl filled with chewed-up balls of gum on the counter at Hooter’s Motel —all that gum hadn’t been there because Raymond Dykes liked to keep his jaw moving. Moses Grace had deliberately left it there, just as he’d left the gum here. Savich said, “He left it for us, to taunt us, some private joke perhaps. It probably won’t matter, but let’s do the works on it, run it for DNA.”
Savich watched Dane slip the gum into a Ziploc bag. Two of his agents led a crew of cemetery workmen forward.
They found Pinky Womack’s body in the coffin with his eyes wide open, a bit of shock his only recognizable expression. He was lying on top of the uniformed skeleton of eighteen-year-old Jeremy Willamette.
It looked from the bloodstains like Pinky had been stabbed in the chest, probably the heart, so his death had been fast, at least Savich prayed it had. He didn’t see any signs of torture, but it would take Dr. Ransom’s autopsy to be sure of that.
Savich called Ms. Lilly at the Bonhomie Club right away to tell her. After she had absorbed the news, she said to him, “Poor Pinky. He wasn’t bad, you know, Dillon? He could even make Fuzz the bartender laugh once in a while. Not often, mind. I’ll tell his brother Cluny myself, don’t you worry about that. Oh, Dillon, I hate this, I really do.”
As he slipped his cell phone back into his coat pocket, Savich knew it would take him a long time to get Pinky’s face out of his mind. He wondered where his wife had slipped off to. He heard the sharp crack of a rifle, heard yells, saw agents running, guns drawn. He found Sherlock, once again surrounded by agents, kneeling over a fallen agent, her palms pressing hard into her shoulder. Savich shouted her name. She looked up at him, her eyes dilated, her face white as his shirt. “Connie wasn’t standing two feet from me, Dillon.”
She was all right. Thank God she was all right.
But Agent Connie Ashley wasn’t. He was relieved she was conscious. When he came down on his knees beside her, she whispered, “Don’t freak out on me, Dillon, I’ll survive.” Blood oozed between Sherlock’
s fingers despite her pressure. He gently shoved Sherlock away and pressed his wadded-up handkerchief against Connie’s shoulder and put his weight on it. “Yes,” he said, “you’ll be fine. I’ll freak out until the ambulance arrives.”
Sherlock said, “I think the shot must have been fired from over there—the northeast, right through those trees, maybe from the second floor of one of those apartments.”
Savich had her go over the exact position of both her and Agent Ashley at the moment the shot was fired. He nodded. He put the angle a bit higher, but said, “Close enough. That’s quite a distance. Okay, let’s see if we can’t find them.” He gave out assignments and yelled as the agents dispersed, “Everyone be careful!”
He knelt down again beside Connie Ashley. “We’ll get him, Connie, don’t you worry about that.”
Sirens sounded in the distance. The snow began to fall more heavily. Savich watched his wife wipe Connie’s blood off her hands on the fresh-fallen snow. Tourists were gathering closer now. He knew the media would be there in force at any moment. He hoped the ambulance would get there first.
He watched his wife as she held Connie’s hand until they arrived.
CHAPTER 7
MAESTRO, VIRGINIASATURDAY AFTERNOON
RAFE CHUGGED DOWN half a glass of iced tea, swiped his hand over his mouth, and said to his father, “Madonna told me about this woman Rosalind Franklin who did a lot of the work on DNA and they gave her research away and she didn’t even get recognized or win a Nobel Prize.”
“Hmm.”
“She died when she was a little bit older than Mom when she left. Isn’t that something, Dad?”
“Yeah, Rafe, it sure is. You wonder what she would have done if she’d lived longer.”
“That’s what Madonna said. She said Rosalind Franklin was the one who actually took the first blurry picture of what the double helix molecule looks like.”
Dix wondered why he’d never heard of Rosalind Franklin, but didn’t say anything. He set a bowl of chicken noodle soup on the table in front of his son, then set another on a tray and took it to the living room. Madonna was propped up with three cushion pillows, Brewster on her chest, his face on his front paws. His eyes fluttered closed as she stroked his head. Dix would swear her eyes were brighter than an hour before.
He moved Brewster to the coffee table, set the tray on her lap, pulled up a chair, and sat beside the sofa.
