Dead on Arrival

showed me a note written in English that said to take off my clothes. When I didn’t right away, he slapped me. I thought they were going to rape me, but they didn’t. They just tied me to a chair. Naked.’

The girl shuddered. It was a cold night, in the low forties, and all Anisa was wearing were sweatpants and a hooded sweatshirt that said uva soccer on the back. Emma didn’t think, however, that it was cold that had made the girl shiver.

‘What did they look like?’ Emma asked.

‘One was big, at least six-four, and heavy. The other was maybe six feet, skinny but real strong. They both wore long-sleeved shirts and had gloves on their hands and ski masks over their faces.’

‘What color were their eyes?’ Emma said.

‘Brown. Both of them.’

Blue would have been better. ‘Could you tell if they were white? If they were American or from some other country?’

‘No. They never spoke, not once.’

‘Okay, then what happened?’

‘Another man — he was wearing a ski mask too — he brought my uncle into the warehouse. My uncle could see me tied up naked inside the glass office. While my uncle was watching, one of the men, not the big man, the other one, the skinny one, came and stood behind me. He was holding two sticks with a wire connecting the sticks. He put the wire around my neck and began to twist it, to choke me, and I started gagging and my neck started bleeding. He stopped before I passed out. I looked up and the man with my uncle was talking to him. Then the skinny man strangled me again and I could see my uncle crying, begging for them to stop, and then my uncle and the man with him left the warehouse.’

Anisa stopped talking to keep herself from crying and closed her eyes for a moment.

‘They left me alone for a long time, maybe five or six hours; then the skinny man came back. He showed me pictures of my mother and my little brother coming out of our house, and then he held up a note for me to read. It said if I talked to the police they would kill my mother and my brother. And me. Then … then he took off one of his gloves and he — he put his finger in me. After that he untied me and let me get dressed, and then he put me back in the trunk of the car and dropped me off near the campus. When I got back to my room, I tried to call my uncle, but he wasn’t home. Then I turned the radio on and heard what he had done. And that he was dead.’

‘I know this is hard for you, Anisa, but when the man took off his glove, could you see his hand?’ Emma said. ‘I mean, could you tell his race from his hand?’

The girl started to shake her head, but then she stopped. ‘Yes, his hands weren’t real dark, not like a black man’s or an Arab’s. They were tanned, but he was probably white.’

‘Good,’ Emma said. ‘Very good.’

‘And there was something else. When he first took off his glove, I saw these blue marks on his knuckles, but only for a second. I think they were tattoos but I couldn’t see a design and they might have been smudges of grease or dirt. I just don’t know.’

‘Can you remember anything else? The type of car they drove? If their clothes had any sort of distinc tive labels on them, anything like that?’

‘No. I’m sorry.’

She and Emma sat there in silence for a moment, then Anisa gestured with her head and said, ‘Did you know they only give these rooms to seniors, the ones who the professors think are going to be somebody special someday?’

Emma nodded her head; she knew what the girl was talking about. On each side of the grass common were five ‘pavilions’ assigned to prestigious faculty members, and between the pavilions were fifty-four little student rooms called ‘lawn rooms.’ The rooms were built about the time Thomas Jefferson died and have no air-conditioning or showers. Yet in spite of their age, size, and lack of creature comforts, the lawn rooms are the most desirable dwellings on campus because only the university’s most impressive overachievers are permitted to reside in them.

‘What chance do you think a Muslim woman has,’ Anisa said, ‘of being picked to live in one of those crummy old rooms?’

51

Tim Crocker liked being a fireman.

He liked the guys he worked with. He liked putting out fires. He liked saving people and their homes. Hell, he even liked getting cats down from trees. What he didn’t like was looking at people who’d burned to death.

The sight of a body — or in this case four bodies — burnt black beyond recognition, their heads turned into skulls, their mouths open from their last screams, their backs arched from their final struggles … well, he just hated it. And the smell. Every time this happened, he couldn’t eat barbecue for a month.

The fire had started in a bedroom in an apartment on the third floor. Then the ceiling above the third floor unit had collapsed and two people sleeping on the fourth floor had dropped right down into the bedroom of the two people who’d been sleeping on the third floor. So he had four bodies — two couples — and the man and woman from the fourth floor were stacked on top of the couple from the third.

Crocker’s guys had done a good job. They’d managed to put the fire out less than an hour after they got the alarm, and although three other units in the apartment building had been heavily damaged, no one else had died and they’d managed to save the building. It was the cause of the fire that was bothering Crocker. He wasn’t the arson investigator but he’d been around a long time, and he was pretty sure that the fire hadn’t been caused by a natural gas explosion or somebody who’d fallen asleep with a cigarette burning. There had been an explosion, though — strong enough to blow out a couple windows in the building next door — and Crocker thought that whatever had exploded had been attached to a container of something flammable. In other words, a damn incendiary device had gone off in this apartment.

So they weren’t dealing with some semi-harmless firefly, some guy who got his rocks off watching buildings burn, or some schmuck trying to collect on the insurance. No, this was something else; he didn’t know what, but whatever was going on it wasn’t his problem. The cops and the arson investigator would have to sort that out.

‘Hey, Chief,’ a voice said.

Crocker turned. It was a cop, a young guy with ears like pitcher handles under his cap. Crocker wasn’t a fire chief, but there was no point telling the cop that; the cops always called the senior fireman on the scene chief.

‘You shouldn’t be up here,’ Crocker said. ‘That floor you’re standing on could give way.’

‘I talked to the manager,’ the cop said, ‘and we know who three of these people are.’

‘Yeah?’ Crocker said.

‘The couple from the fourth floor, their names were Sharon and Pat Montgomery. The gal was a teacher at some middle school and her husband worked at Macy’s over in Arlington.’

Just a couple of ordinary people who had the bad luck to be sleeping in the wrong place at the wrong time, Crocker thought.

‘Who owns this apartment?’ Crocker said.

‘A young gal named Jennifer Talbot. She was a secretary, and that’s why I came up here. You’re never gonna guess who she worked for.’

‘Well, who is it?’ Crocker said. He wished the damn cop would just get to the point and get out of here. He wanted to get away from the smell.

‘Broderick,’ the cop said.

‘You mean Senator Broderick?’ Crocker said.

‘Yeah.’

Oh, boy, Crocker thought, and took out his cell phone. He needed to tell his boss what the cop had just said, but before he dialed, he asked, ‘What about the fourth person, the one who was sleeping with Talbot?’

‘We don’t know yet,’ the cop said. ‘The manager, he said Talbot wasn’t married and he didn’t think she had a boyfriend, although he said she was one good-looking young lady.’

‘Well, you guys need to figure out who he is,’ Crocker said, ‘because …’