“Think whoever it was found what he was looking for?”
“No way of telling, but I’ve got a hunch he didn’t.”
“Why?”
“The mess downstairs,” Frank said. “If he was looking for something, he started here.”
Following Frank’s logic, Atkins nodded. “So if he’d found it up here-”
“He wouldn’t have tossed downstairs,” Jose finished.
Calkins appeared in the doorway with one of his crew. When he saw Atkins, Frank, and Jose, he frowned.
“R.C.,” Jose said, “this’s Brian Atkins from the Bureau.”
Calkins nodded curtly and scanned the room as if to assure himself it hadn’t been disturbed.
“Good to know you’re back,” Atkins said.
“Thank you,” Calkins replied perfunctorily. “You goin’ to be up here long?” he asked Frank and Jose, obviously anxious to have them gone.
Frank suppressed a smile. “Just leaving.”
At the foot of the stairs, Atkins paused. Up above, the indistinct sound of Calkins and his tech talking.
“Never knew a good forensics man who didn’t think he owned the crime scene,” Atkins said, looking back in the direction of the body.
“You’ll never know a better one than R.C.,” Jose said.
The front door was open, and Frank gratefully pulled in the fresh air. A spitting rain was falling outside. At the curb, a government black Mercury Grand Marquis waited, its windshield wipers flapping a metronome beat. Atkins looked past Frank and Jose, back into the house, then focused on the two men.
“I hear somebody put a Colombian necktie on Pencil.”
“Yeah,” Frank said, and he took another breath, as if it would flush away the image of what had been done to Pencil before he’d been stuffed in the trunk of his car.
“Filthy bastards,” Atkins muttered. “Fits,” he said.
“Fits?” Frank asked. “Fits what?”
“We finally broke the code at State.”
Frank had trouble connecting. He glanced at Jose, who was also running slow this morning.
“State?”
Atkins looked at Frank, then at Jose. “Kevin Gentry,” he said. Seeing he’d gotten the detectives’ attention, he continued. “That State Department job of his was a cover.”
“Cover?” Frank said, irritated at himself for not catching on and at Atkins for making it more difficult than it had to be.
Atkins nodded. “Kevin Gentry was CIA. State Department had him listed as a political officer, but actually he was the deputy chief of station in Bogota.”
A Colombian connection?” Kate asked.
Frank felt his bullshit detector twitch and didn’t know why, but registered it anyway.
“Gentry’s time in the agency… the way somebody did Pencil. Not much there.”
After dinner at Tahoga, they’d walked down Thirtieth Street to the river and found a bench along the walk in front of Harbor Place. A 737, landing lights on, wheels and flaps down, passed overhead, then banked to starboard to line up its approach to Reagan National. At the same time, a cabin cruiser, steering between the red and green buoy lights, made its way up the Potomac.
“There’s the time gap,” Kate said uncertainly, as though the thought had suddenly appeared.
Frank shifted on the bench, bringing his shoulder and thigh into contact with her. Dragging itself through the long day’s fatigue from door-to-door canvassing, the thought unreeled slowly, then more rapidly. Yes, the time gap. If there was a connection, why did the person who did Gentry wait two years to do Skeeter and Pencil?
Kate continued circling the riddle. “Maybe the Agency,” she mused to herself as much as to him, “maybe Gentry was still Agency and they had him working the Hill undercover.”
The cabin cruiser had now cleared Roosevelt Bridge, and the 737 had disappeared behind the finger of trees, marking its last turn into Reagan.
Frank added another “What if?” to the conjecture pile. “Or did he use his old Agency connections to go into business with Skeeter and Pencil?”
“You mean Gentry was their ‘insurance’?”
“Skeeter met with somebody in June ’ninety-two. Gentry was working on the Hill at that time for the New York senator. He quit to move to Rhinelander’s subcommittee in January ’ninety-eight.”
“Which could have put him in a better position to be Skeeter’s insurance,” Kate finished.
Frank’s mind replayed the garage rooftop, the Trans Am and the Ethiopian attendant, then Pencil’s house and the dead woman at the top of the stairs. And that brought him to something he’d said to Emerson.
“What?” Kate’s voice seemed to come from a long way off.
“What?” Frank echoed.
“What you just said,” Kate persisted, “quote, Skeeter left a big business, unquote.”
“Oh.” It took him a moment to register. He shrugged, too tired to follow further. “Just something that came back to me from this morning.” He felt himself drop into mental overload. He reached for Kate’s hand.
They sat without talking. Music, soft and indistinct, carried across the water from the cabin cruiser. Finally Kate squeezed his hand. “You’re down.”
“Just tired.”
“It’s more than that.”
He started to shake his head but then realized she was right. He probed, trying to sense the outlines of something lying hidden in the underbrush.
“It’s a feeling. A feeling more than a thought.”
“And the feeling’s like…?”
He probed some more. “It’s like the dropping feeling in your gut,” he added slowly, “like when you sense you’re on a losing team.”
“Losing? Why?”
“Emerson’s face this morning… He sees all this as something he just wants to go away. He tried to sweep it under the carpet once. He’d try again, if he got the chance.”
Kate thought about that, then shook her head. “But he can’t,” she said, “it’s gotten too big.”
Frank drew in the night air and exhaled in a sigh. “Yes, he can. For precisely that reason… that it’s gotten too big. He can pass it off to the Bureau.”
“What makes you think that’s probable?”
“Knowing Emerson for twenty-five years.”
“In a perfect world,” Kate challenged, “why’d it make any difference? If the Bureau could solve it, or the department?”
“In a perfect world it wouldn’t make any difference. In the real world it does. It makes a real difference, who closes the case.”
“Why?”
“If the Bureau takes this over, it sends a message to everybody on the street. It tells them DCMPD can’t do its job. We’re already catching a load of crap because of the cold cases. Now we throw our hands up because this’s just too hard?”
He felt anger rising in his throat. “It’s not up to the FBI or the CIA to keep the peace on the streets. That’s our job.”
“And you don’t want your job taken away?”
“I don’t want somebody saying I can’t do it. Especially somebody like Emerson.”
“And there’s Atkins,” Kate said simply.
He had the eerie feeling she’d read his mind.
“This morning”-Frank drifted, putting his thoughts together for the first time-“we were standing in the door at Pencil’s. There Atkins was, wearing a raincoat that must have cost what I pay for a suit. Hell, two suits. He’s got a driver waiting in a big black car to take him back to an office that’s like the Taj Mahal. Beside him, Hoser and I come off looking like poor cousins… a pair of ragpickers.”
