more.”
Realizing Navarro was using his momentum against him, Jose pulled up short. “Right,” he said, “so…”
Navarro made a small, polite “Wait” gesture with her right hand. “Please. Let me finish. We would see an increase in addiction. But we would destroy the narcotics business.” A beat. “The business,” she repeated. “Addiction is a medical disease. The illegal narcotics business is a social one. You cannot treat the two with the same medicine.
“Think about this.” She leaned forward. “How much violence… how much killing… comes not from the drugs, but from the business… the illegal business of buying, distribution, selling?”
Navarro’s cheeks had an excited flush, and her voice deepened.
“Narcotics do not corrupt. It’s the criminal business that buys politicians and even… even police. We have our ‘war on drugs.’ And we have brave and principled people fighting it. Kevin Gentry was one. But it is a war we are losing. And when you are losing a war, you change your strategy.”
“To preemptive surrender?” Frank asked.
“No. Merely rational recognition of human nature. Congress cannot outlaw sin. But it can keep evil people from making money from it.” Navarro sat back and smiled ruefully. “But you did not come here to argue the merits of legalizing narcotics.”
“You were close to Kevin Gentry,” Frank said.
“Yes.” No longer the missionary, Navarro brought her guard up.
“When he was killed, he was preparing for a subcommittee hearing.”
Navarro answered cautiously. “Yes.”
“The usual annual D.C. budget review.”
Navarro’s look said “Listen carefully.” When she seemed certain she’d be understood, she spoke quietly. “Perhaps.”
“Perhaps?”
“Kevin had it in mind to expose the drug business in the District.”
“You knew this?”
“We helped him build a case.”
“How?”
“I said we exist to put the illegal narcotics dealers out of business.”
“Yes…”
“Those young people you see outside… they may seem like children. But they are very good researchers. We made this research available to Kevin.”
“Research about the business? What in particular?”
“In particular the Juan Brooks empire and his successor, James Hodges. It was quite an enterprise, you know.”
Jose looked doubtful. “Bunch of skinny kids on computers build a case on Skeeter?”
Navarro smiled. “Those skinny kids know the streets as well as computers. And we collect everything… things prohibited to you… rumors, hearsay. We even collect lies. Over time, patterns emerge, even in lies. And we are not bound to courtroom standards of evidence.”
“Could we have a copy of what you furnished Mr. Gentry?” Frank asked. “Hard copy if we can, computer discs if we can’t get that.”
Navarro nodded and made a note. “That was two years ago. We will have to pull it together. Do you want an update?”
Frank shook his head. “Maybe later. Right now, we’d like to see what Mr. Gentry saw.”
“The hearings Mr. Gentry was planning,” Jose asked, “Skeeter Hodges and his crew going to be the feature attraction?”
“Yes. We did an extensive organizational and economic analysis.”
“Economics?”
Navarro smiled cynically. “If the Hodges activities were legal, they’d be the third-largest moneymaker in the District behind the federal government and the Redskins.”
THIRTY-TWO
Frank stirred two Equals into his coffee. “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?”
Jose shut his notebook and tucked his pen in an inside coat pocket. The only other customer in the Starbucks was a thin kid with a ponytail, sharing a table at the back with his parrot. The kid was busily writing in a journal, stopping to feed the parrot chunks of a sweet roll.
Frank sipped at the coffee. He’d read somewhere that during World War II, the Germans had had to make coffee from burnt acorns, and he often wondered if they’d sold the recipe to Starbucks. It was awful stuff, but at least Starbucks was consistently awful. You knew what you’d get wherever you went.
“The lady pulled your chain, didn’t she?” he asked Jose.
Jose nodded. “Senorita’s got cojones. A true believer.” He stared out the window at the gray stone building across P Street. “Helluva thing,” he said wistfully, “older I get, the more I wonder…”
“About?”
“Oh, things I used to know were so… rock-bottom certain.”
“She got you thinking, didn’t she?”
“Made me remember,” Jose said, “something my daddy once told me about Jackson, Mississippi, back when he was a kid.”
“Yeah?”
“Dry state then. No hard booze. Only three-two beer. You wanted hard stuff, you saw the local bootlegger. Night and day, trucks ran the stuff into Jackson from over in Louisiana, ’cross the river to Vicksburg. Folks finally got fed up and got wet/dry on the ballot. Preachers came out for dry. Raised hell on Sundays. Just before the elections, papers carried the story that the bootleggers were paying off the preachers.”
“What happened?”
“Mississippi went wet. Bootleggers lost their asses.”
Frank was about to say something, when Jose’s cell went off.
Jose answered, listened, then flipped his cell shut. “R.C.,” he said. “Has a show-and-tell down at impound.”
We’d finished dusting for prints,” Calkins said. He stood beside Skeeter’s Taurus. Everything that would open was open: hood, trunk, all four doors, even the gas-filler hatch. The seats had been taken out. Halogen droplights illuminated every crevice.
“Nothing but Skeeter’s and Pencil’s. Then, when we were vacuuming for fibers…”
Calkins paused and stepped nearer to the car, picked up a yardstick, and pointed inside.
“… we found this.”
“This” was a heavy insulated cable running from the engine compartment, along the floor of the car, and disappearing into the trunk.
Calkins led Frank and Jose around to the trunk.
“Comes in here.” He motioned with his chin.
Frank saw the cable snaking along the inner fender, then disappearing under the mat that covered the trunk floor. Calkins lifted the mat. The spare tire had been removed from the storage well. The cable ran into a curved section of the well. He reached down into the well, and with a metallic snap, the section popped loose to reveal a small compartment with a black box inside.
“Guts of a top-end Nakamichi cassette recorder.” Calkins tapped the box with the yardstick. “Microphone pick-ups in the floor, headliner, headrests.”
Jose examined the box. “No buttons.”
“Remoted to the car’s regular sound system,” Calkins explained. “Do some trickery like turning off the music, and you turn on the recorder.”
