Known Dead (29 page)

He smiled. ‘‘I agree . . . Just who do you think my boss is, by the way? Nichols at the DEA?’’

‘‘Well, yeah,’’ I said, realizing that I really didn’t have any idea who his boss was.

‘‘I don’t believe I ever said I was in narcotics,’’ he said. ‘‘I’m a counterterrorist agent. I do counterintelligence. I have no interest in narcotics-specific cases.’’

Well, damn. Pieces clicked furiously. I began to feel we were right about the right-wing extremists, then. If that was it, then that was Volont’s interest in the whole thing.

‘‘I don’t think you’d have any connection with my boss,’’ he said.

‘‘Well,’’ I said, playing the only trump card I could think of, ‘‘I was thinking of a man I know with Mossad. One with Shin Beth. I even know a guy with GSG 9, for God’s sake. And I’ve got a friend with a connection with the SAS, now that I think of it. Could they know him?’’

‘‘What,’’ he said, ‘‘no CIA connections?’’ He smiled again.

He thought I was kidding. ‘‘I don’t know anybody in CIA,’’ I said. ‘‘I did attend a lecture by Admiral Bobby Inman once. But I sure wouldn’t want to imply that he’d even talk to me.’’

Volont was silent.

‘‘Your guys were the ones who brought the Mossad agent to our office to talk with us.’’

That got him. It was true. The Israelis had been checking on possible Nazi connections with the extreme right in the United States. We were far from the only ones the Israeli had talked with, and I personally think he was there because he’d pissed off his boss. But it had happened. The fact that I didn’t even remember his name, let alone have a way to reach him, had nothing to do with it. Volont wouldn’t be able to
confirm
that, and confirmation is the key word in the intelligence business.

That also got Hester, by the way. I’d only seen her look that surprised once before.

‘‘I really want to keep this in the family,’’ I said. I held up my thumb and forefinger, in a pinching motion. ‘‘But I want to solve these killings just a little, tiny bit more.’’

Volont pursed his lips. ‘‘Thanks for the dessert,’’ he said. ‘‘I’ll be in touch.’’

For the record, I felt a little angry with myself for having become angry at Volont. This was balanced, I felt, by my being delighted with the Mossad bit. If you threw in a meal that was excellent until dessert, the evening had been a plus. Hell, even the dessert wasn’t that bad.

I got to Maitland about 2300. Long, tired drive. I waited to use my radio until I pulled my unmarked into our garage, just so they wouldn’t be tempted to give me anything to do. I picked up the mike, and went 10-42, giving my ending mileage to the office, as required.

Sally was working. She acknowledged my transmission, and requested I phone her at the office ASAP.

Wonderful.

I walked in the door, and met Sue, who was bringing her popcorn dish to the kitchen sink. We kissed, and I said, ‘‘I’m supposed to call the office.’’

A short hug later, and I was on the phone.

‘‘Nation County Sheriff’s Department.’’

‘‘I hope you know what you’re asking, here,’’ I said.

‘‘ME!!!’’ She nearly took my ear off. ‘‘ME! Holy shit, Houseman. You should talk. You gave me some son of a bitch that doesn’t exist. I can’t get anywhere with this Connie Wittman. I mean it, I can’t get shit.’’

She was talking so fast I couldn’t get a word in.

‘‘What do you want, for shit’s sake? You want me to start running women with that last name, and then call ’em up and ask where their son Connie is? Huh?’’

She ran out of breath. I really liked that about Sally. She gave that job everything she had, and would drive herself harder than any boss ever could.

‘‘No. That’s okay,’’ I said blandly. On purpose, just to slow her down.

Silence. Then: ‘‘What?’’

‘‘Yeah, that’s okay. You can’t get ’em all.’’ I waited a beat. ‘‘Just go home and get a good sleep. It’s okay.’’

‘‘Well . . .’’

‘‘Sure. Good night, Sally.’’

‘‘Well . . . night.’’ As I put the phone down, I heard an increasingly faint ‘‘I’ll try again tomorrow . . .’’

Twenty-one

THE NEXT DAY was Sunday. I got to the office just after lunch. There was an envelope waiting in my box, sealed with red evidence tape. It just had ‘‘Houseman’’ written on it, in Sally’s hand.

Inside was this:

A handwritten note that said, ‘‘Don’t EVER ask me to do this again, ’cause I can’t. Sally.’’

Stapled to the note were two sheets of teletype paper.

The first one looked like this:

TCAM

CANCELED SSN 933 99 9901 OLN 933 99 9901 WITTMAN, JULIUS CONSTANTINE

HWY 220

CLOSTOWN, IA 52933 COUNTY: HOMER PROCDAT: 02-12-91 DOB: 02-10-47 SEX: M RAC: W EYS: BLU HT: 510 WT: 225

It was followed by three traffic entries in ’93.

The second sheet looked like this:

NCIC FEDERAL OFFENDER CRIMINAL HISTORY

NAME FBI NO. INQUIRY DATE WITTMAN, JULIUS CONSTANTINE 995622441AQ 07/28/96 SEX RACE BIRTHDATE HEIGHT WEIGHT EYES HAIR POB M W 02/10/47 509 235 BLU GRY IA

ARREST-1 06/11/86

AGENCY—US MARSHAL’S SERVICE CEDAR RAPIDS IA (IAUSM0002) CHARGE 1—PASS COUNTERFEITED SECURITIES

COURT—IA CEDAR RAPIDS

09-22-86 DISPOSITION—CONVICTED OFFENSE—PASS COUNTERFEITED SECURITIES SENTENCE—6M CONFINEMENT, 30M SUSPENDED, 3Y PROBATION

She’d got him from his middle name. I didn’t want to think how many DLs she’d had to run . . . and Julius Constantine, for God’s sake? What was his mother, a Roman?

It was the same dude, all right. Right up to the tiny discrepancies in the height and weight fields. (The Feds measured and weighed upon entry to prison . . . whereas a driver’s license station took your word for it. The DL people got little vanity figures like an inch or two added to height, and pounds shaved off.)

He was forty-nine. Well, the age was about right. At least in our area, the dyed-in-the-wool members of the extreme right tended to be between forty-five and sixtyfive.

A federal arrest and conviction. Interesting. Phony securities was the sort of thing the extreme right sometimes got into to finance their operations. They usually passed it off as a ‘‘defiant gesture’’ directed toward the Feds and the federal monetary and credit system. Sure. Sad part about it was that they tended to foist the stuff off on people who were in financial difficulties, who, in turn, either tried to use it as collateral or were counting on it for their future. People who believed in them.

Driver’s license ‘‘canceled’’ was expected, and another conforming data bit. The extreme right tended to cancel their driver’s licenses as a gesture. Nobody had the right to impose a ‘‘tax’’ for using the ‘‘free roads,’’ you see, and everybody had a God-given ‘‘right’’ to drive. For sure.

A federal conviction . . . served six months with thirty months suspended. Hmm. Five-sixths of a sentence knocked off spoke of cooperation with the Feds. Large, happy, and profitable cooperation, in fact. Great. I was willing to bet that his compatriots weren’t aware of that . . . except the others who’d done the same. And, I thought, a man who’d cooperated in the past was a fairly easy mark for the future. As it turned out, that was a bit of a mistake.

Sally hadn’t found out where he’d served his time . . . not that I was complaining. But it would be of interest to see who else was there at that time. Especially if one of them had an a.k.a. of Gabriel.

Now came the dilemma. God, how I wanted to see the case file on this guy. Who had access to the case file? Well, basically, it was Volont, of course. But it might also be George, who could lose his job over divulging even a part of it. Well, it was going to be a bit warm for George no matter which way he jumped.

I called Hester at home. We deliberated. Hester said she’d check around. Frequently, the federal charge would arise from a state or local investigation. If that had been the case . . .

Half an hour later, I got a call from Dr. Peters. He had finished the autopsy data on both Bud and Rumsford. I got a yellow pad and sat down to learn.

The information he had on Bud was pretty straightforward. What appeared to be a 7.62 mm round, full-jacketed, had struck him in the right shoulder, transected the lung, and struck the spine, where it took a sharp left, and came out just about the middle of his back, taking almost one whole vertebra with it. The second shot, into his head, appeared to have occurred post-mortem, and had entered from the rear. Most of the skull had disappeared into the yard area, in very small pieces, as the blast had caused quite a bit of rebounding out of the ground. Nearly point-blank, as far as he could tell.

Rumsford was a little bit different. Two rounds, but not quite the same as those that had struck Bud.

‘‘The ones that struck the officer, judging from parts of the jacket and the texture of the cores, were of either Chinese or old Soviet–Warsaw Pact manufacture. The ones that seem to have struck the reporter were possibly just a tad bit lighter, but definitely of much better manufacture. NATO at least, but I’d say something like a really high-quality round, like a Norma.’’

Okay.

Apparently both rounds that hit the reporter had been moving at a pretty good clip. The first one had entered the mediastinum straight through the sternum, at a slight angle from the right, and slightly down. Missing the spine, it took a path just below the heart, raised hell with the plumbing in the left lung, and exited the left rear of the body after nicking the fifth rib.

‘‘Wouldn’t that have knocked him down?’’ I asked.

‘‘At less than twenty yards, not necessarily. It didn’t really hit anything super solid, like the spinal column. That would have rocked him. This just zipped through the breastbone and barely touched a rib. Stopped the heart instantly, of course.’’

Of course. Shock wave.

According to Dr. Peters, the second round came blasting through from a little steeper angle, and going almost straight on. The entrance wound was just about two inches above the first hole. This one struck the heart, pretty well disintegrating it, then hit the spine head-on, split, with a part that skidded to the left and down and exited Rumsford after passing through his liver and intestines, furrowing the inside of his right pelvis, and blowing out through his bladder. In the front, out the front. The other half continued on completely through the spine, and lodged in the muscles of his back.

‘‘This is a powerful weapon here,’’ said Dr. Peters.

No shit.

‘‘You might be looking for a rather longish barrel.’’

Thank you.

‘‘Oh,’’ he added. ‘‘Did you hear these shots?’’

‘‘Oh, yeah,’’ I said, ‘‘I heard ’em.’’

‘‘How far from them were you?’’

‘‘Oh, probably twenty yards.’’

‘‘Were they loud?’’

‘‘Very. I felt the first one, as much as I heard it.’’

‘‘That’s quite strange,’’ said Dr. Peters. ‘‘You know, we examined the half round that lodged in the reporter’s back. It had those strange brushed marks that look like it was fired through a silencer . . .’’

‘‘Boy, I don’t think so, Doc,’’ I said. ‘‘Sounded very loud to me . . .’’

‘‘Strange,’’ he said. ‘‘Very strange . . . oh, well . . .’’

‘‘Same shooter?’’ I asked. ‘‘Rumsford, I mean.’’

‘‘Not sure,’’ he said. ‘‘Could have been, if he was prone for one shot and kneeling for the second. Or it could have been two men using the same ammunition type . . .’’

That made a lot of sense. The shooter, from a prone position, smacks Rumsford, who just stands there. The shooter rises slightly for a better angle, kneeling. Smacks him again, and sees him topple. Couple of seconds separate the shots.

I’d only been off the phone for an hour when I got a call from Harry over in Conception County, WI. He had preliminaries on the body of Johnny Marks.

Marks had been strangled with a leather belt. Markings from the stitching on the edges of the belt were visible within the main ligature mark, and indicated it had been machine-stitched. Cool. The massive chest wound was, in fact, two holes. It appeared that they had driven the spike through him the first time, just about perpendicular to the beam, and it had pulled out when they propped the beam up. Tearing, front and back, so they had driven it through him a second time, at more of an angle. Spoke volumes for their determination. All that had been post-mortem as well. The damage to his face and other parts, which had appeared to me to be incidental and possibly from a beating, turned out to have been inflicted post-mortem too, likely by the fall from the beam.

‘‘Wanna hear the best part?’’ asked Harry.

‘‘Sure.’’

Chuckle. ‘‘He had splinters in his butt, also post-mortem. From sliding down the beam when the first spike pulled out.’’

Oh, that was the best, all right.

‘‘Oh,’’ he said, laughing so hard to himself that he had difficulty getting it out. ‘‘One more bit . . .’’

‘‘Sure.’’

‘‘When they were driving the spike, they apparently used a maul. Missed the spike a couple of times.’’ He started to break up again. ‘‘And I get mad when, when I, when I, I hit my thumb . . .’’

Harry cracks me up too.

Harry still had no solid information for us on a suspect, other than probably a gang member. He did have one fascinating thing. Time of death. ‘‘Been dead about three days,’’ he said. ‘‘Probably done sometime on the 24th.’’

‘‘Any ideas yet as to why?’’ I asked.

‘‘I was hoping you had some.’’

All Harry could tell was that it was probably done to ‘‘set an example for others.’’

Hmmm. The time of death had him being done in on the same day as Rumsford. Significance? Unknown.

I spent the rest of the day eating antacid tablets, drinking coffee, and worrying.

Monday, July 29th, was the date of Rumsford’s funeral in Canada. Fittingly, it was also the day we discovered the whereabouts of Julius Constantine Wittman.

Hester called me at 0921. She’d gotten hold of a friend in the DCI records section and a friend in DCI intelligence. They had found that Wittman had, indeed, been involved in a scam or two in Iowa, including the one that eventually resulted in federal charges. She was going to Des Moines to get the case file.

‘‘You know,’’ she said, ‘‘Noyagama seemed impressed.’’

Howard Noyagama was the best intelligence analyst at DCI, and I thought one of the top people in the country. There were highly placed people across the country who would agree with me.

‘‘Really?’’ That in itself impressed me.

‘‘Yeah.’’ She hesitated. ‘‘I think we’re getting into a group of connections we’d rather not open up.’’

‘‘You’re probably right.’’

‘‘I mean,’’ she said, ‘‘I’ll go for it. But we might really need Volont and company on this one.’’

‘‘Yeah,’’ I admitted. ‘‘I agree. I was thinking about that a lot.’’

‘‘You wanna make the call?’’

I chuckled. ‘‘You mean the decision, or the telephone call to Volont?’’

She was very serious. ‘‘I don’t think there’s any real decision to make here, Carl. The phone call.’’

‘‘I’ll do it.’’

‘‘But not just yet,’’ she added quickly. ‘‘Let me get to Des Moines and back out before you call. I don’t want access shut down before we get the file.’’ She chuckled herself. ‘‘Just in case.’’

‘‘Right.’’

‘‘So I’ll contact you as soon as I get on the Interstate with the file in my hot little hands.’’

‘‘I’ll be waiting,’’ I said.

I hate to wait. It would take Hester about three hours to get to Des Moines, and I didn’t know how long after that to get to the DCI files, copy or write down what was necessary, and get back on I-80. You can imagine all sorts of things, waiting like that, so I decided to keep my mind busy.

I went through a list of LEIN officers, and called one in Homer County, where Wittman lived. Turned out he was new to the program. That meant that, when he found out how long I’d been in, he was very reluctant to ask me any questions, but would tell me just about anything. Nervous, but oh, so eager. Just what I wanted.

He thought Wittman was ‘‘still on the old farm’’ but wasn’t totally sure. He could check. I asked him if he knew anybody whom Wittman could, maybe, hang around with.