The Survivors (40 page)

“No, he didn't,” Weston said flatly. “After Russo got pulled from the US Attorney's job, he did some checking in his own files. He wasn't happy losing out on that, and he wanted to prove he hadn't done anything wrong. He thought he had to travel that week to see a client in Atlanta. He checked his date book from that year, and he was right.”

She flipped the folder open and set a photocopy between us. “That's a receipt for an airline ticket. Russo flew to Georgia that night, a seven fifty flight from National Airport. He left his house in Annapolis right after talking to Cal's mother. He couldn't have been in Damascus.”

“We're supposed to believe this?” Scottie said. “A receipt just appears after twenty-five years?”

“I work with law firms a lot, Mr. Glass,” Weston said. “Those people are the original hoarders. If it's paper, they keep it. Especially if it involves money, and Russo got reimbursed for the cost of the ticket.”

“You'll check with the airlines?” I said.

“Already on it,” she said.

There was a handwritten note in the folder—crabbed, backhanded writing made with a black fountain pen. It explained where the receipt had come from, right down to the file cabinet and drawer.

Scottie said, “Russo wrote this?”

“No,” she said. “His assistant, Griffin O'Shea, dropped that off at my office a couple of hours ago.”

“You're fools if you believe that stuff.” Scottie tossed the note down and looked around. “I need to go to the bathroom.”

I waited for him to walk away. “Sorry about that.”

Weston rolled her eyes and shrugged. She was already reaching for one of the binders so she could get to work.

“I'm going to get some coffee. Would you like a cup? Hazelnut, right?”

“That's sweet you remember,” she said. And she let me pay for it this time.

I hung around the counter until Scottie came back. “Would you like something?” I said.

“No,” he said without looking at me.

I lightly grabbed his wrist. “You don't have to agree with her, but arguing every step isn't going to help. Go along, and I'll bet we learn something.”

He stared hard at me for about ten seconds. “Get me a Mountain Dew.”

Back at the table, Scottie and I took the other two binders and started reading. First up in mine were my parents' telephone and bank account records, the same things Scottie and I had already looked over. He read a few pages in his binder then flipped through randomly.

“We've looked at all this before,” he said.

“Not all of it,” I said. “The cops checked out my parent's finances. I've got some things here about that lawsuit against my father.” I turned the book to show him.

He glanced at it and thumped his own book closed. “Tell me about Markaris. What did he do between the time we left Bowles's place and when he got killed?”

“We don't know yet,” Weston said.

“Did he make any phone calls?” he said.

“His phone wasn't on him. We're checking with his carrier now for any calls.”

“Did you get anything from that partial license plate I gave you?” I said.

She smiled pleasantly, looking from one to the other of us. “Still checking. It's Labor Day weekend. There's not a lot of help around.”

“Markaris was hit with a rock?” Scottie said.

“A rock or something like it,” she said. “We haven't found—”

“Hit here?” He poked her in the temple.

If someone had done that to me, I would have been damned annoyed. Weston took it in stride. “A little farther forward.” She tapped her right eye. “We'll know more when the autopsy is completed.”

“Maybe,” Scottie said. “But the rest of this is stupid. I don't have the original autopsy reports in this binder. I'll bet you don't either. These files are useless. The cops never did a thing in the original investigation.”

Weston and I flipped through our binders, and he was right about the autopsies. “I'll ask Quintero why they're not here,” Weston said. “He's coming in Tuesday to meet with me. Maybe it's something to do with their filing system.”

“And now we're through playing twenty questions,” I said. “Let's get back to work.”

That succeeded for about two minutes. Scottie opened his binder and drummed his fingers on the table and slurped his already empty Mountain Dew. He slapped the binder closed. “Talking to Quintero might help, but this is nothing more than shuffling papers.”

“There could be some reference to Markaris,” I said.

“Let me know if you find it,” he said. “I'm going home. At least I can use my computer there. I might turn up something on him.”

I glanced at Weston. It was her call. “I promised my boss I'd find you today,” she said. “If I let you leave, are you going to run?”

“I told you, I'm just going home.”

She looked at him long enough to make him squirm. “Pick up the phone when I call. Don't make me come looking for you.”

“Whatever,” he said, and he headed for the door.

I followed him outside. “Do you want a ride?”

“I know how to take a cab.”

“I'm sure you do,” I said. “What's the matter with you—acting like that with Weston? She's trying to help us.”

“I can't stand it anymore. Didn't you see how she kept staring at me? And smiling?”

“She was being polite.”

“That's being polite? You can have all of that you want.”

He headed for Pennsylvania Avenue, where he'd have the best chance of catching a taxi on a Sunday evening.

“Stay near the phone,” I yelled after him.

“Right,” he mumbled.

When I got back to her, Weston had dumped the box out on the table and was sifting through the pads and note cards. “Does he act that way around everybody or am I special?”

“He forgot his happy pills today. Don't take it personally.”

“Personally? Never.”

“What are these things?” I said.

“Mostly interview notes. The handwriting is awful. It'll take hours to get through it all.”

I spun one of the pads around. The top sheet was a list of interview subjects. It was long, about forty names. There was Ned Bowles and Lois McGuin and Eric Russo.

“Something wrong?” Weston said.

“Not wrong. Just the names on this list. Markaris—see? The cops interviewed him, but Markaris told me he was away most of that year, working in Puerto Rico. Anyway, this is a lot of interviews. It looks like the detectives did a thorough job.”

“Tuesday, with Quintero, I'll go over all this and see what he remembers.” She stacked up the cards and pads and put her hand lightly on mine. “Would you like more coffee?”

“Sure.”

With the fresh coffee, we switched binders and went back to work. A few times she asked me about something she came across. I admit, I was having trouble concentrating. A couple of times I glanced up and thought I saw her eyes darting away, as if she'd been staring at me. I felt like a kid in school, spending study hall flirting with the prettiest girl around. Totally juvenile—but there it was.

After a while, I went to get us a couple of bagels to munch on. Back at the table, Weston had stood up and was shuffling quickly through the papers. “What's up?” I said.

“I can't find Russo's airline receipt and the note that was with it. The folder's here, but it's empty.”

We looked through everything. They definitely were gone.

Weston said, “Do you think—?”

“Scottie took them.”

“Why?”

“I'll find out,” I said.

He'd had plenty of time to get home. I took out my phone. Mrs. Rogansky answered before the second ring.

“Dr. Henderson, I'm glad you call. I look everywhere for your number. Can't find.”

“Slow down, Mrs. Rogansky. Is Scottie there?”

“No. He came home and look at his papers for a while, then make a phone call. He told me to go away, but even from upstairs I heard him yelling. Really angry.”

“You don't know who he called?”

“No, I was hoping it was you. That's why I look for your number. He went out.”

“Have you made any other calls since then?” I asked.

“No, I would have called you, but your number—”

“Your phone is digital, isn't it? One of the new ones. I saw it in your kitchen.”

“Yes, Scottie buy it. Why?”

“There's a button on it that says ‘redial,' right?”

“Ha!” she said. “Sure, I should have thought. I grew up under the Soviets. There you had to think quick every day, yes? I'll have to hang up first.”

I gave her my number so she could call me back.

“Scottie got in an argument with somebody on the telephone and went out,” I told Weston. “His landlady is getting the number he called.” My phone rang. “It'll show up on her screen when she hits redial.”

“Hi, Mrs. Rogansky. Got it?”

I copied it down: 202 area code, from the District.

“Thanks. Call me back if Scottie comes home, all right?” I hung up.

“Hold on,” Weston said, “I've seen that number today.” She pulled out her own phone and showed it to me—her contacts list. “That's Griffin O'Shea's home phone.”

FORTY-ONE

J
amie dialed O'Shea's number, but there was no answer so she left a message. “Why would Glass want to talk to him?” she said as she put the phone away. “His landlady said he was angry about something?”

“The angry part doesn't mean much,” I said. “Scottie's that way most of the time. I don't know what he'd want to talk to O'Shea about. Something to do with that airline receipt and note. That must be why Scottie took them.”

“The landlady didn't know where he went?”

“No. He went through some of his research papers before he made the call to O'Shea. If we took a look at those things, they might tell us something.”

“That beats sitting around here.” She started putting the binders and papers back in the file box. “If this goes sideways, I'll have to take the gloves off with Glass.”

“Nothing's going to happen. Scottie wants answers, that's all. Just like you.”

“No,” she said after a second, “I don't think he's like me at all.”

We took her car, a beat up Mercury Marquis that she called “company wheels.” It had a bench front seat, so I tossed the box between us, and she stepped on the gas.

Weston drove with one hand loosely on the wheel, the other waving around as she talked. In the first two miles, she spouted six different theories about why Scottie had phoned O'Shea. Then she grew quiet, thinking.

“Cases like this can be funny,” she said. “Sometimes it's Hansel and Gretel—one bread crumb at a time, all the way to the end of the story.”

“And the other times?” I said.

“One of those bread crumbs turns out to be a landmine.” She laughed. “Sorry. Now I'm thinking like Chicken Little.”

I watched her for a moment. “How did you shoot your boss?”

“That? I—” Her voice was suddenly raw. “We were on a raid in Alexandria, a two-bit counterfeiting shop. Arles didn't follow protocol. He went around the outside of the house and in a back door without calling his entrance. A bad guy stepped between us as Arles came in. He had a gun drawn. I dropped and fired. One round went wide, hit Arles in the ear.”

She swallowed hard.

“And the other guy?” I said.

“Three in the chest.”

“Did he get off any shots?”

“Two. Missed me by a bit.”

“That sounds close. How long ago did this happen?”

“Five weeks.”

“How are you doing with it?”

“
Fine, Doctor
.” She shrugged, losing some of the tension. “Sorry.”

“Are you sleeping OK?”

Her laugh was husky. “Your mind goes straight from women with guns to bed. That's way too James Bond.”

And that was an artful parry. It put that story completely out of bounds. I had to wonder, though, how fully recovered she was. An incident like that would leave scars on anybody, even someone as tough as she was.

I watched the road. In a few blocks the awkwardness was gone, and we smiled at each other.

I pulled the box of files closer. The notepad with the list of interview subjects was on top. “According to this list, the cops back then didn't interview Griffin O'Shea.”

“Should they have?”

“Not necessarily. He and Russo were with the same law firm. They both did work for Braeder, but Russo was the point man. O'Shea did contract negotiations. He might never have had anything to do with my mother. But there are some people on this list I can't figure out.”

“Who?” she said.

I flipped through the pages, looking at the interview notes. She was right about the handwriting being a mess.