A Murder of Justice (25 page)

“I did it, you know.”

José regarded him gravely. “You did . . . what?”

“I set it off. They must have had it rigged to the door lock. It was supposed to get me when I turned the key. I set it off when I did the remote.”

José pulled his chair around to face Frank and sat so his knees almost touched Frank’s.

“Yeah,” he said carefully, “that’s what they did. They must have wired it to the lock.”

“And I pressed the remote when Leon was walking by, and I set it off.”

José brought his face close to Frank’s so their eyes were inches apart. He reached out and clamped one of Frank’s knees in his hand.

“Frank,” he said, leaning forward and biting off each word, “you listen to me.
They
put the bomb there. . . .
They
rigged it to the lock. . . .
They
did whatever happened.”

“But Hoser,
I—
”

“Bullshit, Frank!” José rapped out. “No goddamn way you gonna put this on yourself! Pushin’ a goddamn remote button on your car didn’t do that to Leon. Bastards did who put the bomb there.”

Frank looked into José’s eyes for a long time, searching, then pulled back. As he reached into his pocket for the pills, his hand paused. Perplexed, he drew out a small manila envelope. It took him a second to remember Janowitz sitting at the breakfast room table, handing the envelope over.

Riggs Bank . . . court order.

He put the envelope away and fished out the container. He twisted the top off and shook out two white pills, then downed them with the cup of water. He crumpled the cup, sat back in his chair, and rested his head against the wall.

“Hoser, I feel like shit.”

José squeezed his partner’s shoulder. “You got a right, buddy.”

“You oughta get over to the scene.”

“Yeah.” José hesitated, giving Frank a close once-over. “You sure you’re okay?”

“I’ll live.”

After José left, Frank shut his eyes and waited for Arrowsmith’s pills to kick in. He dozed off, his hand opened, and the crumpled paper cup fell to the floor. At the same time, machine-gun fire cut through his mental fog. He bolted upright in his chair, eyes open, and the machine-gun fire morphed into the insistent chirping of his cell phone.

He got the phone to his ear.

“Frank? What the hell?” Tom Kearney’s concern came in at high volume.

“Dad . . .”

“Radio’s talking about a bomb in Georgetown. Then Judith called me. Said your street was blocked off. Neighbors said you were hurt. . . .”

“I’m okay, Dad.”

“Where the hell are you?”

“Hospital Center.”

That reignited Tom Kearney’s alarm. “I thought you weren’t hurt!” he shouted.

“One of our guys is, Dad,” Frank said patiently. “I’m waiting for him to come out of surgery.”

“Any idea who did it?”

“Not yet, Dad. Not yet.”

Frank was putting away his phone when Sheresa Arrowsmith entered, her arm around a woman. Petite, in her late twenties, early thirties, black hair cut short and shaped
around her face. She wore jeans, a paint-daubed Ohio State sweatshirt, and Nike running shoes.

“Detective Kearney,” Arrowsmith said softly to the woman. To Frank she said, “This’s Esther Janowitz.”

H
e’s been in there nine hours,” Esther Janowitz whispered to the clock on the ICU waiting room wall.

Frank watched the red second hand. All that could be said had been said. He and Esther Janowitz had been by turn withdrawn and almost maniacally chattering, only to drift off again into isolation. The clock notched another second, then another and another. And the near-silent ticking engulfed the tiny room.

He had told her all he remembered. How he and her husband had sat over coffee, how his remote had triggered the explosion. She had listened expressionlessly, and there was no way he could tell whether she blamed him for what had happened. If she was angry, the anger might come up later, but then it might never come up. She didn’t impress him as a whiner or sniveler, and if she did bring it up, she’d come at him in-your-face hard. He didn’t want it now, but he’d rather have it now than never.

He stepped outside to use his phone. He left a short message with Kate’s answering service, then called José. Calkins was setting up for a twenty-four-hour operation. Robin Bouchard had offered the Bureau explosives team, and José had gone into Frank’s to feed Monty.

Frank thought about calling Emerson, but gave it up when he realized he had nothing to say. He didn’t want to get involved in a hand-holding exercise.

Back in the waiting room, Esther Janowitz put down the copy of
Condé Nast Traveler
—“The Best Tapas Bars in Seville”—and gave Frank, a long, appraising look.

“Mind if I ask you something?”

“No. I don’t,” Frank said, wishing inside that she’d stayed with the magazine.
What
were
the best tapas bars in Seville?

“Why did you choose Leon?”

It didn’t come across as a baited question. Esther Janowitz seemed genuinely curious. All the same, Frank found himself vaguely troubled that she’d asked and that he’d have to answer.

“I don’t know that I’m making the best of sense right now,” he began slowly, talking to her and to himself as well. “Simple answer . . . I asked for Leon because José and I needed help. We’d worked with him on the Keegan case, and we thought he was a good cop.”

He paused to gather his thoughts. “There’s a not-so-simple answer too. I’m proud of being a cop. There’ve been lots of days I wish I wasn’t, but on the whole, I like what I do, and I think it’s important.”

He searched for a word, a word that meant something. “It’s a
worthy
job. A job worth doing. Something worth devoting a life to. And it’s worth all the crap that goes along with it. And I guess when I see a young cop like Leon, it makes me feel good because I know when I hang up the badge, somebody is going to be out there wearing that badge who feels the same way I do about being a cop.”

“A legacy?”

“Call it that. Why’d you want to know . . . why I chose him?”

A small, nostalgic smile played around Esther Janowitz’s mouth. “I know why I chose him. And those reasons are good enough for me. I love him very much for those reasons. But it helps to know him better if I know how others see him.”

“I didn’t want him to leave the force.”

“I know. He told me. He said it made him feel warm inside.”

“Now I’m not so sure. Maybe New York . . .”

From the corner of his eye, he caught a flurry of motion in the narrow window set into the door to the ICU. A tall African-American man in green surgical scrubs came through a set of double doors, crossed the hallway, and entered the waiting room. He came over to Esther Janowitz.

“Mrs. Janowitz, I’m Dr. Michaels. They’re bringing your husband out of surgery now. I expect a full recovery. We had some internal injuries to take care of. . . . There were facial lacerations, and . . .”

Michaels paused. Frank sensed a man about to step out on unknown ice. The doctor shot a glance at Frank. “. . . we . . . I . . .
I
had to amputate his arm.”

Esther Janowitz gave no sign she’d heard. Her eyes widened as two orderlies brought a gurney through the double doors into the ICU. Without a word, Esther Janowitz brushed by Michaels and was at her husband’s side.

T
hat night, Frank couldn’t sleep. Outside in the rain, R.C.’s techs were still scavenging the block for evidence, working below canopies flung up over high-intensity floodlights. In his bedroom, each time Frank closed his eyes he felt the presence of meaningless death, the slow, circling beat of dark wings. He lay staring at the ceiling, listening to the rain, measuring its rhythms on the roof.

He couldn’t imagine ever having slept before or ever sleeping again. Soon he gave up. He got out of bed, slipped a pair of denim shorts on, and padded downstairs to the kitchen. Standing in the light of the open refrigerator, he drank deeply from a carton of milk. He wandered into the den, where he switched on a floor lamp and aimlessly began opening cabinets. One after another, he surveyed their contents, then closed them. Finally, in one, a thick album caught his attention.

He took it into the kitchen, retrieved the carton of milk, and sat at the table. He opened the album and it was Vietnam again.

A series of photographs: the building of the firebase near Ben Cat. GIs filling sandbags, digging bunkers, stringing razor-bladed coils of concertina wire.

In one photograph, he and Masek stood grinning into
the camera, interrupted from their task of setting out Claymore mines. Masek held a curved book-size mine in his hand. They were both bare-chested and rail-thin, and their fatigue trousers were stained dark with sweat. A gold tooth glinted in Masek’s mouth, and Frank wore a low-slung pistol belt. They looked rakish and impossibly young.

The pictures tugged at him—he was looking into a time when the firebase at Ben Cat still existed, before Masek became a name on the black marble wall, and when all that had happened to Frank had yet to happen to the Frank in the pictures. It was a time before the images became distorted by shattered truth and failed ambition.

Looking at himself, Frank wanted to whisper a warning to the young man he once was.

 THIRTY-FIVE

T
he headache was a roaring, clawing dragon behind his eyes. Eyes shut, Frank crab-walked his hand across the nightstand until he found the plastic container. Cursing the nanny state, he managed to work open the childproof cap and roll out two capsules. He got them down dry, then lay back in half-sleep and listened to Monty snore on the other pillow. He heard the grandfather clock downstairs strike two. Only seconds later, he heard it strike seven.

The dragon had left, but the stitches over his right eye felt like dozens of needles thrust under his skin. When he sat up, a painful protest swept over him from the bruises covering his chest and arms.

Every joint creaking, he made it into the shower, then, after gingerly drying himself, in front of the mirror to shave. The stitches pulled his right eye open, while a world-class shiner surrounded his left eye and blood from a ruptured vein had turned the white of the eye a deep red.

“No Hollywood contract today,” he muttered to himself.

Thirty minutes later, he hailed a cab at the corner of
Thirtieth and M, and fifteen minutes after that, John Richardson, the department’s dispatcher, was looking up at him.

“Jesus, Frank, you look worse than your car.”

“Car didn’t wake up with a head-popper this morning. You got something drivable?”

“You don’t want to wait until we fix yours?”

“You and I aren’t gonna live long enough, John.”

Richardson checked his computer, running a finger down the screen. “We got a couple of confiscated vehicles. How about a Hummer? Leather, Bose sound, only eight thousand miles, no bullet holes?”

“Maybe when I move to Montana.”

“You moving to Montana?”

“No. You got a spare Crown Vic?”

Richardson swiveled around, ran his fingers across a pegboard on the wall, plucked a set of keys, then turned back to Frank.

“Hummer matches your face,” he said, holding on to the keys. “You look like the Terminator on one of his worst days.”

Frank held out his hand. “I don’t want to be in anything that looks like my face.”

Richardson lofted the keys, and in an easy motion, Frank snagged them out of midair.

“Thanks, John.” Frank put on his dark glasses, and smiled. “I’ll be back.”

H
ummer might have been fun,
Frank thought as he made his way across the Fourteenth Street bridge. He switched on the radio and there was Joe Madison. As he expected, Madison was waist deep in yesterday’s bombing, grilling a hapless guest from Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Sorry, Joe.

The next preset put him in the middle of Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Can’t Take Love for Granted.” Carpenter’s Marlboro-and-Jack-Daniel’s throatiness came out warm
and sexy, and he felt his tension ease as Kate’s smile came to mind.

At Reagan National, Frank hurried past newsstands whose papers carried photos of his bomb-blasted car side by side with file shots of Leon Janowitz. He got to the US Airways gate just as the doors were opening.

Kate was among the first passengers off the shuttle. Catching sight of Frank, she stopped momentarily, obviously shaken, then rushed to him. She dropped her carry-on bag and hugged him, then, feeling him wince, stood back, eyes moist, and cupped his chin in her hand.

“You said a couple of scratches.”

“Looks worse than it is. I was lucky. Leon wasn’t.”

She held him at arm’s length, eyes going over his face.

“Frank,” she whispered, “it was . . .” As though suddenly realizing how near to the brink they had stood, and how deep the abyss, she shuddered. A single tear ran down her cheek. “. . . it was so damn close.”

She leaned forward and kissed him.

F
ive minutes later, they were driving north on the parkway.

“Favor?” Frank asked.

“Not here,” Kate said.

He reached into his shirt pocket for what he’d started thinking of as Janowitz’s envelope. He passed it to her.

She opened it. “Looks like a safe-deposit-box key.”

“It is. From Kevin Gentry’s office files. I want to see what’s inside. We need a court order or something?”

“Unh-hunh. You’ll want it yesterday?”

“That’d be nice.”

“How about today? Even that’ll be a push, getting a judge on a Saturday.”

Frank swung off the parkway onto the ramp to the Fourteenth Street bridge and back into the District. He headed toward Kate’s office.

“Have to do.”

“What do I get in exchange?”

Frank glanced over and grinned, and for the first time that day he felt pretty damn good.

I
t was an improvised device employing a sodium perchlorate explosive.” Renfro Calkins danced a laser pointer over the poster-size enlargement of what had been the front seat of Frank’s car.

At the head of the conference table, Seth Tompkins raised a hand.

“Improvised, Mr. Calkins . . . how?”

“Relatively simple, Your Honor,” Calkins told the mayor. Around the table with him were Chief Noah Day, Randolph Emerson, Frank, and José.

“You can do it in a bathroom or kitchen. Take HTH, a common swimming pool chlorinating compound, boil it along with table salt. Run the mixture through a couple of filtering processes and you come up with sodium perchlorate crystals. Grind the crystals, then mix with petroleum jelly . . . Vaseline . . . and you’ve got a very dandy plastique explosive.”

Calkins nodded toward Frank. “Your batch, Frank, was mixed with aluminum powder . . . obtainable at any paint store . . . that increased the explosive power, which also accounted for the bright flash you saw.”

“How big was it?” Tompkins asked.

“Not more than a pound of explosive,” Calkins answered, “perhaps even less.”

Tompkins’s eyes widened. “That small?”

“Enough if you know what you’re doing. The explosive was formed into a shaped charge, much like a cone,” Calkins explained. “The wide end was pointed toward the door and packed with lead pellets. Strictly an antipersonnel weapon. Officer Janowitz wasn’t killed, because the driver’s-side door shielded him from the pellets.”

“So much for the device,” Emerson said. “Any evidence of the origins?”

Calkins made eye contact with Frank, then with
Emerson. “The design is one favored by bombmakers in the drug trade.”

Frank knew what was coming.

“Colombian?” Emerson asked.

Persistent if nothing else, Randolph,
Frank wanted to say. Instead, he asked, “Forensics, R.C.?”

“The bombmaker was a local.”

“How’d you get that?” Emerson asked.

Calkins went to the easel, reached behind the photo enlargement of Frank’s car, and brought out another enlargement, of an irregular-shaped orange and black object. He settled the photo on the easel and flashed the laser pointer over a series of numbers apparently impressed into the surface.

“The bomb’s firing mechanism had its own power source,” he said. “A nine-volt Duracell battery. We found this fragment. Note here”—the bright red laser dot danced across the figures—“these are the manufacturer’s lot numbers. Duracell records the regional distributors to whom each lot is shipped.”

Emerson frowned. “Yes?”

“We traced this lot to a distributor in Columbus, Ohio. The distributor’s records show that it was broken into three separate shipments to retailers. One to a Home Depot in Montgomery, Alabama, and another to a Lowe’s in Lexington, Kentucky, and a third . . . here in the District. The Home Depot over in Northeast.”

The door to Tompkins’s left opened, and an assistant slipped in and handed him a folded note.

Tompkins picked his reading glasses up off the conference table. He took his time when reading the note, then glanced around the table.

“A summons,” he said, waving the paper. “The Honorable Frederick Rhinelander requests my presence in his office Monday morning.”

Calkins, sensing his time onstage was over, folded his easel and began putting away his charts. Frank caught Emerson nudging Chief Day’s elbow. Day sat without expression.

Emerson hesitated, then jumped in. “You know what he’s going to want, Your Honor.”

Tompkins raised an eyebrow. “Besides my head?” After enjoying Emerson’s discomfort, he continued. “I suspect, Captain Emerson, he’s going to put the squeeze on me to get this case solved.”

Emerson nodded energetically. “I think you’re right, Your Honor.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Tompkins said dryly. His sarcasm sailed over Emerson’s head.

“Who do you want to go with you?” Emerson asked with the same suck-up enthusiasm.

“Who do you suggest, Captain?”

“Well,” Emerson said, all businesslike, “myself. . . ah . . . Chief Day, of course. Perhaps Susan Liberman, our congressional relations specialist . . .”

“Quite an entourage, Captain,” Tompkins said as he got up. “I don’t think so.” He got an amused look and pointed down the table to Frank and José. “I think these two gentlemen will be sufficient.”

J
osé looked down the block. Both sides of the street had been restricted to parking for official vehicles.

“We got wheels?”

“Yeah . . . blue Crown Vic over there.” Frank pointed. “Richardson wanted to give us a confiscated Hummer.”

“And you didn’t take it? Shit, Frank, our chance to get a luxury assault vehicle and you turn it down?” José glanced around, checking for anyone within earshot. “Tompkins is gonna be hung out to dry. Steaks on it.”

“Depends on how much Rhinelander squeezes him.”

“Rhinelander’s in the catbird seat. He gets prime time on the tube for beating up on the D.C. government. . . .”

“The D.C. punching bag . . .”

“And if we close the case, you can bet your ass he’ll grab the credit for that too.”

“Helluva place, that Congress. You don’t have to come
up with solutions. . . . All you got to do is point fingers and piss and moan.”

“And hire guys to raise flags on the roof.”

H
ow is he . . . ?” Frank asked. “Long-term prospects?”

Sheresa Arrowsmith stopped and leaned wearily against a column in the long corridor leading to the ICU. She pushed her glasses up to her forehead with one hand, and with the other scrubbed her eyes.

“That’s two questions, Frank. How is he? He’s still critical. Damage like that doesn’t leave a clean wound. But Dr. Michaels saved the elbow and a little over three inches of the forearm.”

“Meaning?” José asked.

“Meaning he’s got a chance for a working prosthesis. One that can take advantage of the muscles remaining above the elbow. The second question, long-term prospects, that’s harder. The best prosthesis can only do so much. Rest of it comes from the heart. Overall, for what he went through, he’s lucky.”

“Yeah,” Frank said in soft irony, “lucky Leon.”

I
n the ICU, a wave of smothering despair swept over Frank. Leon Janowitz lay almost lifeless, his face a waxy white. His right arm, encased in a pillowlike bandage, was elevated by an overhead traction device.

Esther Janowitz was curled up in a chair beside her husband’s bed. Frank recognized the chair as one from the ICU waiting room.

Frank whispered her name.

Esther stirred, was still, then suddenly awake, eyes wide, taking in Frank, only slowly becoming aware of where she was.

“What . . . what time is it?” Then her eyes fastened on José. “You have to be José.”

José smiled big. “Don’t have to be, but I am. How’s he doing?”

Esther stood and stretched, hand covering a yawn. “He came out of it for a minute or two this morning. Sometime around three.” She smiled wryly. “He told me they were going to discharge him tomorrow. He’s been drifting in and out since.” She gave Frank a grave look. “Each time he asks about you.”

“Me?”

“He thinks you didn’t make it. I tell him you were okay. But I don’t think it sinks in.”