Bombshell (AN FBI THRILLER) (12 page)

Potomac Village

Potomac, Maryland

Sunday afternoon

The countryside was pristine white, tree branches bowed low from the weight of snow, houses domed under six-foot-deep white hats. Savich was thankful the roads were clear and he could rocket his Porsche toward Potomac, Maryland, his light bar flashing on the roof. There were no harried commuters on the road this beautiful Sunday morning, and the few cars in their way pulled over to let the Porsche speed by.

Savich felt it to his gut—if they didn’t move fast, something else bad was going to happen. Then he thought it might not matter if they moved at the speed of light, something bad was still going to happen. He hated the feeling of helplessness, of inevitability.

Sherlock settled sunglasses on her nose to cut the glare. “I wonder what all the pulled-over drivers are thinking about a red Porsche cop car.”

“They probably think we’re yuppie idiots who paid someone to steal the flasher for us. We’ll fit in better once we get to Potomac Village. Did you know the place is one of the best-educated small towns in America? Lots of money, too, and not far from Washington.

“I forgot to tell you, I got a voice mail from Bo Horsley. You remember him, don’t you? Partnered with my dad on a lot of cases in the New York field office? He was the SAC until he retired a couple of months ago and opened his own security business.”

“Did he say what he wanted?”

Savich shook his head. “Something about the
Jewel of the Lion
exhibit in New York City in a couple of weeks. You know, that exhibit at the Met. I haven’t had time to call him back since we’ve been moving so quickly on this case. It didn’t sound all that urgent, so I’ll get to him when we come up for air.”

The Porsche slowed as they left the highway and cruised to the intersection of Falls Road and River Road.

“Nice place.” Sherlock nodded toward the clusters of upscale shops and businesses.

Savich turned the Porsche onto Rock Creek Court, checked his GPS, and after another half-block, turned into the driveway of a two-story white Colonial with black window frames. Lush, snow-heavy pine and oak trees dotted the sloping grounds. Like its neighbors, Marian Lodge’s house had a big front yard, a sturdy white fence on two sides, and a three-car garage. It looked welcoming and particularly charming with the Christmas lights still up, turned on, and shining brightly under the midday sun.

Marian Lodge was expecting them. When she opened the front door, they heard the sounds of the
Titanic
movie theme song playing faintly in the background.

Sherlock had seen Marian Lodge’s photo, but the woman in the flesh was far more striking. She was nearly as tall as Dillon, built like an Amazon, her dark hair pulled back with a careless hand and fastened with a clip. She wore black yoga pants and an oversized white shirt that hung off one shoulder, showing a black bra strap. She was barefoot.

“Come in, come in—don’t want all the heat to whoosh out of here.”

Marian Lodge waved them into the entrance hall and quickly closed the black front door. After introductions, Ms. Lodge checked their creds and waved them straight ahead into the living room.

The house’s pure Colonial exterior gave way to American country inside, with big overstuffed furniture, cozy and without pretense. It looked lived-in and welcoming. Half the back living room wall was glass, a deep backyard beyond that sloped down to a frozen creek. Like the front, the back was filled with motionless white trees and dozens of hibernating rosebushes you could barely make out in all the snow.

Marian Lodge faced them, her arms crossed over her chest. “My nieces are upstairs watching
Titanic
for about the tenth time. At least it’s a distraction. I’ll bring them down later if you wish to speak to them, though I hope you don’t. They would be of little help. Come into the kitchen. We’ll have coffee at the table.”

It was a worn wooden table, with scars and scratches, a family table that had seen gossip, arguments, laughter. Tommy Cronin had eaten at that table, Sherlock thought, maybe spread his books out, yelled at his sisters—she shook it off, anger at what had happened to him wouldn’t help.

Her coffee was good, though not as good as Dillon’s. Sherlock listened as Dillon expressed their condolences.

Lodge said abruptly, “Yes, everyone is very sorry. Who wouldn’t be? Tommy was only twenty years old, and now he’s dead, killed by some maniac who could only find Palmer Cronin’s face to connect to the anonymous banks that screwed him over. So he took his revenge, not by killing Palmer, since he’s an old man, his life nearly over, so why not make him suffer to his dying day by taking his only grandson?

“And so he did. He
brutally murdered Tommy for the world to see. I’ll bet he walked away smiling, the monster, and now he’s enjoying all the media outrage at him. If Tommy had at least been one of the bankers who’d worked with Palmer, I’d bet there would be some chortling behind people’s hands, some jokes that he probably deserved it.

“But not with Tommy. They can’t chortle, since it was Tommy.”

She started to say more, but she seemed tired of talking. She sat with her head down, staring into the coffee and letting its hot scent waft up into her face. A lone tear streaked down her cheek, but she didn’t make a sound. Sherlock stretched out her hand and lightly placed it on her forearm. “We don’t yet know if Tommy’s murder was an act of revenge, but we will find out, I promise you that.”

Her head came up fast. She dashed away the tear. “Not if I catch this monster before you do. I’d disembowel him and hang him naked by his ankles from the front gate at Palmer Cronin’s house, with a sign around his neck—
I WISH I’D KILLED YOU
—see what the media thinks of that.”

Whoa.
How raw was that pain?

Sherlock said smoothly, “In that case, Ms. Lodge, we’d best keep any information we have from you. I certainly don’t want to have to arrest you for murder.”

Lodge gave a bitter laugh. “Tommy’s girlfriend, Melissa Ivy, called me yesterday, bawling her eyes out, wanting to come over. Real tears? Maybe, since she saw Tommy as her meal ticket. She told me, stuttering through her tears, that she had to talk to someone and I was closest to Tommy. I told her I didn’t want to see her. I told her she was a user, a little social climber, and that’s what I’d told Tommy about her.” She paused, frowned at a fingernail and began picking at it. “When she heard that she hung up on me. Dreadful girl.

“I did tell Tommy what I thought of her shortly before Christmas, when he wanted me to be on his side and against his grandparents. But I agreed with them. He was really angry at me, yelled I was just like the old relics—that’s what he called his grandparents when they made him angry, which was nearly every time he saw them. I remember he walked out, drove back to Magdalene, he told me, but I’ll bet he went to see Melissa.

“He didn’t come to his grandparents’ house on Christmas Eve. He stopped by here on Christmas Day, but he stayed only ten minutes, long enough to give presents to his sisters and give me a nasty look. He ignored the presents I got him and left, told me he was going to spend Christmas with someone he loved and who understood him.”

Marian Lodge raised pain-filled eyes. “I never saw him again. The entire month before he died was filled with his anger toward me.”

She was breathing hard by the time she got that all out. Sherlock and Savich waited to see if she would say anything more, but she didn’t. She picked up her coffee mug and sipped, staring out the back kitchen windows at the white backyard with the sun glistening down on the white trees. She said, “I had Christmas lights in the backyard trees, too. I took them down early this morning, couldn’t bear to look at them any longer.”

Savich said, “You said you disapproved of Melissa Ivy as much as the Cronins.”

“Yes, it surprised me to agree with them, my step-in-laws, I guess you’d call them now that I’m their granddaughters’ legal guardian. After Barbara’s—my sister—funeral, I saw what a mess her kids were, saw their father was next to useless, and I moved here to take care of them. I remember it was a couple of weeks after that before the Cronins finally let me know, all benign and condescending, that I could call them Palmer and Avilla.

“Well, they’re not condescending now. With Tommy’s murder they’re even more devastated than they were when their own son, my sister’s husband, Palmer Junior, died in that bloody ridiculous Ferrari of his last year.”

“I take it you didn’t care for your brother-in-law, Ms. Lodge?” Sherlock asked her, studying her mobile face and thinking that Marion Lodge would always lose at poker.

“I called him JP—Junior Palmer. As you can imagine, he really didn’t like that. He’d say he wasn’t like his father. But the fact is Junior and Senior Palmer were like two peas in a pod, completely consumed by their careers. Only JP was deep in the financial muck his father was supposed to be regulating, a king of the junk bond world. I know he was always talking to his father, sawing away not to change anything, not to question the wonderful boom, to keep everything on track. As I said, father and son were very much alike, so why would Palmer Senior change anything?

“
Junior
didn’t like me any more than I liked him. He didn’t want me around until Barbara died. Then he swallowed his bile, and when I offered he was glad to have me move in to take care of the kids.”

Savich said, “Your sister, Barbara, committed suicide, didn’t she, Ms. Lodge? What was it, two and a half years ago?”

Marian raised a face fierce with warrior rage. “If it
was
suicide! The coroner called it that, and Barbara’s shrink agreed she was suicidal. But what else would he say when they were feeding her so many drugs, both JP and that damned shrink?”

Talk about a fountain of black suspicion—this woman was Niagara Falls. Sherlock said slowly, “You believe your brother-in-law was responsible for your sister’s death? He fed her drugs that drove her to kill herself?”

“I can’t prove it, but he might as well have. He kept me from seeing her, helping her. She didn’t have a lover in the wings, or any friends to speak to, because JP liked her under his thumb, the ultimate hausfrau. But none of that is important now; both of them are gone and buried. But so is Tommy, isn’t he? He’s dead, too.” She slammed her hand on the kitchen table, her mug teetering before it righted itself again. “He was twenty years old! How can any of us live with that? How can his sisters not have nightmares for the rest of their lives after seeing his dead face on YouTube? How can the Cronins survive this?”

Sherlock wondered if she wasn’t right. Her last thought about the Cronins when she and Dillon had followed Agent Ted Atkinson out of their living room was that they were props of themselves, that the only thing keeping them going at all was the promise of catching Tommy’s killer. What would happen to them once they did catch Tommy’s killer? They’d have no focus, no reason to continue.

Savich said quietly, “We’d like to ask you a few questions about Tommy, Ms. Lodge. Apart from his girlfriend, Melissa, was there anything else recently that caused you to worry about Tommy? Any change in his behavior or grades, any sign he was in trouble?”

She shrugged. “As I said, I barely saw him the last month he was alive. Did his friends at school tell you something like that?”

“We’re talking with his dorm mates, his professors, checking his room and his computer, but no, they have not, Ms. Lodge. What can you tell us yourself about Tommy’s friends?”

She cocked her head at them. “But I thought this was a domestic terrorist act committed by someone who’d been crushed by the banking collapse and blamed Palmer.”

“We are looking at all the possibilities,” Sherlock said.

“Tommy had two main friends, together since they were kids—I used to call them little jerk faces, even after Tommy turned twenty last October. They’d come by with him after classes at Magdalene sometimes, try to kiss up to me or try to hit on Marla. She’s seventeen, the older of Tommy’s two sisters, and a looker, like her mom. Joanie is only fifteen, so she was safe from Tommy’s friends, only giggled a lot around them. Most of them were geeks, trying to grow out of it, like Tommy, and like most geeks that age, they had a long way to go. I mean, they’d play at speaking Klingon, but try to carry on an adult conversation with them in English?—Good luck. Except for Peter Biaggini—now, he’s a piece of work. Peter’s really smart, not a geek bone in his body. Sometimes I wanted to quash him like a bug.”

“The Cronins felt he dominated Tommy,” Sherlock said. “What did you think?”

“Peter was something like the Fonzie of the group. The one with some social graces as well as brains, and they all seemed to let him take the lead. Peter didn’t talk to me or the girls too much, like he was too busy handling the controls to waste time talking to the underlings. I remember asking him if he was like his father. He gave me an angry look—it was gone real fast. Then he said his dad was dead. I asked Tommy about Peter’s father, and he told me he wasn’t dead, he ran a beauty-supply company with franchise stores all over the country. He said Peter didn’t like to talk about his father, that he was ashamed of him for being so ordinary, for selling cosmetics—the Hair Spray King, he called him. But Tommy really liked Mr. Biaggini, said he was a great guy, always doing stuff for the kids.”