Sweat (22 page)

“Stop by the house and Camille will have the keys to the Porsche ready.”

“Your new car?” Jake asked, feeling a fleeting twinge of guilt. “Dad I can't.”

“Sure you can, Jake. Just remember it has about three hundred fifty more horsepower than your Subaru.”

“Okay. I'll be careful.”

“Atta boy.”

As Jake walked out, his father smiled. He could control anyone, but his son was easy. His son was just like him. As the elevator doors began to shut and Jake turned to press the button, the unmistakable sound of a particular bell attached to a particular key ring still in Jake's pocket let out a “ding.” For a split second that lasted entirely too long, Jake's eyes met his father's.

Camille answered the door with a smile, and Jake fell back into immediate infatuation. There was just something about his father's domestic help. A spiritual connection that transcended current circumstances. Before Jake could ask, Camille reached into the pocket of her blue apron and produced the keys to the one hundred thirty-one thousand dollar automobile.

“I believe you have come for these?”

“Thank you,” Jake said as Camille placed the keys in his hand. “How have you been?”

“I'm good, Jake. How about you? How's work with your father?”

“Work with my father?” Jake asked pensively. “Something tells me you already know the answer to that question.”

“I don't know what you mean, Jake.”

“In that case, I guess there is no reason to tell Reina thank you.”

“Like I said, Jake, I don't know what you're referring to,” Camille repeated.

Both knew the conversation Jake wanted to have wasn't going to take place. He smiled. Camille smiled. And with a silent understanding, Jake stepped off the porch. “I'll open the garage door for you,” Camille said, as Jake walked down the stone path in front of the house.

Jake sat in the car, still safely parked in the garage. He rubbed his hand across the top arc of the wheel, depressed the clutch, and ran through the gears of his father's candy-apple-red Porsche 911 Turbo convertible. He turned the key in the ignition with a mix of excitement and trepidation, and the four hundred forty-four horsepower engine came to life. Jake felt the vibrations rumbling through the seat and immediately understood German automotive engineering. With wheels still frozen to the pavement, one thing was already clear—the beast was built for business.

He eased the car into reverse and down the driveway. The large ceramic brakes were powerful, and the sudden grip of the brake pads on the rotor pushed his skull into the headrest at the end of the driveway. Definitely not the Subaru, he thought. Jake chugged out of his father's neighborhood in first gear, the engine purring, begging for more.

Jake toured the winding roads near Georgetown Pike and cruised the quiet streets of Great Falls that were a dime a dozen among the woods that overlooked the Potomac on the Virginia side. At the entrance ramp to the GW Parkway, Jake needlessly checked the blind spot over his left shoulder, and punched it. The difference between a decade-old, four-banger station wagon with all wheel drive and a German sports car was measured by Jake's white-knuckled grip on the wheel. He hit fifty before shifting out of second and passed eighty-five with the turbo kicking in. A hundred and ten was fast enough to scare him for the day, and he settled into the traffic at an uninspiring seventy mph in a car that cost more money than he had made thus far in his life. He turned the radio up, looked for someone to impress, and kept pace with the lower forms of automotive life.

He zipped across the Key Bridge against the evening rush hour traffic, thousands of cars straining to ooze out of the city on every available road. He made one trip down M Street and turned a few heads at a safe, almost-stalling speed of twenty-five. Just another young entrepreneur, lawyer, or son of a diplomat showing his worth. He turned toward home. One stop and then it was off to see Kate. Enough was enough. He missed her. He needed to tell her the truth. What better way to make a lasting impression than in a Porsche, he thought. It should have been the car company's advertising slogan.

Jake turned left just beyond the fire station and drove by the sparsely populated parking lot on the far side of the three-story brick structure. Kate's Lexus was there, next to the lone picnic table where they had had lunch weeks before. Jake was tired of calling, tired of leaving messages, tired of thinking that he had lost his girlfriend because of an annoying Turk named Hasad and his ambition with two strippers. Kate may not have wanted to see him, but he was giving her no choice.

A block from one of the main traffic arteries, the fire station stood in relative isolation. A string of small shops lined the street across from the station, next to a library that had been slated for destruction in favor of a more modern, more audacious building to store books. Jake paused at the stop sign, took a last look around for other cars or pedestrians, and hit the accelerator. The car lunged forward and picked up speed until the thirty-six hundred pounds of moving metal was halted by the laws of physics.

The eight-man fire-and-rescue team inside the station sat down for dinner for the third time. A two-alarm house fire had interrupted their first attempt at a hot meal. An octogenarian with a system full of Viagra and a twenty-three-year-old wife kept them away from their plates for a second time, as normal dinner hours for the rest of the world flew by.

The unique sound of crunching, twisting metal is rarely heard by fire and rescue personnel. They deal with the aftermath—the bloody faces, the missing limbs, the unidentifiable remains in an unidentifiable car. The accident scenes they knew were filled with screams of hysteria and cries of pain.

With the crash in their front yard, the firehouse sprang into action. There was no need for anyone to call 911. No need for a dispatcher to give them the address. The accident had come to them. As the professional men and women of the life support and rescue team prepared for work, the question on everyone's mind was whether or not to get in the truck. The fifteen-foot doors to the station opened and the rescue team poured out across the driveway to the concrete utility pole. The candy-apple-red Porsche was still a Porsche, but its status as a legal street racer was going to depend on a very good mechanic.

Kate's supervisor, the resident expert on accident extraction, reached the driver's side first. He surveyed the damage to the inside of the car and calculated the possible injuries and potential exit strategies. The steering wheel rested within inches of the victim's chest. The deflated remains of the car's airbag hung like an unrolled condom in the space between. Another airbag dangled from the ceiling above the door. Hidden beneath the encroaching dashboard, the condition of the victim's legs was unknown. He flashed his ever-ready penlight into the eyes of the victim and gauged his alertness. The victim looked back with lids wide open.

Orders filled the air. Crow bar, neck brace, stretcher. The twenty-five-foot rescue squad vehicle finally rolled from its parking bay and stopped at the end of the station's driveway, setting a record for the fastest response time in regional rescue history. The head of rescue looked at the victim and scratched his head. The accident was a two on a ten scale. He had pulled far more endangered victims out of far more mangled pieces of metal.

Kate was on autopilot. After more than a hundred accident scenes, the car half-enclosed around the concrete pole at the end of the drive was nothing more than scenery. Irrelevant background information. Kate, her basic rescue kit in hand, headed around the rear of the car. She approached the driver's side door, looked in and spewed words her mother didn't know were in her daughter's vernacular.

She didn't bother with the latex gloves—she had exchanged more bodily fluid with the man behind the wheel than she cared to admit. The victim's pupils were normal, his pulse was strong. The extraction team peeled the driver's door back like the top on a tuna can. They removed the victim and placed him on the stretcher. Kate moved over Jake and checked for injuries. She unbuttoned his oxford shirt like she had so many times in the past months, passion now substituted with professionalism. She opened the shirt and cursed again. The head of rescue looked over at the victim.

“What the hell is that?”

“It's a note.”

Across his Jake's chest, in dark indelible ink, were the words “I am innocent. Let me explain.”

“Kate, you want to tell me what this is about?”

“Do I have to? It seems pretty obvious to me.”

Jake smiled.

“You're an asshole,” Kate said quietly.

“Sometimes it takes an insane act by a sane person to prove a point.”

Kate tried not to laugh, but a smile formed on her face. Her words were being thrown back at her in the most ridiculous of circumstances.

“You can let me off the stretcher. I'm fine,” Jake said as he was rolled toward the ambulance.

“Sorry, Jake. You're going to the hospital whether you like it or not. And I wouldn't be surprised if they keep you for psychiatric observation.”

“How's the car?”

“I take it that was your father's?”

“Yes. My first time in a Porsche. The power got away from me.”

“Don't bullshit me, Jake.”

“That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Is it drivable?”

“No,” Kate answered looking at the wreck. “How pissed is he going to be?”

“He'll get over it.”

Peter went straight from the bar in the clubhouse to the hospital. Jake was in the recovery room, the healthiest patient in the D.C. metro area. He had endured the cursory exam, a standard chest and neck x-ray, and a stern consultation from a young District-licensed psychiatrist who determined Jake to be as mentally sound as anyone he met in his line of work. In fact, his last patient of the day was in better mental health than most of his stressed-out medical colleagues.

Jake flipped through the outdated
Sports Illustrated
magazine for the fourth time, having already burned through three issues of
Reader's Digest
. Peter met the nurse at the recovery room door, her station a single white table with a chair on wheels.

Dressed in his favorite golfing shorts and shirt, accentuated with a healthy tan, Peter performed his first fatherly duty in twenty years. “My name is Peter Winthrop. I am here to pick up my son, Jake Patrick.”

The nurse didn't get out of her seat. “Last bed on the right, next to the window.”

Peter walked past the curtains that divided the eight-bed room and stuck his head around the corner.

“Jake?”

“Dad.”

“How are you, son?”

“I'm fine. Caught a little airbag in the face, but nothing's hurt except my pride.”

“And the car?”

“It may need a little work,” Jake said, putting on his best look of shame.

“You know, I was on a six-month waiting list for that car,” Peter said, switching concerns.

Jake didn't know if his father knew about the note on his chest, and he wasn't about to volunteer that small detail. He kept up the charade as he got out of bed, and stood. “Dad, I'm sorry about the car. You were right. It was a little more power than I was ready for. I should have been more careful.”

“I'm disappointed, son.”

Peter was disappointed, and not just because he would be without his favorite toy for a while. He was disappointed for another reason. In the midst of the standard hospital formaldehyde scent, he smelled bullshit. The same bullshit he was famous for shoveling. This time it was coming from his son.

He hoped he was wrong.

The old apartment was an orchestra of creaks and squeaks, groans and moans. The steps, the banister, the doors, the windows, all kept rhythm. The pipes to the sink, shower, and toilet hit all the high notes in various pitch. When the infamous D.C. summer thunderstorms blew in during the late afternoon and early evening, the whole building rattled and rolled. Jake had been there a month, and had yet to sleep uninterrupted until morning. Even when Kate wasn't there and he didn't have an excuse for being up half the night. There were hundreds of haunted jaunts in D.C., a winding trail of supernatural leftovers through the city, and Jake accepted that his building should have been an official tour stop.

Sex usually put him to sleep the moment his head hit the pillow, but between the thunderstorm raging outside and the noise from his apartment inside, he was wide awake. Post-sex dry mouth led him to the refrigerator where he quickly changed focus from thirst to hunger and choked down two pieces of cold pizza while standing barefoot in the kitchen in his underwear. He washed the pepperoni slice down with milk, straight from the carton, as usual. By the time Jake returned to the bedroom, Kate had taken the pole position on visiting Mr. Sandman. The remote control sat on his pillow, a considerate gesture from someone who was too busy studying how to save lives to watch TV.

Jake turned on the late news, the last edition of headlines for the day in a town with a neverending supply of new ones. Local news focused on the planned development of the Anacostia River front, a filthy stretch of land on the banks of water so polluted, one could do a Jesus impersonation on the cans and dead bodies floating on the surface. The second news story was even worse, and Jake cringed as he listened to the report on the re-entry of an infamous former D.C. mayor into the political fray—a man who once went to jail after being caught smoking crack on an FBI sting video. Framed by a hooker, the former mayor had won his second term, after serving his prison sentence, with the election slogan of “The Bitch Set Me Up.”

And D.C. wondered why it had problems.

The local news broadcast switched over to Rock Johnson, exposé reporter extraordinaire, on camera in front of the Senate Hart Building. He was flanked by a small but vocal crowd, screaming improvised chants and pumping homemade signs into the air. When Senator Day's face flashed onto the corner of the screen, Jake inched up the volume. Kate, slipping toward sleep, moved closer to him, her head now resting on the edge of his thigh. Jake stroked her hair and turned the volume up one more notch.

The news clip started with glorious views of the surroundings—palm trees swaying in the breeze, seagulls floating in a cloudless sky. It wasn't until ten seconds into the report that Jake sat up at attention and adjusted the volume yet higher. Standing against a wall, just off-center from Senator Day, was one Peter Winthrop—tall, broad, and smiling like the politician he was with. The camera moved around to another view of the building, followed by excerpts of video taken during a quick tour of the inside and the facilities. Jake was mesmerized. Lee Chang, the face from the file Jake had stolen from his father's office, was shown shaking hands with Senator Day and good ol' Dad. Next to Lee Chang, crystal clear, was another Asian man whom Jake immediately recognized. Jake's pulse jumped and his mouth went dry again, this time from panic. The eyes, the ponytail, the sheer size of the man.

Jake almost choked on the desert in his throat. “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit,” he rasped.

“Nice language, Jake,” Kate murmured through closed eyes.

“Sorry,” Jake said, followed by a much cleaner “Dear God.”

“What is it?” Kate asked, picking up her head and staring at her panicking boyfriend.

“You don't want to know.”

“What is it?” Kate asked again. “You're freaking me out.”

“Kate, I think I may be in real trouble.”

The break-room in the First District was the oldest room in a building of old rooms. Brownish tiles that were once white ran four feet up the wall. The original plaster walls bulged and cracked, a relief map without a designated region. The sink in the corner dripped water steadily, and the a/c unit in the window screeched when it ran. If you wanted to have a conversation in the break-room during the summer, lip-reading skills didn't hurt.

Detective Wallace and Detective Nguyen sat around the wooden table in the middle of the room. Wallace, the big-bellied detective with an infectious laugh, smoked a cigarette, tipping his ashes into the small ashtray that rested on a tabletop with so many scratches it looked like it had been caught in a cat stampede. Detective Nguyen, bored by an incredibly slow week, drank a bottle of water, a rare break from the coffee that kept him alive during the graveyard shift.

“A quick game of five card?” Detective Wallace asked, blowing a cloud of used nicotine, tobacco, and tar across the room in the smoke-free building.

“What are we playing for?” Nguyen asked.

“A gentleman's bet. Gambling on the premises is against policy. You know that,” Detective Wallace answered, taking another drag from his menthol to conceal his laughter.

“Right, no betting unless the captain is at the table.”

“You young guys catch on quick.”

The senior detective slid the deck toward Nguyen who shuffled the cards without protesting. Detective Wallace flipped the channel to the news and tuned in to the local stories. He picked up his hand of cards, looked at the two aces and pair of jacks, and wished he had money in the pot. He glanced back at the TV at the end of the next news story and for a brief second, he stopped breathing. Detective Nguyen watched the cigarette droop from Earl Wallace's mouth, and he wrenched his neck around to see a picture of Rock Johnson in front of the Hart Senate Building.

“Forget the game and grab your keys,” Detective Wallace said, throwing his two pair on the table.

Detective Nguyen looked at the cards, and then back up at the TV. “Taking me on a date Sergeant?”

“Yes, and you're driving. Meet me in front of the building. I'll be down in a minute. I gotta make a phone call.”

The D.C. affiliate for the ABC network, WJLA-TV, is housed in the old
USA Today
building in Rosslyn. The twin glass towers stand on the Virginia side of the Potomac River and are regular recipients of unintended near misses with airplanes landing at Reagan National Airport. Restricted flight patterns over the capital city make the approach at Reagan National one of the trickiest in the nation, and the
USA Today
buildings are the highlight of the pilot's dexterity test. Planes bank left and right as they follow the Potomac, the flight path a slalom course a stone's throw from CIA headquarters, the White House, and the Pentagon. Passengers with window seats were known to get close enough to read the computer screen on the reporters' desks.

Earl Wallace and Detective Nguyen showed their badges to the security guard and walked to the TV studio and broadcast production facilities on the second floor of the building. A middle-aged production manager in jeans introduced herself as Crystal and showed the detectives to the newly appointed “news technology room.” Crystal, a redhead with curly locks down to her shoulders, introduced a young, wire-thin intern wearing an old Metallica t-shirt that looked like it was held together by nothing short of magic.

“This is T.J.,” Crystal said. “He can help you with whatever you need. If you would excuse me detectives, I have to go. News is coming across the wire on a potential terrorist incident in Kuala Lumpur. It looks like I'll be up all night.”

“Thank you,” Detective Wallace said to the departing woman's back. He turned toward T.J., who was happy to be helping with official police business.

“What do you have for us?” Detective Wallace asked.

“This is the story you asked to see,” T.J. said, holding the tape in his left hand as if to impress his guests, before shoving it into the machine. “What part are you interested in?”

“The final picture. The one with the senator and a group of people in front of some building.”

T.J. forwarded the tape and pressed stop.

“Go back a couple of frames. Can you do that?”

“This bad boy can define a standard video tape to fifty frames per second. It can also make a perfect digital copy of a two-hour movie in fifteen seconds. It is the best piece of machinery I have had the privilege to work with.”

“So can you show me what I need to see?”

“Sure.” T.J. pushed a button, dragged a small handle to the left and smiled. “There you go.”

“Perfect.”

Detective Nguyen took one look at the screen and realized the reason behind Detective Wallace's desire for the sudden date.

“Take a look at that guy. Does he look familiar?” Wallace asked with a serious look on his face. He knew the question was rhetorical.

“The big Asian guy from the Fleet Bank ATM.”

“Yeah.”

“Who are the other guys?” Wallace asked. T.J. picked up a note that came with the tape and its untimely, premature circulation. He scanned the handwritten note, words scribbled horribly across the paper at an angle.

“From what I can decipher from this note, this is the rundown. The guy on the left is Senator Day's aide. The man next to the senator is a businessman by the name of Peter Winthrop. The man on the other side of the senator is a man named Lee Chang. He is the owner of the manufacturing facility in Saipan where the piece was filmed. Next to him on the far side is one of Lee Chang's assistants. The ‘big Asian guy,' as you referred to him. No name given.”

“How much did you guys pay for this tape?”

“None that I know of, but I'm a just a techie intern. They don't let me have control of the checkbook, if you know what I mean. I work here for the cool toys and late hours.”

Detective Wallace let it go. “Can you zoom-in on the face of the big guy and print a picture of it?”

“Sure.”

“Can we get a copy of the tape?”

“I already made you one. I didn't figure you were coming over to spend your evening with me.”

“Could you also print a picture of the screen with the entire group—the senator, the businessman, the aides, everyone?”

“Consider it done,” T.J. answered. His fingers jumped to life and moved around the million-dollar equipment like a star player from the video game generation.

“What are you thinking?” Detective Nguyen asked.

“I'm not exactly sure yet, but I do have an idea.”

The detectives thanked the gracious intern and left the building past the now-empty security booth.

“Where to, boss?” asked Detective Nguyen, behind the wheel.

“Taco Bell and then back to the station.”

Earl Wallace pulled out the original file for Marilyn Ford and put it on his desk. Detective Nguyen watched the wheels of his mentor's mind chug through the evidence.

“Humor me for a minute?” Detective Wallace asked without taking his eyes off the file.

“Shoot.”

“Ask me questions about the dead lady and see where it takes us.”

“With pleasure. What's her name?”

“Marilyn Ford.”

“Age?”

“Forty-six.”

“Marital Status?”

“Single. Never married.”

“Address?”

Earl Wallace looked down and read the answer.

“Phone number?”

Once again he read the number off the information sheet.

“Occupation?”

“Secretary.”

“Place of employment?”

Detective Wallace looked down again at the sheet of paper. “Winthrop Enterprises.”

The two detectives locked eyes.

“What was the name of the American businessman in the news clip?

Detective Nguyen checked his notes. “Peter Winthrop.”

Momentary silence fell on the two as the evidence clicked. “Winthrop Enterprises,” they said in unison.

“I'll be damned,” Wallace added. He looked at the clock on the wall. “You better get home and get a few hours of sleep. Tomorrow we start knocking on doors. Early.”