The Second Perimeter (8 page)

* * *

NORTON HAD A
two-bedroom apartment. The living room was dominated by a television with a fifty-inch screen and there were more auxiliary components than DeMarco had ever seen connected to the set. He counted six speakers in different spots around the small room.
Unlike Mulherin, Norton was neater than DeMarco’s mother— and that was very neat. There were no unwashed dishes in the sink, no unmade bed, no clothes on the bedroom floor. All the boxes on the upper shelf of his closet were neatly labeled as to their contents. Now that, DeMarco thought, was weird.
“If this guy isn’t arrested,” DeMarco said, “I’m gonna see if he wants to be my maid.”
Emma ignored him and went directly to the kitchen and began opening drawers.
“Let’s go, partner,” DeMarco said to the dog and tugged on its leash and started walking the animal around the living room. For some reason the dog was panting now; its tongue was about a foot long.
When they opened the door to the second bedroom, Emma said, “My, my.”
Against one wall was a long table. On the table was a flat-screen monitor, a laser printer, and a state-of-the-art scanner— those were the items that DeMarco recognized. What had most likely elicited the “my, my” from Emma were the half-dozen other devices that DeMarco didn’t recognize. Above the table was a bookshelf filled with computer books and computer magazines; the magazines were filed in chronological order. Beneath the table was a red Craftsman toolbox on casters and it housed small hand tools and electronic components.
Emma walked over to the table, picked up an object lying there, and said, “Huh.”
“What’s that?” DeMarco said.
“A section of fiber-optic cable. It can be attached to a miniature camera or video recorder.”
“Ah,” DeMarco said. “One of those things that weirdos poke through a little hole in a bathroom wall so they can watch women pee.” Norton struck him as the Peeping Tom type.
“That’s one use for it,” Emma said. “Another possibility is Carmody walking around a nuclear submarine with one of these cables up his sleeve, taking pictures of anything he wants and nobody noticing.”
Emma took a digital camera out of her jacket pocket and began to photograph the computer equipment and the books on the shelf above the table. After she finished photographing the equipment, she sat down at the table and turned on the computer.
“Let’s see what he’s got in this thing,” she said.
DeMarco looked at his watch. “Emma, we gotta get going,” he said.
Emma ignored him and DeMarco soon heard the little tune that Microsoft Windows plays when a computer starts up.
“Damn it,” Emma muttered a moment later. “It’s password protected, and judging by all the sophisticated crap this guy has, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the programs were encrypted. I’m going to need a pro to find out what’s in this machine.”
Now
Emma looked at her watch. “It’s getting late,” she said.
“No shit,” DeMarco said. Geez, she could be annoying.
“Take Lucy outside and stand watch. I saw an owner’s manual for a laptop, but I can’t find the laptop. I want to spend a little more time looking for it. If Norton shows up, call me.”
DeMarco thought Lucy was a really dumb name for a German shepherd, even a female one. German shepherds should have names like Bullet, Fang, or Killer. They should have rabid doggy-slobber dripping from their fangs. Lucy, DeMarco now realized after having spent the day with her, was just a big, friendly puppy with a sensitive nose. She was an embarrassment to the breed, and the name confirmed it.
DeMarco picked a spot to wait near the entrance to the apartment building and ten minutes later Norton drove into the adjacent garage. DeMarco immediately called Emma on the cell phone.
“Stall him for five minutes,” Emma said and hung up before DeMarco could complain.
Goddamnit, DeMarco thought, he needed to come up with some reason for being here. Maybe he could tell Norton he’d taken a job as a dog walker.
Norton exited the garage. He was holding a knapsack in one hand.
DeMarco walked up to him and said, “Mr. Norton, I need to talk to you.”
Norton looked confused for a moment, before he recognized DeMarco. “I’m not talkin’ to you,” he said.
“It’ll only take a minute.”
“Nope. You got any questions, you talk to Carmody.”
Norton started to move around DeMarco, but when he did, Lucy barked. It was a scary sound and Norton stopped immediately.
“If that thing bites me, I swear to God, I’ll sue your ass,” Norton said.
DeMarco looked down at Lucy.
Now
she looked like a German shepherd. Her teeth were exposed, she was straining against the leash, and her eyes were focused on Norton’s knapsack. Norton again started to walk around DeMarco but when he did the dog lunged at him and barked again, making Norton take a step back, his eyes wide with fear. “Jesus Christ! You call that fuckin’ thing off,” Norton said. “You hear? I’m not kiddin’.”
“What’s in the knapsack, Mr. Norton?” DeMarco said.
“None of your business. Now call that motherfucker off.”
“Norton, I bought this dog from a buddy of mine who works for the DEA. She’s trained to sniff out drugs.”
“Drugs?” Norton said. “I don’t have any drugs.”
“Show me what’s in the knapsack. If you don’t, I’m calling the police and we’re all going to wait here until they arrive.”
“I’m not showing you shit. And I’ll say it again: if that bitch bites me, I’ll sue you.”
“You’ll be suing me with half your butt in a bandage,” DeMarco said.
Over Norton’s shoulder, DeMarco saw the door to the apartment building open and Emma exit. She made a let’s-go-gesture at DeMarco and kept walking toward where their car was parked.
“All right, goddamnit,” Norton said to DeMarco. He unzipped the knapsack and held it out so DeMarco could look inside it. There were two small bags. One contained potting soil and the other fertilizer. DeMarco had seen a couple of red plants— geraniums, he thought— on the small balcony of Norton’s apartment.
“You happy now?” Norton said.
“Yeah,” DeMarco said and walked away, practically dragging Lucy with the leash. Stupid dog. It couldn’t tell the difference between chicken shit and a bomb.

* * *

“FERTILIZER CAN
BE
an explosive,” Emma said. “What do you think they used to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma?”
“I know
that
,” DeMarco said, “but McVeigh had a damn truckload of the stuff, not a one-pound bag.”
Emma wasn’t listening. She was talking baby talk to the Lucy. “You’re a good girl. Yes you are. Yes you are,” she said. As she spoke, Emma thumped her right hand against the mutt’s thick rib cage. It sounded like she was beating on a drum, but the dog seemed to like it. Dogs are weird, DeMarco thought.
“So now what?” he said. They were back on Highway 3, heading south. Emma was driving and Lucy was once again in the backseat, her head stuck happily out the window. Lucy belonged to the Transportation Security Administration at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport. Emma’s pals at the DIA had arranged for her to borrow the animal, and she and DeMarco were now returning the dog to its handler.
“I need to get into Carmody’s office,” she said.
“That’s gonna be tough. It’s in the middle of downtown Bremerton and there are people walking around there all the time.”
“Yeah,” Emma said, already thinking about how she was going to break in.
“We’re going to get our asses arrested for sure,” DeMarco said.
“
You
won’t,” Emma said. “I want you to go back to D.C.”

D
eMarco was getting pretty damn annoyed with the United States Navy. He was now into his second hour of looking for whomever had awarded Carmody the shipyard training contract and he seemed no closer to finding this person than when he started. If he’d owned an aircraft carrier, he would have picked a fight with the navy.
He had been told by Carmody that Carmody’s contract was administered by someone who worked at NAVSEA— the Naval Sea Systems Command. NAVSEA was located in the Washington Navy Yard in southeast D.C. The Washington Navy Yard had once been a real shipyard but the repair facilities had been closed years ago and its current function was to provide office space for navy headquarters personnel and their minions.
It took DeMarco half an hour to get past security after which he learned that NAVSEA was a gigantic bureaucracy consisting of hundreds of people working on all aspects of navy business: weapons, ship construction, overhauls, personnel, logistics, and on and on and on. The number of cogs in this bureaucratic juggernaut was endless, and the people in the various departments seemed to know nothing other than their own function.
So DeMarco walked from office to office, from building to building, searching for the group that dealt with naval shipyard training. He asked his question for the fiftieth time to a secretary, a sturdy, androgynous creature with short hair and a faint mustache. He thought the secretary was female but he wasn’t sure. Is there anybody here, he asked politely, who knows anything about a contract for a training study at the shipyard in Bremerton? “Yeah,” she— or he— said. “Go see Gary. Down the hall there.”
Gary was a skinny, nervous kid with a mild facial tick. He looked about twenty years old and was sitting behind a desk that overflowed with paper. The capacity of his in basket had been exceeded days ago. This might have explained the tick; the kid seemed so overwhelmed by his workload that DeMarco could imagine him having a nervous breakdown when the next piece of paper landed on his desk.
“Bill Berry was in charge of that contract,” Gary said to DeMarco. “He handled all that sorta stuff at the shipyards.”
“So can I talk to Berry?” DeMarco asked.
Gary’s phone rang before he could answer DeMarco’s question. “Yes, sir. Yes, sir. I’ll be right there,” Gary said into the phone and hung up. “Jesus,” he said. “That was the
admiral
. He wants to see me.”
The way Gary said “the admiral” it sounded like the man was seated at the right hand of God— or maybe he outranked God.
“All I want to know is where this guy Berry is,” DeMarco said.
Gary wasn’t listening. He had pulled open a drawer in his desk and was rifling through it. “Hold on a minute,” he said to DeMarco. He searched, flipping tabs on manila file folders as fast as his index finger could move. “Damn it!” he wailed. “Where is it?” A moment later he said, “There you are!” as if speaking to a pet that had been hiding under the bed, and he pulled a graph from a tattered folder. DeMarco noticed the graph had a yellow Post-it sticker on it, and on the Post-it someone had scrawled the word “Bullshit” with a red felt-tip pen.
“Bill Berry?” DeMarco said. “Can you
please
tell me where he is?”
Gary tore the Post-it off the graph, shoved the graph into a new file folder, and patted down a cowlick on the back of his head.
“Bill Berry’s dead,” he said to DeMarco as he walked away.

* * *

BILL BERRY HAD
died in an automobile accident the day after Dave Whitfield was killed. He missed a curve and his car had plunged down a steep, wooded embankment on Spout Run in Arlington, Virginia. His blood alcohol content at the time of his death had been a whopping .25.
“But are you sure it was an accident, Sheriff?” DeMarco said.
It had taken some effort to get the Arlington County sheriff to agree to talk to him about Bill Berry’s death. When he’d first arrived at the sheriff’s office, he was told that unless he had some official status— such as being Bill Berry’s lawyer or a lawyer who worked for Berry’s insurance company— they weren’t going to tell him anything. DeMarco had been forced to call the Speaker and tell Mahoney that the sheriff was being mean to him.
“Shit,” Mahoney had said. “What’s this fuckin’ guy’s name?”
Half an hour later the sheriff escorted DeMarco back to his office.
“What do you mean, am I sure it was an accident?” the sheriff said. “The damn guy was drunk and he ran his car off the road. What the hell else could it have been?”
“Sheriff,” DeMarco said, “I can’t tell you the specifics, but Mr. Berry could have been involved in something bad. He could have been murdered.”
“Jesus Christ,” the sheriff said. “So what do you think happened, bud? You think somebody messed with the brakes on the guy’s car? Or maybe rammed him and pushed him off the road?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out, Sheriff.”
“Berry’s car bounced down a hill. He hit one tree head-on, broadsided another one, then the car rolled over a couple of times before it ended up on its top in someone’s backyard. The car was a mess, the body was a mess, and there’s no way I can tell if anybody did something to it.”
“Can’t you—”
“Television,” the sheriff said, shaking his big, bald head. “I’ll just bet you’ve been watching TV, one of them dumb-ass CSI shows. You’ve probably seen ’em strip some car down to the frame, and then the hero goes: ‘Hey, we’ve got a scratch here that came from a hacksaw made in Tijuana.’ Well let me tell you something, pal. In real life, a county sheriff’s department doesn’t have the budget or the expertise to do shit like that. We looked over the car as best we could and didn’t see anything inconsistent with a drunk runnin’ his car off the road. Now since you’re apparently some kinda big shot, maybe what you oughta do is call up the FBI and have
them
check out Berry’s car.”

* * *

BILL BERRY’S WIDOW
was a small plump woman in her early fifties. She had unremarkable features, a soft chin, and lifeless brown hair. She was as drab as a sparrow except for her glasses: the frames were fire-engine red and too big for her face. DeMarco bet that one of her friends had talked her into the frames, telling her they made her look young and with-it. They didn’t.
“He handled everything,” she told DeMarco. “The bills, the insurance policies, the bank accounts. I don’t know where anything is, and when I do find something, I don’t know what it means.”
“It must be pretty hard,” DeMarco said. “And I’m sorry to intrude, but I need to know a few things about your husband.”
“Why?” she said. She wasn’t being belligerent; she was just bewildered. A week after her husband’s death she found everything bewildering.
“He had a government insurance policy, Mrs. Berry. We just need to make sure of a few things before we sign off on it.”
“He did?” Mrs. Berry said.
Berry had had a standard government life insurance policy that paid his widow one year of his salary. DeMarco had determined this when he had looked at Berry’s personnel record. So DeMarco knew that Berry had had an insurance policy and was glad his wife now did, too. He also knew that her husband had thirty-seven thousand dollars in a credit union in Crystal City— and it was not a joint account. The account had been opened about the same time as Carmody was given the training contract at the shipyard. The initial deposit into the account had been fifty thousand dollars.
“What was your husband doing the night he died, Mrs. Berry?” DeMarco asked.
“Having dinner with some people from out of town,” she said. “He was always doing that. Guys would fly in from one of the shipyards for meetings and later they’d go out for dinner and drinks.”
“Do you know who he was having dinner with that night?”
“No. He may have told me their names, but I don’t remember.”
“Did your husband ever mention a man named Phil Carmody? He lives in Bremerton, Washington.”
“I don’t think so,” she said, shaking her head several times. Every time DeMarco asked another question to which she didn’t know the answer, the world became a stranger, more frightening place.
“Mrs. Berry, did you know that your husband deposited fifty thousand dollars in a bank in Crystal City a few months ago?”
DeMarco knew what she was going to say before she said it.
“What?” she said. “Where did the money come from?”