House Secrets Read online

  “You don’t think it’s strange that he was kayaking in the dark?” DeMarco said.

  “It wasn’t that dark. There was a full moon that night and the lights from other houses on the lake would have provided more light. But there’s something else, something we didn’t tell Mr. Finley.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Terry’s blood alcohol level was .18 at the time of his death. We think he had a few drinks after work, came home with a pretty good buzz on, and decided to go for a little moonlight paddle. Drunks have bad judgment. And their coordination and sense of balance aren’t too good either. Have you ever been in a kayak, Mr. DeMarco?”

  “No. Been in a canoe, but not a kayak.”

  “Well, sometime you oughta try to get in one. What I’m saying is, the toughest part of kayaking is getting in and out of the damn boat without tipping it over, and if you don’t believe me, try it. Then try it again after four drinks.”

  DeMarco called the Washington Post and spent five frustrating minutes navigating his way through a particularly annoying voice mail system before he was finally connected to Reggie Harmon’s phone.

  “Reggie, my man,” DeMarco said, “I’m in the mood to buy you a big salad for lunch.”

  “A salad?” Reggie said, as if he couldn’t imagine consuming something so horrible.

  “That’s right, Reginald. A two-olive salad with martini dressing. Onions if you prefer.”

  “Ah, that kinda salad. Well, veggies are one of your four basic food groups, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, they are, my friend. Plus vodka’s usually made from potatoes. Carbohydrates, you know. And if you have a twist in your second martini, you’ll ward off scurvy.”

  “Where and when, son? A man my age can’t afford to ignore his health.”

  “The Monocle. As soon as you can get there.”

  DeMarco hung up the phone. He should have been ashamed of himself, appealing to the late-morning cravings of an alcoholic to get information—but he wasn’t.

  DeMarco had called Reggie from his office, a small windowless room in the subbasement of the Capitol that seemed to have been designed to induce claustrophobia. He spent as little time there as possible, and the décor—or the lack of it—reflected this. The only furniture in the room was his desk, two wooden chairs, and a battered, four-drawer file cabinet. The file cabinet was a totally unnecessary item because DeMarco didn’t believe in keeping written records; they could subpoena him, but not his files. At one point he’d had a couple of pictures on one wall that had been given to him by his ex-wife, but since they had reminded him of her unfaithful nature every time he looked at them, he’d finally taken them down. The pathetic part was that the bare space on the wall where the pictures had been still reminded him of her.

  The Monocle Bar and Grill was located near Union Station, less than a fifteen-minute walk from the Capitol. DeMarco locked his office door and walked up the steps to the main floor of the building, to the rotunda, the space directly beneath the dome. He saw a page he knew leading a tour group: a smart-assed, jug-eared little bastard named Mullen. Pages had the professional longevity of butterflies, here one summer and gone the next, so DeMarco rarely knew their names—but he knew Mullen’s. He had walked out of his office one day and saw Mullen smooching a girl page out in the hall, next to his door. Instead of acting embarrassed as he should have, Mullen had the balls to offer DeMarco fifty bucks for the use of his office. The kid would probably be president one day.

  To reach the Monocle, DeMarco walked down First Street, past the Supreme Court. He looked up, as he always did, at the words EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW carved into the stone above the building’s sixteen massive marble columns. The high court was one of the few institutions in Washington that DeMarco still had any faith in, and he had this faith for a simple reason: the nine people who worked there had nothing more to gain. They were at the pinnacle of their profession, they had the job for life, and they didn’t have to please anybody to keep the job. Those, he believed, were circumstances that tended to produce honest if not always wise decisions. But he was probably wrong about that too.

  As DeMarco stepped inside the Monocle, the maître d’ glanced over at him to see if his attire was appropriate, nodded curtly, then returned to his reservation list. The Monocle was a bit pretentious but then this was understandable: its clientele tended to be the legislative branch of government as opposed to the electorate, and the walls of the bar were covered with photographs of drinking politicians. It seemed like Mahoney was in half the pictures.

  DeMarco saw Reggie Harmon sitting at the end of the bar, the only customer at eleven in the morning, his first martini half-gone. Reggie was sixty and he looked like a vampire that had been caught in a sunbeam. He had a pale sunken-cheeked face and dyed black hair plastered to a long, narrow skull. His shirt was two sizes too large around the collar and his thin fingers poked beyond the cuffs like claws.

  As DeMarco sat down on the stool next to him, Reggie slowly swiveled his head in DeMarco’s direction. His eyes were so red that DeMarco wondered if any of the reporter’s blood reached his brain. Exposing too many nicotine-stained teeth in the grimace he called a smile, Reggie said, “What do you call a hundred lawyers buried in a landfill?”

  “A good start. Reggie, that’s the third time you’ve told me that stupid joke. You need to get some new material.”

  “Well, you could still laugh, just to be polite,” Reggie said.

  DeMarco just shook his head then pointed at Reggie’s drink and held up two fingers for the bartender’s benefit.

  “What do you know about Terry Finley?” DeMarco asked.

  Reggie drained his first martini. “The kid that drowned?” he said.

  “Yeah, the kid that drowned.” Finley had been forty-two when he died.

  Reggie shrugged, then reached for the full glass the bartender had just placed at his elbow. He swallowed a third of the drink before saying, “What do I know about him? Well, he worked the political beat, of course.”

  “Why ‘of course’?”

  “The only reason he got the job was because his dad was a congressman. The schemers in charge figured a kid whose dad worked on the Hill would give the paper an edge.”

  “Did it?”

  “No. Terry was an annoying, ambitious little shit, one of those guys who always thought he was gonna be the next Bobby Woodward, but he never tried to use his old man to get there.”

  “Was he any good?”

  Reggie swallowed the remainder of his second martini; as an afterthought he reached for the olives from his first martini. At the rate Reggie drank, DeMarco was thinking that they should just hook up an IV bag to his arm.

  “Only in his dreams,” Reggie said. “A couple years ago he got everyone all excited when he said he’d discovered that this colonel over at the Pentagon was an al-Qaeda mole. The basis for his conclusion was that the guy—the Pentagon guy—was always meeting this dishy, Arabic-looking gal in these seedy hotel bars. Turned out the guy was just boffing the lady, who happened to be Egyptian, but was no more into Islam than the Pope. That was Terry: seeing a spy ring instead of two people fuckin’.”

  “Huh,” DeMarco said. “Was he working on anything important before he died?”

  “Maybe. I heard him and his editor going at it one day. Frank was trying to get Terry’s ass up to the Hill to write about some political squabble, and Terry kept telling him that he didn’t have time. He said he was working on the biggest thing since Clinton got a blow job.”

  “But you don’t know what the story was about?”

  “No. All I heard was Terry say that if Frank knew who his source was, he wouldn’t be giving him chickenshit assignments.”

  “Shit. So now I have talk to this Frank guy to find out what Terry was working on.”

  “Well, unless you got a hotline to hell, you can forget that.”

  “What?”

  “Frank’s dead.”

  “Dead? When did he die?
”

  “A week ago, about two days after Terry.”

  “Jesus,” DeMarco said. “Was there anything mysterious about the way he died?”

  Reggie took his time finishing his last drink as DeMarco waited impatiently for his answer. Finally, he said, “Frank was sixty-three years old. He was five-seven, weighed two-fifty, and smoked unfiltered Camels. He thought high cholesterol was the name of a race-horse. The only mystery is that Frank didn’t have a coronary when he was forty-three.”

  Chapter 4

  “Are you feeling lucky, punk?” DeMarco muttered, his lips twisted into an Eastwood snarl—then he fired the gun, a .357 magnum.

  “Stop doing that,” Emma said.

  DeMarco ignored her and looked at the man-shaped paper target. There were five holes in it, and although no hole was closer than six inches to any other hole, all of his shots had hit the punk.

  “Well, pilgrim, what do you think of that,” he said to Emma, switching from Eastwood to Wayne.

  “I think you’re jerking the trigger instead of squeezing it,” Emma said.

  “Let’s try the Glock now,” DeMarco said. “I’m gonna use the two-handed, cop’s grip this time.”

  “I give up,” Emma said.

  Emma was tall and slim. She wore her hair short, and it was colored a blondish shade with some gray mixed in. Her profile was regal, like a Norse queen on a coin, and her eyes were light blue, cool, and cynical. She was at least ten years older than DeMarco, maybe fifteen, but in such good shape that she would have run him into the ground had he ever been dumb enough to challenge her to a race. She was wearing jeans, a long-sleeved navy-blue pullover, and black Reeboks. Clipped to her belt was a holster and in the holster was an automatic with a worn grip.

  DeMarco had decided it was time to learn something about firearms. He was a firm believer in gun control—meaning that the only people who should be allowed to have guns were cops and soldiers, and himself, of course, if he thought he ever needed one—but a few months ago he came close to being killed because he didn’t know where the safety was on a weapon. So though he had no immediate plans to buy a gun, and hoped sincerely that he would never need one in the future, he figured a little basic education couldn’t hurt. And there was another thing: he thought it’d be kinda fun to shoot a few guns, which it was.

  So under Emma’s less than patient tutelage, he fired three weapons that day: a 9mm Glock; a .22 automatic that Emma said was the firearm often preferred by professional killers; and the .357 magnum. He had wanted to shoot the Glock and the .357 because those were the guns they always mentioned in the movies.

  DeMarco put a fresh target on the target-hanger, sent it down-range twenty yards, and picked up the Glock. He liked the way it felt. He spread his legs in what he considered to be a shooter’s stance, gripped the gun in both hands, said “Freeze, asshole”—and pulled the trigger six times. When he finished there were six holes in the target, three of them bunched fairly close together in the paper guy’s left shoulder. Other than the fact that he’d been aiming for the heart, not bad, he thought. Emma thought differently.

  “Joe,” she said, “if you’re ever attacked, and if you have a choice between a bat and a gun, use the bat.”

  “Well, let’s see you do better,” DeMarco said.

  Now why in the hell had he said that? It must have been all the gun smoke in the air, the fumes short-circuiting those brain cells that caused him to actually think before speaking.

  Emma was now retired but she had worked for the DIA—the Defense Intelligence Agency. She was, however, a person who rarely, and then only reluctantly, talked about her past, and consequently DeMarco had no idea what she had done for the military for almost thirty years. He did know that by the end of her career she’d been a senior player in the intelligence community in Washington, and that early in her career she’d been some sort of spy. And there was one other thing he knew—he knew that she could shoot a gun.

  She hit a button that pushed DeMarco’s target ten yards farther away, pulled the automatic from the holster on her hip, and then, without appearing to take aim, she fired. BAMBAMBAMBAMBAM. Five shots fired so rapidly it was hard to distinguish one from the other. When the smoke cleared, DeMarco looked at the target.

  The paper man had a two-inch-diameter hole where his nose had once been.

  Emma’s reward for instructing DeMarco was dinner at a place of her choosing, and she surprised him by selecting a mid-priced restaurant in Alexandria that specialized in soft-shelled crab. She may have chosen the place because of the way they were dressed but DeMarco suspected that she was being kind to his wallet. Emma was rich; DeMarco wasn’t. As they waited for their dinners, Emma sipped a glass of white wine and looked at the ragged, water-damaged napkin that Dick Finley had taken from his son’s wallet.

  “So what do you think?” DeMarco asked.

  “I would guess that these are people’s names followed by a year, but who the people are and what the dates signify . . . well, your guess is as good as mine. As for the numbers, they look like a D.C. phone number minus the last three digits.”

  “Yeah, I figured that. How ’bout the ‘egg’?”

  Emma shrugged. “Maybe part of a shopping list, but I doubt it. He would have written ‘eggs,’ not ‘egg.’ And it looks like there’s some word that comes after ‘egg,’ but I can’t even make out the first letter.”

  “That’s the best you can do? I thought in your old job you decoded encrypted messages.”

  “Not me,” Emma said. “The people who do that sort of thing have PhDs and use really big computers. I did other stuff.” This last statement was followed by an enigmatic smile. Emma had a really good enigmatic smile.

  “Great,” DeMarco said. “So that’s it? You don’t have any bright ideas about what I should do next?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do,” she said.

  “Emma,” DeMarco whined, “why can’t he just fax me the damn information? We’re dealing with names on a cocktail napkin, for Christ’s sake, not plans for a missile defense system.”

  “Fax you! You must be joking,” Emma said. “Neil’s so paranoid he never puts anything sensitive into a computer connected to the net, he doesn’t even own a cell phone, and he never, ever sends information out on lines that can be tapped.”

  It was for this reason that Emma and DeMarco, the day after their session at the shooting range, were now sitting in a room on the Washington side of the Potomac River within sight of the Pentagon. Neil was an associate of Emma’s from her days at the DIA and he called himself an “information broker”—which really meant that he hacked and bugged and spied, then sold whatever he acquired to the highest bidder. DeMarco had always found it disconcerting that a man with Neil’s skills should have an office so close to the Pentagon.

  Neil sat behind a cluttered desk in a chair engineered for his girth. He was in his early fifties and growing bald on top, but he gathered his remaining gray-blond hair into a thin ponytail that hung down from the back of his head like the tail on a well-fed rodent. As usual, he was dressed in a loose-fitting Hawaiian shirt, baggy shorts, and sandals. DeMarco had no idea what Neil wore when the temperature dropped, but as he rarely left his office, the issue was academic.

  “Emma, you look lovely as always,” Neil said.

  “Thank you,” Emma said. “And you look as if you’ve lost some weight.”

  DeMarco looked over at Emma to see if she was serious. Neil was the size of the Chrysler Building; if he lost a hundred pounds it wouldn’t be apparent.

  Neil, however, was pleased by the compliment. He beamed a smile at Emma and said, “Thank you for noticing.”

  DeMarco cleared his throat.

  “Yes, Joe,” Emma said, “we’ll get to it in a minute. You know, it wouldn’t hurt you to develop a few social skills, such as the ability to make small talk for more than sixty seconds.”

  “It’s all right, Emma,” Neil said. “I need to get going. Cindy and I are going d
ancing tonight.”

  Cindy was Neil’s wife—and the fact that Neil had a wife and DeMarco did not was proof of God’s dark sense of humor. But Neil dancing? The image that came to mind was the hippo in Fantasia, not Travolta in Pulp Fiction.

  “Well, good for you,” Emma said. “Maybe if Joe took his girlfriends dancing he might be able to keep one.”

  Neil smirked at Emma’s comment then pulled an unlabeled manila file folder out of a stack of identical folders sitting on one corner of his desk. DeMarco didn’t know how he knew which folder to select, but knowing how Neil liked to show off, he wouldn’t have been surprised if the files were marked like a crooked deck of cards.

  “To begin,” Neil said. “We have five names, five apparent dates, and a partial phone number. The phone number I’m still working on. I’ve checked Finley’s home and cell phone records but he didn’t call anyone with a number matching the seven numbers on the napkin. He may have called the number from a public phone, in which case I can’t tell who he called. So, since there are three missing digits from the phone number, and therefore a thousand possible phone number combinations, what I’m doing now is cross-checking those combinations against existing phone numbers to see if I can find anyone connected with what else I’ve learned. Which brings me to the names on the list. The obvious thing to do was to see if there was any common factor linking them. And there was.” He paused, then said: “The common factor is Paul Morelli.”

  “Paul Morelli?” DeMarco said. “Do you mean Senator Paul Morelli?”

  Senator Paul Morelli was, according to every political pundit on the planet, the man most likely to be the Democratic candidate for president in the next election.

  “I do,” Neil said. “In 1992, Marshall Bachaud was the district attorney of the fair isle of Manhattan. In January of that year, he was in a car accident which kept him hospitalized for twenty-six weeks and required three surgeries to rebuild various parts of his anatomy. Over the protests of many, the governor of New York appointed a young assistant DA named Paul Morelli as the acting district attorney until such time as Bachaud could resume his duties. As acting DA, young Morelli became a visible public figure.