Cold Frame Read online

  Straight-up crimes in the District were handled by the MPD’s District and police service area detectives. Those incidents or issues that entangled or had even the potential to entangle the MPD with the brave new world of state security were known throughout the MPD as tarbabies, as in, touch one and it gets all over you, usually forever. Hence ILB’s unofficial nickname: the Briar Patch. Wrangling tarbabies was not an assignment much sought after in the ranks of MPD detectives, which meant that none of ILB’s four serving detectives were volunteers.

  Av Smith was one of those guys who seemed to get bigger as you got closer to him. He was five-ten and had the physique of a weight lifter up top and a runner down below. He worked out in the police gym every day of the week and usually ran ten miles before coming to work. He shaved his head every third day and favored sport coats instead of suits, mostly because he couldn’t find suits off the rack that could accommodate his enlarged torso and arms. He had brown eyes and a large nose that had been broken and reset a few times, which was why he’d taken up weight lifting in the first place. He could no longer remember when someone last took a swing at him. The last guy who did probably couldn’t remember it, either.

  His nickname, Av, came as the result of a disagreement with his boss in the Second District. Av had had something of a personality conflict with his lieutenant. In the MPD that meant that the lieutenant had a personality, and Av had a conflict. His boss then, one Lieutenant Parsons, was apparently fed up with the amount of time Av was spending at the police gym during working hours. Av had pointed out that physical fitness was supposedly a departmental priority, in theory if not necessarily in practice. He’d then stared pointedly at the lieutenant’s own prominent front porch. Parsons took immediate offense and lectured Av on how he had been chasing down bad guys while Av was still in diapers. Av retorted that the lieutenant would need a pair of Superman’s diapers to chase down his own shadow. Things went downhill from there, culminating in a declaration by the lieutenant that, you, Detective Smith, are a “relentlessly average” detective. Your work’s average, your closure rate is average, hell, even your name’s average, for Chrissake! He’d been “Average” Smith ever since, Av to his squad room, and, then three months later, he’d become the newest member of the Briar Patch posse.

  Av liked police work, if not what seemed to him like three too many layers of bosses associated with it. He actually enjoyed apprehending bad guys and building cases against them. He was known by the criminal element in his district as the skinhead white guy who showed up wearing running shoes and openly carrying an ASP in the hopes that a perp would elude and evade. He had been known to use that collapsible baton, too. One time, when Av was still a beat cop, two gangbangers were sitting in their stolen ride, its nose wrapped around a telephone pole, giving the two attending detectives an elaborate ration of crap. Av had produced the ASP and hit the windshield in the sweet spot. His theory was that it was hard to concentrate on talking proper trash when you had a lap full of broken glass. Normally an ASP couldn’t do that to safety glass, but with Av behind it, the whole thing had caved in on them. The terrified bangers ultimately agreed to take the blame for the windshield, which the cops pronounced was only right. Word got around: don’t mess with the skinhead five-oh with the big arms and the international orange tenny-pumps. And his ASP.

  Av was actually a native of the District of Columbia, which made him one of a rare species in a city filled with political transients, military, and almost a million suburban commuters. His parents, now retired in Florida, had been federal civil servants in the Transportation Department. He’d grown up in northwest D.C., attended public schools, and then, uninterested in college, he’d done a stint in the Marines, where he developed an appetite for extreme physical fitness. He used his veteran’s preference to get a slot at the police academy and had made detective in five years. At the moment, he was the only white guy in ILB.

  He finally gave up on saving his desktop and dumped the entire blotter, papers and all, into the trash can. Another of the ILB inmates came in, saw Av standing over his trash can like he was going to piss in it, and just shook his head. As Av began fishing some of the paperwork back out of the trash can, Lieutenant Johnson, his new boss, approached. She was a tall, thin black woman with shiny black hair slicked into a tight bun and a face that declared for any fool to see that she was a walking, talking BS-free zone. Her first name was actually Precious, although no one in the entire department had ever had the nerve to call her that to her face, not even the chief. Av and the other ILB detectives thought she was a good boss—decisive, technically competent, and not to be messed with. She was also working on a night-school law degree and enjoyed a daily noontime run. Right now, though, she was surveying the disaster area that was Av’s desktop.

  “Detective Sergeant Smith,” she said. Precious kept things formal in the ILB squad room; Av sometimes thought it was like being back in the corps.

  “Lieutenant?”

  She was carrying a folder in her right hand, but she was looking at Av’s trash can. “What are you doing?”

  “Salvage?” he said. Howie snorted in the next cubicle.

  She sighed and handed him the folder. “Unexplained death in a restaurant. This is the EMS report. There are two wrinkles.”

  “Just two?” Av said, trying for some levity. He’d made it his mission to make Precious smile one day. So far, with not much success.

  “Wrinkle number one: victim apparently was a medium muckety-muck in the SS.”

  SS? Av blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “Sorry: the Newnited States Department of Homeland Security. You know, the federal department that’s building prison camps out in the desert and buying a billion rounds of ammo for ‘training’?”

  Av hadn’t heard anything about prison camps, but the MPD’s training ammo allowance had been cut back recently. But: if she was saying the vic was a fed, there was an easy solution to this case.

  “Great,” he said brightly. “I’ll get onto the Bureau, then. They handle—”

  “Wrinkle number two: I’ve liaised with the Bureau. Apparently there is some as-yet-undefined Bureau involvement in this incident. They think it’d look better if the prelim was done by MPD. After that, well, you know…”

  Av, realizing now that a tarbaby was materializing right there on his coffee-stained desk, sighed. And on a Friday, of course. Typical Bureau bullshit, he thought: let the MPD do the grunt work, then step in and take over the investigation for the close. More importantly, these so-called wrinkles threatened to frustrate the first law of ILB: move the case.

  “Okay if I try talking to them?” he asked.

  Lieutenant Johnson gave him the look that said she was not there to discuss the mechanics of the matter. He took the folder. “I’ll get right on it,” he said.

  “Knew you would,” she said. She looked again at the trash can, wrinkled her nose at the aroma of wet papers and spilled coffee, and then left the squad room, shaking her head.

  Whole lotta head-shaking going on here, Av thought. Place is beginning to look like a goddamned Parkinson’s ward. He heard Howie chuckling behind his newspaper.

  “What?”

  “I’ll get right on it,” Wallace echoed. “You don’t sound like no temp to me, bro.”

  * * *

  Av made sure there was no coffee on his chair, sat down, and read through the patrol report. He noted the names and places involved. He had driven by that French restaurant, but he’d never tried it. It was the kind of place you might take a special woman friend to, and Av had given up getting that involved with women for Lent, if not forever. The report said the EMS took the nonresponsive victim to MedStar Hospital Center. Av got on the phone. After some back and forth, he finally cut through all the security and privacy gatekeepers to their pathology department.

  Av identified himself and asked for any available information on what had happened to one Francis Xavier McGavin, DOA.

  “Don’t know,” the pat
hologist said. “EMS reported that the victim had some kind of seizure, possibly a stroke, in a restaurant. ER ordered a scan, which showed neither a bleed nor a clot, so probably not a stroke. Cardiac, maybe. Either way, you’ll have to wait for the autopsy. The remains have been transferred to the OCME.”

  Av then called the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, mentally kicking himself for not going there in the first place. It must have been the lack of coffee. A clerk confirmed that they’d received the DOA from MedStar, and that they were waiting for permission to conduct an autopsy.

  “Who gives permission?” Av asked.

  “Immediate family, an attorney, a court.”

  “He’s supposedly a deputy under-something at DHS,” Av said. “Have you guys contacted them yet?”

  “Don’t know anything about DHS,” the clerk said. “MedStar sent him here as a John Doe. No ID onboard when he got here. You mentioned a name? You, like, got next of kin? You guys thinking this is, like, a homicide?”

  “Like, it beats me,” Av said, rolling his eyes. “I’m thinking we’ll need, like, an autopsy report to find out, but, like, what do I know. Lemme get back to you.”

  Av then called back to MedStar and asked for the patient affairs office. Something wasn’t adding up here. John Doe? They’d had his name from the EMS report, information indicating he worked for DHS, and the MedStar pathologist had recognized the name. So why the John Doe tag?

  Patient Affairs wasn’t any more forthcoming. “Francis X. McGavin? We have nobody by that name in our system,” said the woman who answered. “Sure you got the right hospital?”

  “Metro EMS said they brought him to your ER at 1330 yesterday. Pathology says they had him briefly, and they transferred the body to OCME. But: they recognized that name when I asked.”

  She sighed, asked him to wait. He could hear a keyboard clicking. “Okay, right, we did get a John Doe ER admission, possible stroke, triaged at thirteen twenty-two. White male, fifties, unresponsive. They declared him at thirteen forty-five. No name, though. Total John Doe.”

  Total John Doe? What the hell. “Anyone listed as accompanying?”

  “No record of it. The insurance Nazis might have something on him, but probably not if he’s a John Doe, especially if he was a DOA John Doe. ER record says they did a brain scan, continued resuscitation efforts, then declared him.”

  “Was he carrying any ID?”

  “I guess not. Otherwise he wouldn’t be a John Doe, right?”

  Av wanted to hit her.

  “You say our pathology department had an actual name?” she asked.

  “Yup.”

  “Give it to me again.”

  It was Av’s turn to sigh. Like talking to a brick wall. He repeated the name, then asked if Patient Affairs had made any notifications.

  “To whom?” she asked. He executed a Polish salute. It was a reasonable question. Gotta get some coffee. And maybe a phone book.

  “He’s supposedly a ranking civil serpent at Homeland Security,” Av said, wondering now how Precious had known that. Feds carried badges, sometimes whole clutches of them. Building passes, scanner cards, gate cards, vault access cards. Have to check on that.

  She asked him to hold again, then came back on. “My supervisor says the MPD will have to do that, since you’re saying he’s a federal somebody. She says government talks to government. Says you guys at the MPD have an office for that?”

  And that would be ILB, Av thought. Full circle. Well done. “Yup,” he said. “Thanks.”

  Definitely a tarbaby, Av thought. So how does a dead guy have a name at the scene, lose it at the ER, regain it at the hospital’s morgue, and then lose it again on the way to the medical examiner’s office? And if the guy had come to the restaurant from work he would have had both his wallet and his badges. Credit cards, cash, some way to pay for lunch. Where’d his wallet gone?

  Okay, he thought. Back to basics here: where did that name come from originally? He reread the EMS report. There was no mention of any personal effects being bagged to go along with the victim to the ER. He looked at the beat cop’s report. Restaurant waitstaff had named McGavin from the reservation, and had mentioned a woman who’d been there to meet McGavin, but who had disappeared right before the incident. The maître d’ had given her name as Ellen Whiting. He had also confirmed the victim’s name as Francis X. McGavin, based on the credit card McGavin had given with the reservation two days before.

  Well, good, Av thought. If the restaurant has the victim’s credit card info, we can get to his next of kin. That still didn’t explain all this John Doe business, but the way forward was clear: contact the restaurant, get the card info, call the card company, get his file, make the notification, get the autopsy going, get a result, and presto: one more tarbaby ejected from the Briar Patch. The fact that the mystery woman had taken a powder was no longer important—she’d probably seen what happened and decided to beat feet. No reason to invite unwanted attention to the fact that she and McGavin were meeting in a trysting spot, assuming he was married. Or she was. Or they both were. Shit.

  He sat back. What in hell was the MPD headquarters doing with a tawdry little case like this? Any District detective squad could do this. He asked Howie, who suggested he go ask Precious.

  One minute later, ears burning, Av was back at his desk and on the phone to the restaurant.

  Howie didn’t say a word.

  THREE

  “Very well, then, we’re adjourned,” Mandeville announced from the head of the conference table. “Next session at my call. Thank you, everybody.”

  Carl Mandeville was a large, florid-faced man in his late forties. He had a commanding voice and a permanently imperious expression that declared that, no matter where he was, he was the man in charge. In this particular venue, a drafty but electronically secure conference room in a relatively unused section of the EEOB, he was most definitely in charge.

  The EEOB, known previously throughout Washington as the Old Executive Office Building, was an 1870s marble pile that sat across the street from the White House. Its principal use was as a ceremonial office complex for the Vice President, but it also housed offices for the National Security Council staff, of which Mandeville was a senior member. In a capital where bureaucratic titles were often onerously complex, abbreviation was not only the norm but constituted a vocabulary that everyone had to master in order to be considered a Washington hand. Nobody said the words “National Security Council”: it was always NSC. Nobody would refer to the deputy secretary of defense in those words: it was DepSecDef. This was not a new trend: the building where they had been meeting had originally been called the executive offices of the cabinet departments of State, War (Army), and Navy. Even in 1878, Washington bureaucrats abbreviated the building’s name to State-War-Navy.

  Mandeville watched the principals file out of the room. He was amused by the fact that there was none of the postmeeting chitchat that usually followed adjournment of a Washington meeting. The purpose of these particular meetings probably had something to do with that, he thought. Mandeville held the rank of special assistant to the President and senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council staff. He was one of twenty-two senior directors, and because the National Security Council was the most important interagency group in the capital, it followed that a senior director for its staff held tremendous bureaucratic power within the scope of his or her mandate. When Mandeville called a meeting, especially a meeting of the DMX principals committee, it was like a summons from the White House itself.

  He remained in his chair at the head of the table and waited. Two staff aides came into the room, nodded deferentially, and checked the table for any papers or notes left behind. They then disabled the hummers, four small electronic machines, one for each corner of the room, which made it impossible for listening devices, either inside or outside the conference room, to hear anything being said in the room. The staffers didn’t speak to him, and he didn’t speak to
them. When Carl Mandeville came down the hallway, people stepped aside like small boats getting out of a big steamer’s way in a harbor channel.

  He looked at his watch impatiently as the ancient steam radiators began to clank. Where was she?

  As if on cue, a woman returned to the room. She carried her purse in one hand and a meeting tablet in the other. She closed the door behind her, noticed that the hummers were off, and then went around the room turning them all back on. Mandeville watched her move around the room with silent appreciation. She was a tall brunette with the body of an athlete—wide shoulders supporting lovely breasts, and beautifully sculpted legs. She had blue eyes that bordered on being violet in just the right light, and she favored clingy fabrics for her clothes. She wasn’t beautiful in the traditional sense, but you wouldn’t forget meeting her, either. He’d once heard one of the principals call her a slinky toy, behind her back, of course. In the same way that Mandeville projected power, she radiated a tightly controlled sexuality, assuming you were looking for it.

  Her name was Ellen Whiting, and she was the Bureau’s rep to the DMX. She’d replaced a much more senior Bureau assistant director, which made her the junior member of the committee. He remembered when she’d first shown up, nervous but putting on a brave face in a room full of assistant secretaries of various cabinet-level departments. He’d taken her under his wing after the first meeting, given her some pointers on how things really worked on the DMX.

  She was also whip-smart, and he began to understand why the Bureau had sent her over. Three reasons: she was intelligent enough to understand the seriousness of the DMX’s mission, and never hesitated when it came time for the fatal vote. Plus, if the DMX blew up politically one day, as it well might, none of the senior dragons over there in the Hoover building would have to be involved.