Avenger (17 page)

Returning home, the world was his oyster. He joined his father's firm on Wall Street, took it over eventually, became a giant in the financial community and ran for public office when he was sixty. In April 2001, he was in his fourth and last term as a Republican senator for New Hampshire and he had just seen a Republican president elected.

When he heard who was on the line, he told his secretary to hold all calls and his voice filled the moving limousine ten miles away.

"Steve. Good to hear you again. Where are you?"

"Right here in Washington. Peter, I need to see you. It's serious."

Catching his mood, the senator dropped the bonhomie. "Sure, pal. Wanna tell me?"

"Over lunch. Can you make it?"

"I'll clear the diary. The Hay Adams. Ask for my usual corner table. It's quiet. One o'clock."

They met when the senator strode into the lobby. The Canadian was waiting there.

"You sounded serious, Steve. You have a problem?"

"I just came from an interment up in Georgetown. I just buried my only grandson."

The senator stared and his face creased with shared pain. "Jesus, old friend, I am so sorry. I can't even imagine it. Illness? Accident?"

"Let's talk at the table. There's something I need you to read."

When they were seated the Canadian answered his friend's question. "He was murdered. In cold blood. No, not here, and not now. Six years ago. In Bosnia."

He explained briefly about the boy's age, his desire back in 1995 to help alleviate the pain of the Bosnians, his odyssey through the capitals to the town of Travnik, his agreement to try to help his interpreter trace his family homestead. Then he passed over the Rajak confession.

Dry martinis came. The senator ordered smoked salmon platter, brown bread, chilled Meursault. Edmond nodded, meaning: the same.

Senator Lucas was accustomed to reading fast, but halfway through the report he gave a low whistle and slowed down.

While the senator toyed with the salmon and read the last pages, Steve Edmond glanced around. His friend had chosen well: a personal table just beyond the grand piano, secluded in a corner by a window through which part of the White House was visible. The Lafayette at the Hay Adams was unique, more like a house set at the heart of an eighteenth-century country estate than a restaurant in the middle of a bustling capital city.

Senator Lucas raised his head.

"I don't know what to say, Steve. This is perhaps the most awful document I have ever read. What do you want me to do?"

A waiter removed the plates and brought small black coffees and for each man a glass bowl of old Armagnac. They were silent while the young man was at the table.

Steve Edmond looked down at their four hands on the white cloth. Old men's hands, cord-veined, sausage-fingered, liver-spotted. Hands that had thrown a Hurricane fighter straight down into a formation of Dornier bombers; hands that had emptied an M-l carbine into a trattoria full of SS-men outside Bolzano; hands that had fought fights, caressed women, held first-borns, signed cheques, created fortunes, altered politics, changed the world. Once.

Peter Lucas caught his friend's glance and understood his mood. "Yes, we are old now. But not dead yet. What do you want me to do?"

"Maybe we could do one last good thing. My grandson was an American citizen. The USA has the right to require this monster's extradition from wherever he is. Back here. To stand trial for Murder One. That means the Justice Department. And State. Acting together on any government that harbours this swine. Will you take it to them?"

"My friend, if this government of Washington cannot give you justice, then no one can."

He raised his glass.

"One last good thing."

But he was wrong.

Chapter FOURTEEN

The Father

IT WAS ONLY A FAMILY SPAT AND IT SHOULD HAVE ENDED WITH A kiss-and-make-up. But it took place between a passionate Italian-blooded daughter and a doggedly tenacious father.

By the summer of 1991 Amanda Jane Dexter was sixteen and knockout attractive. The Naples-descended Marozzi genes had given her a figure to cause a bishop to kick a hole in a stained-glass window. The blond

Anglo-Saxon lineage of Dexter endowed her with a face like the young

Bardot. The local boys were over her like a rash and her father had to accept that. But he did not like Emilio.

He had nothing against Hispanics, but there was something sly and shallow about Emilio, even predatory and cruel behind matinee-idol looks. But Amanda Jane fell for him like a ton of bricks.

It came to a head during the long summer vacation. Emilio proposed he take her away for a holiday by the sea. He spun a good tale. There would be other young people, adults to supervise, beach sports, fresh air and the bracing tang of the Atlantic. But when Cal Dexter tried to eye-contact the young man, Emilio avoided his gaze. His gut instinct told him there was something wrong. He said, "No."

A week later she ran away. There was a note to say they should not worry, everything would be fine, but she was a grown woman now and refused to be treated like a child. She never came back.

School holidays ended. She still did not appear. Too late, her mother, who had approved her request, listened to her husband. They had no address for the beach party, no knowledge of Emilio's background, parentage, or real home address. The Bronx address he had used turned out to be a lodging house. His car had Virginia number plates but a check with Richmond told Dexter it had been sold for cash in July. Even the surname, Gonzalez, was as common as Smith.

Through his contacts Cal Dexter consulted with a senior sergeant in the

Missing Persons Bureau of the NYPD. The officer was sympathetic but resigned.

"Sixteen is like grown-up nowadays, counsellor; they sleep together, vacation together, set up home together .. ."

The Department could only send out an all-points if there was evidence of threat, duress, forcible removal from the parental home, drug abuse, whatever.

Dexter had to concede there had been a single phone message. It had come at a time Amanda Jane would know her father would be at work and her mother out. The message was on the machine tape.

She was fine she said, very happy and they should not worry. She was living her own life and enjoying it. She would be in touch when she was good and ready.

Cal Dexter traced the call. It came from a mobile phone, the sort that operates off a purchased SIM card and cannot be traced to the owner. He played the tape to the sergeant and the man shrugged. Like all Missing

Person Bureaux in every force across the States he had a case overload.

This was not an emergency.

Christmas came, but it was bleak. The first in the Dexter household in sixteen years without their baby.

It was a morning jogger who found the body. His name was Hugh Lamport, he ran a small IT consultancy company, he was an honest citizen trying to keep in shape. For him that meant a three-mile run every morning between six thirty and as near to seven o'clock as he could make it, and that even included cold bleak mornings like 18 February 1992.

He was running along the grass verge of Indian River Road, Virginia

Beach, which was where he lived. The grass was easier on the ankles than tarmac or concrete. But when he came to a bridge over a narrow culvert, he had a choice. Cross via the concrete bridge or jump the culvert. He jumped.

He noticed something pass under him in the jump, something pale in the pre-dawn gloom. After landing, he turned and peered back into the ditch. She lay in the strange disjointed pose of death, half in and half out the water.

Mr. Lamport glanced frantically round and saw four hundred yards away through some trees a dim light; another early riser brewing the morning cup. No longer jogging but sprinting, he arrived at the door and hammered hard. The coffee brewer peered through the window, listened to the shouted explanation, and let him in.

The 911 call was taken by the night-duty dispatcher in the basement switchboard at Virginia City's police HQ on Princess Anne Road. She asked as a matter of urgency for the nearest patrol car and the response came from the First Precinct's sole cruiser, which was a mile from the culvert. It made that mile in a minute, to find a man in jogging kit and another in a dressing gown marking the spot.

It took the two patrol officers no more than two minutes to call in for homicide detectives and a full forensic team. The householder fetched coffee, which was gratefully received, and all four waited.

That whole sector of eastern Virginia is occupied by six cities with contiguous boundaries, a conurbation that extends for miles on both banks of the James River and Hampton Roads. It is a landscape studded with navy and air bases, for here the Roads run out into Chesapeake Bay and thence the Atlantic.

Of the six cities, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Hampton (with Newport News),

James City, Chesapeake and Virginia Beach, the biggest by far is

Virginia Beach. It covers 310 square miles and contains 430,000 citizens out of a total of 1.5 million.

Of its four precincts, Second, Third and Fourth cover the built-up areas, while First Precinct is large and mainly rural. Its 195 square miles run right down to the North Carolina border and are bisected by

Indian River Road.

Forensics and Homicide arrived at the culvert around the same time, thirty minutes later. The Medical Examiner was five minutes after that. Dawn came, or what passed for dawn, and a drizzle set in.

Mr. Lamport was driven home to shower off and make a full statement.

The coffee brewer made a statement, which is to say he could only aver he had heard and seen nothing during the night.

The ME established quickly that life was extinct, that the victim was a young Caucasian female, that death had almost certainly occurred somewhere else and the body had been dumped, presumably from a car. He ordered the attendant ambulance to take the cadaver to the state morgue in Norfolk, a facility that serves all six cities.

The local homicide detectives took time out to muse that if the perpetrators, who seemed to have a moral code on the level of a snake's navel and an IQ to match, had driven three miles further on, they would have entered the swamp country at the head of Back Bay. Here, a weighted body could disappear for ever and none the wiser. But they had seemingly run out of patience and dumped their grisly cargo where it would be quickly found and start a manhunt.

At Norfolk, two things happened with respect to the corpse: an autopsy to establish cause, time and, if possible, location of death, and an attempt to secure identification.

The body itself yielded nothing to the second search: some skimpy but no longer provocative underwear, a badly torn and slinky dress. No medallions, bracelets, tattoos or purse.

Before the forensic pathologist began his task, the face, which bore lesions and contusions compatible with a savage beating, was restored as best possible with sutures and makeup, and photographed. The photo would be passed around the vice squads of all six cities, for the body's dress code seemed to indicate a possibility that she had been involved with what is hopefully called 'night life'.

The other two details the ID hunters needed and got were fingerprints and blood group. Then the pathologist started. It was the fingerprints they pinned their hopes on.

The six cities came up with a zero on the prints. Details went to the state capital at Richmond where prints covering the whole of Virginia were stored. Days went by. The answer came back. Sorry. The next step up is the FBI covering the entire USA. It uses IAFIS the

International Automated Fingerprints ID System.

The pathologist's report made even hardened homicide detectives queasy.

The girl appeared not much more than eighteen, if that. She had once been pretty, but someone, plus her lifestyle, had put an end to that.

Vaginal and anal dilation was so exaggerated that she had clearly been penetrated, and repeatedly, by instruments far larger than a normal male organ. The terminal beating had not been the only one; there had been others before. And heroin abuse, probably dating back no more than six months.

To both homicide and vice detectives in Norfolk the report said

'prostitution'. It was no news to any of them that recruitment into vice was often accomplished by narcotic dependency, the pimp being the only source of the drug.

Any girl trying to escape the clutches of such a gang would certainly be punished; such 'lesson learning' could involve forced participation in exhibitions featuring brutal perversions and bestiality. There were creatures prepared to pay for this, and thus creatures prepared to supply it.

The post-autopsy body went into the cold room while the search for identity continued. She was still Jane Doe. Then a vice detective in

Portsmouth thought he might recognize the circulated photograph, despite the damage and discoloration. He thought she might have been a hooker going under the name of Lorraine.

Enquiries revealed that "Lorraine' had not been seen for several weeks.

Prior to that she had worked for a notoriously vicious Hispanic gang who recruited by using good-looking gang members to pick up girls in the cities to the north and entice them south with promises of marriage, a lovely vacation, whatever it took.