Authors: Keith Yocum
“Negative,” the man said firmly. “It doesn’t work that way. Contaminated materials require a separate set of protocols. You should know that.”
“Look, I’m working on an important investigation in the OIG,” Dennis said, leaning forward to look at the man’s laminated ID tag on his shirt, “and you, Mr. Elia, are impeding that investigation.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Of course you are. I need access to some of the material in one of those crates. You’re preventing me from seeing that material.”
The man stared at Dennis for several seconds, then reached over and picked up the phone and dialed.
“I need some help,” he said. “Someone from the IG’s office is here, and he wants to sign out some material from one of the hazmat cartons we got last week. He insists that I let him take it.”
Dennis could faintly hear the other person’s high-pitched voice from the earpiece.
“OK,” Elia said. “We’re in D-12.” He hung up. “I need the officer in charge to help out.”
Dennis idly picked the nonexistent dirt from underneath his fingernails while he waited. After twenty minutes a small plump woman in her fifties opened the door and joined them. She was wearing a blue cotton polo shirt and a pair of khaki slacks, and vaguely reminded Dennis of a Best Buy sales clerk. Her blonde hair appeared to be artificially colored and was permed into a kind of bob.
“Can I see your ID?” she said.
He gave her his plastic card. She sat down at a computer screen and typed in several items from his card. Dennis knew she was calling up the internal database and would find his department and photograph. She stared at the screen, looked at the ID in her hand, and then at Dennis.
She logged off the computer, returned the ID to Dennis, and said, “You can’t take the materials out of the building. Mr. Elia has already told you that. I’m not sure what else we can do for you.”
“It’s critical that I get access to a box of watches in one of the cartons,” Dennis said. “Surely you can let me sign out that box. I was told the radiation exposure wasn’t that harmful, so I don’t understand why my investigation is being held up by your silly regulations.”
“They’re not my regulations. They’re the Agency’s. The same Agency you work for, I believe, Mr. Cunningham.”
“Jesus,” Dennis said. “I just need to borrow the box of watches.”
She stared at him and turned her head slightly, as a puppy might as it refocused its attention. “Why do you need the watches, may I ask?” she said.
“I need to have a watch expert look at them and estimate their value,” he said. “It’s that simple.”
“Why don’t you just take pictures of them?” she said. “Show the appraiser the photos. Wouldn’t that work?”
“Um, that just might work,” Dennis said, struggling a little with this new possibility. “Yes, I would think something like that would work.”
“Do you have a camera with you, Mr. Cunningham?” she asked calmly.
“No, but I can go buy one.”
“I have a digital camera,” she said, standing up. “I’ll let you use it. You can take the memory stick with you and get prints made from it. Would that work?”
“Yes, that would work fine,” Dennis said. “I’ll return the memory stick later.”
“No need to return the stick. Well, then,” she said, “we have a plan.”
***
“Judy,” Dennis said, “you’re a genius! The watches in the box are crap: worth maybe a total of five hundred bucks.”
“Dennis, it’s three o’clock in the morning here in WA,” she said in a husky voice. “I thought it was an emergency at work.”
“Oh, sorry, I keep forgetting. Bye. I’ll call you tomorrow. Sorry.”
“No, wait, Dennis. You got me up, and we might as well continue. What did you find out?”
He told her that the watches were inexpensive brands and the appraiser was actually offended he was being asked to evaluate pictures of worthless items.
“So, Dennis, I wonder what all this means. Perhaps someone did ‘off’ Garder for his watches and replaced them with these junk items.”
“That seems like a strong possibility,” Dennis said. “I think I should talk to the owner of the watch store in Perth again, and there are a few other folks I’d like to chat with, like the consul general in Perth.”
“Why don’t you dust the watches?” Judy said, her sharp yawn sounding like a yelp through the mouthpiece. “If Garder really put the watches there, then they’ll have only his prints on them. If someone else put them there, they’ll be clean, because that person would have used gloves.”
“Ha!” Dennis laughed. “You think like a criminal!”
“Dennis, you can at least give me some credit for being a law enforcement officer. I’m sure if I were a man, you wouldn’t talk like that.”
“Get some sleep, Judy. I wasn’t calling to piss you off, just trying to thank you—in my typical, stupid way. Sorry. Talk to you later.”
Afterward she tried to sleep, but it was no use; the empty house made her feel lonely and isolated. The faucet in the kitchen was dripping, and she could hear the water rhythmically hit the stainless-steel sink with a plop. Phillip was supposed to have fixed it.
Bastard
, she thought as she turned on her side.
***
It took a full week before the results of the fingerprint analysis on Garder’s watches were complete. Garder’s prints were clearly visible on seven out of the ten watches; the other three were either clean or had partial unrecognizable prints.
Dennis sat in his office and looked at the fingerprint results on his computer. He began to feel that squirmy sensation nearly every investigator feels at one time or another; he was missing something important. He took a pen out of his drawer, grabbed a yellow, lined notepad and began writing down his assumptions about the watches, starting with his basic premise:
Garder murdered, made to look like an accident.
Why did they kill Garder?
For his watches.
Who has Garder’s expensive watches now?
The cheap watches were put there by Garder. Why would he keep cheap watches? He hated mass-produced, battery-powered watches.
Did Garder have a lockbox at a bank that we missed?
Are the expensive watches Garder owned worth killing him for?
He could only afford watches worth a thousand dollars or so each, at the most.
Did he have more expensive watches that we don’t know about? Did he own a watch that was rare and priceless, but he was unaware?
Dennis put down his pen and reread his notes. As an afterthought he went to his computer and opened the folder with all of the Garder files, some of which he had not looked at closely.
After ten minutes poring over the files, he was about to close the electronic folder when he noticed an entry from US Rep. Daniel Barkley’s office.
He opened the file and found a scanned letter to the director of the CIA from the New Hampshire Republican. The letter was on Barkley’s congressional letterhead, not on the letterhead from the House Intelligence Committee that he chaired. The letter inquired into the whereabouts of the son of his constituents Fred and Colleen Garder of Epping, New Hampshire.
Their son, an employee of the CIA, had been reported missing while on overseas assignment, and his parents had received scant information from the Agency. The congressman was asking the director if he could intercede on his constituents’ behalf to offer more information on the disappearance. The parents were understandably upset and desperate to find out more details.
Dennis viewed several more scanned images on the same subject: three were records of phone calls received in the Public Affairs office at the Agency from Garder’s parents demanding more information on their son; two scans showed short letters from Garder senior begging for more information; the last entry was from the congressman and was dated nearly four weeks ago.
Dennis could find no other communication from Garder’s family, though he spent at least ten minutes reviewing the files.
***
He left work early to beat rush hour, not that Marty or anyone else cared about Dennis’s work hours. Pulling out of the huge Langley parking lot, he entered Route 123 and was disappointed to find it already jammed with cars. He snaked across Arlington, Virginia, taking several back roads he had used over the years, but even these seemed crowded. Finally on George Mason Drive, he made the last leg home and pulled up in front of his house just as his neighbor was getting home.
The neighbor, an army colonel at the Pentagon, waved and yelled, “Hi, Dennis.”
Dennis returned a perfunctory wave.
Christ,
he thought,
I can’t even remember his name.
Inside he walked over to the small dining room table and put his weather-beaten briefcase on the chair at the head of the table, just like he had done a thousand times over the years.
Standing in front of the refrigerator, Dennis looked at several pieces of notepaper held in place by whimsical plastic-backed magnets. One of the magnets was a ladybug that held a small strip of paper against the metal door. It was the phone number of the local boy who used to cut their grass. Dennis looked at the numbers and marveled at Martha’s elaborate penmanship; she could turn a simple phone number into what looked like a signature to the Declaration of Independence.
He opened the refrigerator and realized nothing much was in there; he rarely paid attention to household chores like food and cleaning. That had been Martha’s duty, and she had done it well.
Just for a moment, standing in front of the open refrigerator, the cool air swirling against his legs and chest, he felt the presence of his wife and he turned, expecting to see her standing at the sink.
He slowly closed the refrigerator door, waddled into the living room, and sat down on the couch Martha had loved and Dennis had hated. He stared at the darkened TV set and noticed two shafts of late-afternoon sunlight shining through the two small glass panes at the top of the front door. The light beams cut a swath across the gray, patterned carpet, and he could see thousands of dust particles he had disturbed dancing in the beams. He could not remember the last time he had vacuumed.
He felt depressed and worried that he was about to fall into one of those deep, dark holes. Each time he fell in, they seemed harder to get out of.
For a fleeting moment—he would not allow the thought to remain long because it hurt so much—he felt the guilt, sadness, and rage that Martha had left him with.
“It’s just a little favor,” Dennis said, sitting on a stool in the dimly lit bar in a strip mall in McLean, Virginia. “Small, really.”
“Right,” said the man sitting to his right. “Nothing you ask for is ‘small.’”
“You’re too cynical, Parker,” Dennis said, taking a small sip of his single malt.
“Cynical? Christ, I couldn’t hold a candle to you on that one.” The man laughed. “You’re the Dark Angel of Cynicism, my friend.”
“So I am,” Dennis said, staring down at his drink.
“I was kidding: don’t take it personally. You look tired. How’s your mental health? I hear you got laid pretty low after your wife died.”
“Yeah, well, that’s mostly true,” Dennis said. “But I’m back at work now. Back in the shit, as we say.”
“Got that right,” Parker said.
Dennis looked at the mirror that ran the length of the wall behind the bar. He could see two men hunched over their drinks. The smaller of them did indeed look forlorn. Dennis winked at himself in the mirror and chuckled.
“What’s so funny?”
“Look at those two bozos in the mirror,” Dennis said. “We look like agents right out of central casting—one from the Bureau, the other from the Agency.”
“Hey, speak for yourself.”
“I need some phone records.” Dennis reached into his pocket and pulled out a small piece of paper. “Here’s the number. I just need activity for the last sixty days. That’s all. No taps, nothing fancy: just inbound and outbound records.”
Parker took a long pull of his drink using his right hand and slid the paper into his shirt pocket with his left.
“That’s a roger,” he said, standing. “We’ll see what we find.”
“Thanks, I appreciate the help.”
“Just do me a favor.”
“Yeah?”
“Look after yourself, OK?”
“Don’t worry about me.”
“Take up a hobby: go on a vacation. Hell, buy one of those Russian mail-order brides.”
“No, thanks,” Dennis said. “That would be too much work.”
***
“I get computer activity records every week,” Marty said. “Most times I don’t even look at the stupid things. But I looked at yours.”
Dennis just stared; less is always more in situations like this, he knew. Just shut up, he told himself.
“Your activity report shows you accessed the Garder folder several times, once for almost fifty minutes.”
Dennis stared, trying to concentrate on a small freckle Marty had on the left side of his nose. He had used that freckle before in similar circumstances.
“The Garder case is closed, Dennis. Didn’t Special Activities tell you that?”
Dennis stared hard at the little brown dot.
“Goddamnit, Dennis, didn’t we agree?”
“I suppose you said it was closed,” Dennis said.
“What the hell has got into you? Have you gone completely nuts? We sat right here, like we have a hundred times before, and I told you the case was closed. I told you those assholes in the Special Activities Division are crazy and to close this one up. And I let you speak to them, even though I thought it was a bad idea. And they told you stop, correct?”
“I was just poking around. I don’t know why you’re so upset. It’s not the first time I’ve gone back into files on a closed case,” he lied. “Seemed innocent enough. Didn’t know Big Brother was going to be clocking my every move.”
“Don’t be a jerk.” Marty sat forward. “They don’t pay me enough to deal with your shit. For the record, I’m officially reordering you not to look into the Garder files again—though you’re locked out of those files now, anyway. I need to remind you, according to Human Resources—I’m being serious about this, Dennis—that you understand this is your first warning on this issue?”
Dennis nodded.
“I need a yes,” Marty said.