The Ambitious City (21 page)

When her sobbing subsided, she wiped her eyes, blew her nose and, with a shaking hand, took a short sip of water. After she set the cup back down, still shakily, she looked across the table at MacNeice. “There’s more, isn’t there.”

“Yes, I’m sorry, there’s more. His hands and feet and the tattoos on his arms were all removed …”

More tears fell down her face onto the table, and she struggled to catch her breath. Her hands rose as if to ask for his attention, but she couldn’t speak and let them drop. She took several deep, steadying breaths and raised them again. MacNeice noticed the slim gold wedding ring. Slowly she let her hands fall. Minutes passed, and then she looked at her brother, patted his arm and nodded slowly. “Okay … okay … okay,” she said as tears
continued to spill down her cheeks. Her brother reached for more tissues and gently wiped her face.

“Ms. Hughes, Sergeant Penniman”—MacNeice’s words came softly and without hesitation—“I urge you for the last time to reconsider viewing the body. Please let this meeting, and my words, be the worst of it for both of you.”

Sue-Ellen put the heels of her hands to her eyes, pressing deeply for a moment before dropping them to her lap. She looked at her brother, who wiped another stream of tears from her cheek. “It has to be your call, Sis,” he said. “Either way, I’m here …”

She looked from her brother to Vertesi, and then to MacNeice. “I have to say goodbye. It can’t end here. If it did, it would never end.” She looked again at her brother, willing him to agree.

“Take some time, just the two of you,” MacNeice said, and he and Vertesi pushed their chairs back.

“No need,” Penniman responded. “I know my sister, and it’s her wish to see the body of her husband. If you can kindly direct us to the morgue …” He and his sister stood up slowly.

MacNeice nodded and said, “Michael will take you.” He offered his hand to the brother, whose grip had softened somewhat. He turned to Sue-Ellen, who managed a nod before she and Penniman followed Vertesi out of the room. After they’d left, MacNeice sank back into the chair and closed his eyes.

“She’s certain it’s her husband?” MacNeice asked Vertesi when he got back, more as confirmation than a question.

“Oh yeah, oh yeah,” Vertesi said. He looked spent. “He had a mole on the side of his chest—apparently called it his third nipple. But—and I apologize, Fiza—it was his penis that really confirmed it. They’re back in the interview room, sir, but I don’t know how much Sue-Ellen has left in her. Her brother had to hold her up, literally.”

“Did they say anything, either during the viewing or outside, anything we should know about?” MacNeice asked.

“No. It was seriously grim.” Vertesi fell silent. “I mean, on the way back, they tried talking old times—you know, like back to the beginning—but their hearts weren’t in it. Good thing I’d stuffed my pockets with Kleenex.”

“Let’s get in there. If she’s not up to it, we’ll let them go.”

MacNeice picked up his file folder and pad. “If they’re comfortable with it, I want to split them up. Michael, you and Aziz with Sue-Ellen. Williams and I will take Mark.”

MacNeice made the introductions. Penniman listened carefully but his sister’s eyes kept welling up, and MacNeice didn’t think she was really taking anything in.

“Mrs. Hughes—Sue-Ellen—are you up for this?” MacNeice asked. “We understand completely if you need to leave.”

She wiped her face, straightened in her chair and met his eyes. “If I leave now I’m not sure I’ll ever come back, Detective MacNeice. I want to help in any way I can. I want Gary to receive the justice he deserves. He’d expect that of me.”

“All right, then. Thank you, and we will be as brief as possible.”

MacNeice went to the video screen and raised it to reveal a wall-mounted whiteboard divided into two columns. The left one was headed
What We Know
, and the one to the right,
What We Don’t Know
.

Below the first heading, he identified the images of the
Hamilton
and
Scourge
, the names of the couple from the Packard and the bodies in the two older concrete columns, and two photos of Bermuda Shorts—the close-up that Ryan had Photoshopped to remove the hole in his forehead, and a full-length shot that MacNeice had taken on site, also retouched. He pointed to Bermuda Shorts.

“This man has a .44-calibre entry wound in his forehead. We’ve doctored the images for this presentation so you can see what he looked like without it.”

Under Bermuda Shorts were listed the three winning concrete supply companies and the loser, DeLillo Concrete, of Buffalo–Fort Erie. Following that was the Old Soldiers roadhouse in Tonawanda.

In the other column he wrote:

MacNeice slid the marker into the tray and turned back to the room. “These questions aren’t intended to cause more grief for either of you, and we have to ask them. Everything in the other column is what we have so far. Before we begin, you’re welcome to ask anything at all about what you see here.” He sat down, poured a glass of water and waited.

Penniman was staring at the photo of Bermuda Shorts. “That man wouldn’t be a friend of Gary’s under any circumstances.” And that was all either of them could add or wanted to know about the first column.

They did a little better with the list of questions, though Sue-Ellen was barely holding it together. She said that her husband had begun to question America’s role in Iraq, but it was when he was deployed to Afghanistan that he grew angry at both the role and the strategy. “I think Gary just burned out. There was a Catch-22 in place so that people kept getting rotated back: he kept seeing
his troops get injured or killed, and it seemed there would be no end to it.”

She blew her nose and wiped her eyes before continuing. “As for his future, it was vague. He decided to get out of the army and then think about what to do. Once he was out, he met up with some vets at Old Soldiers—I’m not sure he knew any of them before. I’ve never been there and I’ve never met any of them. After he disappeared, the investigators said no one at the roadhouse recognized him.”

“I heard it was a biker hangout and that a lot of them were vets, but that’s all I know,” Penniman said.

“Gary wasn’t a biker!” Sue-Ellen insisted. “He was there drinking beer. I worried that he had PTSD, and told him so, but he laughed it off. He was great with the kids, with me, but his benefits package wasn’t enough to keep us going … so we argued about that … quite a bit.” Her eyes filled and she stopped talking.

“You mentioned a security job? That he was going to meet someone about it?”

“Yeah. I mean, he was a martial arts specialist and a combat soldier, so in a way it made sense to me. But he didn’t tell me anything more than that.”

“Was he meeting this person at the roadhouse?”

“I think so, but it was like he was keeping something from me …”

“Did he know anyone or have relatives in Canada?”

“No, Gary didn’t have any family. His parents have been gone for years and he was an only child. We were his family—me and the kids, and Mark and his wife, Tracy.”

“And the army,” Mark Penniman added.

MacNeice looked at the next question on the list and then finally just asked, “Did he have an abuse problem—drugs, alcohol, gambling?”

She flinched but answered. “Not drugs or gambling—never. Of
course he’d been drinking more since he got out—maybe too much—but he was never falling-down drunk or anything. He was a good man.”

MacNeice said, “Mrs. Hughes, I think you’ve been through more than enough for one day. Would you mind if we had a brief word with your brother? I’d like to get his insights into what your husband might have been up to—if Sergeant Penniman agrees, of course.”

Penniman nodded.

“All right, Michael will stay here with you, along with DI Aziz. Mark, would you please come with us?”

Aziz got up and went to sit beside Sue-Ellen as MacNeice and Williams led Penniman to Interview Room Two. The sergeant sat down facing the mirror.

“There’s no one behind the glass this time,” MacNeice said.

“I trust you, sir.” He smiled, genuinely, MacNeice thought.

“Are you a martial arts specialist as well?”

“No, sir. I’m also special ops, like Gary was, but a different discipline.”

“What discipline, if you don’t mind my asking?” MacNeice had his pen in hand but decided not to use it; he laid it on the closed notebook.

“I’m a sniper.”

“Do you work in a team?” MacNeice asked, trying to mask his surprise at how direct the statement was, as if he had been asked his astrological sign and responded,
I’m a Virgo
.

“I’m responsible for four teams—shooter/spotter teams.”

“Would you cover Gary’s platoons or were you out on your own?”

“Both. He was always getting up close, always the first to come to town. The local Ghannies around Helmand knew Gary, and I think they respected him. FOBs are hairy places—it’s asymmetric
warfare—and he was comfortable with that. I’m usually a thousand yards or more off the beaten path. In Iraq it was door-to-door, because the firefights there were mostly urban, so I was competing with Iraqi snipers for the rooftops.”

“Just out of interest, when you’re over a thousand yards away, what weapon are you using, and what are the targets?” Williams asked.

“M24—7.62-millimeter rifle. My spotter and I hunker down and look for opportunities. The best is another sniper, second best a Taliban leader, third, someone planting an IED. It was the IEDs that got to Gary. He was all army. We sure never talked about whether he liked the direction the Pentagon was taking. He just hated seeing his people blown away.”

“Did he ask for leave?” Williams asked.

“You don’t ask for leave—ever. I only got to come home for the funeral because my commanding officer took the call and told me to go. Gary’d just had enough, and leave wouldn’t fix it, even if he’d asked.”

“Do you think he was desperate enough to earn a living that he’d use his training for criminal ends? Could his attitude have changed that much?”

“Not a chance. Sir, if the recession hadn’t hit, today Gary would probably be a carpenter building homes. He liked the work and he was good with his hands.”

“Is there anything else you’d like us to know about your brother-in-law, anything that might help us?” MacNeice asked.

Penniman stared at him, then said, “I followed Gary from the Sunni Triangle to the Fallujah arms markets and into Afghanistan, where enemies and friends change loyalties every day. I’ve seen first-hand what he can do. All I can say is, whoever did that to him probably had to clean up a stack of bodies afterwards. He wouldn’t go easy—you follow me?”

“I do.”

Penniman stood up to indicate the interview was over. “You got what you needed?”

“Yes, I think we have,” MacNeice said. He offered his hand. Once again, the Vise-Grip was on full crush.

“D
O YOU THINK
Hughes was a one-man wrecking crew?”

Vertesi asked.

“Four large men die. Two have their big, thick necks snapped, one gets his faced caved in by a size twelve, and the last has his throat slashed through to the spine—sounds like Special Forces killing to me,” Aziz said.

“Yeah, it was the killing Olympics,” Vertesi said. “But one guy who weighed—what, 180 pounds—against four guys who weighed 250 or so?”

“One guy puttin’ an expensive education to use.” Williams shrugged as if it was obvious.

MacNeice studied the whiteboard, placing what he knew and what he didn’t in thought boxes. He said, “We’ve got bodies, competing concrete interests and—potentially—hired biker gangs for security. To secure what? We’ve got Hughes, who wasn’t a biker. We need to tie the buried bikers to Hughes and to figure out if the bodies above ground were payback for killing him and Bermuda Shorts.

And if they were vets, why did they break their code of taking every comrade—or his body—home? Though if, as Penniman said, Hughes was always the first to come to town, perhaps he was too far ahead to support.” He turned to his team. “Well, we can’t ask Old Soldiers.”

“Maybe we ask one of the local bikers—I mean, in a convincing way,” Williams suggested. “That sounds like a perfect job for Swets. He knows these guys—at least, the ones still standing—though he’d have to find ’em first.”

The desk phone rang. Ryan picked it up, listened and turned to MacNeice. “Sir, I’ve got Sheilagh Thomas from the university. She said you’ll want to take this call.”

Her voice in his ear was cheerful. “Mac, come out here this afternoon and I’ll treat you to the best plonk B.U. can afford.”

“It’s a lovely idea—”

“Please, no buts, Mac. This is important and it won’t take too much of your time. I’ll open the bottle now and let it breathe—or gasp. See you soon.”

Before he left the cubicle, MacNeice turned to Aziz and told her to start preparing for her first press conference.

“Detective Superintendent MacNeice?” A dark-haired young woman wearing a black T-shirt, knee-length khaki shorts and sandals greeted him inside the door.

“Yes.”

“I’m Andrea Gomes, one of Dr. Thomas’s grad students.”

“Pleased to meet you, Andrea.”

“I came to get you ’cause it’s kind of a maze getting down to our lab.”

He followed her up a flight of eight stairs, across a hallway buzzing with students and down another stairway to a corridor. At the end of the corridor they went through an exit door and down another set of stairs.

“I can see why you came for me,” he said as they walked along a glazed-brick corridor.

“Yeah, it took me a few days before I could find my way. Now, though, I could probably do it blindfolded.”

“I hope you’ll never have to.”