The Clouds Roll Away (25 page)

Down the Mosby Highway, DeMott's headlights carved bright tunnels. But beyond the road's shoulder, snow-covered objects looked vague and threatening, like ghosts. By the time we reached the interstate, the snow was turning to rain and neither of us had spoken.

“I'm still hungry,” DeMott said finally.

“I'm not.”

He drove south on I-95, silently passing the exits for Burger King and Cracker Barrel and McDonald's. Just before the town of Ashland, when I was just fifteen miles from home and rest, the argument began.

“You should have told me you were ambushing Stuart,” he said.

“Interesting word,
ambush
. That's exactly how I felt hearing that I was your girlfriend. No, wait, that we were getting married.”

“It was stupid of me, seeing how you'll treat my brother-in-law.”

“Oh,
now
he's family. This morning you didn't even want Mac to marry him.”

When his truck came around General Lee rotary, the hero's bronze face was filled with a sad recognition, as if he understood too well the world's petty and profound battles. DeMott pulled up to the curb outside my mother's house and turned his face away, pretending to stare out the side mirror.

Neither of us bothered with “Good night.”

In the front parlor, my mother was kneeling on the floor. A high-church choir was harmonizing about stars brightly shining, a world in sin and error pining, and my soul suddenly felt no worth. As the choir told us to fall on our knees, my mother stood. With her foot she shoved something under the sofa.

“I guess that present's for me,” I said.

“Oh, Raleigh.” She stamped her foot. “Can't you play along, just once?”

“Okay. That present you just hid must be for somebody else.”

Her sigh caused the ornaments knit into her sweater to shudder. And my heart grew even more weighted.

“I'm sorry, Mom. Really, I didn't see anything.”

She waved me off. But there was no music to her gesture. No bracelets. Just the blasted digital watch. I wondered why I yearned for home, when this was what it would be. Tilting her head, she offered me her quizzical expression. Her hair didn't move.

“You don't look happy,” she said.

“I'm fine.”

“Are you hungry? I made—”

“I'm not hungry.”

She blinked. “You're not hungry?”

The next morning was Wednesday, December 20, and I walked into the hair salon on Broad Street, my stomach growling.

Zennie's smile was like curdled milk.

“Could you touch up the sides?” I asked, because the manager with the purple hair was watching. “I love the cut,” I added.

Zennie fastened the nylon smock as I sat in her chair. Our eyes met in the mirror. Behind us, the manager asked the old man in her chair about his plans for Christmas. In a tottery voice, he described his son's family in Chesterfield.

I kept my voice down. “You didn't call me back.”

“I couldn't.”

“Why not?”

Her amber eyes watched the manager. The woman was nodding at everything the old man said about pecan pie. But she glanced over suddenly and Zennie said, “I'll show you where it's at. Right this way.”

“What?” I whispered.

“The bathroom,” Zennie whispered into my ear.

I followed her past the bubble dryers all the way to the far back. She reached under her apron and yanked a cell phone from her jeans, clicking the buttons with acrylic nails. Before handing me the phone, she glanced back at the manager.

“The saved message,” she said. “Listen to it.”

The bathroom's toilet and sink were the color of Pepto-Bismol. Closing the door, I put the phone to my ear and heard noise. After several moments, I realized it was music. Live music. Closer to the phone, I heard bursts of words, exclamations. Ebonics. It seemed to continue with no perceivable point and I pulled the phone away, checking the time. When nothing meaningful was said, forty-nine seconds felt like eternity. After another twenty-two seconds I almost clicked it off but somebody mentioned fishing.

“Gonna make you fishers of men,” a man said.

There was laughter.

“What we gonna catch?”

“Caviar. You know caviar?”

“Dawg, you got to bait a hook.”

“Don't worry about the hook. This caviar be swimming around in the dark. When the light comes, you take 'em. Dig?”

There was silence.

Then somebody offered a vow of obedience, twisting Proverbs. The background noise dimmed and I heard one voice. It sounded amplified but far away, echoing as if coming through a microphone. The closer voices uttered quick responses—
“Yeah, that's
right”—
and then the band started playing again.

Then: “Z-girl, what's wrong with you?”

The reply from Zennie was a mean mumble.

“When I get back here,” the male voice said, “you be nice, or no fat man's coming down the chimney for you.”

“Where you going?” Zennie's voice, close. “You leaving?”

“You just get ready to party.”

Moments later, the recording ended.

I looked at the display. Six minutes forty-four seconds. I closed the phone, flushed the toilet, ran soap and water over my hands, and stepped out.

Zennie was dragging a broom across the salon's vinyl floor.

I sat in the chair and slid the phone onto her counter.

She touched my hair, glancing in the mirror.

“Think you're ready to even it out?” I asked.

She nodded.

I dropped my voice. “You recorded that at the party?”

She leaned down, as if inspecting the layers. “Moon and XL were talking in the limo on the way there. When I saw you, I thought y'all was busting in that night. I thought I'd buy me some protection.”

Smart girl. “Where does RPM fit into this?”

“I don't know,” she said.

“But they know him, or they wouldn't be there.”

She nodded. “Everybody knows that man. He's the biggest thing in Richmond.”

“Who went fishing?”

“Moon, XL, all of them.”

“Did RPM have anything to do with it?”

She shook her head, glancing over her shoulder at the manager.

“When did they come back?” I asked.

“Late, past midnight.”

“What did they say?”

“Nothing. But they had on different clothes.” She stood up, speaking louder. “I think you're talking a quarter inch.”

In the mirror, she watched the manager. The woman had finished with the elderly gentleman and now worked on a young mother holding a toddler in her lap. They talked about kids, naps, preschool.

When Zennie looked back at me, her round face looked tight. “He got away,” she said.

“Who got away?”

“What?” she said.

“You said he got away.”

“No. He's got a way of acting. After. I can always tell.”

“I'm not following. Who—Moon?”

She nodded.

“After what?” I asked.

“You know.”

“No, I don't know, Zennie.”

She took the steel shears from her pocket and drove the blades forward, snipping the air in a sharp line, her small mouth twisted in torment. “I don't like saying it,” she said.

I could see the contrasts in her face deepening, the wise eyes turning weary and despairing. She finally recognized the bitter end of it all.

I nodded. I knew what she meant.

And I didn't like saying it either.

chapter thirty-one

M
y first call was to Hannah Hamer at Aberdeen Proving Grounds. I asked for the information on lewisite.

“Didn't I send you that?” she said.

_“
No, you didn't.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“Would I be calling you if you did?” I said.

“If you could just wait until after the holiday—”

“I can't wait.”

There was a pause as she absorbed my tone of voice. Then the phone clanked as if set on a desk—or dropped to the floor— and I spent several minutes doodling on paper until she picked up the phone again. My notes were covered with polyhedron snowflakes.

“I've got to get into the archives,” she said.

“When can you fax the information?” I asked.

“It's Christmas.”

“The other side doesn't care. Can you please get me the information by this afternoon?”

She hung up and I checked my e-mail. Memos, interoffice reminders about the budget, no overtime pay. Requests for agents to move to Iraq and investigate missing antiquities. For a moment I imagined life under a burka and considered whether it would be an improvement over things here.

I hit Delete and clicked on an e-mail from Pollard Durant. It was marked Urgent. I read it, then walked upstairs to his office.

Despite the dull winter light and soggy cattails leaning over the wetlands below, Pollard's office seemed cheerful. Opposite the windows, the wall was an exuberant quilt of children's finger paintings. Emerald Christmas trees and ruby Santas and gypsum-white snowmen.

“My Prozac,” he said.

“Pardon?” I said, taking a seat.

“My antidepressant, pictures from my kids.” He spread a dozen photographs over his desk. “Recognize any of them?”

I picked up the first black-and-white surveillance picture. It was enlarged to gray grains that made up Moon's shaved head. I picked up the next one. XL's horn-rims. Hooded Raiders.

“The guys running the house,” I said.

“Phaup wants the task force to make one buy before the holiday,” he said. “Can you work tonight?”

“Yes.”

“She wants you wired.”

“No way.”

He hesitated, taken aback. “All we need is one decent transmission. SWAT will be out there with you.”

“If you wire me, Pollard, I'm dead.”

“Phaup's demanding it. I happen to agree with her.”

“They'll kill me.”

I told him about my visit to Zennie, what I heard on her phone, and how the sheriff found two guys strung up in trees. “Crucified upside down. We don't have IDs on the men yet; I'm heading to the morgue this afternoon. But this gang had something to do with those murders.”

“Can we bring them in?”

I shook my head. “Right now it's not even circumstantial.”

“Wear the wire, get something on tape.”

“Pollard, they know somebody's snitching. They'll probably frisk me.”

“We'll put it where they can't find it.”

“But I'll still know it's there, and I haven't done enough undercover to pull it off. They see me acting differently, I'm dead. It's that simple.”

He stacked the photos in a neat pile on the corner of his tidy desk. “I want you to feel confident going in. Let me see what I can do. We'll meet back here about seven and go over everything with SWAT.”

Back at my desk, several bags of chocolate chip cookies whispered my name from the bottom drawer. I answered and drank a warm Coke from the can, sealing up the soil from Stuart Morgan's truck with the samples taken from the Chickahominy River. I wrote up the paperwork for Nettie Labelle in the mineralogy lab, asking her to identify each soil, then compare them for matching profiles.

I walked the evidence down to the processing room and pressed the small buzzer next to the Dutch door. Allene Carron greeted me with raised eyebrows, then gave me the pronouncement.

“You got the flu?”

“No.”

“Then why do you keep pushing back the date?”

“I don't know. Isn't it December twentieth?”

“Yes, but you put the eighteenth on here.” She corrected my documents, punching the pages with her red stamp. “You know what I think?”

“No. What do you think?”

She handed me the evidence's barcode. “Christmas is five days away, and you're not ready for it.”

And with that, she closed the Dutch door.

Back at my desk, I found curling pages in the fax machine. They told of a chemist named Winford Lee Lewis who combined arsenic trichloride with acetylene in a hydrochloric solution of mercuric chloride. The result was lewisite, nicknamed “the dew of death.”

And the United States wasn't the only country interested. Japan, Russia, and China stockpiled lewisite. It was particularly helpful because it lowered the freezing point of mustard gas, always useful in Siberian climates. Lewisite sometimes killed by drowning its victims, flooding the respiratory system with blood. Blisters erupted on the inside of eyelids, causing permanent blindness. But the U.S. military decided it was a second-rate weapon. It was unstable in humid atmospheres, and as I noticed that night at Rapland, the distinctive geranium odor warned an enemy of its presence.

The military deemed it obsolete. But they still had twenty thousand tons of the stuff. Some of the reserves were whittled away during World War II, when lewisite was used as an antifreeze for mustard gas. Some of it was even dumped in the ocean, back when we paid no attention to environmental damage. And some remained stockpiled at the Edgewood Area of Aberdeen Proving Grounds.