The Bitter Past, page 4
I shake my head. “I spent almost twenty years in the Army, lady. Of course I have a problem with authority.”
“And you have a quick wit and don’t take yourself too seriously.”
I smirk and slide my sunglasses back on. “Ma’am, I’m afraid you’ll have to come with me now.”
She laughs. “See, you’re not like that, and that’s … unexpected.”
I let my smile do the talking for a long moment as we watch each other. “That’s pretty good, Sana. Okay, my turn.”
She looks away. Interesting, I think. Not comfortable under the spotlight. I lean closer across the small table, mapping her features with my eyes, cataloging the data. “You are obviously of Middle Eastern descent. This is on your mother’s side, of course.” My head tilts a bit to the right like I’m studying the brushstrokes on a painting. “I would say … Jordanian, possibly some Egyptian mixed in.”
Sana turns back, her eyes widening. “There you go surprising me again. Not many people would be able to be so … specific. My mother is Jordanian, but our lineage stretches across the Red Sea. How could you possibly know this?”
“It’s my superpower,” I say, pulling back out of my trance. “I’ve spent some time in the region. But Locke, obviously your father’s name, is English. I’m guessing your old man is a scholar of some sort, not in law enforcement like his daughter.”
Sana holds a hand up. “Stop. Is this a magic trick? You just met me.”
“It’s your elocution,” I tell her. “Dead giveaway for a life spent in books. Let me guess, he’s a literature professor?”
“Oh, fucking hell,” Sana says loudly, half the Omelet House suddenly watching. “You are not real.” She composes herself by reaching out with her fork and taking the last bite of my eggs, which I find incredibly seductive.
My job is done here. I’ve made her laugh and piqued her interest. I plop some cash down on the table and wink at her. “We’re off to see the Weezard.”
* * *
Otto has the body fully draped when we enter the examination suite, where the air is heavily scented with ammonia and which looks like a showroom for all things stainless steel. Faucets, sinks, the tables where the dead are opened. Gadgets of every kind are mounted to the ceiling, cameras, lights, things that look a lot like special drills. The place gives me the heebie-jeebies, much like Otto Weezard himself. Though not stainless steel, his rail-thin body sports a grayish hue that under these lights would render him practically invisible if it weren’t for his white lab coat.
“You’re punching above your weight, Beck,” Otto tells me as his assistant lifts the sheet over Atterbury’s head and chest. “This kind of mutilation is something I’ve honestly never seen.” He pauses a second. “And I’ve seen some cartel shit that made me think twice about my chosen profession.”
I’m not looking at the body. I’ve already seen the body. I’m looking at Sana who is studying the body. No flinching. No revulsion. No visceral reaction whatsoever. Impressive.
“Show me the rest of him, please,” she tells Otto.
Otto looks to me, and I give him the nod. “She’s already seen the photos.”
He peels back the sheet to uncover the rest of the body. Cleaned up and laid out as he is under the bright lights, Atterbury’s wounds are even more pronounced now.
Sana walks slowly around the table, leaning in here and there to better examine the long, almost perfectly rectangular patches of removed skin. “What kind of tool peels skin like this?”
Otto nods. “A grafting tool called a dermatome. Nothing else could do that so precisely.”
Sana moves up to the shoulders and face. “And the burns?”
“Acetylene torch. Most likely small, like what a plumber would carry around for soldering pipes.”
I say, “We found one at the house.”
She crosses over to a sink and splashes some cold water on her face, her fingers gripping the counter tightly. “Took his time, didn’t he?”
Otto glances at me again. “Give her all of it, Otto.”
“Well over an hour, I’d say. Kept him awake with adrenaline.”
I step to the table. “Cause of death?”
Sana spins around from the sink, drying her hands and face with a paper towel. “Seriously? The man was flayed and set fire to. Do we need to know more?”
My eyes are trained on hers like truth detectors. “Otto, do we need to know more?”
“Well,” he says, “likely heart failure from everything you see here. But there is one more thing. Something odd. If he hadn’t been tortured, his cause of death would have been poisoning.”
I’m still watching her. “You don’t say?”
“Yes.” Otto crosses the room, removing a plastic container from a refrigerator. “Thallium.” He opens the container and shows Sana, then me. “Forced them down his throat. Some even made their way into his stomach.”
Sana folds her arms over her chest. “The rat poison.”
“Yes and no,” Otto says. “It was a rat poison a long time ago. Not legal to buy now in most countries, including the U.S. Too toxic.”
I touch her on the shoulder so she’ll look up at me. “We don’t have a rat problem in my county.”
She pulls her eyes from mine. “So?”
Otto continues. “So, you’ve already pretty much killed the guy. But you go to the trouble of feeding him thallium salts? Why on earth would you do that? It would take days, maybe longer for him to die from that.”
“Symptoms?” I ask, entirely for Sana’s benefit. I know the symptoms.
“Of thallium ingestion?” Otto shakes his head. “More torture really. Quite agonizing in its own right. Arrhythmia, difficulty breathing, large swings in blood pressure, violent vomiting, pain. Lots of pain.”
I gaze down at the poor man. “But pain he probably never felt, I’m guessing.”
Otto nods. “Correct. It would have taken a few hours for the symptoms to hit. This was … this was purely an afterthought. Overkill.”
I have to ask. “Symbolic? A signature perhaps?”
Sana pulls the sheet back over Atterbury’s body. “With respect, Beck, I think you’re overthinking this. The man was brutalized to death, end of story.”
She’s what I always imagined Helen of Troy must have looked like. Men would go to war over her. But her dismissiveness has a five-alarm fire starting in my amygdala. “Otto, anything you can surmise about the killer, or killers?”
Dr. Weezard picks up a file from the counter and opens it. “It’s difficult to say if there was more than one. What I can tell you is that the person who inflicted these wounds is likely male and right-handed.”
Sana is suddenly interested again. “That’s it, no other DNA? Nothing?”
Her question seems strange. DNA is a very specific thing to ask about. I think she means “any trace evidence,” which could be in multiple forms like fibers, hair, essentially anything that can be transferred between people. “This isn’t like the CSI you see on television, Sana,” I say. “It takes a few days to process everything.”
She ignores me. “Thank you, Doctor. This was helpful. I trust his family has been contacted and arrangements will be made for the body?”
Otto gives her the details and we leave. Outside in the truck, she’s waiting for me to start the engine. But it’s time for some answers.
“You have to turn the key,” she says.
“Should I drop you at the airport?”
She’s nervous now. “Excuse me, are we done with this investigation?”
I take a long look out the window. “Well, I’m certainly not done with it. But it’s a murder investigation, and your agent was retired. Is there some reason for you to stick around?”
She takes a moment to calculate her response. “The Bureau looks after its own. I would like to get a better sense of what happened before heading back, if that’s okay.”
“So, you would like to work together?”
She bats those beautiful lashes at me. “Yes.”
“That would be great, but I’m not really feeling like we’re on a team here. If we were doing this together, you’d be sharing what you already know.”
Sana makes a poor attempt at bewilderment. “Like what, for instance?”
“Like why a retired agent’s murder is big enough to get you out here. Was he really retired? What was he working on, Sana?”
She swivels around and leans her head back against the passenger window. “I told you. We look after our own. And yes, he was retired.”
Bullshit always makes my nose crinkle. “You can call an Uber or taxi from here. I’ll have one of my people drive your rental car back.”
She laughs. “And I’ll have thirty agents in your office within six hours. Would you like that?”
Still crinkling, I don’t budge. “Wow. Thirty agents. That’s a lot of attention for one guy.” We just stare at each other for a few minutes. Or an hour. Finally, she looks out her window. “All right. What do you want to know?”
Now we’re getting somewhere. “Oh, there’s quite a bit, but let’s start with why the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service came all the way to my county to kill a man who hasn’t been in the FBI for almost twenty years.”
CHAPTER 4
“Who said anything about Russians?” My mention of the SVR, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, has thrown Special Agent Sana Locke into a bit of a tizzy.
I’m in a tizzy of my own, not because I hate driving in Vegas but because the perfume she’s wearing has just the slightest hint of jasmine mixed with jelly donuts, a combination I find difficult to resist. I brake the truck as if a toddler has just run into the road, and Sana’s seat belt locks painfully into place on her hips and chest. “I’m going to save us both some time, Sana, so that you don’t have to pretend with me. A good deal of my career in the Army, I was a foreign area officer. Do you know what that is?”
I can tell she’s considering lying again, but then she looks at me and just nods.
“My area of specialty was Russia. I spent five years in Russia. I know the SVR much better than I’d like to, and I know that their predecessor’s choice of poison for a long time was thallium. It’s slow-acting, colorless, tasteless, and odorless. The SVR was suspected of using it as recently as 2006 when they whacked a dissident named Litvinenko in London.” History lesson aside, I have a much more personal reason for a state of high anxiety when it comes to the SVR, and already my blood is pumping.
“My, my,” says Sana. “We are not in Kansas anymore, are we, Dorothy?”
“Toto.”
“Pardon?”
“The line is: ‘Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.’” See, I literally cannot forget things.
Sana is properly annoyed with my smugness, which kind of makes us even. We pull onto the interstate and I mash the gas pedal. In seconds, we’re flying by other vehicles at an increasing rate, my heart rate matching the truck’s speed, and I have an uncomfortable feeling forming in my gut that is not my Denver omelet. “Atterbury was ex-FBI. He was an old man living in retirement in relative obscurity and was savagely tortured before his killer shoved thallium down his throat, which in addition to being a poison is also radiological, an interesting coincidence since my county is located right next door to the Nevada Test Site. In my experience, you only torture someone because you want information on someone or something. Atterbury’s house was ripped apart, which tells me the killer was looking for a thing. Now, why don’t you tell me what it was?”
Sana puts her hands on the dash. “In your experience?”
“Yes, but not relevant to our discussion, and you’re avoiding my question.”
“Could you slow down, please?”
Being a reasonable guy, I decelerate and pull into the slow lane. Sana takes a moment. “This is going to sound a bit preposterous.”
“Lady, I live right next door to where we park the UFOs. I can do preposterous.”
She starts to speak, then stops, then starts again. “You are not cleared for this.”
I wait, and smell her again. Jesus.
“I could lose my job just for telling you.”
I swerve back into the fast lane.
“Okay, okay!” she yells. “Okay.”
I can almost see the gears turning in her head. “Sometime in the 1950s, ’55 or ’56 we think, a Russian KGB agent came to Nevada to spy on the atomic testing program located, as you say, right next door to your county.”
“Makes sense,” I reply. “It was an arms race, especially with the advent of the hydrogen bomb. I’m sure the Sovs were crawling all over the place.”
“Exactly. We didn’t know he was here. We never caught him. We didn’t find out about him until the early sixties, when he contacted the Bureau.”
I take my eyes from the highway and peer over at her, and because my libido seems to be at DEFCON 1 today, my first thought is that she’s even more beautiful when she’s being honest. “He contacted us?”
Sana nods, drawing her feet up to the dash like a little girl. “Yes. Over a period of years, he fed us information on the Soviet spy apparatus in the U.S. Little gems about how the illegal program worked, to establish his bona fides, and then a lot of specific information about what the Soviets knew and didn’t know about the American nuclear program.”
Russia was my specialty in the Army, so I know quite a bit about the KGB—the SVR’s predecessor—and its Directorate S, which coordinated the training and planting of Soviet spies in the U.S. to gather what we refer to as “illegal” intelligence. I know these were people trained to look and speak like Americans and were provided deep cover identities that allowed them to perform espionage against this country for long periods of time while living next door to their unsuspecting American neighbors. “Why? Why did he reveal that?”
“He said he was sorry for the part he played in it all. He wanted to make amends.”
Something isn’t quite adding up. “And the connection to Atterbury? Wait, was he the illegal’s contact at the Bureau?”
She pauses. “One of them. There were several over the years. Atterbury was the last of them.”
“So, what’s the punch line?”
The corners of her mouth drop, and I know the bad news is coming. “The punch line, Beck, is that eight months ago a source our government has in Russian intelligence tells us that the SVR has turned someone on our side, and that the leaked information could have catastrophic consequences for us across the board.”
Now I know why she’s here and not some local G-man. “Well,” I say, “that seems to happen every other week now. And you’re speaking in generalities again. What’s the impact on this story?”
Sana hesitates a second. “Some portion of the information leaked indicates everything I just told you as well as material suggesting this illegal is still alive.” Before I can jump in with the ten or twelve thoughts I’ve just had, Sana continues. “It’s a huge loss for us. Tons of classified stuff. Think Robert Hanssen but bigger. We started losing sources. And like with Hanssen, a lot of people got rounded up and shot, we think.”
“And one of those files also had the names of the illegal’s FBI handlers.”
“Precisely,” she says. “Atterbury included.”
“You’re suggesting the Russians have come looking for the illegal now? If he was still alive, he’d be in his eighties, maybe ninety by now. Why risk it after sixty years?”
She shrugs. “We don’t know. But when you called us to report Atterbury’s murder, we knew it was possible they had sent someone.”
We drive in silence for a few minutes, me with the knot still in my intestines and her watching me as I digest the information she has just shared. “How is it you never found the illegal?”
Sana’s hands go up in surrender. “We tried for years, Atterbury especially. It became a bit of an obsession for him. Like someone looking for lost treasure. Based on some of the information he provided, we believed the illegal had been in Nevada at least some of the time we were in contact. Of course, he never revealed where he was. And he was very good at hiding. We did get enough to believe he had been here at the height of aboveground atomic testing.”
This was an era I know a lot about. My mother died at a young age from cancer, and Lincoln County and half of Utah are littered with the dead and dying resulting from the Cold War’s radioactive winds that blew eastward from those detonations in the Nevada desert.
Sana’s tongue is getting looser by the minute, which conjures another mental image I’m forced to stifle. “We knew that Atterbury had continued his search for the illegal into retirement, but honestly, most of the counterintelligence guys thought he was a bit cuckoo.”
“He thought the illegal was still in Nevada? Like recently?”
“He did. We didn’t. We scoured the country for years looking for this man. We went back and looked at everyone who worked at the test site or had contact with people who worked there during those years. We tore their lives apart. Nothing.”
“Well, Atterbury had something or thought he did. We don’t get a lot of people coming to Lincoln County to retire. We’re more of a way station than a destination.”
“I don’t know,” Sana says. “But you were right, Beck. Atterbury’s killer was looking for someone. The illegal.”
It hits me like a lightning strike, every nerve in my body suddenly on fire. “Yes, but…”
“But?”
“Atterbury’s killer had access to the intelligence leaked to the SVR, intelligence which told him our government still didn’t know who the illegal was. That’s why he ripped Atterbury’s house apart. He was looking for Atterbury’s case notes, his files.”
Sana’s head drops solemnly. “Well, based on what he put the poor man through, I’m guessing he found them.”
I flip on the light bar and toggle the siren switch, jumping back to the fast lane. “I don’t think he did. He tortured Atterbury to death to get him to tell him where those files were. The only reason to rip up the house like that is because Atterbury wouldn’t tell him.”
