Ghost Image, page 8
“If not liking someone’s politics or what he stood for was enough of a motive to commit murder, Washington would be a ghost town, Soph. It’s a big step off the edge into the abyss to go from hating someone to actually doing something about it. What’s your other reason?”
I heard voices in the background on his end of the phone and glanced up at the television. “Here it is,” I said, unmuting the sound on mine. “I’m watching Channel 4.”
“Me, too.”
We were silent as an attractive blond reporter did a live standup in front of the monastery gates. The harsh spotlights lit her and the scenery behind her as if it were daytime while the camera panned to show bouquets of flowers, lighted votive candles, and handwritten notes placed in tribute in front of the entrance to the Rosary Portico.
“The tight-knit Catholic religious community in Brookland, often called ‘Little Rome’ because of the many Catholic institutions located here, is reeling tonight from the death of one of their own,” the reporter said. “Brother Kevin Boyle, a Franciscan friar and internationally known environmentalist, was found—tragically—on the grounds of the Franciscan Monastery’s magnificent gardens in northeast Washington, a place he knew and loved so well.”
She continued talking as the picture switched to B-roll of the monastery, showing the gardens in full bloom, dazzling sweeps of color against vivid greens, on a sun-dappled day. Eventually, the camera zeroed in on the Gethsemane Grotto, and the reporter didn’t miss the opportunity to play up the irony.
I heard Jack’s sharp intake of breath. “That’s where you found him?”
“Yes … shhh, listen. She interviewed Father Xavier.”
The brief taped interview was poignant, and the old priest looked more weary than when I’d seen him this evening. The picture cut back to the reporter, who wove together Kevin’s pioneering work as an environmentalist into the story of Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of plants and animals, before doing her sign-off.
Then the screen flickered to the story of the twelve-year-old boy who’d been shot, his mother’s anguished face. I couldn’t bear to watch her raw grief and turned it off.
After a moment, Jack said, “You were about to tell me the other reason why someone would push Kevin down those stairs. And why he thought someone was following him.”
“I think it might have something to do with his research.” I told him about the key. “I was going to ask Kevin if it was his, but obviously I can’t anymore. Father Xavier didn’t recognize it. He suggested I ask Edward Jaine. Did you know he was underwriting Kevin’s research?”
“No.” Jack sounded as surprised as I’d been. “I didn’t.”
“They were arguing about something last night at the party. I overheard them.”
“Sophie,” he said, “maybe you should just do what Xavier said and ask Jaine about the key.”
I didn’t reply, and he said, “Let me guess. You want to keep it so you can try to find whatever it unlocks.”
“Not keep it, just hang on to it for a while. If Kevin and Edward Jaine were arguing, Kevin probably wouldn’t want him to have it anyway.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I just want to see if I can find out what it opens.”
“And if you do?”
“Then maybe I’ll know why they were arguing and what to do next.”
“And if you don’t?” When I didn’t answer, he said, “It’s a slippery slope, kiddo.”
“Come on, Jack. If the key is Kevin’s, then why did he have to find someplace that he considered safer than the monastery to store something … or hide it? If the autopsy shows he died because of a fall and there are no witnesses who saw anyone with him, the investigation ends there. The crime scene’s contaminated to hell. Every friar who was at the monastery went down there to pray over him. It’s a mess. The police may never find out what really happened.”
“I don’t think—”
“We owe it to Kevin. You know that. I know he’s with God, but he should still be alive. There were so many things he wanted to do, so much good he could have done.”
I heard Jack take another long drink, and when he spoke, his voice was tinged with sadness. “He was an incredible person. And don’t think I didn’t notice that you’ve roped me into this.”
“Just give me twenty-four hours,” I said. “If I don’t find anything by tomorrow evening, I’ll try to contact Edward Jaine and see if he knows anything about the key.”
“If you do find anything, call me. And if I don’t hear from you, I’ll call you.”
“Don’t worry. There’s really only one place I can think of to look. After that, I’m out of ideas.”
Nick phoned the next morning when I was in the kitchen finishing my coffee and reading Grace’s front-page story about Kevin. Her byline ran under the obit as well. Nick had already read the story on the Internet.
Long ago when I realized how much Nick would be on the road for his job with the Agency, we made a pact that we wouldn’t share news that didn’t travel well and would save the rough stuff for when we were together again and could talk it over face-to-face. I didn’t tell Nick that I had found Kevin, or any of the rest of the story about him being stalked or my belief that his death was no accident. He knew, of course, that something was wrong. You can’t fool a spook, especially if you are sleeping with him.
“Are you okay, baby? I wish I were there.”
“I wish you were here, too. Jack took it hard and Grace covered the story for the Trib. Everyone’s devastated.”
“I’m sure.” He exhaled the way he did when he wanted to get something off his chest. “Look, love, I know my industry fought hard against what Kevin stood for, that we don’t accept his arguments and theories that we are somehow responsible for, or the cause of, climate change.”
We had had this discussion before, how industry lawyers and their scientists had come up with an avalanche of data and statistics refuting much of what Kevin had said in Reaping What We Have Sown. Nick was veering into the forbidden territory of news that didn’t travel well. He and I had had our differences on this subject. Some of them involved shouting.
“I don’t think we should—”
“Wait,” he said. “Hear me out. Kevin held our feet to the fire, standing there like the reincarnation of St. Francis of Assisi in his quiet, humble way. He never backed down and he wasn’t afraid of anything or anyone. Everyone in my business listened to him, Soph. I know a lot of people who rooted for him privately though they couldn’t say so publicly, me included. Now that he’s gone, there’s no one who can take his place. He was a formidable adversary. Everyone’s going to miss him, and thanks to you, I was honored to know him as a friend.”
I reached for the dish towel and swiped at my eyes. Eventually I said, “I’m glad you knew him, too.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“I’m not upset.”
“I love you. And I’m afraid I have to go. I’m leaving for the desert tonight and I’m not sure what kind of Internet service I’ll have. But I promise I’ll call or write as soon as I can.”
“I love you, too.”
Nick wasn’t at all religious—the family joke was that he was waiting for the Rapture—so I didn’t expect him to say what he said next. “I guess God decided He needed Kevin more than we did, so He called him home.”
If he meant it as a comfort to me, it wasn’t. I didn’t think God had called Kevin home.
I still thought there was a killer out there who had made that decision.
My solitary idea about what the little gray key unlocked wasn’t that imaginative. At the party two nights ago, Kevin and Thea Stavros had talked about a study room he used in the Science, Technology and Business Library at the Library of Congress. I had already checked and found it was located in the John Adams Building across the street behind the main Jefferson library. What were the odds I’d find lockers there where scholars like Kevin could leave books, papers, and other reference materials at the end of the day?
I grabbed my camera bag and the key to my Vespa from a hook on an antique hall rack and went downstairs. Nick and I rented the top two floors of a Queen Anne gingerbread row house on S Street, just north of Dupont Circle. India Ferrer, our landlady, lived next door, and the lower two floors were occupied by Maximillian Katzer, an interior designer who owned an upscale antiques gallery in Georgetown. Our apartment had come furnished, and we’d sold almost everything we owned in England rather than pay to ship it home, so over the winter Max had taken me around town to his friends’ galleries and used his professional discount and bargaining skills to help me purchase a number of pieces of vintage furniture that would have otherwise been out of my price range. Nick and I moved India’s things to the carriage house in the alley behind the two row houses, and gradually the duplex started to feel like home. In return for Max’s design help and services, I photographed several of his clients’ homes for his portfolio and took pictures for his website. So far we both thought it had been a good deal.
An envelope with M. Katzer Fine Antiques engraved in plum-colored ink lay on the floor below the mail slot when I got downstairs to the foyer. The handwritten note looked like he’d written in haste.
Left very early this morning and didn’t think you’d be up. My deepest condolences on the death of your friend—saw the story on the news. I’ll call you for a drink. I’m sure you could use one. Love.
I took a deep breath, sent him a thank-you text message, and put the note in my camera bag. Overnight the weather had changed from yesterday’s late-winter raw chilliness to the soft sunshine and sharp blue skies of early spring. Washington is like that now, seasons that ping-pong back and forth, so it might be seventy for a few days in December, or there will be a brief, fierce blizzard in late March, instead of the orderly trajectory of the seasons that I remember growing up. Kevin had told me climate change evolved over centuries, not decades, but I still thought the weather was crazier and more extreme now.
I unlocked the large sliding doors to the carriage house where I kept my mint-green Vespa in bad weather. It had been one of my first purchases when I moved home after owning one in London and discovering what a godsend it was in a city with no place to park. But D.C. didn’t have London’s temperate climate, so when the weather turned bad, I took cabs or the Metro, or borrowed Niles, India’s late husband’s British racing-green Jaguar. Parking the Jaguar was like docking the Queen Mary, and within a few months Nick had moved back to D.C. as well, so at Christmas we bought a used red-and-white-striped Mini Cooper convertible from a family friend.
But today was perfect for the Vespa, and after a half-hour trip from Dupont Circle to Capitol Hill, it took only a few minutes to find a lamppost on 2nd Street, a block from the Adams Building, where I chained the scooter.
A guard at the front desk in the empty lobby looked inside my camera bag and asked me to walk through a metal detector before directing me to a bank of elevators down the hall. I was the lone occupant of the car, which went straight to the fifth floor. Unlike the palatial Thomas Jefferson Building across the street, the staid-looking Adams Building, built in the 1930s for the sole purpose of housing overflow books, wasn’t a tourist destination. The only people I was likely to encounter in the corridors were employees of the Library of Congress and people who had come to do research as Kevin had done. So far, other than the guard downstairs, I hadn’t seen a soul.
The double doors to the Science and Business Reading Room had been thrown open on an enormous high-ceilinged Art Deco space of lighted bookcases and walls of gray concrete block decorated with subtly colored murals and quotations. Candlestick lamps with green-striped copper shades lined rows of mahogany tables and made pools of golden light in an otherwise coolly lit elegant room where half a dozen people read, wrote, or typed on laptops. Kevin must have loved this beautiful place with its air of Old World scholarship and reverential silence.
A cute blonde who looked like she’d just graduated college asked for my reader’s card at the entrance desk. The laminated ID around her neck said her name was Logan Day. A few months ago when I was still working at the photo agency in Georgetown, I’d gotten a reader’s card when I needed to use another of the library’s specialized reading rooms before a photo shoot at the Turkish embassy. I pulled it out of my wallet and handed it to Logan Day. She examined it and asked me to sign in.
“Is Thea Stavros here?” I asked.
“She’s in her office. Do you have an appointment?”
“No. Actually, I was just wondering if this reading room has public lockers.”
“Around the corner,” she said, and I felt a little zing of excitement. “The long teal doors, two rows of them, above the bookshelves. You’ll need a library ladder to reach the top row. Unfortunately, ever since the earthquake a few are jammed shut, but you won’t have any problem finding one that’s free.”
“The earthquake damaged this building?” I said.
“It did that.” She pointed to a long jagged crack like a lightning bolt in the far wall. “And some of the lockers. But I’m sure you’ll find an empty one.”
I thanked her and walked around the corner.
A moment later I was back, holding the key. “Those look like storage cabinets. I’m looking for the locker that this key fits, number fifty-eight.”
Logan examined it. “It’s not ours.”
“Don’t the people who use your research facilities need lockers to keep their things secure when they leave at the end of the day?”
She passed the key back to me and shook her head. “They’re called study rooms, but they’re more like individual private offices with doors that can be locked. Everyone leaves their stuff in their own room.” She frowned. “Why are you so sure that key belongs to us?”
I’d tripped too many red flags and now I’d made her suspicious. But I was also out of ideas about what the key might unlock. “I’m not. A friend who uses one of your rooms might have dropped it when he and I were down at the Tidal Basin yesterday.”
Her eyes narrowed. “So you’re trying to get into your friend’s locker, rather than returning the key to him?”
“I don’t know if it’s his, so I thought I would check here first. Unfortunately I can’t ask him anymore if it belonged to him.”
“Why not?”
“He’s dead.”
We were no longer speaking in library whispers, and I could feel the eyes of everyone sitting nearby focused on the two of us as though an electrical current had passed through the place.
She turned pale. “I think I should get Thea.” She glanced down at my name on her sign-in sheet. “Please wait here, Ms. Medina.”
I set my camera bag down and pretended to study the murals that formed an enormous frieze around the room, ignoring the stares I was getting. In a lighted alcove above the reference desk, a fan-shaped painting of Thomas Jefferson with Monticello in the background had an inscription in a corner: THIS ROOM IS DEDICATED TO THOMAS JEFFERSON. By the time I realized that all the murals and all the quotes were in some way related to Jefferson, Thea Stavros had burst through a set of double doors and was striding across the room.
She wore a tailored navy silk shirtwaist dress and held a lace-trimmed handkerchief in one hand. As she got closer, I wondered if she had been crying because her mascara looked smudged.
She didn’t bother with a greeting, nor did she seem surprised to see me. “I heard the awful news about Kevin this morning,” she said. “I still can’t believe it.”
“I know. Me, either.”
“Logan said you’ve brought a key that belonged to a friend who died and you thought it was ours. It’s Kevin’s, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know.”
Logan placed a hand over her heart as though she’d just felt a sudden pain. “Your friend was Brother Kevin Boyle?” she asked me, and I nodded. “He was such a sweetheart, everyone here loved him.”
“May I see the key?” Thea asked.
We still had the undivided attention of everyone in the room. I handed it to Thea and she studied it.
“Why don’t you leave it with me? I’ll ask around at the other libraries and see if I can find out what it opens.”
Giving up the key wasn’t what I had in mind. “What about Kevin’s study room?” I said. “Would it be possible to see if the key unlocks something he left in there?”
“You’ve got the master key, Thea,” Logan said. “Maybe the three of us ought to check it out.”
Thea gave Logan an admonishing look. “There are privacy issues, my dear.”
“Kevin’s dead,” I said. “I can give the key to Father Navarro, the guardian at the Franciscan Monastery. He can fill out the appropriate paperwork to get Kevin’s things returned. I guess I can wait and ask him.”
I held my breath, hoping Thea was as curious as I was about the key. She turned it over in her hand and wrestled with protocol. Finally she sighed and said, “The study rooms are just through those double doors. I suppose we can take a quick look.”
A small staircase on the other side of the doors led to a dimly lit corridor of sea-green walls. Glass-fronted doors lined one side of the hallway. A floor-to-ceiling metal bookshelf divided into compartments ran the length of the opposite wall, and a few of the compartments held books, magazines, and reference items bound together in neat bundles.
“After I saw Kevin yesterday morning, he was planning to come by here and pick up the documents you told him about at the engagement party,” I said. “Is this where you left them?”
Thea rifled through the bundles that were waiting to be retrieved. “Yes, but Kevin’s papers are still here. He never got them. Did he sign in yesterday, Logan?”
Logan picked up a clipboard with a sheet of paper on it from a small table near the stairs. “The last time he was here was Monday. Four days ago.”
