Rough Draft Page 2

  The kitchen door was open. Hannah stepped inside and saw immediately that something was wrong. A burner on the gas stove was fluttering its blue flame. A pan of grits had tumbled onto the floor and spilled across the tile. They looked as hard and cold as white rubber.

  Hannah came around the breakfast counter and called out for her mother.

  Then she stumbled hard against the refrigerator, nearly went down. Dressed in white linen, Martha Keller was sprawled in front of the stove. There were three bullet wounds in her upper torso. Chest, lungs, stomach. The bloodstain against the white dress had taken the shape of a large, disfigured butterfly.

  Hannah stood for a moment, staring at her mother’s body just as she had stared at hundreds of other corpses in the last five years. Countless gunshot victims who had come to rest in the same eerie, inert pose as Martha Keller.

  Hannah dropped her purse and stepped close to her mother’s body and kneeled down to feel for a pulse. But there was none. The flesh was cool and her mother’s eyes were open, her face holding a look that was neither frightened nor angry nor in any distress at all. She looked composed. A quiet calm, as if she were simply daydreaming there on the Mexican tiles.

  Hannah rose and turned to the kitchen window. She could see her father’s fishing skiff still tied to the dock in the wide canal.

  She whirled around and called out her son’s name. And called it out again.

  She snatched up her purse and drew out her Glock nine.

  She was a police officer now. Not the daughter of the deceased.

  She edged to the swinging door that opened onto the living room. She pointed the pistol upward and slung aside the door and stepped across the threshold.

  Twenty feet away she saw her father’s legs, his body hidden by the green corduroy couch. He was wearing his blue seersucker trousers, part of an ensemble he’d worn hundreds of times before. White shirt and his blue tie with sailboats printed on it, blue-striped seersucker suit coat. His plantation owner’s look.

  Hannah inched across the room, panning the pistol back and forth as she moved past the two couches and overstuffed chairs. Her heart was numb, her breath tight in her lungs. Some essential muscle in her soul had short-circuited. She was only dimly aware, seeing the room as if through some weirdly distorted lens. An undersea vision, cloudy and wavering.

  “Randall!” she called, and swung around to aim her pistol at the empty bedroom doorway. “Randall!”

  She stepped forward, around the end of the couch.

  And the pistol nearly fell from her hands. She gasped, staggered forward.

  Her father was lolling on the Oriental rug, one arm trapped behind his back at an obscene angle, the other arm extended across the rug. In his hand he gripped the chrome Smith & Wesson .357 revolver, the one pistol in his collection he kept loaded. His white shirt was punctured in three places and the blood had pooled around his left armpit.

  His face was hidden by a glossy photograph.

  She inched forward, aiming her pistol at the doorway to the den. She crouched down, blinded by tears.

  “Randall!” she screamed “Randall!”

  The killer had used a blue pushpin from the bulletin board in her father’s study to fix the photograph to his face. He’d gouged the thumbtack into the flesh of Ed Keller’s forehead to hold in place the eight-by-ten glossy of J. J. Fielding, banker, money launderer, fugitive.

  “Randall!”

  She pushed herself back upright and edged across the room toward the bedroom. She hopped through the door, swinging the pistol from side to side. The bed was made, the room tidy. Light streamed in through the French doors that opened onto the patio.

  “It’s me, Randall. It’s Mommy.”

  At the foot of the bed, the green and gold throw rug was askew as if Ed Keller had come running from the bathroom at the sound of the shots, kicked it awry. Hours ago. Breakfast time.

  She moved to the bathroom, stepped inside, slung the shower curtain aside, and pointed the Glock at the bare porcelain.

  She turned and went back into the bedroom and halted.

  It wasn’t a noise that stopped her or a scent or anything out of place. It was some disturbance in the air, some barometric flutter her sensors had detected.

  “Randall?” she said quietly. “Is that you, Randall?”

  She drew aside the folding louvered door and stepped into her parents’ closet. There at the back under a pile of Hannah’s own laundry, clothes she’d brought over to her mother’s because her own washer had broken down, there beneath her jeans and blouses and underwear, in the heavy-scented mass of work clothes and after-work clothes, she saw Randall’s bare foot.

  “Randall?” she whispered.

  The pistol dropped from her hand.

  “Randall?”

  She fell onto the pile of laundry, throwing aside the cotton jerseys and denim. And Randall looked up at her with the dull, unfocused flatness of the blind. His unruly blond hair was damp with sweat. His white skin flushed, the freckles on his cheek seemed to be glowing.

  “I was fishing,” he said, his voice empty.

  “Randall, are you all right?” She inspected his limbs, his torso. Then drew him to her, hugged his small, perfect body against hers.

  “I was on the seawall,” he said, his mouth near her ear. “I was fishing.”

  “Don’t,” she whispered. “We can talk later.”

  “I saw them go in the kitchen door. Three men.”

  She relaxed her hold on him. He lifted his head, stared up at his grandparents’ clothes hanging above him.

  “Two short men and one tall,” he said.

  He drew out of the embrace and spoke as if in a trance. A few words, a pause, his eyes detached.

  “They had on white pants. White shirts. And white hats. Like painters. Like house painters. I thought they were doing work for Granddad. Then I came inside and I found them lying on the floor. There was blood all over. They’re dead, aren’t they, Mommy? Granddaddy and Nana are dead.”

  She nodded.

  “But you’re all right, Randall. You’re going to be just fine.”

  “I was fishing,” he said. “There were three of them. They looked like house painters.”

  “It’s okay, it’s okay, Randall.”

  His body was rigid. Face slack, eyes filmed over, Randall stared off at some invisible spot in the air, his lips pursed as if he were blowing bubbles of silence.

  And those were the last words he spoke. For days he did not utter a sound. Those days stretched into silent, agonizing weeks. Hannah rarely left his side. For long hours, he curled up in her lap and the two of them rocked. His eyes were disengaged. He sat in the living room and gazed out the window. He lay in bed beside her and peered up at the ceiling. He sat motionless in the bow of his skiff while Hannah steered them up and down his favorite mangrove canals and pointed out the great blue herons, the ospreys. Sometimes he turned his head in the direction she pointed, but his eyes were empty.

  He ate little, slept not at all. His blood pressure fluctuated wildly. The first psychiatrist Hannah took him to prescribed a mild antianxiety drug, but it had no effect. The next two psychiatrists told her that she should simply stay on her present course, give Randall as much love and reassurance as she could. Keep talking to him in normal tones, touch him gently and often. Be there for him when he was ready to speak. This was a trance that only he could break and only when he was ready.

  After three weeks of Randall’s silence, Hannah had almost given up, resigned to life with a mute son, a boy stunted forever. Destroyed because his mother hadn’t been there to protect him.

  Then one morning at breakfast as she set a plate of blueberry pancakes before him, he looked up and said, “Hi.”

  She held back the tears. Pretended it was a perfectly ordinary moment.

  “Hi,” she said. But Randall would say no more for the next hour.

  Midmorning they were sitting on the dock, watching the mangrove snappers cruise b
eneath their dangling legs. Hannah’s pulse was wild. Randall looked over at her and said, “I’m sorry, Mom.”

  “Sorry?” she said. “You haven’t done anything, Randall. Nothing at all.”

  She hugged him against her chest and wept.

  A month and a half after the murders, the FBI’s forensics people were still nowhere. Dozens of hair or fiber samples at the scene, but nothing useful. No usable fingerprints, no DNA samples. Particles of sand in the carpet, dirt, pebbles, sandspurs, smudges of dog shit, leaves, twigs. Everything and nothing.

  According to the ballistics reports and the trajectory studies done later by the FBI, a single pistol was used, a thirty-two caliber, and all three shots were fired by a person taller than six feet. Beyond that, there was no physical trace of the shooter and his accomplices, nothing but the molecules of their breath still circulating in the room and that photograph tacked to her father’s forehead.

  Frank Sheffield, the FBI’s lead investigator on the case, dismissed the photo as a red herring. Too obvious, too convenient to be believed. According to Frank, the three men had walked into the study, grabbed the first item they saw that might incriminate some other party, and left it on the scene. Such arrogance didn’t fit their profile of J. J. Fielding, leaving behind a calling card. Anyway, the guy was a banker, a high-powered number-cruncher. Not a killer.

  Oh, sure, they were still seeking him on the money-laundering charge, but he wasn’t the FBI’s prime suspect for the murders, not even close. There were dozens of others on the list ahead of him, bad people, serious felons, all of whom had been Ed Keller’s target at one time or another. All considered far more likely than Fielding to order a hit or do the deed themselves.

  With Randall back in school and Hannah on leave, she spent her days scouring old newspaper files, questioning Fielding’s associates at Nation’s Trust, searching for any scrap of evidence that might point to the man’s whereabouts. At one point she showed up on the porch of Maude Fielding, the banker’s abandoned wife. After a moment’s hesitation, Mrs. Fielding invited her in, made her tea, listened to her story. Said nothing till Hannah asked the one question she’d come for, “Was your husband capable of murder?”

  Maude Fielding smiled quietly.

  “My dear,” she said, “who among us isn’t capable of it?”

  For weeks Hannah took notes, developed theories, relentlessly badgered Frank Sheffield. A nice guy, mellow, looked more like an aging tennis bum than an FBI agent. Lived in a dinky motel on the beach at Key Biscayne, ran around shirtless when he wasn’t at work. Hannah knocked on his motel room door at six in the morning, ten at night, bombarded him with seven, eight phone calls a day. “Did you consider this?” “Have you looked into that?” “The shooter was taller than six feet. Fielding was six foot one.”

  “A lot of people are over six feet, Hannah. And who were the other two guys with him, his chauffeur and butler?”

  Frank Sheffield was always patient and respectful, looking her straight in the eye, though he must have considered her a flaming crackpot.

  Because of course she was. During her years with homicide she’d often been on the receiving end of the same kind of lunacy. A victim’s family member calling every day, convinced that unless they did so the investigation would be shelved. Pestering, pestering.

  But she couldn’t help herself. So inflamed with rage, she couldn’t stop. Picking up the phone, dialing it again, “Frank Sheffield, please.” The secretaries started recognizing her voice. Frank was in a conference. Frank was in the field.

  Weeks like that. Every waking moment on the phone or at the library. Until one evening as she was setting the phone back on the hook after sharing another brilliant idea with Frank Sheffield, she turned to find Randall staring at her from the doorway of her study. His mouth twisted, eyes red.

  “What is it?” she asked him. “What’s wrong, Randall?”

  He took a breath, a tear gleaming on his cheek.

  “Please stop,” he said. “I can’t take it anymore. I want it to be over.”

  So she stopped. No more calls. No faxes. Nothing.

  J. J. Fielding was never seen or heard from again. No one at the FBI ever informed her directly, but she knew how it worked. Without a prime suspect or fresh leads, the probe of her parents’ murder gradually faded from their high-priority roster. Until finally the case slipped quietly to the Bureau’s back shelves.

  ONE

  There were no windows in room 2307 of the FBI office building at 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan. An interior room, plain white walls, naked except for an FBI seal and a TV screen flush-mounted beside it. Gray carpet, and a long cherry table with fifteen green leather chairs. Five of them occupied today. A couple of minutes earlier the small talk had died away, now everyone was quiet, eyes down, sipping their coffee, waiting for Special Agent Helen Shane to arrive.

  One look around the conference table and Frank Sheffield knew a serious mistake had been made. He didn’t belong here. Not with these people. Unless maybe he’d been ordered to New York on a Saturday morning to face a reprimand for his total and unwavering lack of distinction. Twenty-one years with the Bureau without a single commendation. A record so undistinguished it had given Frank Sheffield a kind of reverse fame.

  He worked out of the Miami field office, one of the busiest in the country, over seven thousand cases last year, six hundred-fifty agents and support personnel responsible for FBI activity from Vero Beach all the way to Antarctica. Frank hadn’t heard of any major crime outbreaks in Antarctica, then again, you could never be sure when the penguin population might start acting up.

  It wasn’t that Frank was a screw-off. He did his job as well as the next guy. But he wasn’t at the head of the line volunteering for extra duty, and he sure as hell didn’t have that spit-shined gung-ho bearing that bumped you steadily up the ladder. He served warrants, sat in surveillance vans, carried crates of subpoenaed documents from banks and boiler room operations. He sat in meetings half of every day, adding to his collection of doodles. Mostly he kept his head down, went home at five, took his kayak out on the bay, paddled ten miles around Key Biscayne, good weather or foul, and by the time he got back to his little stretch of beach, all the day’s aggravations were magically erased.

  Any way you looked at it, Sheffield didn’t belong in this room with this bunch of fired-up overachievers who spent all their waking hours keeping America safe and their careers revving in high gear.

  Across the table was Deputy Assistant Director Charlie Pettigrew who ten years ago was Special Agent in Charge of the Miami field office, Frank’s boss. Somehow Charlie had parlayed one minor talent into major career advancement. Not exactly a yes-man, still Charlie was a guy who could sing harmony to any tune. Great at meetings, aligning himself with the right position. These days Pettigrew was fourth down the chain of command from Director Robert Kelly. Charlie was looking slim and spiffy, sharply creased white shirt, jeans. But Frank detected a little upper-echelon worry in his old buddy’s eyes. Bigger concerns, more shades of gray than the old days in Miami, gunning for dopers, tearing holes in the cocaine pipeline.

  On the other side of the table, slouching in his seat, was a kid named Andy Barth, twenty-something, with die long stringy blond hair and wolfish face of an undercover dope cop. Frank had seen the kid’s picture a lot lately in internal press releases. The Bureau’s computer guru, headed the cyber-crime division, fastest growing section in the FBI. Andy wore ratty blue jeans and a fresh white T-shirt. He was helping himself to the basket of Danish in the middle of the table. Taking one, offering them around, taking another. A boy with serious cravings.

  At the head of the table was Abraham Ackerman, senior United States senator from New York, and Chair of the Armed Services Committee. For a man in his early fifties he obviously kept himself gym-pumped. His dark wavy hair was swept back on the sides, and he was wearing a blue baseball hat with the FBI logo embroidered in gold on the front. Probably a gift from Director Ke
lly. Ackerman wore a yellow golf shirt, faded jeans, and running shoes. Very casual on this Saturday morning, just one of the guys. Former college quarterback, Penn State, missed the national championship by a field goal. Two feet wide right. Frank remembered it because he’d won two hundred bucks on the game. With a mediocre team around him, Ackerman had thrown for over three hundred yards, run for a hundred more, almost won the championship single-handedly. A man who could carry ten guys on his back, haul them to the mountaintop. He’d done it then, been doing it ever since. Maybe not an astronaut, never walked on the moon, but the next best thing.

  As Chair of the Armed Services Committee, the guy was used to five-star generals kowtowing to him, sitting there in a row, chests dripping with medals and ribbons while the senior senator from New York chewed them out or blasted holes in their latest budget requests.

  That morning there was a hum rising from Ackerman’s flesh like the tick of radioactivity. Not exactly the look of a grieving father. Frank had seen the story on the evening news a few weeks back, Ackerman, wiping tears from his eyes, had taken questions from reporters. Joanie, his only daughter, a teenager, had been killed in a skiing accident in Aspen. Took a wrong trail in the tricky light of dusk, and smashed into a tree. Tragic mess.

  But this morning the man looked like he was totally back to business. The way he lifted his eyes and measured each person in the room, his gaze swinging sharply to the doorway as Helen Shane made her entrance.