The Rivers Run Dry Page 2

  I shrugged. “It rains in Virginia.”

  “Sure it does. But do you feel like you’ve been in the shower for six months?”

  I snapped off my gloves, told him to call if there was anything else, and drove back to the office with the windows down. My assigned government ride was a 1997 Buick Skylark. At first glance, it looked dark blue, but in the bright sun it revealed a peculiar shade of purple, a color that provoked my colleagues to dub it “The Barney Mobile” after the fake dinosaur on children’s television. The color didn’t bother me as much as the smell that came from the backseat, a rank stench of vomit that rose like an apparition, testifying to the fear and panic in every collared criminal who ever puked back there. As if that wasn’t enough, the car’s engine knocked too, a sound like spare parts coming loose under the hood. I checked; I couldn’t find anything.

  But for my foreseeable future, this was my car, and the Seattle field office was home base, courtesy of a disciplinary transfer that was requested by my former supervisor in Richmond. Disciplinary transfers were one way the Bureau dissuaded agents from dis-agreeing with orders, even when the order seemed wrong. Scratch that: especially when the order seemed wrong. My now former supervisor claimed I had placed myself in grave danger unnecessarily, that I continued to work the case even after she’d suspended me. The case closed with spectacular effects for the Bureau, the Feds looking like heroes, but my supervisor still thought I needed punishment. To her disappointment, Alaska didn’t have an opening. She chose the next farthest office from Richmond.

  Now I drove down Madison Street, heading toward Seattle’s waterfront, descending the steep grade that rolled across down-town in an east-west pattern. Although the Bureau’s field office perched atop Spring Street in a ten-story building with an under-ground garage, my assigned parking spot sat fifteen blocks away on a sliver of leased land above the barnacle-covered piers that buttressed the waterfront.

  I left the windows cracked, locked my car, and loaded up my gear. Laptop, handheld radio, cell phone, gym bag for a lunch-time workout that never happened, and my briefcase. Then I slipped on a blazer that covered the Glock .22 holstered to my belt. In the distance, a ferryboat horned the air.

  The first seven blocks weren’t so bad. They ran parallel to Puget Sound, but the second half pitched near forty degrees. The sun burned on my back, my hands stung from twenty pounds of gear, and my thighs ached so badly that when I reached the corner of James and Spring Street, my hello to Mike at the front desk was nothing more than a hoarse whisper. I rode the elevator to the third floor, wiping sweat from my forehead. When the doors parted, a gruff voice barked my name.

  “Harmon!”

  Allen McLeod, my new supervisor.

  I walked down the main corridor of the Violent Crimes unit, my gym bag bouncing off my right leg. Allen McLeod approached from the opposite side of the room, lumbering through a maze of cubicles with towering stacks of paper until he reached my desk. He rested one large hand on the column of cardboard boxes with case numbers scrawled across their sides. I still hadn’t unpacked.

  “Where’ve you been?” he asked.

  A big man, he wore starched white shirts that looked pilfered from the closets of his superiors. The red suspenders were flecked with oily stains.

  “Jack sent me out to Issaquah. They wanted legal backup on a missing.” I explained that we’d taken tire impressions and soil samples.

  “See if Jack needs anything else,” he said. “And check with me end of day.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He paused, about to say something, then walked away. I set my laptop and briefcase on my desk, rubbing a sweaty palm creased by the nylon straps. My desk phone blinked with unanswered messages. I punched in my numbered code for voice mail, writing down the information, and halfway through the second message, Jack Stephanson walked over and rested a muscular haunch on the edge of my desk.

  “How’d it go, Harmon?”

  I raised an index finger, indicating that I was still writing. He reached down, depressing the plastic triangle in the phone bed, severing the message.

  “I asked you a question,” he said.

  Setting down the receiver as if it were made of glass, I described my visit to Issaquah. Jack’s azure eyes were set close and they gave his face the focused intensity of a German shepherd. When he asked me to recount the evidence collection procedure again, I said, “Did I do something wrong?”

  “No,” he said. “File it.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Send that thing down with the Titanic. It’s another nowhere case. But that’s just my opinion,” he added. “You might choose to do something different. But I know you can handle the consequences.”

  “What are you saying, Jack?”

  He stood up. “I need you to get to the courthouse.”

  “You just said file this.”

  “You need to pick up my paperwork,” he said. “Pronto.”

  I counted to five. “I’ve got an interview scheduled in half an hour. McLeod wants a background check on a Federal applicant.”

  “Tell the clerk down at the courthouse that I want certified copies of all prior convictions on a guy named Bookman Landrow,” he continued, as though I’d said nothing. “Case goes to trial Thursday. Keep that day open. I need an assist.”

  He adjusted his blue jeans; they groped his muscular legs. “Oh, and another thing, Harmon . . .”

  I swiveled the chair, picking up the telephone, punching in my code again. It was only fair. He wasn’t explaining why the VanAlstyne case was a dead end; I didn’t need to listen. He stood behind me for several moments, then walked away. When I glanced down the aisle, watching his cowboy’s swagger in lug-soled shoes, he suddenly turned around and raised his voice, making sure it crossed the cluttered room. “Harmon, I need those documents now. So quit pouting and get over to the clerk’s office.”

  From the corner of my eye, I saw my supervisor lift his head. The phone stayed nestled between my shoulder and ear and I wrote down all eight messages, documenting the information, before logging onto the computer and checking e-mail. I replied to one message from a former colleague in the FBI’s mineralogy lab in Washington DC, and ignored the Bureau’s blanket request for agents willing to move to Iraq and investigate stolen antiquities. Twenty minutes later, I walked down the corridor to the squad’s conference room and purchased a can of Coca-Cola and two bags of potato chips from the vending machine. Between bites, I returned two phone calls.

  Forty-nine minutes later, I walked outside, heading toward the courthouse on Jack’s orders. The sun was still shining and the west side of the city’s skyscrapers reflected the view of Puget Sound. The glass panels made it look like the ferryboats were navigating vertical reaches, cruising up an ocean of concrete, sailing for the bright and distant sun.

  chapter two

  When I was assigned to Violent Crimes, I expected some hazing. The good intentions of the politically correct had assigned some unfortunate token women to the toughest unit of the FBI, the unit that called out SWAT more than any other branch. As much as anything else, necessity forced the Violent Crime units to develop their own proving grounds; these guys deserved to know whether I could cover their backs.

  But Jack Stephanson wanted some torture beyond hazing. An alpha among alphas, Jack was assigned by my squad supervisor to be my training agent, the person who guides the newbie through her transfer, eases the transition, shows her the ropes. Instead, Jack was fashioning my noose.

  Per his order, I found the King County Courthouse, a Beaux Arts-style building that swallowed a block between Jefferson and James streets. In the clerk’s office, a homeless man stood at the public computer, pile-driving a soiled middle finger into the Return key. When the computer froze, he cursed the pretty woman standing behind the counter, spittle gathering at the corners of his chapped mouth. He picked up a rumpled paper bag from the floor, promised to return, and shambled down the hallway, leaving behind a scent of salt a
nd paranoia.

  I walked to the counter and asked the clerk for help.

  “Can I see some ID?” she said.

  Her blonde hair fell like liquid citrine, her bare tan shoulders dark against her yellow sundress. She wore high heels, and to read my credentials, she balanced herself by placing both manicured hands on the laminate counter. Then she tipped back on her heels.

  “Jack just called me,” she said. “You’re an agent?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You work with Jack.”

  “That’s right.”

  She paused. “Like, side by side?”

  “He’s a colleague.”

  She repeated the word, a sharp pebble on her tongue. “Colleague. That means you go on stakeouts together. Stuff like that?”

  “I’m not sure what you’re asking.”

  “It’s fifty cents a page for straight copies,” she said. “We charge a fee for certifying every page.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Type the guy’s name into that computer.” She pointed a red fingernail at the computer terminal where the homeless man had been.

  “But that computer’s not working,” I said.

  “Guess you’ve got a problem.”

  Behind her, a computer rested on a long wooden desk. And behind that, a Xerox machine hummed idly against the far wall.

  “Could you print out the copies for me?” I asked. “We would pay all the fees.”

  “You got cash?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Cash. We only take cash. No credit cards. With fees for certifying and all, you’re looking at fifty bucks easy. Jack says the guy has priors up the yin-yang.”

  “Okay. Do you know where I might find a cash machine?”

  “Beats me.” She smiled, her teeth white as petrified bone. “Be sure to tell Jack that Tiffany says hello.”

  She turned and walked back toward the metal cabinets, past the available computer and the Xerox machine, her high heels clicking across the marble floor, a sound like an empty chamber tumbling in a revolver.

  Later that evening, as dusk settled over Seattle in a series of stratus clouds that glowed like backlit amethyst, I opened the front door to my aunt’s house on Capital Hill. A small black dog raced down the hallway to greet me. I dropped my briefcase and lap-top, kneeling to stroke Madame’s soft fur, whispering praise in her ears. Down the wainscoted hallway, I could hear my aunt’s voice, the sound of the old South gone west, and the voice of my mother, a woman Virginia-born and bred and believing.

  “Nadine,” my aunt said, “here’s another good one. See what you think.”

  “Oh, Charlotte, really, you believe I need it?”

  With Madame by my side, I walked down the hall and found my mother and aunt in the kitchen with three long-haired cats hunched across the painted table. As Madame entered the room, the cats arched their backs, hissing, and my mother’s dog crawled under the table, curling beside her feet.

  “All you have to do is wear it,” my aunt was saying. “Rub the crystals if the situation is particularly bad.”

  She draped the necklace of polished stones around my mother’s neck.

  “That’s fuschite,” I said.

  She waved a plump hand, dismissing me. “Raleigh, forget all the geo-technobabble. Who cares? What matters is these stones can protect your mother.”

  “Protect her—from what?” I bit back the obvious point: fuschite wasn’t protecting her from any nutty New Age ideas.

  My mother leaned forward, allowing the light to catch the stones’ green and silver veins. “My, Charlotte, this is beautiful,” she said. “But I’ve never heard of such a thing. Have you, Raleigh?”

  I shook my head. Charlotte Harmon had lived in Seattle twenty-one years, having fled Richmond in the wake of an acrimonious divorce. Back then, Seattle was a somewhat obscure city, particularly to Southerners, and I remember my mother wondering aloud why anyone would cross the Mason-Dixon Line if a gun wasn’t at their back. But my aunt had found her true home.

  And now we were living with her in an old Craftsman bungalow on the northeast edge of downtown. In the two weeks since we’d arrived, the tone of my mother’s soft voice had changed from familiarity to uncertainty, as her sister-in-law revealed how far she’d fled from the South.

  “Nadine, you will not regret wearing protection in this city,” she said. “It’s the best place in the world, but even the ghosts want to live here. You need to arm yourself, spiritually speaking.”

  “I just don’t see how that’s necessary, Charlotte.” My mother turned to me, looking for help. “Raleigh?”

  I opened my mouth but my aunt barreled forward.

  “If you’re worried about the necklace matching your outfit, just put it in your purse. You can touch the stones every now and then if you feel threatened. You won’t believe the change that comes over you.”

  “This is nuts,” I said.

  “Raleigh Ann!” my mother said. “Don’t be rude.”

  My aunt placed her hands on ample hips, her batiked silk tunic seeming to quiver.

  “I’m telling you, Nadine, this city is the Grand Central Station of the spirit world. Every spirit comes through Seattle before going on to other dimensions. And some of them never leave.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  My mother threw me a harsh look, then smiled at Charlotte as though she were offering a free vacuum. “Go on, Charlotte.”

  “You remember when I moved to Seattle, I was as thin as Raleigh. Now look at me. I’m as wide as the Chesapeake and it’s all because this city has a spirit of hunger. Food, food, it’s all about food here. If you don’t protect yourself, Nadine, you’ll find twenty pounds landing on your hips by Christmas.”

  “Aunt Charlotte, this is—”

  “Raleigh,” my mother warned.

  Holding up the plump hand, she severed my mother’s scold. “You just watch, Raleigh. You won’t be able to stop eating.”

  “I don’t want to stop eating.”

  “That’s what you think.”

  The last time I saw my aunt was at my father’s funeral, four years earlier. She was an exotic character, the aunt who sent me rocks for birthdays and Christmas, and she had flown into Richmond with the smell of patchouli and rain and grief. She had been sensitive enough, or sufficiently devastated, that she did not raise any New Age ideas then, but now I recalled how she gripped a specimen of pink tourmaline during my father’s funeral. At the time, my mind numbed with pain, I only saw a mineral the color of antique roses and a bosomy woman with tear-streaked cheeks whose pudgy fingers rubbed a rock with an agitation I mistook for misery. Her brother, my father, was dead, murdered in an alley near our house.

  I saw pink tourmaline, not spiritual kryptonite.

  “Speaking of hunger, what’s for dinner?” I said, attempting to change the subject.

  “How does tofu tetrazzini sound?” my mother said.

  “You’re asking me?”

  “It sounds great!” my aunt said.

  My mother shooed the cats off the table, and I walked upstairs to change clothes and search my closet for the stash of candy bars. My bedroom, barely used, was a shrine to my late father. Every morning before work, I locked the door with a brass skeleton key, hoping to shield my mother from the walls that held copies of his law degree from the University of Virginia, the official appointment to the state’s Superior Court, the handwritten note from the governor, vowing every resource to solve a crime that to this day remained unsolved. Even the bookcases held his boyhood favorites—Treasure Island, Pilgrim’s Progress—with prep school tennis trophies and blue ribbons for shag dancing contests.

  I did not believe in ghosts, except one who was holy, but there was no mistaking that in this bedroom my father felt close, palpable. The feeling comforted and haunted me at the same time.

  When my cell phone rang, I pulled the closet door behind me, leaving an inch open for air, and lifted the phone off
my belt clip.

  “Harmon?” My supervisor, Allen McLeod.

  “Yes, sir.”

  He paused. “Jack sent you to Issaquah today. That right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Girl missing?”

  “Correct.”

  “Go talk to the parents. Start making nice. We’re in a bad game of hot tomato. The parents called a senator in Washington. He called our ASAC who called me. He wants to know what we were doing about her disappearance.”

  “I was told they wanted it kept quiet.”

  “You did that. I didn’t know what the ASAC was talking about because you didn’t explain it to me.”

  “Jack told me to file it, sir. He said it was a nothing case.”

  I heard the bedroom door open. My mother said, “Raleigh, do you know where my—” She stopped at the closet door, dropping her voice to a whisper. “Oh, you’re on the phone. I’ll wait.”

  “Jack meant file it after you checked with me,” McLeod said. “I’m sure that’s what he told you.”

  “Yes, sir.” I watched my mother turn and take in the documents on the walls. The bedside table lamp cast gold into her dark curls. I heard her gasp.

  “Get over to the parents right away. Tonight. And check in with me first thing tomorrow morning. We need to be on this like wet on rice.”

  My mother stood beside the bed, leaning into the black-and-white photograph of my father holding a tennis racket. He was smiling.

  “Harmon?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Are you listening to me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Full briefing tomorrow morning.”

  I closed the phone.

  My mother was moving like somebody about to lift a dark veil. She went from photograph to document to the bookcase, her fingertips brushing the fringed blue ribbons. When she turned back to me, her face was porcelain.

  “Have you seen my raincoat?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Strange. I can’t find it anywhere. I know I brought one. Do you think it’s possible somebody stole it?”

  “No. Of course not. You misplaced it. That’s all.”