Dead Man’s List

“Well, you could still laugh, just to be polite,” Reggie said.

DeMarco just shook his head then pointed at Reggie’s drink and held up two fingers for the bartender’s benefit.

“What do you know about Terry Finley?” DeMarco asked.

Reggie drained his first martini. “The kid that drowned?” he said.

“Yeah, the kid that drowned.” Finley had been forty-two when he died.

Reggie shrugged, then reached for the full glass the bartender had just placed at his elbow. He swallowed a third of the drink before saying, “What do I know about him? Well, he worked the political beat, of course.”

“Why ‘of course’?”

“The only reason he got the job was because his dad was a congressman. The schemers in charge figured a kid whose dad worked on the Hill would give the paper an edge.”

“Did it?”

“No. Terry was an annoying, ambitious little shit, one of those guys who always thought he was gonna be the next Bobby Woodward, but he never tried to use his old man to get there.”

“Was he any good?”

Reggie swallowed the remainder of his second martini; as an afterthought he reached for the olives from his first martini. At the rate Reggie drank, DeMarco was thinking that they should just hook up an IV bag to his arm.

“Only in his dreams,” Reggie said. “A couple years ago he got everyone all excited when he said he’d discovered that this colonel over at the Pentagon was an al-Qaeda mole. The basis for his conclusion was that the guy—the Pentagon guy—was always meeting this dishy, Arabic-looking gal in these seedy hotel bars. Turned out the guy was just boffing the lady, who happened to be Egyptian, but was no more into Islam than the Pope. That was Terry: seeing a spy ring instead of two people fuckin’.”

“Huh,” DeMarco said. “Was he working on anything important before he died?”

“Maybe. I heard him and his editor going at it one day. Frank was trying to get Terry’s ass up to the Hill to write about some political squabble, and Terry kept telling him that he didn’t have time. He said he was working on the biggest thing since Clinton got a blow job.”

“But you don’t know what the story was about?”

“No. All I heard was Terry say that if Frank knew who his source was, he wouldn’t be giving him chickenshit assignments.”

“Shit. So now I have talk to this Frank guy to find out what Terry was working on.”

“Well, unless you got a hotline to hell, you can forget that.”

“What?”

“Frank’s dead.”

“Dead? When did he die?”

“A week ago, about two days after Terry.”

“Jesus,” DeMarco said. “Was there anything mysterious about the way he died?”

Reggie took his time finishing his last drink as DeMarco waited impatiently for his answer. Finally, he said, “Frank was sixty-three years old. He was five-seven, weighed two-fifty, and smoked unfiltered Camels. He thought high cholesterol was the name of a racehorse. The only mystery is that Frank didn’t have a coronary when he was forty-three.”

Chapter 4

“Are you feeling lucky, punk?” DeMarco muttered, his lips twisted into an Eastwood snarl—then he fired the gun, a .357 magnum.

“Stop doing that,” Emma said.

DeMarco ignored her and looked at the man-shaped paper target. There were five holes in it, and although no hole was closer than six inches to any other hole, all of his shots had hit the punk.

“Well, pilgrim, what do you think of that,” he said to Emma, switching from Eastwood to Wayne.

“I think you’re jerking the trigger instead of squeezing it,” Emma said.

“Let’s try the Glock now,” DeMarco said. “I’m gonna use the two-handed, cop’s grip this time.”

“I give up,” Emma said.

Emma was tall and slim. She wore her hair short, and it was colored a blondish shade with some gray mixed in. Her profile was regal, like a Norse queen on a coin, and her eyes were light blue, cool, and cynical. She was at least ten years older than DeMarco, maybe fifteen, but in such good shape that she would have run him into the ground had he ever been dumb enough to challenge her to a race. She was wearing jeans, a long-sleeved navy-blue pullover, and black Reeboks. Clipped to her belt was a holster and in the holster was an automatic with a worn grip.

DeMarco had decided it was time to learn something about firearms. He was a firm believer in gun control—meaning that the only people who should be allowed to have guns were cops and soldiers, and himself, of course, if he thought he ever needed one—but a few months ago he came close to being killed because he didn’t know where the safety was on a weapon. So though he had no immediate plans to buy a gun, and hoped sincerely that he would never need one in the future, he figured a little basic education couldn’t hurt. And there was another thing: he thought it’d be kinda fun to shoot a few guns, which it was.

So under Emma’s less than patient tutelage, he fired three weapons that day: a 9mm Glock; a .22 automatic that Emma said was the firearm often preferred by professional killers; and the .357 magnum. He had wanted to shoot the Glock and the .357 because those were the guns they always mentioned in the movies.

DeMarco put a fresh target on the target-hanger, sent it down-range twenty yards, and picked up the Glock. He liked the way it felt. He spread his legs in what he considered to be a shooter’s stance, gripped the gun in both hands, said “Freeze, asshole”—and pulled the trigger six times. When he finished there were six holes in the target, three of them bunched fairly close together in the paper guy’s left shoulder. Other than the fact that he’d been aiming for the heart, not bad, he thought. Emma thought differently.

“Joe,” she said, “if you’re ever attacked, and if you have a choice between a bat and a gun, use the bat.”

“Well, let’s see you do better,” DeMarco said.

Now why in the hell had he said that? It must have been all the gun smoke in the air, the fumes short-circuiting those brain cells that caused him to actually think before speaking.

Emma was now retired but she had worked for the DIA—the Defense Intelligence Agency. She was, however, a person who rarely, and then only reluctantly, talked about her past, and consequently DeMarco had no idea what she had done for the military for almost thirty years. He did know that by the end of her career she’d been a senior player in the intelligence community in Washington, and that early in her career she’d been some sort of spy. And there was one other thing he knew—he knew that she could shoot a gun.

She hit a button that pushed DeMarco’s target ten yards farther away, pulled the automatic from the holster on her hip, and then, without appearing to take aim, she fired. BAMBAMBAMBAMBAM. Five shots fired so rapidly it was hard to distinguish one from the other. When the smoke cleared, DeMarco looked at the target.

The paper man had a two-inch-diameter hole where his nose had once been.

Emma’s reward for instructing DeMarco was dinner at a place of her choosing, and she surprised him by selecting a mid-priced restaurant in Alexandria that specialized in soft-shelled crab. She may have chosen the place because of the way they were dressed but DeMarco suspected that she was being kind to his wallet. Emma was rich; DeMarco wasn’t. As they waited for their dinners, Emma sipped a glass of white wine and looked at the ragged, water-damaged napkin that Dick Finley had taken from his son’s wallet.

“So what do you think?” DeMarco asked.

“I would guess that these are people’s names followed by a year, but who the people are and what the dates signify…well, your guess is as good as mine. As for the numbers, they look like a D.C. phone number minus the last three digits.”

“Yeah, I figured that. How ‘bout the ‘egg’?”

Emma shrugged. “Maybe part of a shopping list, but I doubt it. He would have written ‘eggs,’ not ‘egg.’ And it looks like there’s some word that comes after ‘egg,’ but I can’t even make out the first letter.”

“That’s the best you can do? I thought in your old job you decoded encrypted messages.”

“Not me,” Emma said. “The people who do that sort of thing have PhDs and use really big computers. I did other stuff.” This last statement was followed by an enigmatic smile. Emma had a really good enigmatic smile.

“Great,” DeMarco said. “So that’s it? You don’t have any bright ideas about what I should do next?”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” she said.

“Emma,” DeMarco whined, “why can’t he just fax me the damn information? We’re dealing with names on a cocktail napkin, for Christ’s sake, not plans for a missile defense system.”

“Fax you! You must be joking,” Emma said. “Neil’s so paranoid he never puts anything sensitive into a computer connected to the net, he doesn’t even own a cell phone, and he never, ever sends information out on lines that can be tapped.”

It was for this reason that Emma and DeMarco, the day after their session at the shooting range, were now sitting in a room on the Washington side of the Potomac River within sight of the Pentagon. Neil was an associate of Emma’s from her days at the DIA and he called himself an “information broker”—which really meant that he hacked and bugged and spied, then sold whatever he acquired to the highest bidder. DeMarco had always found it disconcerting that a man with Neil’s skills should have an office so close to the Pentagon.

Neil sat behind a cluttered desk in a chair engineered for his girth. He was in his early fifties and growing bald on top, but he gathered his remaining gray-blond hair into a thin ponytail that hung down from the back of his head like the tail on a well-fed rodent. As usual, he was dressed in a loose-fitting Hawaiian shirt, baggy shorts, and sandals. DeMarco had no idea what Neil wore when the temperature dropped, but as he rarely left his office, the issue was academic.

“Emma, you look lovely as always,” Neil said.

“Thank you,” Emma said. “And you look as if you’ve lost some weight.”

DeMarco looked over at Emma to see if she was serious. Neil was the size of the Chrysler Building; if he lost a hundred pounds it wouldn’t be apparent.

Neil, however, was pleased by the compliment. He beamed a smile at Emma and said, “Thank you for noticing.”

DeMarco cleared his throat.

“Yes, Joe,” Emma said, “we’ll get to it in a minute. You know, it wouldn’t hurt you to develop a few social skills, such as the ability to make small talk for more than sixty seconds.”

“It’s all right, Emma,” Neil said. “I need to get going. Cindy and I are going dancing tonight.”

Cindy was Neil’s wife—and the fact that Neil had a wife and DeMarco did not was proof of God’s dark sense of humor. But Neil dancing? The image that came to mind was the hippo in Fantasia, not Travolta in Pulp Fiction.

“Well, good for you,” Emma said. “Maybe if Joe took his girlfriends dancing he might be able to keep one.”

Neil smirked at Emma’s comment then pulled an unlabeled manila file folder out of a stack of identical folders sitting on one corner of his desk. DeMarco didn’t know how he knew which folder to select, but knowing how Neil liked to show off, he wouldn’t have been surprised if the files were marked like a crooked deck of cards.

“To begin,” Neil said. “We have five names, five apparent dates, and a partial phone number. The phone number I’m still working on. I’ve checked Finley’s home and cell phone records but he didn’t call anyone with a number matching the seven numbers on the napkin. He may have called the number from a public phone, in which case I can’t tell who he called. So, since there are three missing digits from the phone number, and therefore a thousand possible phone number combinations, what I’m doing now is cross-checking those combinations against existing phone numbers to see if I can find anyone connected with what else I’ve learned. Which brings me to the names on the list. The obvious thing to do was to see if there was any common factor linking them. And there was.” He paused, then said: “The common factor is Paul Morelli.”

“Paul Morelli?” DeMarco said. “Do you mean Senator Paul Morelli?”

Senator Paul Morelli was, according to every political pundit on the planet, the man most likely to be the Democratic candidate for president in the next election.

“I do,” Neil said. “In 1992, Marshall Bachaud was the district attorney of the fair isle of Manhattan. In January of that year, he was in a car accident which kept him hospitalized for twenty-six weeks and required three surgeries to rebuild various parts of his anatomy. Over the protests of many, the governor of New York appointed a young assistant DA named Paul Morelli as the acting district attorney until such time as Bachaud could resume his duties. As acting DA, young Morelli became a visible public figure.

“In 1996,” Neil continued, “Morelli became the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City. His opponent was a popular fellow with a good record named Walter Frey. Frey was the New York State attorney general at the time, and four months prior to the election he was accused of throwing a major case involving a company in Albany. Emails between Frey and the company were discovered, the emails indicating that Frey had been providing helpful information to the defendant’s attorneys. Then, and although unrelated to the case, it was also discovered that Frey was having an affair with a young lady who worked for him. Frey eventually admitted to the affair but he claimed, and looked quite stupid doing so, that the young lady had been hired by someone to seduce him. And if you look at photos of Walter Frey, it is hard to imagine why the woman would have succumbed to his charms. Ironically, the affair damaged him more politically than the case-fixing accusations because Frey had always been such a big family values guy.”

“Was he ever convicted of a crime?” DeMarco asked.

“No,” Neil said. “The evidence was circumstantial at best, but it didn’t matter because his reputation was destroyed by the press. And Paul Morelli became mayor.”

Neil licked a fat finger and flipped to a new page in the file. “Now to Mr. Reams. In 2001, while still mayor, Paul Morelli decided to run for the Senate. Polls showed that he was the people’s choice but the Democratic old guard in New York wanted David Reams. Reams was well-connected, came from money, and had served in the House. The thinking was that Morelli was young and his time would come, and that Reams had more experience and connections in D.C.”

“Oh, I remember this,” Emma said.

“Yes,” Neil said. “One fine day, the police burst into a motel room on Staten Island and find Reams in bed with a sixteen-year-old boy. Reams claimed that he had no idea who the boy was or how he had ended up in the motel room. He said he must have been drugged and demanded that his blood be tested, which it was, and the results came back negative for narcotics. Reams was convicted because of the boy’s age and served ten months. And Paul Morelli was elected to the Senate.”

“What about Tyler and Davenport,” DeMarco said. “What happened to those guys?”

“Those guys are women,” Neil said.

Chapter 5

According to Neil, J. Tyler was Janet Tyler. Tyler had worked briefly for Paul Morelli when he was mayor of New York, which Neil discovered by searching W-2 forms provided by the city to its employees in 1999. M. Davenport was Marcia Davenport, an interior decorator who had apparently helped the Morellis decorate their Georgetown home when Morelli moved to Washington to begin his first term in the Senate. Neil’s file on Davenport contained a copy of a check signed by Paul Morelli’s wife and a billing statement pilfered from Davenport’s home computer showing that she’d charged the Morellis $365 for her services.

But that was it. There were no news articles or police reports or any other public documentation on either woman to explain why they were on Terry Finley’s list.

Since Davenport lived in Washington, D.C., and Tyler lived in New York, DeMarco decided to begin with Davenport. She was thirty-six years old, had been married briefly, but was now divorced. She had no children and lived in a condo on Connecticut Avenue not too far from the National Zoo. Riggs National Bank held the mortgage on her condo, her credit rating was excellent, and according to her tax return, she made seventy-two thousand dollars last year.

The concept of privacy evaporated when people like Neil booted up their computers.

The woman who came to the door was quite attractive in DeMarco’s opinion. Blond hair; large, warm brown eyes; and a slight overbite that DeMarco thought was sexy as hell. She was small, no more than five foot four, but had a lush figure: relatively large breasts, a small waist, and a nicely rounded backside. She was wearing a white blouse and jeans, and she was barefoot—one of the advantages of working out of one’s own home. A pair of reading glasses was stuck on top of her head and she was holding a piece of cloth in one hand, some sort of fabric sample, DeMarco guessed.

“Ms. Davenport, my name’s Joe DeMarco. I work for Congress and I was wondering if I could speak to you.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I’m really busy right now. So if you’re conducting a poll or something…”

“I’m not a pollster. I need to talk to you about Senator Morelli.”

At the mention of Morelli’s name, Davenport inhaled sharply, her lips closed in a tight line, and the sexy overbite disappeared. DeMarco couldn’t immediately categorize the look on the woman’s face. Fear? Anxiety? Maybe anger. Whatever emotions she was feeling, fond memories of Paul Morelli were not included.

“What’s this about?” Davenport said. She was crushing the fabric sample, but might not have realized it.

“May I come inside?” DeMarco asked.

“No. And I want to know why you’re here.”

That was a hard question for DeMarco to answer. He didn’t want to tell her that he was there because her name had been found on a napkin in a dead man’s wallet.

“I just want to know about your experience working for Senator Morelli,” DeMarco said.

“Why?”

“I can’t tell you that. It’s a government matter relating to an investigation in progress.”

For a minute, DeMarco thought that Davenport was going to refuse to say anything but then she said, “I never worked for the senator. I worked for his wife, and I only consulted with her twice.” She hesitated a second, then added, “Things just didn’t work out.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means she didn’t like my design ideas. Now I have to go,” Davenport said and closed the door.

DeMarco arrived at the Starbucks on Pennsylvania Avenue at exactly 2 p.m. and was relieved when the Speaker’s limo arrived only five minutes later. It wasn’t unusual for Mahoney to keep him waiting forty minutes—or to forget their meetings altogether.

He had called Mahoney right after meeting with Marcia Davenport and convinced his boss to meet with him before he left town. Mahoney was on his way to San Francisco to give a lecture at some convention, meaning that he’d adlib a twenty-minute speech, pocket ten thousand dollars, then spend the rest of his time in California touring Napa Valley wineries. And it didn’t appear that he would be touring alone. When the Speaker’s driver opened the rear door of the limo, DeMarco caught a brief glimpse of a shapely leg encased in black hose.

DeMarco had decided it was time to get Mahoney’s advice. The connection between Terry Finley and Paul Morelli made him nervous. Morelli was not only a man in the political stratosphere, he was also a member of Mahoney’s party. DeMarco, therefore, thought it prudent to let Mahoney know what he had learned before proceeding any further.

Mahoney ambled from the limo to the outside table where DeMarco waited. DeMarco was sitting outside because he knew that Mahoney would want to smoke, and would whine if he couldn’t. He sat down heavily and reached across the table to take one of the two paper cups of coffee that DeMarco had purchased. He took a sip of the coffee, winced at the taste, and then dipped into his pocket for his flask, the small silver one embossed with the Marine Corps seal. The seal on the flask matched a tattoo on his right forearm, and when he spoke to veterans’ groups his sleeves were always rolled up. He smacked his lips in satisfaction at his laced coffee and looked a question at DeMarco.

“Dick Finley thinks his son may have been killed,” DeMarco said. If you didn’t start out with a headline, you lost Mahoney’s attention rapidly. DeMarco then told Mahoney about the napkin that had been found in Terry Finley’s wallet and all the other suspicions Dick Finley had about his son’s death.

When he told Mahoney what Neil had learned about the three men on Finley’s list, Mahoney looked at his watch, then over at the limo, and then he said something that surprised DeMarco. “Shit, everybody knows about that stuff. Before Morelli was elected to the Senate, there was an article in the Times, or maybe it was in one of them tight-assed New York magazines. Anyway, the article said how Morelli was so fuckin’ lucky that he oughta be buyin’ lotto tickets instead of workin’.”

“Maybe it wasn’t luck,” DeMarco said.

Mahoney snorted; not an attractive sound. “A guy gets in a wreck; another guy gets caught dippin’ his wick into a secretary; and a third guy is nabbed for porkin’ teenage boys. There’s an old saying, son: Never attribute to malice something that can be explained by stupidity.”

“Good point,” DeMarco said, but he was also rather annoyed that Neil hadn’t told him that everything he’d learned had been written up in a magazine.

“So you think I should drop this?” DeMarco said. “I can take it further, talk to some of these men, go up to New York and see this lady, but…”

“No, I’ll tell you what I want you to do. I want you to go see Paul Morelli.”

“You’re kidding,” DeMarco said.

“No. I may owe Dick Finley—he was a big help to me when I first came to this town—but I owe it to the country to let Paul know what’s going on.” Mahoney finished his coffee and said, “Morelli’s the best thing to happen to the party since FDR—or me—and he’s gonna be the next president of the United States. He’s a good guy—maybe a great guy—so he needs to know that some reporter was trying to dig up dirt on him. And if Terry Finley really was killed, which I doubt, he needs to know that too. So I want you to go talk to him and tell him what you’ve learned. I’ll call him and get you in. Now I got a plane to catch.”

Chapter 6

DeMarco’s illusions had been mangled so often by politicians that he thought he should qualify for handicapped parking—but he had to admit that he was pretty impressed with Paul Morelli.

Morelli hailed from a blue-collar family, the youngest of five children. He attended college on a poor-boy scholarship and according to legend, obtained his law degree studying twelve hours a day and doing charitable work in the time remaining. He apparently never slept. Ambitious, brilliant, and charismatic, he took to politics as baby eagles take to the air and became one of the youngest occupants of Gracie Mansion. And as mayor of New York, he was a grand success: crime dipped; no ugly scandals marred his term; labor unions refrained from untimely, crippling strikes. Then off to the Senate he flew, and the Senate, all the commentators concurred, was but a pit stop on his race to the Oval Office.

Certainly the way he looked wasn’t a hindrance. He was a youthful forty-seven, his hair was a curly black crown streaked with just the right amount of gray, and he had a profile that plastic surgeons could use for a template. He was also tall and perfectly proportioned, and if he tired of politics he could model swimwear. But even his critics had to admit that he was more than a pretty face. He was a dazzling strategist, the consummate negotiator, and one of the most eloquent speakers to ever choke a microphone. And the things he spoke of, the causes he championed, the battles he fought were always so…right. The last Democrat with such magnetism had been a man named Kennedy.