Operator - 01 Read online

  The vibration of my cell phone on the bathroom sink interrupts my thoughts. I slip from the shower and wrap a towel around my waist as I flip the phone open.

  “It’s Veronica.”

  “Hi.”

  “Can you come meet me? I’m still in Conestoga.”

  “I was about to head home to D.C.”

  “I think you’re going to want to see this. I’m at Mel’s place. I…I don’t think she killed herself.”

  “Give me the address,” I say, reaching for my clothing.

  Mel’s place is the downstairs rental unit of a converted two-story Victorian on an anonymous block of Orchard Road just off of Route 9W, close to the New York State Thruway. The owner, a widower, lives in the upstairs unit. Veronica has charmed him out of the key after calling Mel’s parents, asking them if she can stop by to pick up a book she’d lent Mel and needed back. They’d offered to come over but Veronica had demurred, insisting she knew just where it was.

  I pull the black GTO up to the curb in front of the place and listen for a second as the V-8 growls in protest when I shut it down. It’s almost dark at 5pm and the street is not the best, even for Conestoga. The houses look decrepit, like old bones scrubbed bare by the wind. Some of the yards are tended while others have gone to seed. Even the trees lining the road, planted on the grass between the sidewalk and the asphalt, look skeletal and dyspeptic. The door to the unit is ajar and I step in. The interior of Mel’s apartment is like an extension of her brain, one that I recognize even after all these years. There is a weird sort of order that would look like complete chaos to anyone who didn’t know her. Stacks of papers dot the living room like ferns in a primeval forest. The picture window that looks out onto the driveway is covered with a hand-embroidered lace curtain. A green sofa that looks like it has spent the first fifty years of its life wrapped in plastic is nested under the large window. A rocking chair sits opposite, a silent companion.

  Veronica is standing in the middle of the living room with a stack full of papers in her arms and a puzzled expression on her face. She looks down at the piles of papers around her feet. “This is like playing solitaire with five decks of cards…” then she looks up and smiles at me. She looks different in casual clothing – jeans and a pale blue sweater made from something that looks to be softer than wool. The sweater is snug and I snap my eyes upwards to her face before I am officially staring.

  “This kind of mess I remember,” I say, nodding. It was the source of endless fights between Mel and her mother as a teenager. “She always seemed to know where everything was.”

  Veronica nods slowly. “Exactly. It looks like a mess but she’s got a system. That’s why this is odd. There are twelve stacks of papers on the floor. Every one is a different assignment from one of her four classes. The papers are all in alphabetical order, except for this stack here. It’s two different assignments from two different classes and the papers are all mixed together. Half of them are from the students with A-L last names from this stack over here. One of these papers is half graded – in fact, her pen trails off in the middle of this comment.” Veronica hands me the paper, which is an essay on bird feeders. I remember Mel’s distinctive handwriting, its loops and swirls.

  “Okay. What’s your point?” I ask cautiously. If I’m short with Veronica, it’s because I’m not comfortable in Mel’s place. Being here with Veronica somehow makes it feel worse.

  “She wouldn’t have left this paper half-graded. And if Mel was going to fling a bunch of papers down or something, why straighten them up and put them in some random order? Why wouldn’t she just leave them where they landed if she was that distraught?”

  “Her parents could have cleaned this up.”

  Veronica shakes her head. “They said they haven’t been over here yet. It sounds like they’re not looking forward to it. This place hasn’t been cleaned. There are still bloodstains in the bathroom.” Veronica stops herself from saying more and frowns, momentarily looking queasy. “The landlord, Harvey Kastriner, told me that nothing in here has been touched. The paramedics wouldn’t have cleaned up and I doubt the police would be straightening up piles of paper either.”

  “There are a lot of possible explanations,” I protest, although I do see how the living room looks like a puzzle put back together by someone who never saw the picture on the box.

  “On its own perhaps, but then you have this,” Veronica says as she takes three steps backwards into the kitchen area – really just a corner of the main living room with linoleum tiles instead of carpeting. She points to a portion of the countertop next to the fridge.

  “What?” I ask. Aside from some clutter on the countertop, I don’t see anything significant.

  Veronica rolls her eyes. “It’s sugar, flour, chocolate, butter, vanilla and eggs!”

  “Meaning?” I ask, mystified.

  “Men!” Veronica looks skyward. “She was obviously going to bake brownies. And she left the eggs out. I checked the fridge – other than milk that just expired yesterday, there’s nothing out of date. She wouldn’t have randomly pulled all this stuff out and left the eggs to rot right before she killed herself. That’s not how women work. We don’t decide to make brownies and finish grading papers and then get up and shoot ourselves in the head. We would think about what people would find here and we’d straighten up. Mel would have wanted her students to get their grades, for one thing.” Veronica sounds indignant.

  “You’re assuming she was rational. People do weird things when they’re depressed. I’ve seen it before,” and here I’m thinking of some of the soldiers I knew afflicted by post-traumatic stress disorder after deployments. There was a string of suicides and homicide/suicides when I was posted at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

  “Maybe, maybe…” Veronica says, tapping a slim, manicured fingernail against her lower lip, “but there’s more.” She picks up the phone, a corded model that looks about a dozen years old and presses the redial button, turning the receiver up so we can both listen. Her hair glides across my neck as I lean in and I can smell the clean scent of her shampoo and a hint of something more complicated on her neck. It makes me uncomfortable.

  “9-1-1, what is the nature of your emergency?” the female voice on the phone asks.

  “I’m so sorry, my little boy dialed this number again by accident. I apologize, it won’t happen again,” Veronica says quickly, and the operator says it’s fine before disconnecting.

  “Wait, don’t they have to respond to that? Are we going to have the fire department on the doorstep here in five minutes?” I ask.

  “Maybe in some places, but not here. This phone doesn’t have a caller ID display, so I hit redial when I got here. I asked the woman who picked up the same question. She said no.”

  “Then obviously whoever found Mel called 9-1-1.”

  “That stands to reason, but it didn’t happen that way. Harvey found her. I asked him what happened when he let me in tonight. He said he was upstairs when he heard the gunshot. He called 9-1-1 first before he came downstairs. He thought it was a break-in – there have been a bunch in this neighborhood.”

  “The EMTs could have called,” I offer.

  “Why would an ambulance driver call 9-1-1 on Mel’s home phone?” Veronica asks and then wags her finger as I try to respond. “Okay, it’s possible that someone else called but you have to admit it’s suspicious. Now the final piece of the puzzle,” Veronica says. She steps directly in front of me, forcing me to pivot outwards, which has the effect of preventing me from offering any more objections. She turns toward the back of the house and I follow her down the hallway that leads straight back, passing the door to Mel’s bedroom on one side and the single bathroom on the other. There’s a small laundry room at the back of the apartment, and a white door with louvered glass panes leading out to a fenced yard in back.

  Veronica stops just shy of the door and pulls the knob towards her without turning the handle. The door swings open. She points to the doorframe,
and I can see a piece missing where the door lock and deadbolt receivers ought to be. It wouldn’t be too hard to jimmy a door like this – it’s a wood door without a metal frame. The lock isn’t the type you can open with a credit card, but a stout crowbar or even a Slim Jim handled by someone with a bit of experience would do the trick.

  “Well, I can see why this might upset you,” I say, examining the lock, “but there’s no way to know when it happened. It could have been last week, last month or two years ago.”

  Veronica considers this for a few seconds before replying. “Maybe the old Mel wouldn’t have worried about the lock on the back door, but after that incident with George last year, she wouldn’t have let this go for more than a couple of days.”

  I shake my head, suddenly weary. “I’m not a cop, but I really doubt you’ll change Sheriff Peterson’s mind by showing him these things. There are small mysteries in everyone’s house. It doesn’t add up to murder.”

  As I say this, I realize there’s one room we’ve avoided. Well, two actually, but I’m not going into the bedroom. As we walk back towards the living room I stop and put my hand on the tarnished brass knob on the bathroom door. I glance back at Veronica to see her tracking me with her eyes. She nods.

  I hold my breath as I swing open the door to Mel’s bathroom. It’s not that I’m squeamish. I’ve seen things in war that I’d have trouble explaining to anyone who hasn’t been there: the aftermath of a missile strike on an Afghan village that hit a school misidentified as a terrorist camp, a brown betty mine vaporizing a man two-dozen feet from me. A hundred other disturbing images flicker through my consciousness. In spite of all this, seeing the exact spot where my high school sweetheart shot herself is different.

  The bathroom walls are the standard off-white rental color. White porcelain tiles looking at least fifty years old adorn both the floors and the walls. The sink is also an antique. It’s constructed with real porcelain and has individual faucets for hot and cold water. It’s obvious that Mel died in the bathtub. The bottom of the tub is mostly clean, but there is a smattering of dried blood in the far corner near the drain. The tiled wall above the faucet is splattered with a large, oval halo of dried blood and bits of crusted gore. There are flecks of crimson on the shower curtain as well. I kneel down on the bathroom floor and examine the grout between the floor tiles. I see no signs of blood and the grout is gray and moldy. It’s obvious that the tiles have neither been cleaned nor replaced recently.

  “I’m sorry to say it, but it really looks like Mel shot herself here,” I say.

  “How can you tell?” Veronica asks.

  I pause and consider how to answer the question without revealing too much. “A bullet at close range makes a lot of…mess,” I explain, searching for a delicate word. “But there’s no blood outside the shower and the tub is mostly clean. That means that the shower was running and the curtain was closed when she shot herself. And if you’re thinking that George killed Mel, it’s hard to imagine that he’d have the presence of mind to think of these details when he was in a rage. Not unless he’s done this before.”

  Veronica deflates a little as she lets my words sink in. I can see the question in her eyes – How do you know this stuff? – but she has the sense not to ask. She stands there for a moment, rooted in one spot, then turns and leaves the bathroom. When I catch up to her in the living room I can see tears leaking from her eyes. “I just can’t believe Mel would have done this to herself,” she whispers. I put a hand on her shoulder and she leans into me, her chest heaving silently. Then we step apart awkwardly as the moment fades. We walk out of the apartment.

  “It’s been really nice to meet you, Mike. I hope you’ll call me the next time you’re heading up this direction,” Veronica says as we stand on the lawn near our cars.

  “I might be back for Thanksgiving next month,” I confess, “now that I’m speaking to my mother again.”

  Veronica smiles fleetingly. “It’s a date then. Be well, Mike.” She kisses me on the cheek, and the imprint of her lips lingers on my skin for a moment. As I slide into the GTO and pull the door shut, I realize that Mel is the only other person who called me Mike.

  As I head toward the Thruway, I start to have second thoughts. On their merits – even taken together – the minor inconsistencies that Veronica has pointed out don’t really add up to much. But something in the bigger picture nags me. When I joined the Activity, I got to spend a lot of time with field intelligence folks – the kind of guys who spend weeks at a time in a white panel van listening to landline and mobile phone conversations and reading someone’s e-mails and text messages. I remember something that one of the analysts told me early on that I’d always found to be true.

  “When you’ve been listening in on some dirt bag for three, four weeks, you get a sense of his routine, the way he lives his life. Sometimes you’ll see something that’s just a little bit different and it’s not a big deal but you get this feeling that something’s not right. It might be this guy telling his wife that he’s got to go out and meet someone or just an odd conversation on the phone, whatever. The point is, when you get this feeling, it’s usually correct. You have to trust it and dig deeper. What we call a gut feeling is the subconscious mind putting together little pieces of data we could never organize consciously. Call it expert intuition. If you want to stay alive in this job, learn to trust it.”

  Even since leaving the Army, I’d found these words to be helpful. A few months ago I was looking at a satellite photo of a small container ship leaving port from Bandar Abbas, Iran, and I had a feeling just like that. Something just didn’t look right. Only after two days of analysis did I figure out that the ship didn’t fit any of the normal shipping patterns from that port and in fact didn’t have a registered manifest or insurance. As green as I am at my analyst job, my intuition still guides me.

  And now it’s telling me that something is wrong with the story of Mel’s death I’m supposed to believe. Veronica’s theories are probably all nonsense. She’s doing what people do when confronted with an unbearable truth – she is reconstructing reality. Her ideas are all flimsy and circumstantial, with no more weight to them than the yellow film of chewing tobacco residue on a 90-mph spitball. Still, I hesitate. Something feels out of place to me. With a start, I realize it’s the most basic thing – the same thing that’s bothered me since I heard that Mel killed itself and the same thing that bothered my sisters. I flat out don’t believe that Mel would end her life with a gun.

  I’m fast approaching the entrance ramp to the New York State Thruway. I replay the scene in Mel’s apartment in my mind and I suddenly realize that there is at least one hole in the story that I can fill in. At the last moment, I pull off into a gas station and punch a number into my phone. A familiar voice answers immediately.

  “Long time, Orion, how you been, dude?”

  Orion was my call sign at the Activity.

  “I’ve been well, Sammie, how about you?” I reply. Sammie Fernandes is a headquarters guy, not a field guy, but he’s probably worth more than a dozen of the rest of us. He is a data specialist whose abilities I’m only beginning to appreciate as I deal with other men and women who fill the same role for the Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

  “I’m guessing this is not a social call?”

  “I need a favor.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Are you at work or home?” I ask.

  “I live, sleep, eat and breathe this man’s Army.”

  “So you got killed in fantasy football this afternoon?” I can imagine Sammie at his data station in the Tactical Operations Center of the Activity, four expensive 50” flat screen monitors blossoming with player stats. Fortunately, Command Sergeant Majors are pretty forgiving of that kind of stuff.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Master Sergeant,” Sammie says carefully, with exaggerated innocence.

  “Can you check on a call to 9-1-1 in New York State last week?”

&nbs
p; “Sure, if you’ve got the originating phone number,” Sammie replies. I give him Mel’s number, which I saw on the phone in her apartment.

  “Okay, Sergeant, just hang on here a second while I get into the right network.”

  I listen to the clicking of keys for a few moments.

  “Ah, here we go. I actually see three calls into 9-1-1 from that number in the last week. Two were today…”

  “Yeah, don’t worry about those.”

  “The other was last Wednesday at 6:11pm.”

  “Can I hear the recording of that call?”

  “Sure, but I’ll have to get that tomorrow. This gets into a grey area with Posse Comitatus. We have an understanding with the FBI counterintelligence folks that allow us to exchange little tidbits like this with no questions asked, but I’d need to contact them during working hours unless you want some alarm bells to start ringing.”

  “No, tomorrow is just fine. I really appreciate it.”

  “No problem, boss. Just let me know if there’s anything else I can do you for.” These little requests are the currency in our profession and both of us know that as an intelligence analyst at State, I’m in a pretty good position to return the favor.

  I thank him and hang up. Then I dial Veronica, catching her in her car on the way back to Greenwich. It sounds as if she has some sort of hands free device, maybe a Bluetooth system in her car. I tell her that I’ve confirmed a 9-1-1 call was placed on the day of Mel’s death and I ask her if she knows the exact time that Mel purportedly killed herself. She does not. I tell her that I’ll be able to hear the recording tomorrow and that I’ll call her when I do. She’s silent for a moment then thanks me for believing her.

  I stand outside the GTO, pumping gas with my collar turned up against a stiff cold breeze blowing off the river. I know I can get on the Interstate, go to work tomorrow and put everything out of my mind until I get the call from Sammie. I know that odds are that the call will be perfectly legitimate and that it will give both Veronica and me some closure. The problem is, whatever the odds are, I don’t believe them anymore. I’m not ready to leave town. So I have one more call to make.