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  I was careful not to look at him, watched out of the corner of my eye for his black shoes. An instant later he was leaning over me. I arched my back as though I were going to vomit, then used the leverage to swing my left arm from the floor, to hurl the back of my fist directly into his nose. I heard a gravelly crunch as the cartilage gave way—and ignored the jolting pain in my hand as he stepped back. I lifted my head to see how badly I’d hurt him, but I shouldn’t have bothered.

  Jesus Christ, who is this guy?

  Blood spurted from the middle of his face, but he made no sound. His nose lay crushed to one side, but the man showed no reaction. Nothing. Instead, he simply reached to his face, shoved the mess back into place. I winced at the sound of grinding cartilage, but an instant later he was coming back again.

  I tried once more to get up, but got only as far as my knees. I lifted my hands to keep fighting, wondered how long it would take him to break my head wide open.

  But suddenly he stopped, his head cocked. Despite the singing in my ears, I could hear the faint sound of sirens. He raced past me and out the door. I struggled to my feet, tried to go after him, tried to put one foot ahead of the other, but my body wasn’t ready. I fell next to Jabalah Abahd, rose once more and managed to get out into the hallway. I stared toward the open front door. The giant was long gone.

  I turned to Abahd. She showed no signs of life. This time I did check for a pulse, her neck first, then her arm, finally one ankle. Nothing. She was dead. Or so close to it, I could do nothing to save her.

  I opened my briefcase, pulled the semiautomatic Smith-10 from it and went to the front door, stepped out onto the porch just in time to see the first of two Cheverly P.D. black-and-whites skidding to a stop in front of the house. The drivers leaped from their squad cars and crouched behind them, weapons drawn. In the next instant a spotlight blazed directly into my eyes. I started toward them, then froze as I realized what was happening, that I was an armed man coming from a house that had called 911. They were trained to shoot. They wouldn’t hesitate to kill me. I could hardly blame them if they did.

  I flipped my weapon toward the lawn to my right, but blinded by the light I couldn’t see where it fell. I thrust my arms in the air, began to shout. “FBI! FBI! I’m the one who called! There’s a dead woman in the house! My weapon’s on the lawn! My credentials and badge are in my pocket!”

  The response was immediate.

  “Slowly,” a deep voice ordered, “very slowly. Get your ID out of your pocket and throw it over here. Then turn around and lay on your stomach. Stay there until we tell you to get back up.”

  I did as I was told. Threw my black credential case with the gold badge imbedded in the cover. Again I had no clue where it landed. I turned and lay on my stomach as ordered. A white-hot stab of pain from my ribs made me gasp. A violent throbbing in my right ear told me the numbness had worn away. I wanted to massage my ear, but knew better. I didn’t dare move a muscle till they were satisfied I was no risk. And that wouldn’t happen till they’d fetched my gun and ID, then called WMFO and verified my identity.

  It took little more than a minute, thank God, before the spotlight went out and I heard more cars arriving. I was told to get up and come to the cars. I did so, my eyes slowly readjusting, enough so I could see a bright red ambulance, half a dozen more black-and-whites, and one unmarked unit from what had to be the Cheverly P.D., along with a gray sedan bearing the words Prince George’s County Medical Examiner on the front door. Cops and medical personnel streamed past me into the house. From behind, a hand touched my shoulder. I turned to see a tall, thin man in a light-blue suit. He pulled back his jacket to show me the badge attached to his belt, introduced himself as Lieutenant Barra, Cheverly P.D. He didn’t offer a first name, and I didn’t ask.

  “Christ,” he said. “What happened in there?”

  I took a very shallow breath, the pain in my ribs now fully awake, then told him.

  He frowned at me. “But you had a gun.”

  “In my briefcase.”

  “You weren’t carrying?”

  “Just routine business. No reason to be.”

  “Jesus,” he said, shaking his head. “You Feds.”

  I stared at him and felt the burn on the back of my neck. “Look, pal, you got questions about what happened, ask them. You got a complaint about me, take it to the Hoover Building.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “In this business you gotta be ready, is all I’m saying.” He glanced toward the front door, wide open now, police personnel coming and going as they worked the crime scene. “So what you’re telling me, the lady walked in on some kind of madman burglar.”

  “What else could it be?”

  He stared at the large house. “Nice house, but Jesus! you saw what the guy did to her … her finger, for shit’s sake. What could she possibly have had in there she’d rather be tortured to death than give up?”

  “Money,” I said. “Maybe some kind of art collection.” And I believed it. Despite the diary thing trying to claw its way out of my mouth, I wasn’t about to say it out loud. Not yet. Not to this guy.

  He glared, shook his head. “Don’t start … don’t even start with me. I know you guys far too well for that.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You tell me,” the lieutenant said. “FBI comes calling, lady ends up dead. What are the odds?”

  “Shit happens.”

  “It sure does.” Sarcastic now. “You wouldn’t believe the shit that happens.” He looked back at Abahd’s red front door. “Gonna need your statement. Let’s do it inside.”

  I nodded, followed him up the walkway and into the house. We jostled our way through the homicide investigators and crime-scene specialists crowding the living room and up the hallway toward Abahd’s home office and her dead body. So many people, I thought, but I knew why. The Cheverly P.D. was a big department, handled a lot of bad people and bad things, but a dead lawyer and a beat-up FBI agent in the same house had to get their blood pumping a whole lot faster than normal. I turned my head to avoid the blinding flashes from half a dozen cameras, then followed Lieutenant Barra to the formal dining room just beyond the living room. We sat at the long gleaming maple table. He pulled a small notebook from the inside pocket of his suit jacket. I told him what happened again, more slowly this time. When I finished, he asked the obvious question.

  What had brought me to the house in the first place?

  “Jabalah Abahd was the college roommate of a woman applying for a position in the government,” I told him. “In my business it doesn’t get any less exciting.”

  “Gonna need more than that, Monk, a whole lot more. Like a name, for starters. The government woman, I mean.”

  I shook my head. “It doesn’t have anything to do with what happened here. Trust me, my being here was pure coincidence.”

  “Trust you?” He looked around at his people. It struck me he wanted to tell them what I’d said, wanted to share in the good laugh such a statement would bring. “Look, Monk, you’re a witness to a murder, the only witness. Surely you know you’re also a suspect. There’s no trust for you here, and you can trust me on that.”

  “We’ve got rules,” I told him. “I can’t give you the name even if I wanted to.”

  “I don’t care about your rules. This is a homicide investigation. My D.A. isn’t going to let you stonewall us.”

  “Of course not. My bosses won’t allow that either.” A lie he didn’t even bother showing a reaction to. “All I’m saying is I need to talk to them first.”

  “You better get moving then.” He looked around the room. “These cases get awfully cold awfully quick. I don’t have time to play politics. And I’ll need elimination prints before you leave. One of the techs can do it.”

  “Get them from the bureau. Your lab will have them before you get back to your office.”

  He shook his head, opened his mouth to complain, then closed it again. Barra looked to b
e about fifty or so. He’d been around long enough to know when he couldn’t win. It wouldn’t stop him from trying, of course, but he had to know he’d heard all he was going to get out of me.

  It was almost eleven o’clock before I got back to my father’s ludicrous house. The unsellable geodesic dome Pastor Monk had bought as the final proof of his dementia, the act that had led to his relocation to Jack Quigley’s nursing home, had left me with a house no one on earth was going to buy.

  I was at a point several miles beyond exhaustion as I hurried through the door and up the spiral staircase to my bedroom. I went straight to the telephone on the nightstand, took the receiver off the hook and put the phone in the drawer, pulled off my clothes and let them lie where they landed, then uttered a groan of relief as I hoisted myself into bed for what was certain to be the night’s sleep of my life.

  But twenty minutes later I was still awake, sitting up in bed and groaning with frustration. My battered body wanted nothing more than sleep, but my mind was nowhere near ready to let it happen. My head began to bubble with activity, awash in thoughts, half-thoughts, and semiparanoid speculations that tumbled through my brain like damp laundry in a front-loading clothes dryer. Around and around they turned, until several things began to work their way to the surface. A number, to start with. A date actually—1972, the year 1972. Followed by my phone conversation with Jabalah Abahd, and the lawyer’s reluctance to repeat to me what she’d already told the mysterious Robert Bennett. The same thing she’d found important enough to include in her diary at the time.

  What had happened, I wondered, between Abahd and Brenda Thompson that made that particular year so troubling?

  As I wrestled with the answer I recalled Abahd’s dying words.

  FBI, she’d whispered. Agent Monk, she’d added.

  What had she meant?

  That whoever I was, I should call Agent Monk at the FBI?

  That she knew it was me she was talking to?

  The next question tightened my throat and made my ribs hurt all the more.

  What if she were trying to name her torturer?

  Christ.

  Robert Bennett. Agent Bennett. Or—it could safely be assumed after Lisa’s checks with the Personnel Division—non-agent Bennett. Maybe Abahd had seen his creds, just assumed he was me. I lay on my pillow and stared at the ceiling, looking for guidance—some kind of deus ex geodesic dome to bring me the truth—but nothing came. Nothing but yet another voice, this time one that sounded a whole lot like Matt Drudge.

  “Quit stalling, Monk,” the voice told me. “You know damned well what happened. Judge Thompson realized she was about to be caught in a dreadful lie, sent a hit man to kill her old roommate to keep her from talking about what happened in ’72.”

  A quick stab of rib-pain kept me from laughing out loud.

  Christ, Drudge, I answered, Supreme Court nominees don’t kill people. Federal judges don’t do anything with hit men but send them to witness-protection programs. I may have been slapped upside the head, but I’m sure as hell not crazy.

  And even if I were, there was a far bigger problem with the Brenda Thompson using Robert Bennett to whack Jabalah Abahd scenario. Besides the lunacy of a federal judge’s involvement in torture and murder, Judge Thompson had no idea we’d even found Abahd, or that we would ever find her. Nobody from my office had told her about our appointment in Cheverly this evening. No one knew about it but me … and Lisa, after I’d called her from the restaurant … and Jabalah Abahd, of course.

  I checked the clock on my nightstand. Midnight. Shit. I had to sleep. I couldn’t do anything without rest. TV was the answer, I decided. Better than a truckload of pills and booze for putting me under. I reached for the clicker but my hand stopped in midair as I heard a sound I shouldn’t be hearing at midnight in my quiet little neighborhood.

  A door closing. A car door closing. Or the trunk of a car closing, that’s what it was.

  I sat up, reached to open the hatch-type window in the sloping wall above the bed. The rain had stopped and the winter air was quiet enough to carry a lot of sound. I strained to listen, heard a new sound. The unmistakable sound of a foot crunching in gravel. Then a second crunch. And a third.

  I stretched to get closer to the window, but the crunching disappeared. I formed a mental picture of the gravel pathway between the dome and the more conventional garage I used mostly for storage. Unless I was dreaming, someone was on or around that path. I got out of bed and slipped over to the window next to my dresser, slid it open and tilted my head in the direction of the garage. Nothing. Not a sound.

  Until I heard another step in the same gravel. Just the one, this time, then quiet again.

  I moved back to the bed, to the nightstand, opened the drawer, and pulled out my backup weapon, a Smith and Wesson .38 with a two-inch barrel, five rounds loaded and locked. I was overreacting, I told myself, but I didn’t care. My ribs still hurt enough to keep the giant in the black hood firmly in the front of my mind. I pictured him slipping through my back door, then glanced at my weapon. Five rounds might not be enough … might just make him mad.

  Revolver in hand, I padded across the floor to the bedroom closet, snatched a pair of pants and a T-shirt, threw them on, and jammed my feet into a pair of tennis shoes, then crept down the spiral staircase into the living room. I held my weapon in both hands as I stepped across the back side of the living room, through the archway into the kitchen, to the back door.

  I stopped short when I saw the knob turn, heard the scratching and scraping of someone trying to jimmy the lock.

  I grabbed the knob, yanked the door open and leaped through it. From my right an arm grabbed at me. I pivoted hard, my finger all over the trigger when I heard the scream.

  SEVEN

  “Puller!” Annie Fisher shrieked. “For Christ’s sake, Puller, it’s me!”

  “Annie!” I pulled her into my arms. “My God, Annie, what are you doing here? Why are you sneaking around like this?”

  She clung to me as it began to rain again, hard at first, then even harder. I grabbed her hand and turned for the door, then stopped as I saw that it was closed and realized immediately what had happened. Bursting through it, I’d flung the door open, it had bounced back and closed behind me. I didn’t even have to check to know that it was locked. And that I didn’t have a key in my pocket. Shit. I turned to Annie for the key she’d been trying to use, but she shook her head.

  “I dropped it, Puller … when you came at me like that.” She looked down at the landing on which we stood. We both looked down, but the key wasn’t there. The rain was a torrent now, and by the time I found the damned thing in the flower bed next to the steps, we were both drenched.

  Back in the kitchen, rainwater streaming from our hair and clothing, I repeated my question.

  “I wasn’t sneaking,” she said. “I was worried about you. I tried to call, a bunch of times, but your phone isn’t working, so I came over.” She reached for a dish towel lying on the counter, mopped her face with it, handed it to me. “I thought I’d …” She shook her head. “Hell, I don’t know what I thought. I just wanted to see you, I guess. I still have your key, so I decided to use it. Slip in and surprise you.”

  She flipped the towel back to the counter, then moved toward me and opened her arms, put them around my neck. I kissed her forehead.

  “I’m glad you did, Annie.” I shook away the thought of what I’d been expecting, then held her at arm’s length and inspected her trim body. “Did I hurt you?”

  “Scared the crap out of me, especially when I realized you had no idea it was me.” She stared at the revolver I’d set on the kitchen counter. “Mostly when I saw that thing in your hand … but I’m okay now.”

  I hugged her again, then kept my arm around her waist and aimed her toward the living room. “C’mon,” I said. “I’ll make you some decaf.”

  In the living room we stood together, dripping all over the Turkish carpet in front of the fireplace,
until I turned and headed for the bathroom.

  “Take your hat and coat off,” I called over my shoulder, “shoes, too. I’ll get us some towels.” I winced as my aching bruises began to resurface, but it was surprising how much less painful they were already. I took a deep breath, very carefully, felt none of the sharp pain that would go along with broken ribs, and I was grateful for that. I had too much to do, and no time at all for bandages and recuperation.

  From the bathroom I grabbed a stack of white bath towels, took them back to my off-again on-again special lady.

  She sat waiting in the blue leather chair to the right of the Franklin fireplace in what I was forced to call a living room, although in the persistent circularity of a dome house it’s hard to think in terms of rooms. Annie had removed more than her topcoat, I saw, and in her ivory-colored slip she looked like a friendly cat.

  “You’re soaked,” she told me. “Get your clothes off before you ruin your carpet.”

  I started to, but stopped as I realized I couldn’t. That she’d see my bruises and ask questions I couldn’t answer without lying. She’d get mad, I’d get mad, and she’d go away for another couple of months. We were pathetic—we’d agreed on that for a long time now—but knowing didn’t seem to help.

  “I’ll grab my bathrobe, Annie, and get the coffee started.”

  She nodded, then scrubbed at her hair with a dry towel. I left for the kitchen but stopped at the bathroom again, traded my wet clothes for a dry white bathrobe, zipped into the kitchen and got the coffee started.

  Back with Annie, I built a fire to dry our clothes, then fell into the chair opposite her and watched the tongues of fire turn into a blaze.

  “I’ve been thinking about you, too,” I said a few moments later. “I wanted to call a couple of times, but …” The words seemed to die in the warming air.

  Annie smiled. Her hazel eyes seemed sad to me, and that wasn’t a good sign. There was an argument afoot, and I had no interest in another one. As infrequently as we managed to get together anymore, it seemed pointless not to enjoy it.