Butterfly Knife
Chapter Thirty
O’Neil needed a drink but it was too early in the day and he had many more interviews ahead of him. It had not gone well with the chief and Ossening had been downright hostile. It never went well if a plan failed. It always went well if a plan succeeded. This one had failed in a spectacular way and there was a stampede to get away from it. Stampede was a good word, O’Neil thought, given that both the chief and Ossening had called him a cowboy, a “rodeo rider”, and a fool.
“See, here’s where the shit hit the fan,” Ossening had said. “You work with contractors and they didn’t know what they were doing. You bring down some of your friends from NYPD and look what happened. You didn’t bring down New York’s finest. You got involved with some guys in a prayer group who go to the range once a year and spend their rest of their duty hours eating donuts. What the hell were you thinking?”
The chief was more direct. “You fucked this up. Tell me why I should keep you around. This is a very high profile case and you decide to play amateur hour. Go clean this up or clean out your desk.”
He wished it was that simple. There were things he couldn’t say to either Ossening or the chief or to anyone else they wanted to throw at him. He wanted to call Frank but assumed his calls were being monitored. He wanted to hear the details. Maybe Frank had some ideas. Ossening had told him that the Bureau was already examining, “performing an autopsy”, on the monitoring operation at the silo on the farm. “See what happens when you use contractors?” he had said. “You go outside the tribe and it all falls apart.”
Whose tribe? O’Neil wondered. The police tribe? Law enforcement in general? He had known Frank for years, even back when they both were rookies, O’Neil on the Metropolitan Police, the formal name for the D.C. department, and Frank at D.E.A., working the crack trade back in the 80s, when kid gangs were perfecting the drive-by shooting and leaving bodies all over the city. And Andrew. Poor Andrew Krieger. He went so far undercover they never really got him back. He was a good man in his day, though. He still he still had some value working the streets using the name Peppers, but you never really knew what was going on inside. He went over to the dark side in a psychotic, dysfunctional way. Damn shame. O’Neil had his suspicions about who had killed him but that would wait until the current crop of fires was out.
And Malone. What about Peter Malone? A prudent man would have behaved differently. O’Neil was against bringing Malone into the effort to find Father Darius. Malone was a sociopath and, for all O’Neil knew, Malone had been involved in a few of the priest killings himself, if only to expand the outrage against Father Darius. The key question that had yet to be answered was at what point does devotion become fanaticism that leads to horror? And when does going along become complicity? He knew that under the law he was as guilty as anyone else in this mess, but he was not satisfied that he had met the moral standard of the Warriors of Mary, which, to him, was the real test. And what about this woman Elena? Was she still alive? What happens if she’s found? How much can Dave figure out? Or Sid? O’Neil knew that Sid was another old lion like himself and probably had better instincts than Dave and all it would take is one good sniff for Sid to get an idea of what the big picture looked like. Another problem to be dealt with.
All of this was on his mind as he walked into the Justice Department building for a meeting with an Assistant Attorney General who was Grand Vizier of the Warriors of Mary and a man who held the power to issue edicts in absolution. The title Grand Vizier originated in the Ottoman Empire as a chief officer who wielded power and influence for weak Turkish sultans. How the Warriors of Mary came to use the title was subject to the whims of whomever was telling the story, but it appears to have originated during a round of drinking following the funeral of a long-ago leader.
This particular Grand Vizier of the Warriors of Mary was known to be a severe rule follower who had no qualms about issuing “final orders” to dispatch errant members. Members such as Father Darius. O’Neil assumed that such an order would have been issued for Peter Malone once the Father Darius issue had been sufficiently dealt with.
The Justice Department building had been the laughingstock of Washington during the second Bush administration, when Attorney General Ashcroft ordered that statues known as the Spirit of Justice and the Majesty of Law be covered by a curtain. Spirit of Justice, a dozen feet tall, is a woman holding her arms up. One of her breasts is exposed. Majesty of Law is a scantily clad man. Both were installed during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt, a period more repressed than now, but the sensitivities of the day were not upset by the statues. Ashcroft found them objectionable and covered them up. The modesty left the building with Ashcroft, but the silliness of it lingered on and visitors to the Grand Hall routinely recounted the episode.
O’Neil was not concerned with such matters as he walked past the statues. He had other things on his mind. The fifth floor office of the A.A.G. was set midway down a long, government-standard hallway. The man was ensconced in a suite that held a small conference room, space for staff, and his own, somewhat grand and officious office where he spent his days doling out grants to fight youth gangs across the country, among other duties. The man would, by any standard, be described as severe. His thin face was never known to smile. His dark eyes were a shadow behind black, horn rimmed glasses. His hair was cut in a military style, high and tight. He wore dark gray suits, white shirts, and blue ties. He stood erect. His lone human hero was J. Edgar Hoover, who, as he saw it, knew right from wrong and had no reticence about wielding power for the good. And, like Hoover, he kept files on everyone he knew. His sources, his minions, at the F.B.I. were his eyes and ears and they fed the files that were buried in locked portions of his external hard drive, the one in his home safe.
He was sitting behind an antique mahogany desk when his secretary informed him that O’Neil had arrived. He had been reflecting with the tips of his fingers touching, staring at the ceiling, and pondering his options. There were no good options, in his opinion, only some that were less bad. Final orders were out of the question. There had been too much of that already, not all of it his doing, but people had been killed and that brought attention where none was welcome. On the whole, things had been botched. That was it. It needed to be cleaned up. Too much was a stake. He looked up to see O’Neil standing in the doorway looking every inch the big city cop who’s seen and done it all.
“Hello, Captain. Come in. Have a seat.”
O’Neil took chair in front of the desk and waited.
“Well, I hear you’ve been making the rounds. What conclusions have been reached, may I ask?”
“We’re in a shit storm,” O’Neil said, looking the man in the eye.
“We?”
“All for one and one for all, as they say.”
“That’s not how I see it, Captain. I see it as a mess you need to clean up. So, my question to you is, what do you plan to do about it?”
“Just what part of this are you talking about?”
“Let’s start with the woman, this Elena. Where does that stand?”
“We’re working on some leads.”
“Spare me the press release. Do you know where she is or not?”
“Not yet but we’ll find her, one way or the other. Father Darius’s weakness for the red MG will be his downfall. Half of Northern Virginia saw him in it last night because of the traffic jam on 66. We were up to our eyeballs in phone calls this morning and one guy had the plate. It won’t take long. We don’t know how long he keeps them before he kills them. The priests at the shelter and at Catholic University were killed on the spot. The monsignor was kept alive for awhile.”
“What about Chicago and San Francisco?”
“Maybe it was him, maybe not.”
“I’ve heard that theory. Do you think it was Malone?”
“Hard to say. He was an odd one. He’s missing and I’d bet that Father Darius took care of him. We don’t have a body yet, so Malone could be sunning himself in Mia
mi, but I doubt it.”
“Okay, so you find the woman and take care of the good father. That’s problem number one. The bigger issue is the mess you made out of this business with the reporter, Dave Haggard, and the unbelievable foul-up at the farm. What in God’s name were you thinking?”
“That’s been the number one question all day,” O’Neil said. “I thought Frank could handle it. He couldn’t. I thought Byrne and the guys from New York were better than they were. We went outside for this and it didn’t work out.”
“Thank you for your analysis of the obvious. I won’t be able to keep this from going up the pole, you know that. The organization must come first. You may be the lamb, if you get my drift. The boys at the Bureau are all over this and there are forces over there that are not sympathetic to our cause. Do you see how this is spinning away from us?”
O’Neil had been on the other side of many such conversations and they always ended with the strong side convincing the weak side to concede and accept punishment. “Let me take care of this.”
“I suppose if I didn’t believe in miracles my faith would be weak, so I’ll give you until the end of the day.”
“Twenty-four hours. That gets me to midday tomorrow.”
“I’ll be having lunch at the Willard in the Occidental Grill. See me there.”
So that was it. One day. Well, he reasoned, by then Elena would either be dead or alive. If he could bring in Father Darius, or at least kill him, the priest killings could be proclaimed “solved”. Dave was another matter. He liked the reporter and he didn’t rule out something non-lethal by way of a resolution. His phone rang and he saw that it was Dave. What are the odds? he wondered. “I was just thinking of you. How are you, Dave?”
“How do you think I am? I’m out of my mind. I might have something for you. Didn’t I hear that some guy on I-66 last night got a plate number for the MG?”
“Yeah, that’s what I heard too.”
“I went to see that guy in Arlington, a nosy neighbor type, who took me to a house where another guy has been parking a red MG. I went to take a look and I got a plate number. Do you have the one that was phoned in?”
“Not with me, no, and I’m in transit now. I’ll call you when I get back to the office. I’ll be half an hour or so. Listen, we need to talk in person. How about I buy you dinner tonight?”
Dave was in no mood to spend personal time with O’Neil but he was aware of his need to maintain contact with him until Elena could be found and rescued. “Yeah, sure. Call me when you get the plate number. We can make plans.”
Dave was at his apartment when he made the call to O’Neil and he felt empty. He ended the call and laid down on his bed and quickly fell into a dreamless sleep, the sort that takes the sleeper down into a near-coma where the world is shut out to all but the most insistent intrusions. An hour later the dobro ringtone was not enough. He slept through it. Five minutes later it rang again and he was immune to the noise, even though the phone was inches from his head. O’Neil gave up and left a message on Dave’s voicemail that contained the license plate number and the name of a South American restaurant just off Dupont Circle where he would meet Dave for dinner at seven.