“Where are we going?” Walling asked as our gray nondescript Ford followed the gray nondescript Ford carrying Backus and Thompson out of the airport.
“Scottsdale Funeral Home,” Mize said. He was in the front passenger seat while Matuzak drove. He looked at his watch. “Funeral is at two. Your man is probably going to have less than a half hour with the body before they’ll have to suit him up and put him in the box for the show.”
“Was it open casket?”
“Yeah, last night,” Matuzak said. “He’s already been embalmed and made up. I don’t know what you’re expecting.”
“We’re not expecting anything. We just want to look. I assume Agent Backus is being briefed up ahead of us. Do you two care to fill us in?”
“That’s Robert Backus?” Mize said. “He looks so young.”
“Robert Backus Junior.”
“Oh.” Mize made a face that seemed to show that he understood why such a young man was running the show. “Figures.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rachel said. “He’s got the name but he’s also the hardest-working and most thorough agent I’ve ever worked with. He earned the position he has. It probably would have been easier for him, in fact, if he had a name like Mize. Now can one of you fill us in on what’s going on?”
I saw Matuzak study her in the mirror. He then looked over at me and Rachel registered this.
“He’s fine,” she said. “He’s got approval from the top to be here. He knows everything we do. You have a problem with that?”
“Not if you don’t,” Matuzak said. “John, you tell it.”
Mize cleared his throat.
“Not a lot to fill in. We don’t have a lot because we weren’t invited in. But what we do know is they found this guy, name’s William Orsulak, they found him in his house on Monday. Homicide cop. They figured he’d been dead at least three days. He was off Friday ’cause of comp time and the last time anybody remembered seeing him was Thursday night at a bar they all go to.”
“Who found him?”
“Somebody from the squad when he didn’t show Monday. He was divorced, lived alone. Anyway, they apparently spent all week on the fence. You know, suicide or murder? Eventually, they went with murder. That was yesterday. Apparently there were too many problems with the suicide.”
“What do you know about the scene?”
“I hate to tell you this Agent Walling, but you’d learn just as much as me by picking up one of the local papers. Like I said, Phoenix police didn’t invite us to the dance so we don’t know what they have. After we got the wire from Quantico this morning, Jamie Fox, he’s up in the lead car with Agent Backus, took a look at it while working a little OT doing paperwork. It seemed to fit with what you people were working on and he made the call. Then me and Bob got called out, but like I said, we don’t know what’s what for sure.”
“Fine.” She sounded put out. I knew she wanted to be up in the lead car. “I’m sure we’ll get it at the funeral home. What about the locals?”
“They’re meeting us.”
We parked in the back of the Scottsdale Funeral Home on Camelback Road. The lot was already crowded, though the funeral was still two hours away. There were several men milling about or leaning on cars. Detectives. I could tell. Probably waiting to hear what the FBI had to say. I saw one TV truck with the dish on top parked at the far end of the lot.
Walling and I got out and joined Backus and Thompson and we were led to a rear door of the mortuary. Inside we stepped into a large room with white tile running up to the ceiling. There were two stainless-steel tables for bodies in the center with overhead spray hoses, and stainless-steel counters and equipment against three walls. A group of five men were in the room and as they moved to greet us I could see the body on the far table. I assumed it to be Orsulak, though there was no obvious sign of damage from a gunshot to the head. The body was naked and someone had taken a yard-long length of paper towel from the roll on the counter and placed it across the dead cop’s waist to cover the genitals. The suit Orsulak would wear to the grave was on a hanger on a hook on the far wall.
Handshakes were passed all around between us and the living cops. Thompson was directed to the body and he carried his case over and went to work examining it.
“I don’t think you’ll get anything we don’t already have,” said the one called Grayson, who was in charge of the investigation for the locals. He was a stocky man with an assured and good-natured demeanor. He was deeply tanned, as were the other locals.
“We don’t, either,” said Walling, quick with the politically correct response. “You’ve been over him. Now he’s been washed and readied.”
“But we need to go through the motions,” Backus said.
“Why don’t you folks tell us what you’re working?” Grayson asked. “Maybe we can make some sense out of this.”
“Fair enough,” Backus said.
As Backus gave an abbreviated report on the Poet investigation, I watched Thompson do his work. He was at home with the body, not timid about touching, probing, squeezing. He spent a good amount of time running gloved fingers through the dead man’s gray-white hair and then carefully brushed it back in place with a comb from his own pocket. He then made a careful study of the mouth and throat, using a lighted magnifying glass. At one point he put the magnifier aside and pulled a camera from the toolbox. He took a photo of the throat, the flash drawing the attention of the cops assembled in the room.
“Just documentary photos, gentlemen,” Thompson said, not even looking up from his work.
Next he began studying the extremities of the body, first the right arm and hand, then the left. He used the magnifier again when he studied the left palm and fingers. Then he took two photos of the palm and two of the index finger. The cops in the room didn’t seem to make much of this, seemingly accepting his earlier statement that the photos were routine. But because I had noticed that he had not taken photos of the right hand, I knew he had found something of possible significance on the left. Thompson returned the camera to the box after placing the four new Polaroids it had spit out on the counter. He then continued his search of the body but took no more photos. He interrupted Backus to ask for help in turning the body over, then the head-to-foot search began again. I could see a patch of a dark, waxy material in the back of the dead man’s head and I assumed this to be where the exit wound was. Thompson didn’t bother taking a Polaroid of this.
Thompson finished with the body at about the same time Backus finished his briefing and I wondered if it hadn’t been planned that way.
“Anything?” Backus asked.
“Nothing of note, I don’t think,” Thompson said. “I’d like to review the autopsy if I could. Was the report brought along?”
“As requested,” Grayson said. “Here’s a copy of everything.”
He handed a file to him and Thompson stepped back with it to a counter where he opened it and began scanning pages.
“So, I’ve told you what I know, gentlemen,” Backus said. “Now I’d like to hear what it was about this case that dissuaded you from calling it suicide.”
“Well, I don’t think I was entirely dissuaded until I heard your story,” Grayson said. “Now I think this Poet fucker—excuse me, Agent Walling—is our guy. Anyway, we raised the question and then decided to go with a classification of homicide because of three reasons. One, when we found Bill, his hair was parted the wrong way. For twenty years he’d been coming in the office, his part is on the left. We find him dead and the part’s on the right. That was a little thing but there were two others and they add up. Next was the forensics. We had a guy swab the mouth for GSR so we could make a determination if the gun was in his mouth or held a few inches outside or what. We got the GSR but we also got some gun oil and a third substance that we haven’t been able to identify properly. Until we could explain it I wasn’t comfortable going suicide on this.”
“What can you tell me about the
substance?” Thompson asked.
“Some kind of animal-fat extract. There’s pulverized silicon in it, too. It’s in the forensic report that you’ve got in that file, too.”
I thought I saw Thompson glance at Backus and then away, a tacit admission of knowledge.
“You know it?” Grayson asked, seeming to catch the impression.
“Not offhand,” Thompson said. “I’ll get the specifics from the report and have the lab in Quantico run it on the computer. I’ll let you know.”
“What was the third reason?” Backus asked, quickly leaving the subject.
“The third reason came from Jim Beam, Orsulak’s old partner. He’s retired now.”
“That’s his name, Jim Beam?” Walling asked.
“Yeah, the Beamer. He called me up from Tucson after he heard about Bill and asked if we’d recovered the slug. I said sure, we dug it out of the wall behind his head. Then he asked me if it was gold.”
“Gold?” Backus asked. “Real gold?”
“Yes. A golden bullet. I told him no, it was a lead slug like all the others in his clip. Like the one we dug out of the floor, too. We’d figured that the floor shot was the first one, a get-up-the-courage shot. But then Beamer told me it was no suicide, that it was murder.”
“And how did he know this?”
“He and Orsulak went back a lot of years and he knew that Orsulak occasionally . . . hell, there probably isn’t a single cop who hasn’t thought about it at one time or another.”
“Killing himself,” Walling said, a statement, not a question.
“Right. And Jim Beam tells me that one time Orsulak showed him this golden bullet that he got from somewhere, he didn’t know, a mail-order catalog or something. And he says to Beamer, ‘This is my golden parachute. When I can’t take it no more, this one’s for me.’ So what Beam was saying was no golden bullet, no suicide.”
“Did you find the golden bullet?” Walling asked.
“Yeah, we found it. After we talked to Beam we found it. It was in the drawer right next to his bed. Like it was kept nearby in case he ever needed it.”
“So that convinced you.”
“In totality, all three things leaned it way over toward homicide. Murder. But like I said, I wasn’t convinced of anything until you walked in here and told your story. Now I got a hard-on for this Poet the size of—sorry for the offense, Agent Walling.”
“None taken. We all have a hard-on for him. Was there a suicide note?”
“Yes, and that’s the thing that made it so hard for us to call it a homicide. There was a note and damn if it wasn’t in Bill’s writing.”
Walling nodded that what he had just said was no surprise.
“What did the note say?”
“It didn’t make a whole lot of sense. It was like a poem. It said—well, hold on here. Agent Thomas, let me borrow that file a sec.”
“Thompson,” Thompson said as he handed it over.
“Sorry.”
Grayson looked through some pages until he found what he wanted. He read it out loud.
“ ‘Mountains toppling evermore / Into seas without a shore.’ That was it.”
Walling and Backus looked at me. I opened the book and started paging through the poems.
“I remember the line but I’m not sure where.”
I went to the poems that the Poet had already used and started reading quickly. I found it in “Dream-Land,” the poem used twice before, including the note left on my brother’s windshield.
“I got it,” I said.
I held the book out so Rachel could read the poem. The others crowded around her as well.
“Son of a bitch,” Grayson muttered.
“Can you give us a rundown on how you think it happened?” Rachel asked him.
“Uh, sure. Our theory is whoever this doer was, he came in and surprised Bill in his sleep. With Bill’s own gun. He made him get up and get dressed. That’s when Bill parted his hair wrong, I mean, he didn’t know what was going to happen or maybe he did. Either way, he leaves us a little sign. From there he’s taken out into the living room, put in the chair and the doer makes him write out that note on a piece of paper torn outta his own notebook he keeps in his coat pocket. Then he pops him. One in the mouth. Puts the gun in Bill’s hand, puts the slug into the floor and you’ve got gunshot residue on the hand. The doer’s outta there and we don’t find poor Bill for three days.”
Grayson looked over his shoulder at the body, noticed it was being unattended and looked at his watch.
“Hey, where’s the guy? he said. “Somebody go get him and tell him we’re through. You’re through with the body, right?”
“Yes,” Thompson said.
“We have to get him ready.”
“Detective Grayson,” Walling said. “Was there a specific case that Detective Orsulak was currently pursuing?”
“Oh, yeah, there was a case. The Little Joaquin case. Eight-year-old kid abducted last month. All they found of him was his head.”
Mention of the case and its brutality brought a moment of silence in the room where the dead were prepared. Before that moment I had no doubt that Orsulak’s death was related to the others, but after hearing of the crime against the boy I felt an unwavering certainty and the anger that was becoming so familiar to me foaming in my guts.
“I assume everyone is going to the funeral?” Backus said.
“That’s right.”
“Can we arrange a time to meet again? We would like to see the reports on the boy, Joaquin, as well.”
They set the meeting for nine o’clock Sunday morning at the Phoenix Police Department. Grayson apparently felt that if it was on his turf he might be better able to hang on to a piece of it. But I had a feeling that the Big G was about to move in and sweep him aside like a tidal wave hitting a lifeguard stand.
“One last thing, the press,” Walling said. “I saw a TV truck outside.”
“Yeah, they’ve been all over this, especially when they . . .”
He didn’t finish.
“When they what?”
“Well, somebody sort of put it out on the police frequency that we were meeting the FBI here.”
Rachel groaned and Grayson nodded as if he expected it.
“Look, this absolutely has to be contained,” Rachel said. “If any of what we just told you men gets out, the Poet will go under. We’ll never catch the man who did that.”
She nodded at the corpse and a few of the cops turned to make sure it was still there. The undertaker had just stepped into the room and was lifting the hanger containing Orsulak’s last suit. He was looking at the assemblage of investigators, waiting for them to leave so that he could be alone with the body.
“We’re about out of here, George,” Grayson said. “You can start.”
Backus said, “Tell the media that the FBI’s interest was purely routine and that you will continue to handle the investigation as a suspected homicide. Don’t act like you are sure of anything.”
As we were walking back through the lot to the government cars, a young woman with bleached-blond hair and a grim look on her face came up to us with a microphone, a cameraman in tow. Holding the mike to her own mouth she asked, “Why is the FBI here today?”
She turned the microphone and pointed it directly under my chin for the response. I opened my mouth but nothing came out. I had no idea why I was chosen but then realized it was the shirt I wore. The FBI seal on the breast pocket apparently assured her that she was talking to the bureau.
“I’ll answer that,” Backus said quickly and the microphone went to his chin. “We came at the request of the Phoenix Police Department to make a routine examination of the body and to hear details of the case. It is expected that our involvement ends here and further questions should go to the police. We have no further comment, thank you.”
“But are you convinced that Detective Orsulak was the victim of foul play?” the reporter persisted.
“I’m sorry,?
?? Backus said. “You’ll have to refer your questions to the Phoenix police.”
“And your name is?”
“I’d rather keep my name out of it, thank you.”
He brushed by her and got into one of the cars. I followed Walling to the other. In a few minutes we were out of there and driving back toward Phoenix.
“Are you worried?” Rachel asked.
“About what?”
“The exclusivity of your story.”
“I’m getting there. But I’m hoping she’s like most TV reporters.”
“And how are they?”
“Sourceless and senseless. If she is, then I’ll be okay.”
26
The field office was in the federal courthouse on Washington Street, just a few blocks from the police department where we would meet with the locals the next day. As we followed Mize and Matuzak down a polished corridor to a conference room, I sensed anxiety in Rachel and I thought I knew what it was. By traveling with me, she had been unable to be in the other car when Thompson filled Backus in on what he had learned from the body.
The conference room was far smaller than the one we had used in Quantico. When we entered, Backus and Thompson were already seated at the table and Backus held a phone to his ear. He covered the mouthpiece when we entered and said, “Guys, I’m going to need to talk to my people alone for a few minutes. Uh, what you could do is get some cars if you can. We’ll also need to reserve rooms somewhere. Six rooms, it looks like.”
Matuzak and Mize looked like they had just gotten word that they were demoted. They nodded glumly and left the room. I didn’t know where that left me, if I was invited or excluded, since I really wasn’t one of Backus’s people.
“Jack, Rachel, have a seat,” Backus said. “Let me finish up and I’ll have James bring you up to date.”
We took seats and watched and listened to the one-sided phone conversation. It was clear Backus was listening to messages and responding to them. Not all seemed to have something to do with the Poet investigation.