CHAPTER

19

 

Tolman’s apartment was all neutral earth tones, neither cramped nor spacious. Much of the furniture had come from her grandmother’s house, and the rest she had scavenged from yard sales. Friends had told her it looked like the home of a perpetual graduate student.

She woke early, called and checked in with Hudson—he was in the office by 7 A.M., even after the late night—then fed Rocky, her solid white, blue-eyed cat. She showered and dressed in black slacks and a simple white silk blouse. By ten thirty she was on the Metro, headed to Vienna in Fairfax County, the western terminus of the Metro’s Orange Line. From the station, she walked two blocks to the small hotel where the monthly luncheon of the Fairfax County Kiwanis was held. Sixty or so members, mostly men, mostly middle-aged, ate the obligatory chicken and listened to three of their members talk about service projects and scholarships and the upcoming fall picnic. Tolman tuned them out—she’d played enough of these sorts of things to hear every possible variation on it many, many times.

Still distracted, she thought of Nick Journey.

“I think the chief justice is going to be next.”

The words were softly spoken, hesitant. Tolman remembered the sound of the high-pitched wail in the background: the man’s son, shrieking without words.

Tolman tried to drive the thoughts away. She heard “Margaret Isabell Tolman” off to her left, then a little polite applause. She rose, nodded to the group, and moved to the piano. She closed her eyes for a moment, letting the deep cleansing feeling of music begin to take hold. She raised her hands to begin a Rachmaninov prelude.

“Excuse me, Margaret.”

Hands two inches above the keyboard, Tolman froze. She looked toward the voice. The man at the podium was looking at her.

“I know you have a program you’ve planned for us,” the man said.

Tolman stared at him. The room was silent.

“But since our great tragedy this weekend with the death of the Speaker of the House, I wonder if you would take a moment and play our national anthem before you get to the rest of your program.”

Tolman stared.

Feet shuffled, chairs scraped. People were getting to their feet and turning at a slight angle to face an American flag that rested on a stand in the corner of the room.

Tolman nodded. She knew the piece, of course. Any musician who played events like this had to keep it in their repertoire. You’ll have to wait a minute, Sergei, she thought.

She lowered her hands, then stopped.

The national anthem.

The rockets’ red glare.

Bombs bursting in air.

Michael Standridge and Kevin Lane. U.S. Army Special Forces, killed by improvised explosive devices in Iraq.

Gave proof through the night, that our flag was still there.

“Margaret?” said the man at the podium.

People began putting their hands over their hearts.

The land of the free, the home of the brave.

The brave. Elite troops. Standridge and Lane. Dead in Iraq in 2006, alive in Oklahoma last week.

Our flag was still there.

Still there.

I know how to find them, Tolman thought. I know how to trace exactly where they are.

She folded her hands back into her lap.

All eyes in the room were on her.

Tolman stood up. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to go.”

Before any of them could say a word, she was out the door of the meeting room, and then out of the hotel itself. She had to get to the office. She had to talk to Hudson. This wasn’t something she could do alone. She would need the man’s bureaucratic muscle.

Within fifteen minutes, she was on the Metro, headed back toward Washington.

*   *   *

“Rusty, I need a court order,” Tolman announced as she walked into the office forty minutes after boarding the train in Vienna.

Hudson looked up from his computer. “Would you say that again, please?”

“I had a thought about how to track my anonymous shooters from Oklahoma.”

“Meg, I thought you were playing the piano right now.”

“I was, but I came back. They’ll get over it.” Tolman flopped into the chair across from Hudson. “I was sitting there in this hotel meeting room, with all these balding, graying men, and they asked me to play the national anthem, sort of as a tribute to Vandermeer.”

“What does this have to do with a court order?”

“I was about to play it, and I thought of the words to the song, how our flag was still there and all that.”

“Meg, I’m tired and not in a good mood.”

“It made me think, that if these guys were killed in Iraq, there would be payments to their survivors. Land of the free, home of the brave. Brave guys who get killed defending their flag get benefits. If I get access to their bank records, and those of their families, I could see if benefits have been paid and when. If there were no survivors’ benefits paid, then I can prove they aren’t dead, even if the army says they are.”

“You arrived at all this by thinking of the words to ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’”

“The power of music.”

“Meg, these sorts of things aren’t as simple as you seem to think they are. Digging around in our own databases is one thing, but accessing the bank records of private citizens is quite another.”

“Jesus, Rusty, we’re part of Homeland Security. File the request under the Patriot Act or something.”

“Can you demonstrate a verifiable terrorist threat? You don’t even know for certain that the men in the Journey incident are these same men who allegedly died in Iraq. I even called the Pentagon for you this morning. I got nowhere. I think that, for whatever reason, you’re finding ways to look at this case that really have no bearing on the case itself.”

Tolman leaned forward, folding her hands over the edge of Hudson’s desk. “The facial-recognition program—”

“Perhaps you’re putting too much faith in the program.”

“Rusty, you got us the goddamn thing! Don’t be such a fucking bureaucrat! What if someone—let’s say whoever is behind the attack on Journey—really is after the chief justice?”

Hudson met her eyes. “Meg, I give you a great deal of latitude in how you speak to me and the way you go about your job. I do this because you are very, very good at your job and because I count you as a friend. But in most organizations, if a subordinate spoke to their supervisor the way you just spoke to me, they would be gone. You understand that, don’t you?”

Tolman spread her hands apart. “Okay, I’m sorry. I have my father’s mouth. But I can—”

“I think that because Nick Journey called you personally, and the threat assessment came about from that phone call, that you’re internalizing a lot of this case. Díaz is far from my favorite person in the Bureau, but he’s right—we have no evidence that shows anything about your shooters. Getting a federal court order to go about accessing private bank records is not done without having overwhelming evidence that the records will produce an indication either of criminal activity or the intent of future criminal activity.”

“Rusty—”

Hudson stabbed a finger on his desktop. “I don’t like dealing with the Pentagon. They are out of our realm of responsibility. I’ve told you this before. I called them, as a courtesy to you, but there is nothing there.”

“Rusty—”

“That’s enough. I’m sorry the case is frustrating for you.” Hudson turned back to his computer. “By the way, you did very well in presenting at the threat assessment.”

Tolman left Hudson’s office without replying and fumed down the hall, kicking her own door closed behind her. Where cases go to die.

“Such a fucking bureaucrat,” she said out loud. Tolman tapped her foot, thinking of “Weeping Willow,” a Scott Joplin ragtime piece she’d been working on lately. Usually the thought of new music calmed her, but this time Joplin’s syncopations didn’t help. She rocked in her chair, moving papers around her desk.

“Shit,” she finally said.

“You are very, very good at your job,” Hudson had told her.

Patronizing bullshit, or honest evaluation? She tended toward the latter. Hudson was a bureaucrat, but he was also honest with her.

If he thinks I’m so good at my job, then I’m going to do my job.

With or without him.