“Wow,” O’Donnell said, surveying the carnage around me. I was still on my knees, fingers laced behind my head. “You sure know how to throw a party.”
“Ain’t no party like a Dee-troit party.”
The uniformed and SWAT Detroit cops surrounding me kept me squarely in their gun sites. O’Donnell had shown up with her own small contingency of agents.
O’Donnell looked at the prone body of Brewster. “Kinda looks like the first part of our agreement is null and void.”
“Yeah, but since your raid on the bank, the second part trumps the first.”
Skittles, his arms draped around the shoulders of two FBI agents, was escorted to an awaiting ambulance. “The fuck’s going’ on, man?” he was saying. My stomach knotted and I suddenly felt an uncomfortable kinship with Judas Iscariot. I’d given up Skittles for FBI immunity and protection. The buffer I needed from the Detroit Police Department.
O’Donnell was brought into an impromptu confab with three on-site DPD captains, several lieutenants and the commissioner. She was a good head shorter than the men, but it looked like she was holding her own.
Several of the DPD captains angrily gestured toward me. Other gestures were reserved for Skittles, who was quickly secured in the ambulance and whisked away. O’Donnell calmly nodded in the face of the angry recriminations, accusations and threats. She extracted her phone from her coat pocket and held the phone to her ear. She said a few words, then handed the phone to the DPD commissioner. The commissioner took the phone, held up a hand in front of his staff. The captains and lieutenants instantly fell silent.
Several minutes later I was being lifted to my feet by two FBI agents and escorted to one of the two remaining FBI Chevy Tahoes. Past the Detroit uniforms and SWAT teams. Past the captains, lieutenants and commissioner. Past the gathering of news trucks and reporters suddenly on the scene, jockeying for position and hysterically speculating on what latest war had been fought on this decimated Mexicantown territory.
At the FBI Detroit regional office, I was frisked for the third time, treated for minor lacerations, given several ice packs and a couple of aspirin for my badly bruised but unbroken ribs. The bullet wound I’d received in Traverse City was cleaned and redressed. And I spent the next several hours in an interview room answering variations on the same questions from different agents, including a conferenced-in agent in Quantico.
At 5:30 Tuesday morning, O’Donnell entered the room wearing a tactical black jumpsuit and a very imposing sidearm strapped to her left thigh. She had two big cups of Starbucks coffee, a box of Tim Horton donuts and a non-descript white box. She sat the box of donuts and one of the coffees in front of me.
“Ever have the donuts at LaBelle’s Soul Hole?” I said, surveying the box of donuts. “Little place on Michigan Avenue near Rosa Parks Boulevard.”
“LaBelle Mason-Dunwitty,” O’Donnell said, “Carries a Smith & Wesson 1911 and makes a helluva apple fritter. I’m not the tourista you may think I am, Snow.”
I grabbed one of the buttermilk glazed donuts and took a hearty bite. It was good.
Seemed all of my weapons and most of the weapons used by Brewster’s crew were accounted for. However, several of the weapons that had killed them were unaccounted for. Like Frank and Tomás’s weapons. And, of course, the gun used to kill Brewster. I casually speculated that perhaps divine intervention had provided me well-armed angels.
“I’d love to meet these avenging angels,” O’Donnell said.
“You know how angels are,” I said. “‘Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.’”
O’Donnell’s raid on Titan Securities Investments Group had been performed with swift tactical precision. Like the wrath of God, FBI agents stormed the building, gathering up computers, servers, paper files, office safes, lockboxes, safety deposit boxes, notepads, pens, paper and paperclips. Even the offices of LifeLight were turned over.
O’Donnell filled me in on Atchison’s story, which made me nearly choke on a plain donut: The FBI and State Police, unable to serve a warrant to Kip Atchison at his Grosse Pointe Estates home, made the long journey north to his palatial Charlevoix summer home. Atchison was found wearing knee-high leather high-heel boots, expensive panties and bra and a long silk scarf. Dead from auto-erotic asphyxiation. An APB was out for a high-end male escort whose professional name was “Ima Bytchakokoff.”
“You brought in Aaron Spiegelman?” I said after laughing for a minute straight. “How’s he doing?”
O’Donnell shrugged. “’Bout as well as anybody who was in love for twenty-five years and just lost their partner. Funny thing, though. He asked me if you had any part in bringing Titan down.”
“And you said?”
“I told him you were integral to our investigation and left it at that. Then he sang like a castrato choirboy about everything that had been going on at the bank.”
O’Donnell and the FBI’s legal eagles were getting serious carpal tunnel writing up the various and sundry charges against Titan’s board of directors. Of course, O’Donnell wasn’t quite sure what kind of charges to lay at Spiegelman’s feet save for operating with astounding naiveté and willfully blind arrogance. “And hell,” O’Donnell said, eyeing a Boston Cream from the box of donuts, “if I could put him away for that, I could certainly put you and most of congress away for life on the same charges.” She took a moment to enjoy a bite of her Boston Cream and a sip of coffee, then said, “Tell me about Rose Mayfield.”
I did.
When I finished, O’Donnell said, “You’re lucky three witnesses saw you by your car when the shot was fired.” O’Donnell walked to the single narrow window of the room and looked out at the increasing morning traffic on Michigan Avenue, ten stories below. “McKinney, a.k.a. Skittles, is on lock-down at Henry Ford Hospital. He knows you’re his Judas. But I think between the morphine drip and the deal we’re offering, he might be forgiving.”
“Speaking of Judas,” I began, “you ever find out anything about Dax Randolph?”
“Just another mercenary looking for a big pay-out,” O’Donnell said unconvincingly.
“Really?” I said. “That’s not what the Cleaner told me.”
O’Donnell, gazing out at the traffic on Michigan Avenue, suddenly turned to face me. “You talked to the Cleaner?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said brightly. “We’re thick as murderous thieves. He said his contract wasn’t just for Brewster. It was for Dax Randolph, too. Which begs the question: Why would there be a high-end contract out on a glorified bank security guard?” O’Donnell folded her arms across her chest and stared at me dispassionately. “The last thing this Cleaner guy said to me was ‘one should always be careful of the legends one chooses to believe.’”
“Meaning?”
“See, that’s just it,” I said. “I had no idea. I thought maybe he was telling me Dax was some sort of legendary badass. But Dax knew things about me. Knew about a mission I had in Afghanistan. A mission maybe five people knew about.”
“How’s any of this—”
“Dax Randolph never existed,” I said. “He was a fiction. A ‘legend’. Somebody who wears and sheds a number of skins. Someone adept at infiltration. Dax Randolph was CIA. What better way to find out where terrorist money’s coming in from and going out to? Only problem—I mean if Mr. Gramatins, my ninth-grade civics teacher, was right—is the CIA isn’t sanctioned for domestic operations. That would be like a big, bad neighbor taking a steaming hot piss on your rosebush, right?”
O’Donnell walked to the metal table, closed the lid on the box of donuts and started to walk out of the room, taking the remaining donuts with her.
“You forgot something,” I said, pointing to the squat white box on the table.
“It’s yours,” she said standing in the doorway.
I opened the box.
Two navy blue ceramic coffee mugs emblazoned with the FBI logo.
She walked away, leaving the door to the interview room open.