69: Poole stood in the center of the green house, Bishop’s house, with an ice pack pressed to the back of his neck. Federal agents had taped off this property as well as the abandoned home across the street and now swarmed over both. He watched them take out Diener’s lifeless body on a stretcher about an hour ago, only after all evidence was collected and the scene was properly documented.
The woman in the pink robe moved a chair to her picture window and watched the activity with a mug in her hand, golf long forgotten. Agents interviewed her upon arrival but got nothing beyond what she had told Poole.
Special Agent in Charge Foster Hurless stood beside him, his usual scowl etched on his face. “Tell me what happened again.”
“I didn’t see a car in the driveway. He left on foot. He might still be close. I’m not doing any good standing here,” Poole said.
“Medical needs to clear you, and we have a dead agent. I’ve got people going door to door. The only footsteps in the snow outside are on the walkway and the driveway. There’s no garage,” Hurless told him. “This place is small.”
“Well, I’d remember a car.”
“He could have parked on the street. There are cars up and down this road.”
Poole said nothing.
“Tell me again.”
“There isn’t much to tell. We traced the fake identification to a mailing address—the abandoned house across the street. We cleared the house. I drew the short straw, and Diener opted to photograph the interior, particularly the walls with the graffiti, while I talked to the neighbors. The woman across the street said the man living here collected the mail, so I came here next. I didn’t expect Bishop to open the door. He took me by surprise. We struggled. He bested me when he got ahold of the table leg. When I woke, I cleared this house, then went back across the street and found Special Agent Diener.”
“So you knew someone used the house across the street as a mail drop, you knew that someone came from here, and you still came over without backup?”
Poole felt his face flush. “I had no reason to believe there was any danger. I most definitely didn’t expect Bishop.”
“And he was expecting Sam Porter? The Metro detective?”
“His exact words were, ‘You’re not Sam Porter.’ I’m not sure what that means.”
“It means he wouldn’t have been surprised to find Porter on his doorstep.”
Poole shook his head. “I know what you’re thinking, but Porter is a good cop. He made some mistakes, but he’s not mixed up in this, not like that. He wants this guy found, that’s all.”
Hurless touched his chin. “Maybe, maybe not. I just learned there was a diary on the body they found a few months back, the bus victim they thought was 4MK. Apparently it was Bishop’s diary. Porter never checked it into evidence. It’s mentioned in the report, but Metro doesn’t have possession, never did.”
“Why would he withhold evidence?” Poole asked.
“Why would Bishop expect him on his doorstep?”
Poole grimaced, pressing the ice pack harder against his neck. “Why mention the diary in a report if he planned to withhold?”
“The diary is in Detective Nash’s report, not Porter’s. Porter doesn’t mention it once in forty-three pages of typed text.”
A crime scene tech approached and stood silently beside SAIC Hurless, waiting for a break in the conversation. They looked at her and she raised her voice. “Sir. We’ve completed our preliminary of this residence. There are no prints. We found traces of latex residue on many of the surfaces, so he most likely wore gloves while here. Other surfaces have been wiped clean.”
“What about the table leg he hit me with?”
“Wiped,” she said.
Poole nodded toward the bathroom, regretting the motion the moment he did it. “What about the bathtub or shower. Maybe he bathed here?”
“The bathtub was dry and covered with bleach stains. We think he cleaned it after each use—same with the sinks in both the bathroom and the kitchen. He removed the traps on the plumbing as well. We’re taking all the remaining pipes with us in case something got caught up inside. We’re also vacuuming all surfaces. We’ll find something,” she assured them. “Nobody can hide completely.”
“Any way to tell how long he was here?” Poole asked.
She shook her head. “He was ready to bug out on a moment’s notice. Probably got out in less than ten minutes. He could have been here for days or months.”
“The woman across the street said she remembers seeing him as far back as six months ago,” Hurless said.
“So Bishop put this together as a safe house before he was outed as 4MK.”
“Looks that way. According to property records, the house is owned by a subsidiary of Talbot Enterprises. They’ve been buying up houses in this area for about two years and turning them out as rentals. They keep the utilities on to prevent the pipes from freezing while they’re vacant. The whole neighborhood is a hotspot for the homeless and squatters. Once he jimmied the lock, he’d be able to come and go as he pleased. It’s not tough to run a disguise in weather like this. Everyone’s got multiple layers on. He wouldn’t stand out.”
“If he set up this safe house in advance, most likely he has others.”
“That would be my guess.”
Poole turned back to the tech. “What about the cell phones? Bishop took mine and Agent Diener’s.”
“Both went dark at twenty-four minutes past two this afternoon,” she replied.
Poole lowered the ice pack and turned back to SAIC Hurless. “Can we go back across the street? I want to get a better look at that wall.”
Diener’s body was gone, but the dark red stain remained. Poole could still hear the man’s gruff voice, the shuffle of his gait. He half expected him to come walking out from a back room followed by one of the remaining crime scene investigators.
SAIC Hurless motioned toward the graffiti wall. “What can you tell me about these cutouts?”
Diener’s eye still sat precariously on the edge of the dusty drywall, a tag with the number 37 placed beside it.
Poole traced the opening with the tip of his finger. “There was a poem here—Dickinson. Written with a black marker or a Sharpie. It said:
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.”
He crossed over to the second hole, where Diener’s ear now lay, tagged number 38. “This one was Hanshan.” He recalled the poem verbatim:
“A telling analogy for life and death:
Compare the two of them to water and ice.
Water draws together to become ice,
And ice disperses again to become water.
Whatever has died is sure to be born again;
Whatever is born comes around again to dying.
As ice and water do one another no harm,
So life and death, the two of them, are fine.”
At the third hole, Diener’s tongue now lay in silent reflection of the words that had been here earlier, the number 39 beside it:
“Let us return Home, let us go back,
Useless is this reckoning of seeking and getting,
Delight permeates all of today.
From the blue ocean of death
Life is flowing like nectar.
In life there is death; in death there is life.
So where is fear, where is fear?
The birds in the sky are singing ‘No death, no death!’
Day and night the tide of Immortality
Is descending here on earth.”
He motioned toward the opening, toward invisible words. “Home, fear, death, were all underlined. The poem is Tibetan, old.”
It was the fourth hole that intrigued him most, higher on the graffiti wall and off to the right. Nothing sat within it, only an empty space in the drywall, but clearly cut away by Bishop with the same careful technique he used on the other spaces—nearly a perfect square missing.
Poole had not studied whatever was here as he did the others. With those, he read the words, took in the measured handwriting. He could see each letter with perfect clarity in his mind’s eye. This hole was different. At best, he had glanced at this portion of the wall.
“What about this one?” Hurless said. “What was written here?”
Poole raised a hand, silenced him, then closed his eyes, concentrated, focused on what he saw when he first walked the abandoned house. He had seen this wall, but he hadn’t seen the wall. He hadn’t made a conscious effort to memorize it, to take it in. The haphazard artwork and words were nothing more than a smear in his memory, a Pollock painting slightly out of focus.
Are you trying tell me something, Bishop, or are you hiding something? Poole thought.
He pictured the wall, every inch of the wall. He visualized himself walking past, his eyes taking in every speck of color, his eyes glancing over this very spot, this missing spot. The same black handwriting, the blocky letters. He could see them, but they were out of focus, like the background of a photo with a subject front and center and all else blurred. He concentrated on those black words, on the blur, not so much the meaning of the words but the image of them. He concentrated until they came into focus, one letter at a time, and only then did he read, speaking them aloud: “You can’t play God without being acquainted with the devil.”