Gone Tomorrow

‘Like my sister.’

‘It’s human nature.’

‘What’s your point?’

‘I’m working with what we’ve got. We’ve got two random names, and election season starting up, and your sister in HRC.’

‘You think John Sansom is lying about his past?’

‘Probably not,’ I said. ‘But it’s a common area of exaggeration. And politics is a dirty business. You can bet that right now someone is checking on the guy who did Sansom’s dry-cleaning twenty years ago, wanting to know if he had a green card. So it’s a no-brainer to assume that people are fact-checking his actual biography. It’s a national sport.’

‘So maybe Lila Hoth is a journalist. Or a researcher. Cable news, or something. Or talk radio.’

‘Maybe she’s Sansom’s opponent.’

‘Not with a name like that. Not in North Carolina.’

‘OK, let’s say she’s a journalist or a researcher. Maybe she put the squeeze on an HRC clerk for Sansom’s service record. Maybe she picked your sister.’

‘Where was her leverage?’

I said, ‘That’s the first big hole in the story.’ Which it was. Susan Mark had been desperate and terrified. It was hard to imagine a journalist finding that kind of leverage. Journalists can be manipulative and persuasive, but no one is particularly afraid of them.

‘Was Susan political?’ I asked.

‘Why?’

‘Maybe she didn’t like Sansom. Didn’t like what he stood for. Maybe she was cooperating. Or volunteering.’

‘Then why would she be so scared?’

‘Because she was breaking the law,’ I said. ‘Her heart would have been in her mouth.’

‘And why was she carrying the gun?’

‘Didn’t she normally carry it?’

‘Never. It was an heirloom. She kept it in her sock drawer, like people do.’

I shrugged. The gun was the second big hole in the story. People take their guns out of their sock drawers for a variety of reasons. Protection, aggression. But never just in case they feel a spur of the moment impulse to off themselves far from home.

Jake said, ‘Susan wasn’t very political.’

‘OK.’

‘Therefore there can’t be a connection with Sansom.’

‘Then why did his name come up?’

‘I don’t know.’

I said, ‘Susan must have driven up. Can’t take a gun on a plane. Her car is probably getting towed right now. She must have come through the Holland Tunnel and parked way downtown.

Jake didn’t reply. My coffee was cold. The waitress had given up on refills. We were an unprofitable table. The rest of the clientele had changed twice over. Working people, moving fast, filling up, getting ready for a busy day. I pictured Susan Mark twelve hours earlier, getting ready for a busy night. Dressing, finding her father’s gun, loading it, packing it into the black bag. Climbing into her car, taking 236 to the Beltway, going clockwise, maybe getting gas, hitting 95, heading north, eyes wide and desperate, drilling the darkness ahead.

Speculate, Jake had said. But suddenly I didn’t want to. Because I could hear Theresa Lee in my head. The detective. You tipped her over the edge. Jake saw me thinking and asked, ‘What?’

‘Let’s assume the leverage,’ I said. ‘Let’s assume it was totally compelling. So let’s assume Susan was on her way to deliver whatever information she was told to get. And let’s assume these are bad people. She didn’t trust them to release whatever hold

they had over her. Probably she thought they were going to up the stakes and ask for more. She was in, and she didn’t see a way of getting out. And above all, she was very afraid of them. So she was desperate. So she took the gun. Possibly she thought she could fight her way out, but she wasn’t optimistic about her chances. All in all, she didn’t think things were going to end well.’

‘So?’

‘She had business to attend to. She was almost there. She never intended to shoot herself.’

‘But what about the list? The behaviours?’

‘Same difference,’ I said. ‘She was on the way to where she expected someone else to end her life, maybe some other way, either literally or figuratively.’

FOURTEEN

JACOB MARK SAID, ‘IT DOESN’T EXPLAIN THE COAT.’ BUT I thought he was wrong. I thought it explained the coat pretty well. And it explained the fact that she parked downtown and rode up on the subway. I figured she was looking to come upon whoever she was meeting from an unexpected angle, out of a hole in the ground, armed, dressed all in black, ready for some conflict in the dark. Maybe the winter parka was the only black coat she owned.

And it explained everything else, too. The dread, the sense of doom. Maybe the mumbling had been her way of rehearsing pleas, or exculpations, or arguments, or maybe even threats. Maybe repeating them over and over again had made them more convincing to her. More plausible. More reassuring.

Jake said, ‘She can’t have been on her way to deliver something, because she didn’t have anything with her.’

‘She might have had something,’ I said. ‘In her head. You told me she had a great memory. Units, dates, lime lines, whatever they needed.’

He paused, and tried to find a reason to disagree.

He failed.

‘Classified information,’ he said. ‘Army secrets. Jesus, I can’t believe it.’

‘She was under pressure, Jake.’

‘What kind of secrets does a personnel deparment have anyway, that are worth getting killed for?’

I didn’t answer. Because I had no idea. In my day HRC had been called PERSCOM. Personnel Command, not Human Resources Command. I had served thirteen years without ever thinking about it. Not even once. Paperwork and records. All the interesting information had been somewhere else.

Jake moved in his seat. He ran his fingers through his unwashed hair and clamped his palms on his ears and moved his head through a complete oval, like he was easing stiffness in his neck, or acting out some kind of inner turmoil that was bringing him full circle, back to his most basic question.

He said, ‘So why? Why did she just up and kill herself before she got where she was going?’

I paused a beat. Cafe noises went on all around us. The squeak of sneakers on linoleum, the clink and scrape of crockery, the sound of TV news from sets high on the walls, the ding of the short-order bell.

‘She was breaking the law,’ I said. ‘She was in breach of all kinds of trusts and professional obligations. And she must have detected some kind of surveillance. Maybe she had even been warned. So she was tense, right from the moment she got in her car. All the way up she was watching for red lights in her mirror. Every cop at every toll was a potential danger. Every guy she saw in a suit could have been a federal agent. And on the train, any in of us could have been getting ready to bust her.’

Jake didn’t reply.

I said, ‘And then I approached her.’

‘And?’

She flipped. She thought I was about to arrest her. Right then and there, the game was over. She was at the end of the road. She was damned if she did, and damned if she didn’t. She couldn’t go forward, couldn’t go back. She was trapped. Whatever threats they were using against her were going to come to pass, and she was going to jail.’

‘Why would she think you were going to arrest her?’

‘She must have thought I was a cop.’

‘Why would she think you were a cop?’

I’m a cop, I had said. I can help you. We can talk.

‘She was paranoid,’ I said. ‘Understandably.’

‘You don’t look like a cop. You look like a bum. She would more likely have thought you were hustling her for spare change.’

‘Maybe she thought I was undercover.’

‘She was a records clerk, according to you. She would have known what undercover cops look like.’

‘Jake, I’m sorry, but I told her I was a cop.’

‘Why?’

‘I thought she was a bomber. I was just trying to get through the next three seconds without her pushing the button. I was ready to say anything.’

He asked, "What exactly did you say?’ So I told him and he said, ‘Jesus, that even sounds like internal affairs bullshit.’