Bombshell Part 4

"Don't make her laugh," he said. "It might bust her head open."

"That might be tough," Delsey said. "Anna's funny."

"Okay, sweetie, here's the deal," Anna said. "Rumors are flyin' all over town ever since Henry started talkin' to people at the diner about how you were naked and the paramedics were all guys, about how there was blood in your bathtub and someone bein' there with you. That's only one of them, admittedly the most interestin'. Believe me, everybody was wild to hear the details. You never mentioned a lover. You didn't pick one up without tellin' me, did you?"

Delsey laughed, squeezed her eyes shut at the shaft of pain slicing through her head. "You weren't supposed to be funny, Anna."

"I'm sorry. Here, this will help." Anna smoothed out a dampened hand towel and lightly laid it on Delsey's forehead. She leaned close. "That better?"

"Yeah, it is. Now, listen, I may have picked up a lover last night for all I know. I don't remember. It's like hitting a blank wall. Why did Henry come down to my apartment?"

"He said it was really late and he was hearin' b.u.mps and bangs, and then he heard you scream so he called 911. He st.i.tched up his courage and went in your place and found you on your bathroom floor, lyin' naked-he always lowers his voice and whispers it." She shrugged, smiling. "You know Henry."

She turned to Griffin. "I'm very glad you're here. Your timin' in Maestro is like a miracle. You guys have different last names. Why?"

"She married a loser crook, kicked him to the curb, but kept his last name because she said it made the muses of music swarm into her head. Delsey said you play the violin?"

"Actually, since I grew up in the Louisiana boondocks, bayou country, I played the fiddle first. I could still make you want to polka until you fall in a heap and shout yourself hoa.r.s.e." She turned back to Delsey. "You need to get your brain back together and tell us what happened. Exactly."

West Potomac Park

The Lincoln Memorial

Washington, D.C.

Sat.u.r.day morning

"Keep everyone back!" Metro Detective Ben Raven yelled to the three WPD officers as he knelt beside Savich at the broken body of a young man. It was hard to tell how long he'd been dead because he was frozen stiff. There was a small black halo of frozen blood around his smashed head. Did that mean he hadn't died here?

It wasn't ten o'clock yet and had been snowing hard since early that morning, so there was barely a trickle of traffic. Yet there were already at least twenty gawkers bundled up in their coats looking in on them, attracted by the yellow crime tape and all the police activity.

Ben told Savich a Park Service employee had found the body only an hour before and called 911. When Ben had realized the body was on federal land, he'd gotten hold of Savich as he was babying his Porsche through the ice-covered streets from Georgetown to the Hoover Building.

Savich looked up at the solitary figure of Abraham Lincoln, felt a familiar awe and sadness for the man, wondering as he often did whether Lincoln would have managed to bring the country together again if he hadn't been a.s.sa.s.sinated. Savich looked away from the nineteen-foot marble statue and back down at the frozen, broken body. He was a boy, really, no more than twenty, Savich thought, lying close to Lincoln's statue, one frozen arm flung out toward Lincoln's chair. Savich knelt down beside him. Why was he naked? Why had his killer added this indignity? Savich found himself studying what remained of his young face. There was something about him that looked familiar. Who was he?

"No ID anywhere around him?" Savich asked.

Ben Raven shook his head. "Nothing, no clothes, no nothing at all."

His arms and legs were sprawled at odd angles, as if he'd been thrown or fallen from a great height. Savich looked up sixty feet to the grilled ceiling. "We've got to check with the Park Service, see about access." Had someone managed to haul the young man up sixty feet and throw him from the ceiling above Lincoln's head? He didn't see anything broken or unusual about the grills.

"Ben, does he look familiar to you?"

Detective Ben Raven studied the face. "Hard to tell, he's so messed up." He looked up quickly, said in a sharp voice, hard and clear as gla.s.s, "Hey, buddy, back off. No photos. This is a crime scene."

Savich wondered how many photos had already been snapped with cell phones or even with zoom lenses and uploaded to YouTube and Facebook, emailed to friends and family and The National Enquirer. Crime scenes in living color were everywhere now. It made their jobs harder.

"Ben," Savich said, "look again."

Ben again studied the young man's face. "No, I don't recognize him. I've got to say he wasn't dressed for the weather. Looks to me like most every bone in his body is broken. You think he was thrown from up there?" He jerked his head upward.

They both turned when the four-person FBI forensic team came up the steps of the memorial, with them Dr. Ambrose Hardy, the FBI medical examiner from Quantico.

Hardy was as skinny as his favorite fishing pole, his face covered with a thick black beard, like some underfed mountain man. The few patches of gray in his beard added to the effect.

"Savich," Dr. Hardy said, not looking at him but down at the frozen body. "Not something I like to see on a beautiful Sat.u.r.day morning." He knelt down beside the boy.

"Hey, Dillon, you look both hot and cold. Isn't it sad how that works?" He grinned up at Ms. Mary Lou Tyler, supervisor of the FBI forensic team. She was tough and smart, and though she was his mom's age, she was still a seasoned flirt. She knelt down beside Dr. Hardy. "Geez, this isn't how I planned to spend my Sat.u.r.day morning, either, Ambrose."

"None of us did," Savich said, turned, and saw Sherlock running up the steps toward him. He said, "Ben, do you want to be in on this?"

Ben looked back at the thin shattered body. "Yeah," he said, "I do. Let me take you to the guy who found him. He's a longtime employee of the Park Service, name's Danny Franks. I told one of my guys to keep him warm in his squad car."

Sherlock had her creds out so the cops in her path parted easily as she walked quickly to Savich and went down on her knees beside Mary Lou Tyler and Dr. Hardy. The two women spoke quietly. Savich watched her take in her surroundings, carefully, completely. It was her special gift, a kind of magic that happened when she re-created a crime scene in her mind. Sherlock said, "This was staged for effect, to focus public attention. Leaving him in front of Lincoln is a touch of drama to serve that purpose. A good choice, really.

"He was dead when his killer tossed him down here. You already realized there's not enough blood with all his injuries for him to have died here." She looked up. "So how could this work? I can't see the killer climbing up access stairs sixty feet up, the boy over his shoulder. It had to be somewhere else. Actually, I doubt there's any access to the ceiling."

Dr. Hardy said, "I agree these look like ma.s.sive deceleration injuries, Sherlock, such as a fall from several stories."

Sherlock rose and dusted off her hands on her pants. "Yeah, but not here, which means the killer carried him here, to this public stage, where he arranged him just so." She stared silently down at the broken body. "He's so young. This is such a waste, such a horrible, needless waste." She shivered, tucked a hank of curly hair back beneath her wool cap. "Dr. Hardy, can you tell us anything else about him?"

"Not a great deal. I'd say he was placed here within the last twelve hours; that's as close as I can get since he's frozen. He was alive when he suffered the visible injuries to his face and head. We'll know at autopsy whether any of his other injuries were postmortem. I'll have more for you this afternoon."

She said, "Thank you, Dr. Hardy. We'll leave him to you, then. Ben, let's go see Danny Franks."

As they carefully made their way through the heavy snow down the steps of the memorial, Savich asked her, "Sean's okay?"

"Sean's well occupied with Simon and Lilly. Computer games and popcorn at your sister's house." Sherlock shivered. "It's cold, Dillon; it's so very cold. What kind of monster would do this? And why?"

Savich said, "A monster wanting to make a statement, though it's not clear what it is. Picking the Lincoln Memorial was a sure way to make the international news very fast."

Sherlock said to Ben Raven, "I'll bet you Callie is already getting photos emailed to her at The Washington Post. I see the newspeople are setting up already."

Ben said, "I got a call from my wife a few minutes ago about the email she got along with a grainy photo shot from the sidewalk-impossible to see anything clearly through the snow. She wanted to know what was happening. Of course I couldn't tell her." He grinned. "It doesn't keep her from hammering at me, though." He looked up at the fat white flakes pelting down thick from the steel-gray clouds. "We'll find out who our victim is soon enough, no doubt about that." He paused, looked out over the Reflecting Pool. "Why are the weatherpeople always right when it comes to predicting the bad stuff?"

Savich looked one last time over his shoulder through the falling snow at the statue of Lincoln. What kind of statement did this horrific act mean to send? Would they be hearing from this killer again? Soon? He saw the media had arrived en ma.s.se despite the weather, newscasters speaking urgently into microphones as they stood on steps that began at the edge of the Reflecting Pool, probably leading off by describing the Lincoln Memorial with its thirty-six Doric columns and what it means to all of us. What else would they have to talk about until they learned something about the dead young man up there?

Ben eyed all the reporters. "Don't let it slip your mind, Savich, that we're standing on federal land, and that means you're in charge. And these guys are all yours." He gave Savich a huge grin and slithered off into a crowd of WPD officers.

Savich manned up and spoke to the reporters. It was nice to tell them he didn't know a thing yet, and not lie.