Decency (2 page)
…WITCH… …arrogant, controlling WHORE… …who’s in control now…
He arranged her in a natural sleeping posture. Then he vacuumed her again. He pulled the bedclothes up nearly over her head and vacuumed the bed surface, the route out of the bedroom into the computer room, the chair where he sat, and the route back out to the bookshelves.
He pulled the makeshift catchbag from the machine, put the old one back on, and then returned the Hoover to the closet. Taking the shortest route to the door, he wiped the surfaces of the door and the jamb that could have caught some pepper spray with the damp cloth, closed the door behind him, checked that it locked, and left.
The young coroner’s assistant switched off his flashlight, stood up, and sighed.
The detective glanced at him. Both men returned their gaze to the inert young woman lying in her bed in front of them, from all appearances, just asleep.
“From what we have here, I say she just stopped living.”
“That young? She can’t be more than late thirties.”
“It happens. You guys say there’s nothing out of place and no indications of suicide. I don’t see anything on the outside indicating it. To tell you more we’ll have to autopsy.”
“So you’re leaving it to me whether we comb the apartment?”
“Sure am. I can’t say it’s necessary to my jurisdiction.”
“Well, her employer called it in. Said she hadn’t shown up Monday and Tuesday. First time ever. The landlord let us in. Said she was an ideal tenant. We don’t have any reason to think she didn’t just die - except she was so young.”
“The only thing I can tell you is from the body temperature she died before Sunday.”
“Okay. Well I guess we’ll light up the sheets, suck the floors for fiber, check for prints that aren’t hers and leave it at that. Not much else we can do.”
Both paused. The younger man spoke as he turned to leave. He gestured to the detective’s identification cards slung around his neck.
“Haven’t seen you before. You just come on?”
“No, Baltimore sent me down. Odenton needed someone to take a close look. Like you said, she’s so young to just die.”
The young coroner nodded.
“She was beautiful wasn’t she?”
“What a waste.”
When the detective completed the death scene investigation he took the bags of fibers that the technician vacuumed from the woman and her apartment.
“I’m gonna’ take these directly to a lab myself and get them started. We either have something with these or nothing.”
The technician nodded and initialed the chain of custody entries on the bags. The detective scribbled a signature on the receipt for the bags and handed it to him.
The detective left the scene and drove to his home in Annapolis. Before anything else, he built a fire in the fireplace. He put the vacuum catchbag from the apartment, the toilet paper nostril swabs, and the bags of fibers from the technician in the fire and watched them burn. He turned the remnants occasionally, insuring full combustion. He took the bag containing the ether cloth and washcloth to the kitchen and ran both under the tap water, wrung them out, and put them in the dirty clothes hamper.
…can’t have ether exploding in my own fireplace…
He retrieved the bag that held the cloths from the kitchen counter and tossed it into the fire.
The pepper spray can, he might use again.
…if only she hadn’t tried too much…and just allowed control…no one escapes
Harlan and Kathy Pierce opened the door of the apartment with the key the landlord gave them. Nothing was out of place. That’s the way Samantha always was. A quick tour suggested the only things obviously missing were the bedclothes.
Harlan returned to the car and brought in the boxes. They already decided to bring only her most personal items back with them and deal with the rest later. They boxed the books and pictures from the living room together and labeled it.
Next they put the books, CD’s, and computer components from the spare room in another box and labeled it. The laptop was not there and they remembered in silence that the police still had it.
They checked the box in the bottom of the closet and decided to take that because of the CD’s and the old portable computer. They picked a few objects in the bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen that connected directly to her or the family, the photos, keepsakes, and a few hand written letters, mostly from them, and placed them in another box. And they were finished.
Now, the most difficult part of all, taking their daughter’s body back to Nebraska and burying her next to the grave of her sister that she never knew.
The funeral service was far too large for the tiny church. It was held instead in the gymnasium of the high school whose team she led to the state basketball tournament finals. All of her friends from that time attended, as did a few of her co-workers who traveled all the way from Maryland. All of the people from the surrounding farming community who knew Harlan and Kathy were there. Personal tributes were numerous and heart-felt.
The cortege encircled the small cemetery several times over. Deputy Sheriff Tom Koonce, who had loved Samantha from high school on, directed traffic with tears in his eyes. The grave-side ceremony was kept short to minimize exposure to the late November winds, already carving winter into the land.
The reception followed at the Pierce farm house eight miles south of the town. Three of her colleagues, whose plane schedules allowed them to be there, spoke to Harlan and Kathy. Each of them, James Barrington, Christian Mason, and Ted Fitzgerald, expressed their deep respect and affection for her. They left to allow the many to mourn.
Then, it was over.
Lieutenant General Chester O. McKenna entered his secure conference room for the meeting with his most essential contractor. A thirty two year veteran of the Air Force, a computer engineer with advanced degrees from both MIT and Cal Tech, McKenna was sent to NSA to restore morale, as best he could.
“How we coming, Shorty?”
Herman “Shorty” Waldrop, Chairman and CEO of Technical Dynamics, served with McKenna in Berlin, both of them as intelligence officers.
Shorty smiled. “Pretty damn well, Kenny.” No one had called McKenna that since the Reagan administration.
Waldrop reached into his pocket and handed McKenna what appeared to be the works from inside a man’s expensive wristwatch.
“That small?”
“Yup.”
“How?”
“Sandia Lab’s Micro Electro Mechanical Systems techniques enabled a lot of the miniaturization. Who would have thought nuclear triggers could come into electronics this way?”
“Not me.”
“We used your guys’ data compression software to reduce power requirements which in turn reduced the battery size.”
“Does it meet the specs?”
“Pickup range of fifty feet. Monitoring capacity 50,000 channels. Transmission range is almost there. With a few tweaks we’ll have it fully compliant.”
“Then we can get the signal to Echelon?”
“From anywhere in the world with line of sight to the satellite or it can piggyback on cellular wavelengths and go terrestrial for as much as necessary.”
“How soon before commercial applications catch up?”
Commercial applications from remote microsurgery to ultra-high speed financial trading would expose much of the technology to open copying. The window before that happened left the intercept technology safe for just that long.
“I’d say seven years.”
“How long to manufacturing ramp-up?”
“From the word ‘go,’ five months.”
“You just got the word ‘go.’ What are we calling it?”
“The same thing as your contract did, MIMID, for Mobile Implantable Micro Intercept Device. Nothing we have come up with so far says it any better.”
“Let’s get going and work it hard. I really want to get these in the field as soon as we can.”
“Roger, sir.”
T
HREE MONTHS BEFORE THE ACT
.
As usual, in late summer, for maybe two weeks, an implacable sun hunted the Platte River basin near the confluence with the Missouri. The heat shimmered in the streets, skunked water, warped walls, killed cattle, banished birds, pearlized paint, and kissed all, plant or animal, cloth or skin, with clear flame. The hood of your car would blister your palm. Temperature insisted on ninety at night and whatever it wanted in daytime. Heat sucked your energy, sagging your shoulders. You felt like a distance runner all day, your own heart beating in your ears.