Rising Phoenix (30 page)

At the crest of the hill, he slipped the gearshift into neutral and let the car’s momentum fade and then reverse itself. After rolling back ten feet or so, he reluctantly yanked on the emergency brake and brought the car to a skidding stop.

Beamon hated Colorado. He hated the shining mountains, the clean air, and the annoying bicyclists who waved as he passed them in his rented subcompact. Funerals deserved more somber settings. And the funeral of a family member—a child—should, at the very least, rate a good steady rain.

Beamon put the car in gear and forced it forward without releasing the emergency brake. He stopped again when he reached his previous high mark, and surveyed the scene below.

To the left of the cemetery’s imposing front gate were no fewer than four white vans, each adorned with a satellite dish and elaborate logo. The logos were illegible from this distance, but it was a safe bet that the vans represented local affiliates of national news organizations. Beamon didn’t even bother to count the cars nosed up to the fence, or the people perched on their roofs, peering through camera lenses as long as his arm.

Releasing the brake, he started down the hill. On the drive from Denver, he had started to feel a little guilty about the scene he had made in the rental car
agency when they had told him that they didn’t stock cars with tinted windows. As he watched the enormous lenses of the press swivel toward him, though, he made a mental note to find out who ran the rental car agency and have someone shoot out his porch light.

Beamon slowed to a stop ten feet from the cemetery’s gate and rolled down his window. The camera flashes went wild, but finally dissipated when a large man in dark glasses positioned himself directly in front of the car window.

“Sorry to hear about your nephew, Mark.”

“They’re not,” Beamon said, jerking his head in the general direction of the press. “It’s good to see you, Frank. I really appreciate you helping out.”

Frank grunted and looked at the ground. “No problem. I just can’t believe these vultures have the balls to come out here like this.”

“Are you kidding? When my nephew dies from snorting bad coke, they clear their calendars.”

Frank shrugged and rose to his full six and a half feet. “It’s already started. You’d better get going.”

Beamon pulled the car forward, keeping his bumper within two feet of another somberly dressed man slowly pushing the gate open.

Frank had always been a good friend. He hadn’t offered a word of protest when Beamon called and asked him to take on the distasteful and only marginally legal job of bouncer at his nephew’s funeral. Frank was the only man for the job, though. One look at his heavily pockmarked face and solid two hundred and fifty plus pounds would make even the most obnoxious
reporter think twice before spouting off about the publics right to know.

Beamon pulled in too close to a blue Toyota pickup, purposefully blocking it to give himself an excuse to make a run for it at the end of the service. With some effort, he separated himself from the tiny car and weaved his way, alone, through the snowdrifts and headstones toward a small knot of black-clad mourners clinging to each other for support.

He was thankful that no one looked back as he found a strategic position behind a man whose head blocked Beamon’s view of the coffin. He peered around the man’s shoulder for a moment, looking briefly at his sister. Her head was lowered and her stare was fixed on the thing he couldn’t bring himself to look at.

The service went on forever.

The priest alternatively mumbled and shouted, but said nothing about the guest of honor. He talked only of the pervading godlessness that had led to the boy’s death. Beamon’s mind wandered, and he looked around at the small group of people gathered around him. He recognized almost no one in his sister’s life. That wasn’t surprising though—they had never made any kind of real connection when they were children. They spoke now only on holidays, and the conversations consisted of the self-conscious prattle of complete strangers.

Beamon was interrupted from his daydreaming by the sudden silence of the priest and the brief crush of people as they moved past him. He looked up and watched his sister moving purposefully toward him.
The tear in the corner of her right eye was quickly lost in her cold stare.

“You’ve never been much of a brother to me, Mark.”

He didn’t see much point in denying it and remained silent.

“Now’s the time to make up for it. Find out who did this to Kevin. Find out and kill him.” She brushed past him and headed for the cars.

Kevin.

Hearing his name and looking at the dirty snow around his grave brought back the few fleeting memories Beamon had of the boy. He’d been impossibly bright and completely out of control for most of his life, much like Beamon himself had been. Fortunately, the stifling atmosphere of the early sixties had kept the young Mark Beamon from straying too far from the straight and narrow. The nineties had offered no such barriers. Until now.

“Franz—nein,” Scott Dresden pleaded, performing his best tired look from behind the large desk.

Franz Gullich looked down his long straight nose at him, continuing to screw the top off of a fifth of Jack Daniels. When the cap was freed, he followed a tradition that Dresden had come to dread. He threw it in the trash can.

Gullich hadn’t become the head of the German police based on sobriety. In fact, his ability to perform magical feats of deduction while half-cocked was the marvel of two continents. He and Dresden had become fast friends during Dresden’s tour as an assistant
legal attaché in Bonn—a friendship based on mutual respect.

Gullich’s lack of political ambition made him a joy to work with. He’d started as the German equivalent of a beat cop almost twenty years ago on the streets of Munich. Today he was still just a cop. Dresden had come to miss the company of cops in his current position as FBI agent/diplomat.

Gullich pulled two large commemorative mugs from their display case and blew the dust out of them.

The glasses cleaned to his satisfaction, the German worked himself into the sofa at the opposite end of the office and placed the bottle ominously next to him. Dresden hit the intercom button on the complex-looking phone on his desk.

“Hello, Kip? Kip?”

“Hi, Scott. Finally figured out how to use the intercom, huh?”

“Yeah. Hey—Franz is here, why don’t you come over for a drink?” Dresden knew that the bottle would be empty by the end of the night and figured to spread out the pain a little.

“I’d love to, Scott, but I’ve got an appointment that I’m already late for. Tell him I’ll catch him when he gets back. I’m anxious to hear what he has to say about Quantico.”

Dresden flicked off the intercom and came out from around his desk. His mind wandered to how he was going to get back at his assistant for that little white lie.

Gullich was already pouring healthy slugs of the brown liquid into the mugs, emptying almost a third of
the bottle. He slipped his shoes off and put his feet on the coffee table in front of the sofa. The table top wasn’t attached and it tipped wildly, almost upsetting the bottle. He didn’t seem to notice.

“Cheers,” he said holding up his mug.

“Cheers.” Dresden settled into a love seat positioned perpendicular to the sofa.

The Austrian took a long pull from the glass. The corners of his eyes scrunched up a bit as he swallowed, accentuating the deep crow’s-feet that were a relic of his years walking the streets in the harsh German winters.

The conversation moved smoothly from subject to subject, starting with general politics and economics and becoming more and more personal as the liquor took effect. An hour later they were having a heartfelt discussion of the perils of in-laws. Dresden’s head felt light as a feather, a sensation that he was becoming used to, and one that he knew guaranteed a tough morning. Gullich was less affected, though his English was becoming worse and worse. Dresden was indistinguishable from a native in German and French, but Gullich’s English needed work, so he insisted that all conversations between them be in that language.

Tiring of the in-law issue, Gullich fell silent and held up the nearly empty bottle. Dresden offered his cup to be topped off. The Austrian looked mildly disappointed as he tipped a splash into the nearly full mug.

“So how goes the mushroom-hunter hunting?”

Dresden scowled clumsily. His facial muscles were a bit more relaxed than he’d thought. “It’s hopeless.
They’ve got me trying to find one lone American, running around the woods somewhere in Eastern Europe, stuffing mushrooms into a garbage bag.” He put his glass to his lips, shaking his head. “I might have gotten lucky in Western Europe, but you know the condition of law enforcement in the East.”

Gullich swung his feet up on the sofa and leaned his head against a pillow. Dresden thought he was preparing to pass out and watched him carefully during the long silence that ensued. Finally his friend came back to life. “I think you’re approaching this whole thing wrong,” Gullich said, switching to German.

Dresden leaned forward slightly. He’d known Franz long enough to know not to dismiss his drunken musings out of hand. “Care to elaborate?”

“You grew up here, didn’t you?”

“Not here—Berlin,” Dresden answered. “My father was in the army. But you know that.”

A smile spread across Gullich’s face. “It always makes me laugh—how out of touch you are with your countrymen. Let me ask you a question. What do you see when you bump into an American tourist in Bonn?”

They were getting way off the subject here, and Dresden relaxed. His friend must have had a few drinks before he had arrived. He was rambling.

Getting no response, the German answered his own question. “You see a fat, poorly dressed person with no understanding of our culture or language. Without their tour guides, most of them wouldn’t be able to find their hotels and would die of starvation in the streets.”

Dresden opened his mouth to defend his countrymen
but closed it again when he came to the realization that his friend was ninety percent right.

“And that’s Western Europe. I expect they’re even more lost in the East.”

Dresden waited for his friend’s eyes to focus elsewhere, and dumped a good portion of his drink into the unhealthy-looking tree next to the sofa. His secretary, who prided herself on her green thumb, could never understand why the tree always looked like it was about to die.

“Okay, so we’re a little ethnocentric.”

“Put yourself in the shoes—sneakers—of your right-wing friend. You’ve been to Europe, say, three times. You’ve toured, oh, London, Paris, and Rome. You speak no foreign languages and have never been to the former Soviet Union. So you’ve got a problem—you need a bunch of mushrooms from—Poland, is it?”

“That’s where they grow, primarily,” Dresden confirmed.

“Okay, Poland. You’ve never been there, don’t speak the language, and probably don’t know a shiitake mushroom from a portobello. What do you do?”

Gullich drained his glass and turned his head, looking ruefully at the empty bottle on the table. Dresden reached over and poured some of his into his friend’s glass.

“You,” he pointed at Dresden, “get a book on mushrooms and take your four languages and intimate knowledge of Europe and pick them yourself. You wouldn’t have any problem figuring out where you were going and blending in. Like you said—it would
be damn near impossible to track a person like you. Joe American, though, couldn’t. He’d draw lots of unwanted attention getting lost, trying to find places to eat, trying to figure out where the mushrooms grow—whatever.”

“So what’s he do?”

“He hires it done. He calls some farmer or something and gets him to pick the mushrooms. He sends the guy some money and has him mail the lot to him in America.”

Dresden cursed under his breath, dumping what little was left in his glass into the tree. Franz was right. He had spent so much time ignoring his countrymen’s embarrassing attitudes that he had missed the obvious.

Gullich reached an arm up toward the ceiling and swung it around drunkenly. The glass in his hand sloshed and the bourbon dripped down his arm. He switched to heavily accented English again. He had been working on his slang for the past few months, concentrating on the worst that American TV had to offer. “So what do you think, paesan? Am I right or am I right?”

B
ill Karns scanned the street carefully as he walked back to the house he had rented in Southeast Washington. It was almost four blocks from the house to the Korean-owned grocery store that he had come to rely on over the last couple of months.

The day was cold, with a driving wind whipping through the tightly packed rows of decaying houses. The neighborhood had once housed some of Washington’s wealthier families, but the last shards of its dignity had been stolen by neglect and young men with spray cans.

The stone homes on his block were distinguished by their round turrets, topped with almost Russian-looking roofs. Their large windows were now covered with boards, which were in turn covered with paint and an infinite number of peeling flyers. The flyers made a loud chattering noise as the wind tore across them. Every couple of minutes a chunk of paper would break loose and go cartwheeling down the street.

Karns turned abruptly right, glancing behind him at the empty street.

Pulling a set of keys out of his pocket with his free hand, he slipped one into the dead bolt. The door popped open and he pushed through, slamming it behind him.

Inside, the house was even less impressive. The hardwood floor had long since been ripped up and moved to a neighborhood more suitable. The artfully rounded walls were covered with graffiti and topped with a discolored strip where an expensive crown molding had been removed.

He walked to the kitchen and laid his groceries down next to a small refrigerator that shared a bright orange extension cord with an even smaller hot plate. Karns’s groceries consisted of a twelve-pack of National Bohemian beer, three cans of Hormel Chili, a box of Velveeta, and two bags of generic tortilla chips. He closed the refrigerator door tightly on eleven of the twelve beers, keeping one out for himself.