The Fourth Perimeter Read online

  Gracie was in upstate New York at the time, living with their sick mother and working as a bank teller in Albany. In eighteen years she had never ended a day with a drawer that didn’t balance, not once. She was happy to tell you about it too. Kurt had been the youngest of seven. Gracie was the oldest and had never been married. She was a devout Catholic; everyone always wondered why she hadn’t simply become a nun. Her spirit was strong—all you had to do was cross her to find that out—and she was reclusive and showed little interest in men.

  Kurt was too young to know about any of that growing up. He just thought of Gracie as a kind of second mother. She had been ever since their mother had fallen into a protracted illness when Kurt was just a baby. Their father worked fourteen-hour days for the railroad until he died of lung cancer when Kurt was only six.

  When that happened, Kurt’s second-oldest sister, Colleen, had assumed the care of their sick mother. Gracie, however, had always coveted Kurtis Andrew. She didn’t show it outwardly, but Kurt was convinced that she welcomed the move to Dallas. He even caught her on occasion whistling cheerfully to herself. That’s how he thought of Gracie in those early days, dressed in a gray cotton shift and an apron, taking clothes down off the line in the backyard and whistling to herself. It seemed that a baby of Kurt’s was just as good as one of her own.

  So that was how it had been, the three of them, a somewhat untraditional family unit, with Gracie doting on Collin when Kurt was away, and Kurt doting on him when he was home.

  Kurt pulled deftly into his boathouse and ran up the walk with Jill trailing silently behind him. The two state troopers were waiting for him in the entryway. The sergeant offered his sympathy and gave Kurt the number of a police detective from Alexandria, who proceeded to tell Kurt something worse than he had ever imagined: The boy he or Gracie would have killed for . . . had killed himself.

  “You’re wrong,” Kurt told the detective bitterly into the phone.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Ford,” the man replied. “It was pretty conclusive . . . I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t know my son. My son wouldn’t kill himself, Detective,” Kurt said, his blood rising. “So you just get your head right from here on in about that. I know how this goes. I was in law enforcement, Detective. You see something that looks a certain way, but I’m telling you I know my son wouldn’t kill himself. Never.”

  “Mr. Ford,” the detective said calmly, “we’d like you to come down here. We’re in the process of trying to get your son’s fingerprints from the Secret Service, but we’d like you to make a visual identification if you would.”

  “I’ll be there tonight.”

  “I don’t know if you can get a flight this late—”

  “I have access to a plane, Detective,” Kurt said insistently. “I’m on my way. In the meantime, would you please tell your captain that I would like to see him and let him know that I’m a former Secret Service agent. Tell him I’m coming down there and I want to see him and talk to him. I want this investigation to proceed like it’s a murder. My son would never kill himself. This is not a suicide.”

  Kurt slammed down the phone harder than he meant to and turned scowling at the two troopers standing there like a pair of oafs in the towering entryway.

  “Thank you, Officers,” he said curtly. His face was set, his emotions contained. “This isn’t— Thank you.”

  He looked over his shoulder at the rumpled form of his sister where she’d thrown herself down on the couch in the living room. Jill was sitting beside her, gently rubbing her back and occasionally leaning over to mutter some heartfelt consolation. Kurt saw the troopers out the door and went back to Gracie’s side. Kneeling down next to her, he put his arms around her and held her tightly. Gently, he stroked the back of her head while she shook and sobbed.

  “It’ll be all right,” he murmured. “It’ll be all right.”

  Inside, Kurt Ford felt empty. The agony, he knew, was there—sealed off like a big cat, rumbling furiously behind the door of its cage. When it got out, it would tear him apart. It would maul him from the inside out, and he really didn’t know if there would be anything left by the time it was done. But for now he knew he had to keep it contained. Before he let it destroy him, he would find out what had happened to his son, and he would avenge his death. That much he knew.

  “Can I go with you?”

  “With me?” Kurt said quietly. He stood up, his eyes drawing a focus on Jill. Her face, pretty in its distress, reminded him so much of that same day he’d just been thinking about earlier, the day he had gone to rescue her from that other life. But that seemed to him now like a good movie he’d seen years ago. Through his haze of anguish it elicited only disjointed scraps of emotion that seemed not just jumbled, but far away and unimportant.

  A lunatic demon in the back of his mind jumped out, screaming that this was what he deserved. Annie hadn’t really wanted him to give his life to another woman. It was he, kidding himself, fortifying his own selfishness by pretending to know what she would have wanted. Collin was all that had been left of Annie, and on the day he had defiled her memory by asking another woman to replace her, fate had snatched him away too.

  Still, for all that, he couldn’t help the way he felt. He looked lovingly at Jill, his only lifeline in a lonely and torrential sea of grief. All he had to do was grab hold of her and he felt certain she could keep him from drowning in the horror. He touched her face gently with the back of his fingers.

  “You can’t go alone,” she said. Her expression was distorted by pity.

  Kurt closed his eyes briefly. “I’ll be all right. I’m more worried about Gracie.” He reached down and gently rubbed Gracie’s back.

  “Do you want me to stay with her, Kurt?” Jill asked. “Would that be the best thing?”

  “I think it would,” he told her quietly in a strangled voice. “I really think it would.”

  Kurt’s plane touched down in the bright moonlight. He hopped into a rented Suburban that was waiting for him on the tarmac and drove himself straight to the morgue. The detective, whose name was Olander, met him at the door with a mousy-looking partner, a young woman with a drab head of long hair and thick glasses. Olander introduced her without fanfare as Detective Carol Dipper. Dipper looked apologetically at the floor, and the three of them went into a small office where a television with a VCR rested on a battered gray metal desk.

  “What’s this?” Kurt asked as Olander removed a VCR tape from a shelf over the desk and began to insert it into the machine.

  “You can identify the body on videotape,” Olander said as he fiddled with the buttons.

  “It’s easier that way, Mr. Ford,” Carol Dipper whispered.

  “No,” Kurt said. “Take me to— I want to see him.”

  Olander regarded him blandly with a frown. Dipper looked pained. “Okay,” Olander said. “If that’s what you want. We can do that.”

  Olander picked up the phone and talked briefly to an assistant M.E.; then the three of them descended a wide set of stairs to where the bodies were kept. The piercing smell of formaldehyde filled their nostrils, growing stronger until they were standing in front of a stainless steel cart burdened with a sheet-covered body.

  Kurt Ford looked without emotion. He felt strangely cold as the assistant M.E. drew the sheet down over Collin’s face, exposing his bare shoulders.

  “Is that your son, Mr. Ford?” Olander asked solemnly.

  Collin’s face was badly discolored. It looked like his son. Could it be someone else? Could the whole thing be a bizarre trick? No, it was Collin.

  “That’s my son,” Kurt said in a hoarse whisper. He was outside himself. He was spinning. When Annie had died, he thought nothing could ever wound him so deeply or cast his mind so near to the boundaries of insanity. But now this.

  The assistant M.E. mercifully pulled the sheet right back up over Collin’s face. Kurt looked away. He returned to his truck and followed the two detectives back to headquarters.


  It didn’t take more than a few minutes for Kurt to peg Marshal Olander. He was a hardened cop who’d been on the job too long, a miserable bastard, potbellied, stooped. He was still on the good side of fifty, but even so, his scalp had retained only a few patches of wispy blond hair around his ears. His eyes were narrow and dark, set amid the prodigious circles of an insomniac. His nose, also narrow, also prodigious, gave his whole face the aspect of a starved ferret. To provide some visual point of demarcation between his sunken chin and his strangely thick neck, he wore a close-cut dirty blond beard.

  His partner, the woman named Dipper, was apparently inconsequential. Olander tolerated her the way a rhino tolerates one of the birds that picks the bugs off its leathery back.

  While they waited for the captain, Kurt sat patiently and answered what to him was a meaningless set of questions about his son. No, Collin didn’t suffer from any mental illnesses; he hadn’t been depressed; there was no reason for him to have been that way.

  Kurt felt as if he were walking a razor’s edge. He wanted Olander to know that he could come down on him like an avalanche. A few well-placed calls to the dozen or so senators and congressmen he knew—not to mention some old friends within the Service who might even be able to get the old man himself to pick up the phone—could make everyone’s life miserable. But the more he observed the detective, the more he had the discouraging sense that Olander was beyond caring. He was a man comfortably locked into his civil service position, with one eye on his pension, impervious to pressure from above.

  When the captain, whose name was Jim Todd, came in, Kurt tried not to show his irritation. The captain was Kurt’s age, but looked ten years older with his thinning gray hair and the frumpy look of a cop who has spent most of his time behind a desk. The two of them shook hands while Todd nervously turned a pink Canadian Mint over and over between his two smoke-stained front teeth. Kurt then explained as calmly as he could that he hoped they didn’t think he was overreacting, but he knew Collin better than anyone did and he knew his son wouldn’t commit suicide.

  The police listened patiently, but Kurt knew damn well what they were thinking. He was simply a distraught parent. They knew a suicide when they saw one. The kid ate his gun. They wanted to close it out and go on. Real murders remained unsolved. The police were busy people, only giving him the courtesy of their time because he was someone who might be important.

  “Why don’t you tell him what we’ve got, Marshal,” the captain said politely after a pause. He too seemed to overlook the young woman who sat with her head slightly inclined toward the floor but whose eyes Kurt noticed darted quickly from one man to another.

  Olander sighed and went through what they knew. Collin had gone out for drinks with some friends. He met a girl at the bar called Harpoon Alley and left with her not long after. It wasn’t anything unusual. Where the two of them went, no one knew, but at some point in the night he returned home. They had no idea how much time he’d spent with the girl, but there was nothing in his town house to indicate that she had returned with him. There was an empty bottle of beer on the coffee table. After finishing the bottle, Collin had presumably gone upstairs, taken off his clothes, and “inflicted the gunshot wound to his head,” as Olander put it.

  “We got the call at around three-thirty this afternoon,” Olander continued. “The one friend, Lou Myslinski, was supposed to pick up your son and go to a baseball game. The door was unlocked, and he found him upstairs.”

  “What about this girl?” Kurt said suddenly, excitedly. “We’ve got to find her!”

  Olander looked at him with a blank face, then at his captain.

  “Mr. Ford,” the captain said patiently, “I can’t imagine how you must feel. I know you were in the Secret Service at one time, but I have to level with you. Detective Olander is one of the best homicide detectives in the capital area. This is his bailiwick. If this were a homicide, we’d be all over it.”

  “It is a homicide!” Kurt erupted, half rising out of his chair. “Can’t you see? We have to find that woman!”

  The small room was uncomfortably silent for a few moments.

  “Mr. Ford,” Olander said in a flat tone, “there was nothing to suggest that this wasn’t a suicide. There was no sign of forced entry. There was no sign that anyone else was even there. There was no sign of resistance at all, no bruise or cut marks to suggest an altercation of any kind, nothing to make anyone think that it was anything but what we’ve determined it to be.”

  Kurt looked at the man’s uncaring face and he knew that nothing would change Olander’s mind. Kurt Ford’s genius wasn’t in designing the encryption systems that had made Safe Tech a player in the field of technology. He left the esoteric part of his business to a bunch of MIT Ph.D.s. Kurt’s gift was with people. He could read them. He knew what he couldn’t get and what he could. And he knew how to ask for what he could get. He was rarely emotional about it. It was as objective to him as the moves on a chessboard.

  He turned his eyes to the captain. “Captain,” he said, subduing a quaver in his voice, “I’m not some rummy who calls you every Tuesday night to complain about the kids in the back alley. I’m a former cop, even if it wasn’t what you guys do. Look, I’m no crackpot. I’m telling you I know my son wouldn’t have done this. Would you at least dust the house to see if anyone else was there? Could you do that for me and try to find this woman at least to talk to her?”

  The captain pursed his lips and considered Kurt. “Okay, Mr. Ford,” he said. “I want to help you as much as I can. I really do. But I have to be realistic too. I’ll send the lab over there tomorrow to dust it up, and Marshal will do what he can to find out about that woman. If we can find her, we’ll certainly interview her, but I’m not making any guarantees. It might not be possible . . .”

  “I appreciate that, Captain,” Kurt said. “I really do.” He turned to Olander. “Should I just stay in touch with you, Detective?”

  Olander looked blandly at Kurt and then again to his captain.

  “I think,” the captain said, “it would be better if I was the one who acted as your point of contact, Mr. Ford. I can keep track of the big picture and let you know.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  The captain looked at his watch and with a heavy sigh said, “I’ll see if I can get the lab out there, but it might not be until Monday morning. I can give you a call at home—”

  “I’ll be at the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City,” Kurt interrupted.

  “There’s no need for that,” Captain Todd said affably. “We’ll do everything we can. I’m sure you’ll want to get back to make arrangements . . .”

  “Nothing is more important than this, Captain,” Kurt said as he stood.

  He was opening the door to his rented Suburban when he heard a call from behind.

  “Mr. Ford!” It was the woman, Carol Dipper. She was hurrying toward him with an awkward gait somewhere between a walk and a jog. Under her arm was a large three-ring binder. She stopped in front of him, and, before she could catch her breath, blurted out, “I have something you should see.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Kurt waited. Carol Dipper stood before him, breathing hard. Her eyes flickered between his face and the binder while she pushed her glasses back up on her nose and tucked a few stray strands of hair behind her ears. Then her eyes lit on just him and said, “I think you might be right about your son.”

  Kurt observed her with a fresh perspective. Her owlish eyes looked enormous through the thick curve of her lenses in the bright halogen light of the parking lot. There was intelligence there and, once she was free from her superiors, even a hint of determination.

  “I want you to see this,” she said. She opened the binder and paged through a set of glossy photos. They were crime scene shots from Collin’s bedroom, gruesome and bloody. The boy lay face up, naked, his hand loosely encircling the gun that was stuck up inside his mouth.

  Dipper looked up at Kurt and blinked nervously. “Are you all rig
ht to look at these?”

  Kurt nodded grimly.

  “You see the blood?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “There was no exit wound,” Dipper said. Then, in an academic tone, she continued: “An exit wound from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head with a nine-millimeter actually occurs in only sixty-nine percent of the cases, so it’s not unusual at all that there isn’t one here. Also, as you know, the Secret Service uses a special load—”

  “A super-vel,” Kurt said, scowling. It was a soft slug, meant to enter and do maximum damage while also minimizing the danger of exiting the body and harming innocent bystanders. It was the standard load for an agent’s gun. “What’s your point?”

  “You see the blood?” she asked again.

  “Yes.” There was blood all over the bed, from one side to the other.

  “My dad was a funeral director,” Dipper explained, “and I was an investigator for the M.E.’s office in Richmond before I came here. So I know about these things. What happens with a wound like this is if the bullet strikes the brain stem, the person dies instantly. Sometimes, and— Are you okay with this?”

  “I am,” he said. His mouth was pressed tightly closed.

  “Sometimes, if the bullet enters the posterior region of the brain, the person can— It takes some time. They don’t die right away. I’m sorry, but that’s what I think happened with your son.”