"As you know, Mr. Menden, on March 22, a little over half a year ago, Rebecca Harris was killed in the Journal parking lot. She was shot at long range by an assassin. The bullets were intended for her boss, Susan Baum. Whoever fired the shots either didn't know exactly what Susan looks like-unlikely-or couldn't distinguish her at three hundred and fourteen yards from Rebecca. After all, she was wearing a heavy raincoat and hat, and their general coloring, shape and hair color were similar. After all, she was getting into Susan's car. After all, an assassin's heart must be beating awfully hard at that time, wouldn't you guess?"
"I would guess that."
"So, as he let the air out of his lungs to steady his trigger finger, the last thing on his mind was that the woman in his crosshairs might not be the right one. Rebecca died; Susan didn't. It was one of those things that qualify as tragedy, because Rebecca had a tragic flaw that allowed her to die. Her flaw was that she was kind, considerate and attentive. She'd agreed to bring around Ms. Baum's car, and it cost her her life. The fact that Susan Baum suffers from gout and is no triathlete must have made Rebecca's decision easy. None of this, I expect, is news to you."
Menden looked at Weinstein, then sipped again from his beer. "I was a reporter once, but news is always news."
"I couldn't agree more. Now, what I'm about to tell you is what we, the Bureau, have learned in the six months since
Rebecca Harris's death. Some of it you may have read in the papers, but most of it I guarantee you have not. Right now, I need a promise from you, or we can't continue. You're editing the newspaper down here, the Anza Valley Lamp. Correct?"
"That's my career."
"I need your word that nothing I'm about to tell you will come out on those pages, or any other, or from your mouth, ever. No matter how many shots and beers you've downed on a Friday night. No matter how dull the Indian you're talking to here on some quiet Sunday afternoon seems to be. No matter how close a lover may come to you."
Menden smiled with a certain obvious condescension, then drank off his shot and waved the waitress for another. Weinstein's insides withered a little.
"Do I have that promise?"
"If it's what you need."
"I wouldn't ask if I didn't." At that point, Weinstein glanced at Dumars, and his expression demanded the same of her, a promise. She began to suspect that his bringing her here under "personal time" and their abrupt exit from the office-no sign-out, no destination, no emergency number other than her pager-was a way of keeping her out of the official loop of Bureau intelligence. She looked away from Weinstein with what she hoped was a conditional yes.
"Right now," Joshua continued, "this is what we have that's solid. The bullets were. 30/06 caliber, soft-nosed, factory made at Hornady. They did not come from the cartridge shells left at the scene. You heard about those, I assume."
"Two of them."
"Did you know that they had been engraved?"
Menden shook his head.
"One said, 'When in the course of human events-', and the other said, 'it becomes necessary-' The engraving was professional, or by an expert amateur. The script mimicked that of the Declaration of Independence. Each phrase started at the bottom of the shell, and went toward the neck."
Menden frowned and drank from his glass again. "But they weren't fired?"
"Of course not. That would add to our evidence, and they weren't willing to let us do that. God only knows where the gun itself is right now. The bottom of the Pacific, maybe. They took the real casings with them and left behind two shiny brass shells with their little warning on them. Their patriotic… signature."
"Their call for revolution."
Weinstein snorted. "They're not revolutionaries. They're agents of the status quo."
"Like you."
The shot arrived and John arranged it in front of him. The waitress studied Joshua as she made change, then walked away.
"I'll ignore that for now, and address it later. We've got more, but not much. The van, alleged to have been used by the shooter, was found ten miles away from the scene, behind a donut shop in Westminster. It had old plates on it, from a wrecking yard, likely-plates that hadn't been used in a decade, since they graced a Volkswagen bug totalled in 1985. Strictly a disposable vehicle. Nobody saw it drive in; nobody saw who picked up the driver and or passengers. There were fingerprints in it and on it, but very few, and those were all partials. We found traces of talc on the wheel and interior door handles, window knobs, shift lever."
"The old latex glove trick."
"Likely. Hair and Fiber back in Quantico got all the samples we collected and worked them hard-nothing interesting, really, nothing that points a finger. We've got corroborative evidence now-things that don't mean much unless we can match them with a suspect. Nothing primary."
"Hair for DNA?"
"You can't get DNA from hair," snapped Weinstein, "only from the tissue that sticks to it. We've got hair. No skin. We've got sixteen different hair samples. A follicle won't convict like a fingerprint or DNA pattern. Old van, plenty of passengers. Two dogs, a parakeet feather and mouse crap down in the floor carpet. The van had four owners before it was stolen from a repair shop. But the repair shop didn't even notice it was gone because it was fixed, left and never paid for. It collected dust out in the yard for two months. We fired down hard on all the people who owned it, all the people who knew the people who owned it, all the people at the shop, you name it."
Joshua Weinstein perused his beer, and forced another sip.
"And?"
"Something gave. I'll get back to that when I need to. Chronology isn't important here. Questions, so far?"
"Why Susan Baum?"
"Left-wing. A Jew. A woman. A world-class afflicter of the comfortable. A brilliant afflicter. She continues to offend a lot of people, right there on the front page of the Orange County Journal, three days a week. Businessmen, Republicans, old-fashioned patriots, churches, hunters, smokers, meat-eaters, drinkers, straights, men, all-boys' Little League teams and boy scouts without gay troop leaders. You know the litany. By some standards, she's the revolutionary. She's also an American citizen exercising her constitutional right to free speech. They tried to kill her for it, and they said as much when they engraved those casings for us."
At this, John Menden looked down at his beer glass and tapped its bottom against the table. "You're sure they weren't after the assistant-Ms… uh… Harris?"
"We worked that possibility," said Weinstein. "And it yielded nothing."
In the moment of silence that followed, even Weinstein seemed to lose his focus. Dumars saw something remote pass across his expression. The memory of Rebecca, she understood, his fiancee, gliding over his mind as quietly as a cloud across the sun. John Menden's face looked mournful, too.
It was Menden who broke the meditation. "Have you had any contact from the shooters? Anyone making a claim to it-a note or a call-anything?"
Weinstein's attention snapped back to the present. "Eighty-six letters, twelve postcards and a hundred and fourteen calls. They surprised me. I knew Orange County was conservative, but I didn't know there was that much hatred, just under the surface. Hatred and fear. Exactly one letter seemed credible to us, the rest were unconnected-we're pretty sure. We've followed up most of them as best we can-most of them aren't signed. The one we take seriously is from some people calling themselves 'The Freedom Ring.' It was computer-generated, on a nice sheet of twenty-five percent cotton bond paper. Here's a photocopy."
Weinstein removed a folded sheet of paper from his pocket. John Menden downed the fresh shot, then pushed his beer and shot glasses out of the way. He flattened the paper against the table.
Rebecca was a mistake and we are sorry. Baum is the tumor we tried to remove.
What happened to Miss Harris can happen to anyone who seeks to abridge our rights.
We will not have the foundations of America torn down by people who prosper under our system, only to disrespect it.
– The Freedom Ring
Menden handed the sheet back to Joshua, who folded it into his coat pocket. "Well, Mr. Weinstein, do you have a suspect, or don't you?"
"We do."
Weinstein looked at Sharon Dumars as he said this, and registered with some satisfaction the astonishment on her face. She ingested the news like a bad taste, then shook back her dark wavy hair with a toss of her head and lifted the beer glass to her mouth with extreme knowingness. She is learning, he thought, but right now her galvanics would send a polygraph into fits.
"But I can't know who it is," said Menden.
Weinstein looked at John, then centered his beer glass before him.
"No," he said. "You can't know that… yet."
Menden shrugged and sat back. "Then why are you here?"
"I'm here, Mr. Menden, because you want to listen to me."
Menden raised his eyebrows in mock exasperation, then let them down again. "Why do I want to listen to you? With this whole world full of people with their stories to tell and their axes to grind, why do I need to hear yours?"
His tone of voice and his eyes were so placid now that Sharon Dumars couldn't tell if Menden was cunning, innocent, or possibly, just plain stupid. The alcohol seemed to fortify his mask.
"Because you were in love with Rebecca, you smug sonofabitch."
Sharon Dumars emitted a tiny breath, then coughed to cover it. She couldn't take her eyes off of Weinstein. His ears-those wonderful Ichabod Crane ears of his-were a molten red now. The poor man was as tumultuous inside as a volcano. And his thirsty dark eyes fixed onto John's face and didn't let go. They seemed to be trying to locate something almost invisibly small. Yet Menden returned the long assessment with a gaze of utter calm. Weinstein was the active, Menden the passive; Weinstein the river, and Menden the rock against which it raged.
"I," Josh continued, "was engaged to her, as you read in the papers. And while I was, you were courting her at the Journal offices, where you both worked. You talked to her, you lunched with her, and later, you entertained her in your home on Sun Valley Drive in Laguna Canyon. You felt something for her that you believed you had never felt for a woman before. You did love her, didn't you? I don't see how you couldn't. It was the easiest thing I ever did in my whole life. It was easier than breathing. I'm not wrong, am I?"
When Dumars managed to look across to John Menden, his expression had not changed. She looked hard at him, but for all her training and perspicacity, for all of the reverberating context that she now understood, she could not read any reaction at all. It was almost unbelievable. Was he a sociopath? A psychotic? Was Joshua quite simply wrong?
"Don't answer," said Weinstein. "What you answer doesn't matter to me, because I know what happened and I know the truth. The truth, Mr. John Menden, is that Rebecca was in love with you, too. Surprised? Then certainly it's a pleasant surprise. Remember the picture they ran, of Rebecca in the rain by the planter? Of course you do. You were in it, though you weren't recognizable. Didn't you wonder why her left hand was naked, why the ring she'd worn for eight months was suddenly gone? I'll tell you. She took it off that morning and gave it back to me. She said she couldn't, there was someone else. She cried. She didn't just cry, she raged. She stormed. That night, the night after she died, I went to her apartment and found two letters she'd written. Here's yours."
Weinstein produced a smallish envelope, pink with a faint floral pattern, and set it on the table. It was sealed. On top of the envelope, he set something small that shined warmly even in the dim light of Olie's Saloon.
Joshua Weinstein's voice had taken on a profound bitterness. "Take the ring, too. Touch it. Smell it. Think of the perfect finger that used to wear it. Think of the times you spent together. Return it to me when you're finished. It's mine. It cost me a lot, and I'm not talking about money."
Again, Dumars's attention went to Menden. He looked for a long moment at the envelope and ring. He blinked twice, glanced at his empty shot glass, then lifted his eyes to Joshua Weinstein. They were just a fraction brighter than before.
Around the edges showed a moisture that had not been there just a second or two ago. And his ruddy face was even darker now, more deeply lined around the mouth and eyes. There it is, she thought, his confession!
Then, Josh stood. "Rebecca loved you," he said. "They shot out her heart and she died alone in a fucking parking lot in the rain. That's why you want to listen to me. Thanks for your time."
He tossed a few bills on the table and was already through the saloon door by the time Dumars slung her purse over her shoulder, took one look into the pained gray eyes of John Menden, and followed Weinstein out.