Patriot Lies (Jack Widow Book 14) Page 6

  Olympic athletes would have the same thing, not from years of lifting weights and putting them back down or starving themselves to death. Widow’s muscular definition was built by doing the same constant activity that the Olympic athlete does. He did what he loved; he moved every day, all day.

  Widow walked—a lot.

  Pretty much the only times he wasn’t walking was when he was sitting to eat, riding on a bus or train or in a stranger’s car, or when he was asleep.

  It was all simple math. Move the body. Feed the body. Keep the body.

  Widow grabbed the flannel and stretch it out flat and draped it over the shower rod. Hanging it there would help to dry it faster and keep it wrinkle-free. He did the same with the blue jeans.

  Widow wiped the fog from the shower off the mirror and stared at himself. He looked clean. It was a big improvement. He smiled and stared at his teeth. They were tinted a bit from all the coffee. He needed a new toothbrush. He’d lost his last one somewhere.

  Thinking about that, he took note that he also needed toothpaste. The hotel didn’t provide any, which it should’ve with the price he’d paid. He might as well grab some shaving cream and a razor while he was at it.

  Of course, all that would have to wait until the morning because all his clothes were wet and he couldn’t go out naked. He should’ve thought it through, but he hadn’t. A man of leisure thinks things through a lot less than a man with a plan.

  For tonight, Widow would just lie in bed, watch TV, and sip coffee till he fell asleep.

  He returned to the room and scanned it once more and noticed something that wasn’t cool, something he hadn’t seen before.

  There was no coffeemaker.

  Nine

  In the morning, Widow woke with the sun and decided to snooze. He went back to sleep, a perk of the unemployed bachelor's life. His eyes reopened just before seven in the morning. He sat upright and stared at the motel phone. The little light on it was dark. No missed calls. No messages.

  He dressed and sat back down on the bed. He picked up the phone and redialed Aker's number from memory.

  The phone rang. He got the voicemail again.

  He left another message.

  "Aker. I'm headed over to where Eggers died. If you get this, meet me there. If I miss you, leave a message with the front desk."

  At the end of the voicemail, he rattled off the name of the hotel where he was staying and read out the number printed on the phone.

  Widow hung up and started to head out the door. He stopped dead in the doorway because he’d almost forgotten the room card. The door came equipped with a card reader that served as the lock. Nobody used keys anymore. He couldn't recall the last time he’d been to a hotel with keys.

  He took the card, left the room, and exited the parking lot on foot.

  Out on the street, Widow walked to Lincoln Park like a man out on a stroll. He passed the hole-in-the-wall bar with the heavy wooden door and the café where he’d had coffee, where he stopped for a moment. He thought about going in, but decided he would do that afterward, just in case Aker didn't show up and he wanted to wait around.

  The streets were better than the day before. The police were no longer holding up the street or pedestrian traffic. The cars on the street moved along their way, and the people on the sidewalks did the same. Plus, it was a windy Saturday morning.

  Widow tucked his hands into the pockets of his Havelock and kept on moving. He scanned the streets. He noticed the one-way directions of traffic and the signs that designated it. He noticed the various CCTV traffic cameras mounted up on traffic poles. He looked at the streetlights.

  He walked to a corner and stopped at a crosswalk. The light changed for pedestrians to cross. He looked both ways even though the street was one-way. It was a force of habit, but also a good practice.

  Widow crossed over. He didn't enter Lincoln Park, not right away; instead, he did like he had at the church and walked the perimeter, scanning everything he could while making it look like he wasn't scanning anything at all.

  Widow kept his hands tucked into his pockets. To passersby, he was just a guy out walking, enjoying the morning air. He was nobody, a ghost.

  Cars and trucks and SUVs passed on the street. Though the number of pedestrians was lower than the day before, plenty of people passed by him; some were on their phones, talking to someone else on the other side of the phone. Others stared at their phones, probably deep in a text conversation or glued to their social lives on social media.

  He passed couples holding hands, kids walking alongside their parents, and government workers still doing whatever they did, going wherever it was that they went.

  There were no signs of cops or anything out of an ordinary DC Saturday morning. Everything was habitual. Everything was systematic. Everything was routine.

  After a while, he realized that he was the only person looking around at everyone else. The people he passed, the people in their cars that passed him, and the people leaving and entering the buildings across the street, none of them looked at him.

  It appeared that Washingtonians had a thing for minding their own business.

  Lincoln Park was basically a big rectangle-shaped park. It was right smack in the middle of rows of residential and commercial buildings, all brick. The landscape was made up of clean one-way streets, waist-high wrought iron fences. Beyond many fences were pristine hedges and trees.

  The surrounding area appeared to be planned and designed around the park.

  The park wasn't fenced off. It was wide open, but the trees were so enormous and plentiful that they acted as natural barriers, directly guiding park-goers to the entrances and exits.

  He could see directly through the park in some places but could not in others. The trees squared around the park on all sides, creating long blankets of dark shadows that Widow couldn't see into, not from the distance he was standing.

  Interesting, he thought.

  Widow walked and traced the perimeter until he could see where he had started from. He stopped on a street corner and looked up at the nearest CCTV camera and then back at the park. He looked at the nearest building and recalled the Post's article from memory. He recalled the photo and the bench and the placement of the camera. He hoped the bench in the photograph was the same in the stock photo, or, at least, the actual bench that Eggers died on also had a CCTV traffic camera pointed at it.

  He looked up at the closest camera and angled it in his mind and concluded that it was the same one from the stock image. But that didn't mean the bench in the image was the same. He had to go into the park to figure that out.

  Widow turned away from the camera and found the nearest entrance to the park and entered. He came in and looked left, looked right, and turned left. He walked around, studying everything he could, all the little details, and all the big-picture details.

  The plumage on the trees was something to behold, something quite stunning. The leaves on the trees were stunning. They had started turning colors the month before in September and were now peaking. Some had fallen already. Most remained.

  Red and orange colors littered the ground from the fallen leaves. They crinkled under Widow's boots.

  Widow was surprised how dark it got once he was in the park. Sunbeams streamed from the sky and filtered through the leaves in the trees, creating a festive and eerie autumn atmosphere.

  Long, dark shadows were cast all over the grounds and sidewalks.

  Dogs and their owners passed him by. He saw dogs lying around in the grass, next to their owners, panting from just having played catch.

  He saw young lovers lying around, talking, and enjoying the early morning autumn weather. He saw one guy sitting in the grass, back to a tree, and reading a book that he had probably read before. It made Widow a little jealous. He would love nothing more than to do the exact same thing. But he knew he wouldn't be able to concentrate until he had answers.

  He continued on his way, ambling through the park, ta
king the sidewalks, and then following the footpaths. He looked left and looked right. He passed statues, all of which were monuments to American history. The only one he stopped to study was a statue of ole honest Abe himself.

  Widow stared up at it and wondered if Abe was taller than him. Widow stood flat-footed at six foot four. He didn't know how tall Abe was. He was sure he could google it if he had access to Google.

  The thought flew away because right then he saw where Eggers had died. No question.

  The scene, where Eggers took his final breath, was a sliver of the park. It was tucked near a corner of deep hedges and tall trees, taller than others he’d passed by, like these were older. They stood tall the way trees in the wilderness stand proud and grand. They were taller than some of the neighboring buildings.

  This was the right spot. There was no mistaking it because the metal park bench had police tape strung around it. The grass beneath the bench was charred black at the center and yellow on the outer rings of a large burned circle.

  There was a long, curving brick walkway that cut into two paths. One led out past the trees toward another exit. The second led over to the bench.

  Widow took the second and walked to the bench. It was off the beaten path a bit, which Widow figured was why Eggers had chosen it. It was secluded, as secluded an area inside a park could be. Anyone stumbling across him wasn't stumbling across him. They would have had to go out of their way to find him there.

  In this area, Eggers could sleep through the cold night in complete peace. Even patrolling cops, if there were any, would miss him back here, unless they’d already known of it. And Widow figured they wouldn't have.

  He stepped back and looked to the right over a cluster of hedges and saw another exit out to the street. It was less pronounced than the others, appearing as a forgotten portal into and out of the park.

  Widow made his way back to the bench and stopped short of the police tape and the circle of burned grass surrounding the bench.

  The police tape was bright yellow. It was strung from the bench out and down to several plastic stakes in the ground that held the tape down, preventing the gusty wind from blowing it all away.

  There must be a subsection of a section of police literature somewhere in the MPD's police handbook regarding police tape and procedure that indicated it was supposed to set a larger perimeter than the one he stared at. But that might've been only for crime scenes and homicides.

  The MPD had already written off Eggers' death as a fiery accident. They didn’t view it as a crime scene at all. So, the police tape was more useless than anything else. It was merely a formality. Therefore, he doubted that anyone was going to come back for it—ever.

  Some of it was already hanging loosely off the bench anyway, as if someone had ripped it. He imagined kids playing in the park and stealing a section of it.

  Perhaps they were playing and thought how cool it would be to take off with police tape.

  Widow gave the police tape the same amount of respect and ignored it. He stepped over a low section of tape and stared at the bench.

  At first look, Widow saw nothing that would answer any questions. He saw exactly the same thing as the first responders who came, the same as the beat cop left behind to linger over the body while the morgue workers took their time coming to pick it up, and the one MPD detective who came by to sign off on the whole thing as an accidental death.

  Widow figured the MPD detective would've called the fire department to see if a fire investigator was available. But then again, maybe he wouldn't. Why bother that extra effort for a homeless man that nobody cared about?

  Even if a fire investigator was called, what would he do any differently? He would probably take a short look over the scene and see exactly what Widow saw.

  Widow stepped to the bench. The seat was charred. Whole sections of black paint had turned to ash. He saw plenty of ash and dust on the seat and the armrests and the dead grass beneath.

  Suddenly, the thought occurred to him that the dust and ash might not be from the bench. It could be remains from Eggers.

  Widow turned and looked up at the skyline just over the fencing surrounding the park. He scanned for cameras. The bench he was at wasn't the same as the one in the stock image. That was clear. But he did see two cameras of interest. He saw them through the trees. One pointed at a down angle toward the street. That one would probably not get a clear picture of Eggers' death, but the second one was above it. It looked like it was angled high enough to get a look at the street corner beyond, which gave it a partial angle right over Eggers' bench.

  Widow looked at the high camera and followed it down. He imagined the cone of view from it. His vision was obstructed by more foliage and trees that surrounded the park. But he remembered the entrances from the street right there. Maybe the camera had picked up foot and vehicle traffic at the time of Eggers' death. If something more sinister had happened to Eggers other than accidentally burning himself to death, maybe those cameras could tell a story.

  Of course, he figured the MPD or the fire investigators would've seen them by now. But then again, maybe not. If they were ruling it as accidental death, why would they bother?

  It could be worth a look, he thought.

  Widow turned away from the cameras and stared at the bench. He took a step back and to the left, angling the white beams of sunlight that filtered through the tree canopies so that he could look at the bench from different angles.

  Macabrely, he saw something he hadn't noticed before. From this new angle of light, Widow saw a distinct outline of the space between outlined-human legs right on the bench. It was made in soot and charred steel.

  It was a charred outline of Eggers' legs. Had to be.

  Just then—he didn't know he was doing it—but Widow saluted the bench.

  Widow returned his hand back down by his side and stared at the whole bench. He stared from side to side, armrest to armrest.

  He breathed in slowly and heavily and released the same way he would if he were taking a medical examination, trying to take deep breaths for the doctor.

  He turned and walked slowly across the brick walkway. He carefully watched each step he took. He saw multiple shoeprints and scuffs all over the place, in the dirt, and on the walkway. They meant nothing. There was no telling how many cops and firemen and EMTs and pedestrians had come through since the body was removed.

  Widow walked a little farther than a beat cop would have. He traced the walkway halfway to the exit between the trees and stopped. He looked down. The brick walkway was also covered with early morning sleet. It was white, so white he almost missed something important, only he didn't miss it. Right there between the cracks, he saw something small and jagged and white and red.

  He knelt and stared at two broken teeth. Both were jammed down in loose cracks. Someone had lost them abruptly, certainly against their will. He knew that because the roots were mostly still intact, but covered in dried blood. The teeth had been knocked out.

  Just then, Widow wished he had an NCIS forensic kit. He would have had one if he were still in the NCIS and drove an NCIS vehicle. But he wasn't, and he didn't.

  For now, the teeth weren't going anywhere. So, he left them where they were and marked the spot mentally in his head. Then, he looked over the area all around the teeth. He found more dried blood on the brick, easily missed if he hadn't been looking for it.

  He stood up and stepped off the walkway onto the sleet-covered grass and inspected the walkway ahead. He walked all the way to the trees and the exit and stopped. He found something else. Some of it was on the walkway, but most of it was in the grass.

  He found broken glass everywhere. He looked at it. It all seemed to go together like puzzle pieces.

  It had been a bottle before it was shattered into hundreds of shards.

  Judging by the number of shards and the small sizes of the pieces, Widow figured the bottle had been thrown at something or someone, hard too. To smash it that much
meant that it was most likely thrown full force by a powerful arm.

  Widow searched for something to identify the bottle. He searched on one side of the walkway and then the other until he found something. It was part of a label. The glue on the back of the label held part of the glass bottle together.

  It was a bottle of Clyde Brothers’ Whiskey.

  Widow had never heard of it. He took the label, peeled away the shards of glass on the back as best he could, and put the label in his coat pocket. He wasn't worried about possible fingerprints because the label had been printed side down in the dirt and grass and sleet. Any fingerprint that might've been there would be contaminated by now.

  Widow stood up and walked the rest of the length of the brick walkway to the exit. He made it to the street and looked left and looked right.

  Traffic was going one way. He saw a black Cadillac Escalade parked off to the side of the street. It was a block away. The windows were tinted.

  He recognized it from the church the night before.

  He glanced at it and glanced away, not making a big deal of it. But he saw something interesting. The engine in the Escalade was running. He saw exhaust coming from the tailpipe at the rear of the vehicle, which meant that someone was inside it. Presumably, the engine was running because the heater was on inside the cabin.

  The glaring Escalade, plus the teeth, plus the broken glass, plus the fifty million in stocks that Eggers had left behind all just added up to something more going on here than just another dead homeless guy.

  Widow turned around and reentered the park, fully aware that whoever was in the Escalade was watching him.

  He took one more pass over the walkway. He would have to find a way to get those teeth. He didn't want to touch them because the blood was probably still identifiable.

  Widow walked back to the bench, gave it another look over. Then he saw something else that he had missed the last time. It must've been a change in light, or a change in angle, because this time he saw it.