Gideon's Corpse

15

That evening found them in the Collected Works bookstore on Galisteo Street, their third coffee shop, following Fordyce’s incessant complaints about the quality of coffee in the city. It had been a long afternoon, and Gideon had lost track of how many espressos Fordyce had run through his renal system.

Fordyce drained yet another cup in a single swallow. “Okay, now that’s a coffee. But I gotta tell you, I’m sick of this shit,” he said, smacking the cup down in irritation. “New Mexico’s no better than New York. All we do is stand in line with fifty investigators in front of us picking their noses. We’re twenty-four hours into the investigation and we haven’t done shit. Did you get a good look at that mosque?”

“It couldn’t have been more overrun if bin Laden appeared there, raised from the dead with his seventy-two virgins.”

Their first stop had been a detour past Chalker’s mosque, for which they were still awaiting official access. The large golden dome had been a quarter mile deep in official vehicles, countless lightbars flashing. Their request to gain access, like all their requests, had disappeared into a bureaucratic black hole.

After the chaos of New York City, Gideon was disturbed to find Santa Fe also in an uproar. While there wasn’t quite the naked panic here that was gripping New York City, there was a strong sense of impending doom lying over a city in turmoil.

New York, Gideon had to admit, had been on another scale. They had barely escaped La Guardia early that morning. The airport was packed with panicked people, most of whom had arrived even without tickets, trying to get out, anywhere would do. It was a scene of hideous chaos. Fordyce had only managed to get them seats on a plane by ramming his FBI credentials down everyone’s throats and, on top of that, finagling sky marshal duty on the flight to Albuquerque.

Gideon sipped his coffee as Fordyce groused. The “liaising” in Albuquerque hadn’t helped at all. In addition to being frozen out of the mosque, they were unable to access Chalker’s house, his office up at Los Alamos, his colleagues, or any other person or place of interest. Investigative gridlock had taken hold even out here, with NEST and its cronies given first crack at everything, all the other government agencies jockeying into position in the queue behind. Even the regular FBI was making little headway against the bureaucratic headwind—only those agents detailed to NEST. On top of that, their little escapade back in Queens—getting into Chalker’s apartment—had evidently come to Dart’s attention. Fordyce had gotten a frosty message from the man’s office.

As Fordyce got up to visit the men’s room, the red-haired waitress came back around and offered Gideon a refill. “Does he want one?” she asked.

“Nah, better not, he’s wired enough. You can lay one on me, though.” He gave her his most winning smile and pushed his cup forward.

She refilled his cup with a smile of her own.

“More cream?”

“Only if you recommend cream.”

“Well, I like cream in my coffee.”

“Then I do, too. And sugar. Lots of it.”

Her smile deepened. “How much do you want?”

“Don’t stop until I say so.”

Fordyce came back to the table. He looked from Gideon to the waitress and back again. And then, as he seated himself, he asked Gideon: “Those antibiotic shots doing anything for your chancres?”

The waitress hurried off. Gideon turned on him. “What the hell?”

“We’re working. You can chat up waitresses on your own time.”

Gideon sighed. “You’re cramping my style.”

“Style?” Fordyce snorted. “And another thing: You need to lose the black jeans and sneakers. You look like a damn over-the-hill punk rocker. It’s unprofessional and it’s part of our problem.”

“You forget, we didn’t bring luggage.”

“Well, tomorrow I hope you’ll dress properly. If you don’t mind me saying.”

“I do mind, in fact,” Gideon said. “Better than looking like Mr. Quantico.”

“What’s wrong with Mr. Quantico?”

“You think looking like a hard-ass FBI agent is going to open doors, get people to relax, talk to you? I don’t think so.”

Fordyce shook his head and began tapping a pencil against his empty cup. After a few minutes, he said, “There’s got to be a line of investigation nobody’s thought of yet.” His BlackBerry chimed—it had been chiming constantly—and he pulled it out, thumbed up the message, read it, swore, put it back. “Bastards are still ‘reviewing the paperwork.’”

The gesture gave Gideon a thought. “What about Chalker’s phone records?”

Fordyce shook his head. “We won’t get within a thousand miles of them. No doubt they’ve been impounded and sealed.”

“Yeah, but I’ve got an idea about that. Chalker was kind of scatterbrained, and he often misplaced his cell phone or forgot to charge it. He was always borrowing phones.”

Now Fordyce looked up, faintly interested. “From who?”

“Various people. But mostly from this woman who worked in the cubicle next to his.”

“Her name?”

“Melanie Kim.”

Fordyce frowned. “Kim? I recall that name.” He snapped opened his briefcase, took out a file, and flipped through it. “She’s already on the witness list—which means we have to get official permission to talk to her.”

“We don’t need to talk to her. We just need to get her phone records.”

Fordyce shook his head. “Talk about scraping the bottom of the barrel. So how are we going to tell her calls from his?”

Gideon frowned, thinking back. It was a good question. Fordyce went back to tapping his cup.

“About six months ago,” Gideon said slowly, “Chalker dropped his iPhone. Busted it. For a week he kept borrowing her phone to make his calls.”

Fordyce seemed to brighten. “You got a time frame on this?”

Gideon racked his brains. “Wintertime.”

“That’s a help.”

Gideon cursed his poor memory. “Wait. I remember Melanie got all pissed off because she was trying to plan a New Year’s Eve party and he kept borrowing her phone and not returning it for hours on end. So it was before New Year’s.”

“And it must have been before Christmas, then. You wouldn’t have been at work between Christmas and New Year’s.”

Gideon nodded. “Right…And Christmas vacation began December twenty-second last year.”

“So we’re talking the week or so before that?”

“Exactly.”

“I guess we’d better start the paperwork,” said Fordyce wearily.

Gideon stared at him. “Screw the paperwork.” He took out his own iPhone, began dialing.

“Waste of time,” said Fordyce. “By law a telecom provider can’t release cell phone records, even to the customer, except by mail to the customer’s address of record. On top of that, we’d need a subpoena.”

Gideon finished dialing. He punched through the menu selections and finally ended up with an operator.

“Hello, dear?” he asked, putting on an old lady’s quavering voice. “This is Melanie Kim. My phone was stolen.”

“Oh no,” said Fordyce, plugging his ears. “I’m not hearing this. No way.”

The operator asked for the last four digits of her Social Security number and her mother’s maiden name. “Let’s see…” warbled Gideon. “I can’t seem to find it…I’ll have to call you back with that information, dear.” Gideon hung up.

“That was lame,” said Fordyce, removing his fingers with a snort.

Gideon ignored him and called Melanie Kim herself, whose number he had on his own cell. She answered.

“Hey, it’s Gideon.”

“Oh my God, Gideon,” said Kim, “you won’t believe it, but the FBI have been here questioning me all day—”

“Tell me about it,” Gideon said, gently interrupting her, keeping his voice at a whisper. “They’ve been giving me the third degree, too, and you know what? All the questions are about you.”

“Me?” There was instant panic in her voice.

“They seem to think you and Chalker were…well, you know, an item.”

“Chalker? That asshole? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Listen, Melanie, I got the distinct impression they’re going to steamroll you. I felt like I had to warn you. They’re out for blood.”

“No way. I had nothing to do with him. I hated the guy!”

“They were even asking me questions about your mother.”

“My mother? She died five years ago!”

“They hinted around that she was a communist while a student at Harvard.”

“Harvard? My mother didn’t come here from Korea until she was thirty!”

“Your mother was Korean?”

“Of course she was Korean!”

“Well, they kept pressing me and I finally told them I thought she was Irish, you know, mixed marriage and all…I don’t know where I got that impression. Sorry.”

“Irish? Irish? Gideon, you moron!”

“What was her maiden name? So I can straighten this out.”

“Kwon! Jae-hwa Kwon! You’d better straighten it out!”

“I’ll fix it, I promise. One other thing…”

“Oh please, no.”

“They asked a lot of questions about your Social Security number. They said it wasn’t a valid number, hinted that you might have committed identity fraud, you know, like to get a green card or something.”

“Green card? I’m a damn citizen! I can’t believe these idiots. What a horror show—”

He’d really gotten her going now, pushing all her hot buttons. Gideon felt a pang of guilt. Again, he gently interrupted her. “They were especially focused on the last four digits of your Social. Thought they were weird.”

“Weird? What do you mean?”

“That they would just happen to be one two three four. Sounds, you know, made up.”

“One two three four? It’s seven six zero six!”

Gideon cupped the phone and whispered hoarsely, “Oh no, gotta go, they’re calling my name again. I’ll do what I can to defuse this. Listen, whatever you do, don’t let on that I warned you.”

“Wait—!”

He shut the phone, leaned back in the chair, exhaling. He could hardly believe what he had just done. And the next step was going to be even worse.

Fordyce stared at him, an unreadable expression on his face.

Gideon called the phone company back. In his little-old-lady voice, cracking with confusion and upset, he gave the operator Kim’s personal information and reported that her phone was stolen; he wanted the phone canceled, the cell number, data, and address book all switched over to her son’s iPhone, who was getting a BlackBerry and wanted to move his account. Then Gideon gave her his own phone number, Social, and mother’s maiden name. When the operator said the transfer would take up to twenty-four hours, Gideon began to cry and in a weepy voice told a confused tale of a baby, a deformed puppy, cancer, and a house fire.

A few minutes later, he hung up. “Expedited. We’ll have the info in thirty minutes, max.”

“You’re one rotten SOB, you know that?” And Fordyce smiled approvingly.