Imposter Page 2

  There was a gentle tearing sensation. He found himself drifting in the air above his parents’ home. Just another cloud, unnoticed in the mayhem and the screaming he could no longer hear. He hung there one instant only. Not even long enough to draw the entire vista into focus. He was a newborn all over again—staring down at a billion images, none of which made any sense. Even when he told himself he had to look carefully because something vitally important had happened. Even then. He could not bring himself to care.

  Then the instant was over. Gone so fast he could easily have denied it had happened at all. He was back on the pavement and staring at the billowing smoke. He remained there long enough to hear the sirens wail in the distance and voices wail closer to where he lay. Long enough to feel the pain begin to seep into his awareness. Pain so intense it was hard to claim it as his own. Then he was gone.

  The ease with which he drifted away made him certain that things were very bad indeed. Matt Kelly was not a quitter. Yet he released his hold on the sky and the pavement with a total absence of concern. Not even the screams and the sirens could keep him there. He did not shut his eyes. He simply stopped seeing.

  He knew what had happened to him. There had been an explosion. He could no longer see. But he could hear, as though he were in some transitory phase and sound was either the last faculty to depart or the first to connect him to whatever it was that lay beyond.

  The next sound Matt heard was wind chimes. He recognized the chimes instantly as being handblown crystal and antique. They had formed a vivid component of his early childhood. The chimes had hung from his grandparents’ back porch near the Fells Point marina. His thoughts were not so clear on anything else.

  He felt himself drifting off again. Matt used all his remaining time to decide he was okay with being dead.

  Lucas D’Amico stood on the front steps of his daughter’s school when he heard the distant blast. Katy, being the daughter of a cop and a child of Baltimore, hovered just inside the door and watched her father with worried eyes.

  Lucas saw that his daughter was frightened, so he turned to her and asked, “Who is your daddy?”

  She responded in the low voice she used when either worried or sad. “The best policeman in the whole wide world.”

  “That’s right. And what is your daddy’s job?”

  “To keep the world safe and me happy.”

  “Right again. Big smile, now.” Nowadays it wrenched Lucas to hear Katy talk like that, because she had used that low voice for almost five months after his wife had been taken from them. “Come on, that’s no smile. Give me something to take with me out on the street. That’s my sweetheart. You go have a great day, Katy-girl.”

  Ian Reeves waited for the school doors to close behind Katy before asking, “What was that noise?”

  “Hard to say.”

  Ian was pastor of Mount Vernon Methodist and head of Katy’s school. “Could it have been an exploding gas main?”

  “Maybe.” But Lucas didn’t think so. He was fairly certain it was a bomb. Echoes off the surrounding buildings made it hard to pinpoint direction and distance. But it had seemed to come from the north. Which might mean the National Guard Armory. Lucas fervently hoped so. A bomb in a military compound was not his worry. “What did you want to see me about?”

  But the pastor was listening to several hundred car alarms wailing in the distance. His eyes nervously tracked clouds of birds wheeling overhead in frightened unison. “Don’t you need to be somewhere?”

  “I have a couple of minutes.”

  “Right.” Ian Reeves was a remarkably unattractive man. He was tall and stooped at the same time. His face was almost comical. “You have the most incredible daughter it has ever been my joy to know.”

  Lucas nodded. Where most saw an overweight girl with dull eyes and shapeless clothes, Ian managed to see Katy for what she was. “Something wrong?”

  “Not with the school or Katy. She is a favorite with almost everybody inside. No, my concern is with you.”

  “Why is that?” Sirens whooped in the distance. But none appeared to be headed in his direction. Mount Vernon was a haven of civil respectability, but the church stood equidistant from Maryland General and Mercy Hospital, which held the state’s two busiest ER units. Sirens were a normal part of the scenery. Then his phone rang. “Excuse me.”

  He flipped it from the leather holster. “This is D’Amico.”

  His partner asked, “Where are you?”

  “Front steps of Katy’s school.”

  “Then I guess you heard it.”

  “Roger that. You got an ID?”

  “You’re gonna love this.”

  D’Amico turned from the pastor. “So it wasn’t the armory?”

  Clarence Bledsoe laughed out loud. “In your dreams, pal.”

  D’Amico sighed. “I’m two minutes out.”

  “Swing by the front; I’ll be waiting. Bernstein has handed us some serious trouble this time. I hate trouble worse than Mondays.”

  D’Amico cut off his phone and told the pastor, “I have to go.”

  “Call me, Lucas. We need to talk.”

  “I’m doing fine, Ian.”

  Normally this was enough to stifle the pastor’s concern. But not today. He brought his uneven features in closer and said, “Call me.”

  Lucas went code one, rolling with siren and lights. He swung by Mercy and headed down Fayette. His partner jogged out headquarters’ front doors and slipped in before D’Amico pulled to the curb. “Eutaw Place.”

  “You have got to be joking.”

  “It gets worse. Paul Kelly.”

  Their siren cleaved through rush hour. “I know that name.”

  “Running for the U.S. Senate.”

  Of course. Lucas’s wife had called Megan Kelly a friend. “They murdered a candidate? Isn’t that federal?”

  “I wish.” Bledsoe plucked a freshly ironed handkerchief from his jacket and sneezed. He was a slender man with café au lait skin and a penchant for Egyptian cotton shirts with French cuffs. His nickname around the department was Prince. Bledsoe also had notorious allergies. “I’ve got a bad attack coming. I can feel it.”

  “Tell me why this isn’t federal, Clarence.” The law governing their work was supposedly simple. Federal agencies took control when a federal law had been broken. Otherwise, it was a local police case. Murder was a state crime, not a federal crime. But the antiterrorism laws were broad enough for Homeland Security to insert itself almost anywhere it wished. Such as when a senatorial candidate got himself blown up.

  “Because Homeland has spoken.” He sneezed again. “My throat feels like it’s sandblasted.”

  Lucas crossed Charles Street and headed for Martin Luther King Boulevard. “You talked to the feds?”

  “Not me, man. The chief.” Major Hannah Bernstein had been the chief of Baltimore’s homicide division for just under six months. Lucas and Clarence were still in watch-and-wait mode about their new boss. “I got to hand it to the lady. She fought the good fight. But Homeland says unless the guy is actually elected, he’s just another local joe. Besides which, it wasn’t the guy. It was his wife.”

  Lucas parked behind a lone fire truck and three foam-encrusted cars. A brick wall between the house and the street had partially protected the SUVs. Above that level, the vehicles looked decapitated. Yellow police tape was already in place. A crowd was gathering. Eutaw Place was the very pinnacle of upmarket, the highest-priced street within the region known as Bolton Hill. But the areas to either side were heavy crime districts. Druid Lake, less than a mile to the north of where D’Amico stood, was a notorious dumping ground for gang-related violence. But here everything shouted money and a world where bombs did not demolish cars and homes and lives.

  Clarence rose from the car and started for the tape, until Lucas said softly, “Hang on a sec.”

  His partner halted and reached for his handkerchief. Lucas did a slow circle there beside the car. His absorption of the scen
e was not a conscious process. It just happened. Later he would start going back over what he was now taking in. When he wrote up his reports or listened to the 911 tape or sat in a meeting, his mind would hit replay. Now that he slept alone, he sometimes went over things at night. But for Katy’s sake he didn’t like to bring his work home.

  As he scanned the scene, his gaze did not rest anywhere for more than a few seconds. Clarence waited patiently. They had been partners for seven years. Long enough for Clarence to know that if he needed to check something later, Lucas would know. Clarence didn’t scan because he wasn’t good at it; therefore, Lucas scanned for both of them. Clarence coughed and sneezed and waited.

  The Kelly house was one of Bolton Hill’s few stand-alones, a three-story brownstone that probably dated from the early 1800s. The carriage house at the back had formerly been a garage but now housed election staff offices. A carport stood in the corner where the rear alley met Wilson. A waist-high brick wall ran along Wilson Avenue, plastered now with “Paul Kelly for U.S. Senate” election posters. A larger poster covered the carriage house’s entire side wall. The poster had been partly ripped free of the wall by the blast, such that a rumpled candidate glared at the mayhem in his side lawn.

  The narrow park running down the center of Eutaw Place sprouted elms in autumn finery and a fountain that actually worked. The people clustered beyond the tape displayed the area’s neurotic nature. Well-heeled neighbors talked worriedly. Youths in serious street gear stood by a lavender Escalade, gold chains thumping on their chests as they did the fist-on-fist thing, probably complimenting the bomber for his handi– work. Beyond them, bums drifted and laughed, their insanity pricked by the day’s cataclysm.

  “Okay. I’m done.” Lucas ducked under the tape and felt the same thing he always did when approaching a new crime scene. Another shard had been torn from the world’s fabric. No one understood life’s fragility better than a homicide cop.

  Clarence said, “Get a load, will you?”

  The female officer who approached them was definitely made to turn heads. Dark, slender, and so attractive her standard-issue patrol uniform looked ready for a magazine cover. But her attitude was strictly professional. “Help you gents?”

  “I’m D’Amico and this is Bledsoe.” They flashed their badges. Lucas read the officer’s nametag. “Morales?”

  “Yes sir. Sure glad to see you guys.” She motioned toward the house. “We’ve got some serious strangeness here.”

  The house was surprisingly intact, except for the ten-foot hole in the side facing them. “You here alone?”

  “No sir. Officer Brodski was first on scene. He’s inside with the board.”

  Board was patrol-speak for anything to do with the fire squad and EMS. “You got a fire marshal on hand?”

  “Not yet. Everybody’s pretty stretched today. We’ve been asking for more backup. The medical examiner hasn’t even gotten here. One ambo came and left with the guy.”

  “Guy?”

  “Matthew Kelly. That’s his mother over there.” She pointed to the black plastic tarp draped over a rumpled form, midway between the blasted house and the side wall. “I did that because of the people. But I didn’t move anything. It’s just—she’s in bad shape.”

  “You did fine.” The blast had torn a sizable chunk out of the brick wall and pitted the surrounding area with what looked like a spray of bullets. “How did the kid survive that?”

  “Best I can figure it, he was standing over there.” She indicated a point beyond the wall. “Pretty much out of the blast pattern.”

  D’Amico nodded. “So right now it’s just us and one engine and your partner inside.”

  “Brodski isn’t my partner, sir.” Something about that left her looking tense. “We’ve been radioing in pretty regular, but it sounds like the whole force is thin on the ground today. The duty sergeant’s supposed to be on his way . . . I guess that must be him now.”

  A patrol car pulled around the corner and parked in front of the fountain. The sergeant was a twenty-year street vet Lucas knew vaguely, but couldn’t for the moment remember his name. The sergeant nodded at the two homicide detectives but addressed the young officer. “What are you doing off desk, Morales?”

  The young woman was attractive even when pained. “We’ve got two officers in Division One pulling light duty, Sarge. They said—”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  Morales was clearly embarrassed to be discussing the matter in front of two senior detectives, which Lucas could well understand. Desk duty was assigned to an active officer only when their powers of arrest had been suspended by Internal Affairs pending an investigation, or when placed on punishment detail. “Come on, Sarge, cut me a break. You know how stretched we are.”

  “You heard the lieutenant same as me. You’re strictly on desk duty for the duration.”

  Morales kicked the dirt at her feet. Shifted her belt. Was definitely tempted to argue. Instead, she wheeled about and left without another word.

  The sergeant watched her climb into the car and peel rubber down the street before asking, “Homicide claiming this one?”

  “Assuming there’s a body under that tarp.” Lucas pointed at the empty space Morales had left behind. “What was that all about?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  D’Amico waited while his partner went through another coughing fit. “You okay?”

  “Definitely not.” Bledsoe wheezed as they walked toward the gaping hole. “You ever seen anything like this before?”

  “Can’t say that I have.” A crack ran up the brownstone wall from the hole to the ornate stucco cornice along the roofline. Other than that, the house looked intact. More than that. The room Lucas could see beyond the hole appeared almost untouched. “Why don’t you examine the victim; I’ll check inside.”

  “Give me a simple gang war any day.” Clarence pointed at the poster flapping on the side of the carriage house. The candidate’s patented thousand-yard stare was violently skewed by the day’s calamity. “I read trouble in letters ten feet tall.”

  Matt Kelly came around to the constant beeping of a hospital monitor. The sound of crystal chimes seemed to follow him into wakefulness, then vanish upon an astringent wind. He sensed a gradual reconnection to his physical body. He felt neither satisfaction nor sorrow over the awareness that he was alive. He knew he could open his eyes if he wanted. But there was a question he would have to ask as soon as the world realized he was awake. Even if he did not shape the words, the first set of eyes would tell him anyway. And Matt was not ready. Neither for the question, nor for the risk that his mother was gone.

  So he lay as still as the death he would probably have preferred. He kept his eyes shut. He lay in the fragmented reality of a hollow world, surrounded by electronic chimes and the whispers of deadly winds. Finally he drifted away once more.

  He dozed and woke and dozed again, fighting off consciousness as long as he could. Then a nurse came and woke him with hands that took his pulse and eyes that told him the tragic news. A doctor arrived, a slender, olive-skinned male named Krishnamurti. His voice was soft and his concern very professional. He too offered Matt both the message and the condolences without saying a word.

  Matt ate what the nurse brought him without tasting anything. Then the doctor returned with Matt’s father. Matt was as ready as he could be for that encounter. He endured the tears and the words for a brief time, and then he shut it all out—his father and the doctor and the news. He wrestled himself back into sleep, wishing he knew how to make it permanent.

  He dreamed again of being blown free of his body. He struggled from the depths, followed into wakefulness by the faint tremor of crystal chimes. He fled them by focusing on sounds of other voices. Deep voices with the hard insistence of a world that would no longer be denied. He opened his eyes.

  “Mr. Kelly, I’m Detective Lucas D’Amico. This is my partner, Detective Bledsoe. We’re sorry to bother you. But we n
eed to ask some questions.”

  Matt welcomed their official lack of emotion. He waited while the nurse raised his bed and gave him a cup of water and warned the cops not to take too long. When the nurse departed, Detective D’Amico said, “You’re a federal agent, and before that you were a cop, right?”

  Matt nodded.

  Detective D’Amico was clearly the guy in charge, a solid block of a man with the patient air of someone built to wait forever to get what he wanted. He wore the typical cop’s suit, wrinkled and cheap. “Then you know the drill. Tell us what happened.”

  Matt walked them through the afternoon. Meeting his mother at Lexington Market, driving home, the explosion. Five sentences. Agony.

  D’Amico listened and watched. His partner, an African-American dressed in a fashionable tweed jacket and dark slacks, took notes with a gold pen and coughed. The man did not look well. When Matt stopped speaking, D’Amico gave him a few moments of silence, then, “What did you do before you met your mother?”

  “The details won’t help you, Detective.”

  “What say you let us be the judge.”

  “I drove back from FLETSE.”

  “Where?”

  “Federal training academy. Outside Savannah.”

  D’Amico and his partner exchanged glances. “I thought you feds trained at Quantico.”

  “All nondefense agencies except FBI have been relocated.”

  “So you drove back and went straight to Lexington Market?”

  “First I stopped off at a dojo in Tenth Ward and worked out.”

  Bledsoe, the other cop, spoke for the first time. “Vic Wright’s place?”

  “Yes.”

  Bledsoe coughed hard. His voice sounded sandpapery. “I know it. Full-contact karate.” To Matt, “Korean, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long you been going there?”

  “Since I was twelve.”