Liberty Square

  Table of Contents

  Other Books by Katherine V. Forrest

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Afterword

  Copyright © 2008 by Katherine V. Forrest

  Spinsters Ink

  P.O. Box 242

  Midway, FL 32343

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  First published by Berkeley Prime Crime 1996

  Reprinted by Spinsters Ink 2008

  eBook updated January 2013

  Cover Designer: Linda Callaghan

  ISBN 13: 978-1-88352-366-4

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Other Books by Katherine V. Forrest

  An Emergence of Green

  Curious Wine

  Flashpoint

  Kate Delafield Mysteries

  Amateur City

  Murder at the Nightwood Bar

  The Beverly Malibu

  Murder by Tradition

  Liberty Square

  Apparition Alley

  Sleeping Bones

  Hancock Park

  Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Speculative

  Daughters of a Coral Dawn

  Daughters of an Amber Noon

  Daughters of an Emerald Dusk

  For Jo

  Acknowledgments

  To “Louise,” of the United States Marine Corps, for technical detail surrounding Kate Delafield’s time in the Corps and in Vietnam. It is this nation’s shame that I cannot reveal the true identity of an American citizen who has dedicated twenty years of her life in service to her country.

  To Jo Hercus, partner in crime and partner in life, for creative survival techniques and emotional nourishment.

  To Montserrat Fontes, brilliant novelist and great friend, whose passionate advocacy for Aimee and the wholeness of Kate helped fuel this novel.

  To Cath Walker for vital feedback when it really, really mattered.

  To Diane Bennison of Madwoman Press, Northboro, MA, for leading me to “Louise.”

  To my writer-brother Michael Nava.

  To the inestimable Richard LaBonte.

  To Mitch Grobeson for what he’s done for us all.

  To Natalee Rosenstein for very fine editorial suggestions.

  To Charlotte Sheedy for bringing it all together.

  Chapter One

  Kate Delafield waited impatiently at the intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue and 9th Street, searching rush hour traffic for a maroon Chevy Cavalier. She glanced at her watch: 5:15. Fifteen minutes later than when she said she would be here, and Aimee would not be annoyed in the least—which served only to increase Kate’s own irritation.

  She wished she could signal any of the taxi drivers eyeing her from passing vehicles, wished she had not insisted on a rental car. She wanted the Chevy Cavalier here right now, wanted the armor of a car around her. She felt exposed, uneasy, and off balance in Washington, D.C., on this November day in 1994. Images, branded into her from the picture books of childhood and sketchy recollections of visits during her decades-ago training at the Marine Corps base nearby, clashed against the unsettling changes to this place; a chaos of strange new patches had been added to a familiar old quilt of a city.

  Across the street stood the granite Grecian columns of the Justice Department Building; a short distance away on either side of her the two most sanctified features of this city, the White House and the dominating Capitol dome. But behind her was the lego-block FBI Building from which she had just emerged—one of the quilt’s new patches. As was the subject matter of the seminar she had attended: behavioral profiles of the psychopaths infesting the cities of America. In this very city the “normal” murder rate had overwhelmed the capabilities of its Metropolitan Police Force. And although any large city contained its dangers, at least the dangers in the streets of her own city, Los Angeles, were those she knew.

  The breeze had edged to crispness after the day’s earlier showers, scudding a few stray gold leaves along the curb. Kate hunched her shoulders inside her raincoat, her gaze drawn briefly to a maple tree with only vestiges remaining of its fall splendor, like a withered old lady with rouge spots on her cheeks. She thought of the Michigan autumns of her youth, the blazing golds and reds of maple, oak, elm, grudgingly falling away to expose branches of icy brittle lace against the gray clouds of winter, against sere, fallow fields, frost-covered red barns…Her gaze rose to clouds gathering to obscure a milky sky. Where was Aimee?

  A police car drifted past, and Kate took in its occupants, an African-American female and a white male, then she studied the car itself: white, with a red, white, and blue light bar on its roof, a wide aquamarine swath along the side, a gold shield adorning the door. For her, the presence of the patrol car in a city bristling with police presence safeguarding some of the most prestigious officeholders in the world conferred neither security nor protection—nor did standing in front of the building housing the foremost police organization in the world. Washington, D.C., was falling apart, its civil services in a state of budgetary mismanagement and near-collapse, and everyone knew it. For all its massive buildings and marble monuments, this majestic city felt as dangerous to her as the deadliest alleys of Los Angeles.

  Finally, out of the next flotilla of cars released by a stoplight on the wide boulevard, the maroon Chevy Cavalier swung over to the curb.

  “Hope you didn’t have to drive around too much,” Kate said, tossing her shoulder bag and briefcase into the backseat, wrestling the seat belt into place. She brushed a hand over Aimee’s thigh, resting it there. “Sorry I’m late. I like the sweatshirt,” she said. The color was odd—burnt orange—and she could not quite make out its sports logo, but it hung attractively on Aimee’s slender shoulders, its sleeves pushed up to her elbows. “Have fun today?”

  Aimee flashed her a quick grin, squeezed Kate’s hand on her thigh. “We went to the Space Museum. I need two more weeks here at least!” A practiced head shake flung a lock of dark hair away from Aimee’s eyes. “Anything would be better than spending a day in a place named for the asshole of the century.”

  “High-Heels Hoover,” Kate said, quoting her pal Joe D’Amico’s scathing mockery of J. Edgar Hoover’s supposedly hidden life. “Little did we know.”

  “His building looks just like him—squat, ugly, sinister.”

  Kate murmured assent. Penetrating the FBI Building’s high-tech security had required scanning and registration, a laminated ID tag, entry through a turnstile and past a processing slot for the ID tag—all of which granted monitored access to a warren of dauntingly anonymous corridors.

  Aimee’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “The man poisoned so many lives…”

  Kate nodded. Nothing needed to be said. She and Aimee had met during the course of an investigation that had proven the ongoing pervasiveness of that poison.

  Aimee asked, “
So what’s the party line? Is the Bureau at least embarrassed?”

  “To them he’s just a cranky, eccentric old ancestor.” She did not mention that Hoover’s spawn seemed to her unchanged from their historical image—the same dark-suited bodies and mannequin-like deportment, the men and women, what few women there were, still marching out of the same mold.

  Aimee turned onto Massachusetts Avenue. Kate gazed at the varied architecture along this street, famed in part as home to many foreign embassies, its buildings ranging from modern to white marble Renaissance, from plain brick to ornate Victorian. How different from the stucco pastels of her own Los Angeles, the red Spanish tile roofs, the extravagant, evergreen foliage, and the graffiti marching across the sun-splashed city, encroaching on its wealthiest areas as inexorably as kudzu in the South.

  “How’d the session go today?”

  Kate shrugged. “Different location, same subject matter. Got trapped afterward by a sister from Chicago wanting to know if homophobia at LAPD is any less with Daryl Gates gone and Mitch Grobeson winning his discrimination suit.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “That Chief Williams has yet to show he’s got a backbone, and Mitch Grobeson’s at Hollywood Division still trying to part the Red Sea.”

  Aimee chuckled. “Chicago any better?”

  “Nope.”

  Mist began to obscure the windshield; Aimee sluiced it clear with a click on and off of the wipers. “So what did you learn today?”

  “More trends, more stats. Lots of numbers.” Aimee’s disquiet over police work was burdensome enough without dropping any hints about the seminar’s details of ritual torture and ghoulish dismemberment. Again Kate ran a hand down Aimee’s thigh. “What’s on for tonight?”

  Aimee clicked the wipers on and off again. “If it doesn’t fucking rain, dinner at the Indian place down the street, a stroll around Dupont Circle. How does that sound?”

  “Great.” She understood Aimee’s fascination with the city—she had once felt that way herself—but she had not been looking forward to another round of Aimee’s enthusiastic tourism. The upcoming reunion would draw enough emotion out of her without further invasions into her stock of memories.

  Aimee said, “So tomorrow’s the big day.”

  Her mood instantly deflating, Kate did not answer. She thought churlishly that at least Aimee had not as yet suggested a visit to the Wall.

  The subdued sign for the colonial-style Inn on Liberty Square came into view, and Aimee, smiling, pulled into the covered entrance to the parking lot at the rear of the Inn. “Finally I get to meet up with some of your past.”

  “You and me both,” Kate said, trying to recover her equanimity.

  As she got out of the car, she looked more closely at Aimee’s new sweatshirt, discerning the logo, a basketball on a bullet-like trajectory through a basket. The Washington Bullets. Bullets, for God’s sake. This charnel house of a city even called one of its sports teams the Bullets.

  Aimee used her room key to unlock the double doors that led from the parking lot into a small, plain lobby, and turned the same key in another lock to summon the elevator. Kate unbuttoned her raincoat, glanced at herself in the mirrored wall at the back of the elevator to glumly confirm that sitting all day had terminally wrinkled her jacket and pants. Maybe she could get away with wearing jeans and a jacket to dinner.

  The elevator door opened onto the second floor. A tall, lanky male in faded jeans and a jean jacket was striding down the corridor toward them. Kate recognized him and greeted him coolly: “Hello again, Woody.”

  They had exchanged brief greetings that morning in the hotel lobby. Her previous dislike for him had returned undiminished, and she suspected he felt the same way toward her. “Aimee, this is Woody Hampton, one of the men I served with in—”

  “A pleasure, pretty woman,” Woody interrupted Kate, “and I do mean a pleasure.” He pumped Aimee’s hand.

  “Nice to meet you,” Aimee said, deftly extracting her hand. “See you at the party.” She walked on down the navy blue carpeted hallway.

  Following her, Kate smiled, thinking how often she wished she could slip a paper bag over Aimee’s head because of the attention she drew. This was not one of those times. Aimee had maneuvered their presence here; therefore she deserved Woody Hampton, and whatever else happened this weekend.

  Kate shot the dead bolt into place on their room door, moved on down the hallway and tossed her briefcase and shoulder bag onto the bed, then shrugged out of the raincoat and came back to the closet and hung it up. Aimee reached for her. “Hello, grump,” she said, nuzzling her throat.

  Kate sighed, her resentment releasing her. “Hello, sweetheart.” She took her into her arms, kissed her forehead, inhaling the light musk of her hair.

  CRACK!

  At the same instant, glass shattering. Their hotel room window. Aimee broke away from her. “What—”

  “Down!”

  The order was purely reflexive; Kate had already dragged Aimee down to the floor. She covered Aimee with her own body, flinching as three more cracks in rapid succession split the air to more splintering of glass.

  Aimee struggled beneath her. “What the hell—”

  “Hold still,” Kate hissed.

  After several long beats of silence, Kate heard a door flung open and a deep male voice in the hallway. Angling her body toward the door, Kate carefully rolled off Aimee.

  “Aimee, crawl. Into the bathroom.” The bathroom was right beside them.

  Aimee scrambled into it, leaped to her feet, poked her head out into the room’s hallway. “Shit! Somebody shot out the window!”

  “Get your head back!” Did she have no sense at all? “For God’s sake, Aimee!”

  Kate was crawling toward the bed, and her shoulder bag, and her gun.

  A pounding on the door. “Everybody okay in there?” More pounding.

  Aimee sprang out of the bathroom, fumbled with the dead bolt on the door.

  “Aimee!” Kate screamed. She leaped for her shoulder bag, yanked out her gun, and whirled back to the door in a crouch, the gun in a two-handed grip as Aimee flung the door open.

  “Hey!” A tall African-American man stood there, clad in sweatpants, his eyes widening at the sight of the .38 leveled at his eyes. “Good God Almighty.” The voice was deep bass. He extended his hands, palms up, his bare chest glistening in the light from the hallway. “Hey.”

  Kate lowered her gun to his kneecaps, and moved toward the door, still holding the weapon in both hands. “Aimee,” she commanded, “call nine-one-one. Tell them we have a shooter in the hotel.”

  Aimee stood gaping from the fissures in the door to the ones in the window. “The door…the shots went right through the door and out the window—”

  “Hurry.”

  Aimee rushed for the phone.

  Peering first to her left, Kate edged into the hallway. She knew a stairway was to her right; their room was the last one along this hallway. Several people in various stages of dress and undress had come out of their rooms, none of them from the reunion group, or at least not familiar to Kate. At the sight of her and her gun they ducked back into their rooms and slammed their doors.

  She said to the African-American man, “What did you see?”

  “Nothing. Nobody.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “Not a soul. I’m right across the hall, heard the shots, came out of my room, saw the bullet holes in your door—”

  She interrupted him with a raised hand and moved down the hallway, inspecting it for bullet damage, scrutinizing the blue and white flocked wallpaper, the dark blue room doors, the ceiling.

  She returned to the African-American man. “What’s your name?”

  His eyes again on her gun, he answered, “John Stafford.”

  “Mr. Stafford, you’re a brave man,” Kate said, shoving the gun into the waistband of her pants. A brave man, she judged, but a foolish one.

  He said in his deep
voice, “This doesn’t happen where I come from.”

  “Where is that?”

  “Oklahoma City.”

  She extended a hand. “Kate Delafield. I’m a police officer. Los Angeles.”

  He looked relieved. And perplexed. Shaking her hand, he peered down into her face. “What’s going on? Somebody after you here in Washington?” He managed a faint grin. “I’m on a movie set?”

  “Not that I know of,” she answered with a wry smile, and then turned to briefly inspect the damage to her own door. Hearing sirens—at least four or five, she judged—she moved down the hallway to the lighted EXIT sign and the stairway door. Its handle was a bar type, and at the point farthest from the doorjamb she carefully pushed down on the bar. Gun in hand once again, she braced the door open with a knee. The staircase looked empty. She let the door swing shut, again stuffed the gun into her waistband.

  “Ran down there, didn’t he,” John Stafford offered.

  Kate nodded. “Probably. Or into one of the rooms along this floor.”

  “Not likely. Not enough time, unless he’s in the room right next to you.”

  Melanie Shaw was in that room. She and Aimee had spent the day together. Either Melanie was not there now or had not come out despite all the commotion. Kate was looking reflectively at the room when Aimee called, “Cops just pulled up in front.” She came out of the hotel room. “I forgot to tell them you’re police. They won’t be happy to see that gun.”

  Shit, Kate thought. “It’ll be okay,” she said. She could hear the gurgle-clank of the elevator. “The two of you get back in your rooms.”

  Kate turned toward the elevator and kept her hands extended before her, hoping these D.C. Metro cops weren’t trigger-happy.

  The elevator doors opened and out stepped a man and a woman in dark blue uniforms with light blue shirts. Both police officers were African-American, both were resting a hand on the handles of their unsnapped weapons. They immediately backed against the wall, drawing their guns as Kate called in a loud, clear voice: “Police officer! LAPD, Wilshire Division Homicide.”