“Try me. I’m here about Kyle Craig.”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” he said, taking his eyes off me and opening a desk drawer.
“He knew you. He told me you gave him a whole new face. This was back when you were operating at night and under the radar to fund your gambling addiction.”
Dr. Bombay came up with a pistol and aimed it at my chest.
Chapter 74
I looked at the pistol, a stout Remington 1911, probably .45 caliber. In the right hands, it was probably deadly.
But Dr. Bombay’s gun trembled like his voice when he said, “Whoever you are, get out! This is persecution!”
I put up my hands and stood. “I’m not looking to pin another illegal cut job on you, Doctor. I’m just looking for corroboration that you did give Kyle Craig a new face.”
He leaned across the desk and shook the gun at me. “Get out!”
“Calm down,” I said, starting to pivot. “I’m going.”
The instant I saw him begin to retract the weapon, I spun back and smashed the inner wrist of his gun hand so hard, he howled in pain. The pistol went flying and disappeared behind him with a clatter.
“Asshole,” he said. He looked miserably at his wrist, then up at me in alarm, and then he dropped behind the desk.
Knowing he was after the gun, I came around behind him, grabbed him by the shirt collar, and jerked him to his feet. I spun him around and drove my right fist into his solar plexus.
Dr. Bombay doubled over, his eyes bugging out, weird choking noises erupting from his throat. I guided him around into the chair I’d been sitting in, then went back behind the desk, found the gun, and unloaded it.
By the time I was done, he’d almost regained his breath.
“It’s an easy question, so I want an easy answer,” I said. “Did you give Kyle Craig a new face? The face of an FBI agent named Max Siegel?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe? Jesus, man, whoever you are, we didn’t use names. I didn’t want to know names. If I knew names, I could give them to people like you, so no names. Ever. Get it?”
I showed him the still shot from the jail-security footage. “You ever see him?”
Dr. Bombay leaned forward to look and then shook his head. “No. I mean, maybe, but I don’t remember much about their faces beforehand. It’s the after shot I always treasured.”
“What about an after shot? Is there one in your old files? I know the approximate date you would have operated on him.”
His eyebrows raised. “Well, that might have worked, actually. But all my old records were in a storage unit in Tampa until the last hurricane tore the place apart.”
“Dr. Bombay?”
A young woman with purple hair was standing in the doorway. She looked from me to the pistol and bullets on the desk to the doctor.
“Yes, Emma,” he said.
“Your patient is here.” He shifted his gaze to me. “As you’ve heard, duty calls.”
The doctor said this with such an air of resignation that I nodded.
He sighed, getting to his swollen bare feet. “Emma, where are my sandals?”
Emma glanced at his feet. Her nostrils flared in revulsion, but then she pointed at a corner and moved aside to let me leave.
Chapter 75
I’m sure I’ve been to worse airports than Miami International, but I can’t remember when.
I didn’t notice the problems as much when I flew in, but trying to depart, I waited for almost an hour to clear security, and I found most of the toilets broken and the floors filthy. There weren’t enough benches or chairs, and the service people were deeply unhappy; some were downright rude. It put me in an even fouler mood than I’d been in when I left Dr. Bombay’s office. I still had no answers to any of my questions, including whether Kyle Craig had indeed had his face surgically altered to match that of a missing FBI agent.
I’d hoped Dr. Bombay could prove that my idea that Craig might still be alive was wrong. But getting off my flight home, I felt no closer to doing that.
I grabbed a cab, gave an address a block from my house, and waited until I was on the Fourteenth Street Bridge before putting the battery back in my burn phone. When I turned it on, I found eight phone messages and eight texts waiting for me.
My phone rang before I could listen to or read any of them. John Sampson.
“Where the hell are you, Alex?” he asked after I’d said hello. “You haven’t been answering your phone.”
“I needed to disconnect for a few hours.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “Okay, well, whatever. Can you receive text pics wherever you are?”
“I’m almost home, and yes.”
“It’ll take only a minute. I’ll send them and call you back.” Stuck in traffic ten minutes later, I felt the phone buzz. I dug it out and glanced at the two pictures. I felt a blinding headache coming on.
Pseudo-Craig had been caught on-camera, in color, both in profile and straight on. He wore jeans, a tan leather jacket, no sunglasses, tooled cowboy boots, and a white baseball cap on backward.
My phone rang.
“You see him?”
“Couldn’t miss him. Where was he?”
“Union Station. Four o’clock yesterday afternoon. Those are only two taken from the security footage, but I’ve looked at all of it, and... it’s like he wants to be seen, Alex.”
“Okay?”
“He deliberately walked in front of at least four cameras.”
“Where’d he go after that?”
“We lost him when he dropped down the escalators to the Metro station. The cameras there were being repaired.”
Of course they were. I groaned inwardly.
“What’s he up to, Alex?”
“Let me think on it,” I said. “I’ll call you back.”
The phone buzzed the moment I hung up. A text from Ned Mahoney:
We’ve got the federal court order to exhume Craig’s remains tonight. I figure you’ll want to be there.
Chapter 76
Quantico, Virginia
Drizzling rain and fog swept over small black gravestones engraved with alphanumeric codes set flush in the forest floor.
Darkness had long fallen on that remote and piney part of the Marine Corps base, an area not specifically denoted on any map of the vast federal property, an anonymous graveyard in the trees created for criminals whose pasts were so evil, their families had declined to claim their bodies for proper burial.
Mahoney, two other FBI agents, three cemetery workers, and I were there, all of us dressed in rain slickers and rubber boots and waving flashlights, looking for B157, the code on the marker above the supposed remains of Kyle Craig.
“Why aren’t they in order?” I asked.
One of the workers, an older man named Cecil who walked with a slight stoop, said, “The Marine commandant who authorized this burial ground after the Civil War wanted to make sure there would be no shrines to the dead here. Make them as difficult as possible to locate. Especially A-one.”
I took my eyes off gravestone C42. “Who’s under A-one?”
He hesitated, then said quietly, “John Wilkes Booth.”
I frowned. “Lincoln’s assassin? I thought he was buried in some cemetery in Baltimore under a blank gravestone that people cover with Lincoln pennies.”
Cecil shook his head. “Family didn’t want nothing of him. That headstone in Baltimore is over his sister’s grave. Booth’s here. He’s the reason for this unholy place.”
“Who else?”
“Can’t say, but a bunch. People think they’re buried somewhere else, and there are headstones and all, but the truth is, most cemeteries don’t want someone notorious or wicked defiling sacred ground. They send the real remains here. No one’s the wiser.”