“Go to the kitchen,” he said, and gave her a small push in the back.
In the kitchen, Levy turned on the lights. “Sit down in one of those chairs near the table.”
“Look, you got me confused with-”
He backhanded her. He didn’t slap her that hard but she stumbled against the kitchen table.
“Sit in the chair,” he said.
He took the roll of duct tape and wrapped the tape around her chest and legs, binding her to the chair. Her hands were still taped behind her back.
“What do you want?” Merker said.
“I told you. I want to know who you work for.”
“I work for the goddamn army! I work in the commissary at Fort Meade. How many fuckin’ times do I have to tell you? You’re making a mistake.”
Levy took a cloth sack from the gym bag and placed the sack over Merker’s head.
“What are you doing?” she said.
Levy didn’t answer. He tipped back the chair she was sitting in so that she was now lying on her back, her head on the floor, bound to the chair. He then searched the cabinets in the kitchen until he found what he was looking for: cooking pots. One was a five gallon aluminum pot that she probably used for making spaghetti or stews. Two other pots were cast iron and about half that size. He filled all three pots with water.
Waterboarding is a very effective form of persuasion. The prisoner is immobilized, usually on a board or table, a cloth sack is placed over his head, his head is placed in a position lower than his feet-and then water is poured onto the sack. It sounds harmless, and the prisoner isn’t marked in any way-except psychologically. Prisoners subjected to this procedure can have nightmares for life and often develop a number of phobias, some of them completely debilitating, such as an inability to take showers or having panic attacks whenever it rains.
During waterboarding, as the water cascades over the prisoner’s face and into his nose and mouth, his gag reflex kicks in. He begins to choke and cough uncontrollably, and the sensation is identical to drowning, a drowning that never stops. Interrogators have found the technique so effective that hardened men, fanatical terrorists, will sometimes confess in less than five minutes.
“Who do you work for?” Levy said.
“I told you. I…”
Levy began to pour the water onto Merker’s face and she whipped her head from side to side, coughing and choking and gagging, straining against the tape binding her to the chair, the chair bucking off the floor. He poured for almost two minutes-two minutes that would have seemed like an eternity to the woman. When he stopped pouring, Merker sucked in air in huge, ragged gasps, her chest heaving.
“Who do you work for?” Levy said.
She didn’t answer. It sounded as if she might be hyperventilating because of the panic she was certainly feeling, but she didn’t seem to make any attempt to speak.
He began to pour the water again.
Then something strange happened: Merker stopped moving. She just lay there, not choking or trying to evade the water. It appeared as if she’d passed out, but that didn’t make sense. That was one of the nice things about waterboarding: prisoners normally remain conscious, or at least semiconscious, throughout the process.
Levy reached down and felt for a pulse in Merker’s throat.
There was no pulse!
Levy ripped the sack off Merker’s head and performed CPR on her for five minutes. It did no good. Merker was dead.
Levy knelt next to the woman, breathing heavily, completely shocked. There was no way she should have died, not from what he had done to her. She must have had a heart attack or a stroke. She was a chunky woman, but she wasn’t obese. In fact, she looked like she was in pretty good shape. She must have had some sort of preexisting medical condition. That was the only thing that made sense.
What the hell had he done? He hadn’t wanted to kill her-and he wouldn’t have killed her if she’d told him what he wanted to know. She hadn’t seen his face. But now she was dead-and, worst of all, she was the only lead he had. He had just killed the one person who could tell him who their opponent was.
He cut the tape binding Merker to the chair, examined her body, and was relieved to see that he hadn’t taped her so tightly that he’d bruised or marked her. He took a washcloth and soap, gently scrubbed the tape residue from her legs, and pulled the wet Garfield T-shirt off her. He carried her back to her bedroom, placed her back in her bed, put a dry T-shirt on her, then found a hair dryer and blow-dried her short hair. He noticed that her lower lip was somewhat puffy from where he’d struck her, so he took her out of the bed and laid her face down on the floor. That was better: it would look as if she’d risen from her bed and collapsed when she had the first symptoms of whatever killed her, and falling to the floor would account for the bruise he’d caused when he slapped her.
Levy returned to the kitchen, placed the cooking pots back in the cupboard, and, using rags he found in a closet, mopped up the kitchen floor. After he placed all the wet rags in a clothes hamper, he spent the next hour looking for anything that might identify Merker’s employer. All he found was the Fort Meade commissary ID in her purse. He walked back to the bedroom for one final look around and noticed a photo of Merker and another black woman who might have been Merker’s sister. She and the other woman were wearing sombreros and grinning and drinking drinks that looked like margaritas.
First Witherspoon and now this young woman. Witherspoon had been a brother in arms and Merker… well, she had been a soldier in her way as well. She had been his adversary-but not his enemy.
This was not the way John Levy wanted to serve his country.
18
DeMarco was a lawyer who had never practiced law. And what he had learned about estates and wills back in law school wasn’t even a distant memory; he had no memory of those subjects at all. So he looked in the phone book, found the name of an Arlington lawyer who specialized in wills and estates, and made an appointment.
He told the lawyer his problem, that his cousin had been killed and he was the only relative young enough and close enough to deal with Paul’s estate. But he couldn’t find Paul’s will and he needed to clean out Paul’s apartment and do something with the four grand Paul had in the bank.
The lawyer-a crusty, ill-tempered old fart named Crenshaw-said if Paul had died intestate, DeMarco or some other relative would have to deal with the state of Virginia to probate Paul’s will.
“So can you give me the form I have to submit?” DeMarco asked.
“It’s not quite that simple,” Crenshaw said, after which he went through a mind-numbing discourse about how DeMarco would have to qualify as the administer of the estate, get something called a surety bond, provide lists of all of Paul’s known assets and heirs, and submit reports on a periodic basis to some bureaucratic entity known as the Commissioner of Accounts Office. Then, after what sounded to DeMarco like a decade of paper shuffling, the state would divvy up Paul’s possessions to his relatives in accordance with formulas they used.
“But his only relatives are me, my mother, and an aunt who’s eighty-seven years old,” DeMarco whined. “And none of us want his furniture, and me and my mom both agree Paul’s aunt can have the money. Can I at least clean out his apartment and get rid of his sh-his stuff?”
“No. Mr. Russo’s possessions don’t belong to you,” the lawyer said.
“But what’s Paul’s landlady supposed to do with his furniture? Store it someplace until his estate is settled?”
The lawyer shrugged. “She could get rid of the furniture, I suppose. But if she did, and if one of Paul’s relatives wanted the furniture or the money that could have been obtained if the furniture had been sold, well, then she might have a problem. Someone might sue her.”