“Where?” Hoover spat.
“One in Sacramento on February 9th, one in Glendale on June 20th, and one in San Diego on September 3rd. Sacramento and Glendale look like mob hits, single male victims with known organised crime links. San Diego was a guy and his wife playing golf. The victim was in real estate, no known mob links, no criminal record.” Tolson closed the first file on his lap. “Our people realized there was a problem with the ID of the fourth body three days ago and the technical guys have been turning over Agent Christie’s apartment in San Francisco ever since. They haven’t found prints matching the unidentified dead man in Berkeley, but,” he grinned like a kid who has just hooked a catfish, “they’ve turned up something even better, Chief!”
“What, Clyde?” Hoover could hardly contain himself now.
“You remember those shootings and rapes on military bases last fall? And those suicides that the Army and the Air Force wouldn’t let us onto Department of Defense property to investigate?”
The Director of the FBI was still angry about that. He was a man who never forgot a slight and made a point of holding grudges for all time. Attorney General Kennedy and his Deputy, Nicholas Katzenbach had failed to give his requests for intervention the priority he had judged necessary. He had known the Department of Defense was hiding something from him!
“The lab has matched prints taken at Christie’s apartment with those discovered on the car of Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Gunther, he was head of security at Ent Air Force Base on the night of the Cuban Missiles War. He supposedly committed suicide.”
“Remind me of the particulars, Clyde.”
“One night he drove out into the hills, put his service pistol — a Remington-Rand forty-five calibre piece — in his mouth and blew out his brains, Chief. There was no suicide note and there had been no previous indication that he suffered from depression. It was his youngest boy’s birthday in a week or so, he was happily married and coming up to retirement. His wife said they were planning to go down to Sonora. Gunther had trouble with old war wounds — Guadalcanal, I think — and the wife said it would do him good to feel the sun on his face every morning.”
Tolson paused for breath.
“It gets better, Chief. The prints from Christie’s apartment and Colonel Gunther’s car match with those found at the scene of a homicide and rape in Colorado Springs. A really twisted one. A man called Carl Drinkwater — he was some kind of computer whiz at NORAD and his wife Martha. Their kids, too. The husband was killed with a single headshot, we don’t know if that was before or after his wife was raped and strangled, or the two kids died. A boy and a girl, the oldest not yet four; blunt force trauma to the skull. Martha Drinkwater was approximately three months pregnant when she was murdered. The lab recovered a deformed .44 calibre Magnum round from a hardwood structural support. Analysis is ongoing to establish if this bullet was fired from the same gun that was used in as many as five other killings since last fall.”
J. Edgar Hoover’s scowl had morphed into an evil grimace.
His friend would not have briefed him thus and saved the best for last unless it was a real show stopper.
“Do we have a match for these prints, Clyde?”
“Cheney,” Tolson smiled. “John Herbert, AKA Galen Cheney!”
Chapter 60
The Betancourt family’s summer ‘weekend’ retreat — as befitted a country hideaway where senior Democrats all the way back to FDR’s time had secretly met in conclave to foment forthcoming plots and coups — was a large, much modernised old six bedroom colonial style house dating from the middle of the nineteenth century.
Dan Brenckmann’s only previous visit to his boss’s hideaway in the rolling hills and forests of Connecticut had been on the night of the October War; the night his kid sister Tabatha had been consumed by the thermonuclear firestorm over Buffalo. Just thinking about that night chilled his soul. It had been several days before he had learned his parents had survived the bomb that destroyed Quincy, and many weeks before his submariner elder brother Walter junior had returned from patrol and checked in with Ma and Pa. It went without saying that his kid brother Sam had gone missing for several months, only resurfacing again in the spring. However, on that dreadful late October night in 1962 he had suddenly been confronted with the possibility that not just Tabatha but his parents and both his brothers might have been swept away in the maelstrom. It had been the worst night of this life redeemed only by the fact that he had been with Gretchen.
Dan switched off the engine of his company Lincoln — only a 1960 model because he was the new boy at Betancourt and Sallis, Attorneys at Law, of Boston, Massachusetts — and clambered stiffly to his feet in the cool, overcast late New England morning. It had rained heavily on the way up, worked the Lincoln’s wipers almost to destruction until miraculously, possibly serendipitously, the deluge had lifted as he turned off Interstate 91 to follow the twisting back roads up into the hills.
The first time he had come to Wethersfield Mrs Nordstrom, for over three decades the Betancourt’s housekeeper had viewed Dan as if he was something which might, conceivably, have just crawled out from beneath a slimy stone. Kathleen Nordstrom was a large, fierce looking matronly woman of indeterminate later middle years whose stern visage was amply sufficient to turn a strong man’s knees to jelly.
Understandably, when that unbending visage suddenly dissolved into a broad, maternal smile whose authenticity was vouchsafed by the twinkle in her grey-green eyes Dan was positively, well, disconcerted…
Kathleen Nordstrom bustled down the steps.
“Miss Gretchen told us your good news yesterday, Mr Brenckmann,” she declared proudly.
Dan blushed, glanced to his feet.
Everything had happened at once in the last week.
His father’s letter — he had not had a chance to properly say goodbye to Ma and Pa before they flew to England as his country’s ‘ambassadorial couple’ — had been waiting for him on his return to Boston.
‘I should have discussed all this with you, son,’ the letter had begun. ‘But you have been busy in DC and Philadelphia, and Claude,’ Claude was Claude Betancourt, Gretchen’s father, ‘and I had to make arrangements in a hurry. Cutting to the chase; I have sold my law practice to Betancourt and Sallis. The deal creates a small trust fund for you and your brothers which ought to pay you a modest stipend over the years; and you will with immediate effect — assuming you are amenable — be made a full Associate of Betancourt and Sallis. To be honest, given that you are slated to be a counsel to the Warren Commission and between you and me that could go on for years, I took the view that trying to keep the Boston practice alive was going to be an unreasonably tough call…’
His father had previously confided that when he came back from England he and Ma planned to retire, probably to the Florida Keys or maybe the West Coast, and that he did not want to ‘burden’ him with trying to keep Walter Brenckmann and Son Associates afloat when ‘clearly’ his career had taken ‘a new and exciting direction’.
‘One last thing. I freely confess that I asked Claude Betancourt to take you under his wing when the Navy sent me to England last year. I did not ask him, or expect him, to give you any special preferment. Whatever assistance Claude has given you is because he sees great promise in you as a man and as an attorney. Claude has been a good friend to me over the years but he is not a sentimental man. It was with enormous pride when I learned that he sees in you exactly the same fine qualities that your mother and I have always seen in you. Regardless of your situation with Gretchen — which I think is as big a mystery to Claude as it is to your mother and I — you have a big opportunity with Betancourt and Sallis and it is my, humble hope, that you grasp it with both hands.’