A Murder of Justice by Robert Andrews Page A

without parole. Brooks went off to an isolation cell in the maximum-security lockdown of the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois.
    Atkins, head of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, got hero treatment: the cover of Newsweek, a 60 Minutes segment with Mike Wallace, a well-publicized lunch with President Clinton, a profusion of lawman-of-the-year awards, and a promotion to headquarters.
    Skeeter went to work, picking up pieces of Brooks’s empire and adding chunks of his own. But where Brooks had left the street work to his enforcers, Skeeter had kept his hand in. One informant reported Skeeter’s holding forth about how great leaders led from the front, not from the rear. And so Skeeter Hodges had been at the front on Bayless Place, planning his next campaign, when somebody walked up and blew out his brains.
    Frank saw a flag being raised over the chambers of the House of Representatives. There were other flagpoles on the Capitol roof. All day, a handful of congressional employees would be up there, raising scores of American flags—raising them, then immediately lowering them. They’d fold the flags and box them, and later, members of Congress would send them to their more importantconstituents with a certificate saying that the flags had flown over the Capitol.
    Frank realized José was standing beside him, watching the flags. “Congress at work,” he said.
    “Wonder what it would be like, being a flag raiser?” José asked.
    “Lot of ups and downs.”
    “Like us.”
    “Ups and downs?”
    “Job never finished.”
    José watched a flag go up, come down.
    “My stomach thinks my throat’s been cut,” Frank complained.
    José turned away from the window. “Get carry-out and find a bench on the Mall?”
    R uth threw in a pint of potato salad with the salami for Frank and the pastrami on rye for José. They walked across Constitution Avenue and found a bench under a hundred-year-old water oak on the Mall, facing the National Air and Space Museum.
    José motioned to Air and Space. “Haven’t been there in a long time.”
    Frank looked at the huge building. He liked going there. But he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been. You live in a city like D.C. and the only thing you see is killers and dead people. He unwrapped his sandwich and took a small, experimental bite. The salami was slick and spicy on his tongue, and there was just enough mustard to make his eyes wrinkle slightly. He sat back and watched a runner make her way down the Mall. Skeeter Hodges and the dream came back in faded tones.
    “I was thinking, Hoser . . . maybe Emerson was right.”
    “That Skeeter’s a key to the cold-case locker?”
    “He liked working the street personally.”
    “So he had to whack a lot of guys.”
    “One way to thin out the competition.”
    “Business killings.”
    “So to speak.”
    “Yeah. So to speak.”
    “So what you’re sayin’ is he was good at his business.”
    “Or very lucky.”
    They took their time with their sandwiches and the potato salad, then sat drowsily for a quarter-hour under the springtime sun.
    When they got back to the office, the answering machine held two messages: Kate, with her flight number and ETA, and Eleanor, saying the printout was ready. Frank punched the machine and listened to Kate’s message one more time.
    Y ou asked for it.” Eleanor indicated a stack on the desk beside her computer.
    “Damn.” Frank sighed. The printout was at least six inches thick.
    “You were right,” José said. “Lot of trees died for that.”
    Eleanor shrugged. “Just the cold cases since 1990.”
    “How many?” José asked.
    “Fifteen hundred and change.”
    Fifteen hundred. One thousand five hundred unsolved homicides. In ten years.
    “But the rate’s going down,” José protested.
    Eleanor rapped out a riff on her computer keyboard, scanned the results on the monitor, and nodded.
    “The homicide rate is,” she said. “In 1990, we clipped off four hundred