Dearly Departed

Chapter 1

There were six urgent messages on the high-tech communication device my boss insists be turned on at all times—three voice mails and three texts, some less courteous than others. All from him. My being available to him regardless of the circumstances is critical. However, willingly and knowingly, I placed my smartphone under a stack of underwear when I unpacked at the Virginia Beach ocean-front house on Friday night. It was now Sunday morning, and I was in six messages’-worth of trouble. The first was growled, and clearly and colorfully reinforced his position about availability and, although unsaid, the danger inherent in hiding a cell phone under delicate bargains from Victoria’s Secret.

I don’t give a damn if you’re scuba diving or making crazy love, when I need to reach you, I need to reach you. Got it?

I pictured myself in a glistening black wetsuit, surrounded by evil-eyed, saw-toothed barracudas while attempting to have a wireless conversation with Logan. As for the other circumstance, the crazy love, I tried not to picture it at all.

I had figured, now clearly wrongly, that I deserved three days at the beach with dear friends and without Logan. The last time I tried to have an honest-to-God holiday, he called me at a ski lodge in St Moritz to ask why the pheasant he’d baked for hours at three-hundred degrees had turned out on the dry side.

I didn’t call him immediately, trying first to conjure up an excuse as to why, for two days, I’d been unreachable. A tumble off the deck, perhaps, followed by a coma from which I’d just recovered. Other possibilities that came to mind seemed equally unlikely to placate Logan, the savage beast for whom I toil faithfully in the hallowed halls of the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C.

The last message from Logan had been a text. Y the fk u not n tch?

So, I said when he answered, what’s up?

What’s up? he bellowed. "Just like that?"

It took a couple of minutes, or more, for him to get to simmer, after which he succinctly summarized the urgent matter at hand. As he did so, I felt a chill run over my bikini-clad body, felt my palms dampen.

"It seems as if the dead double agent we so carefully buried two years ago in Los Angeles, along with her juicy secrets, may have surfaced in Russia. You and I are going to L.A. tomorrow to attend an exhumation. Get your ass to Dulles for a nine-o’clock flight." He gave me the departure information I needed, and I made note of the details with a shaking hand.

Not that I haven’t encountered my share of dead bodies in my role as a special agent of the FBI. It’s just that I’ve never handled well the business of seeing human beings in a lifeless condition, seeing the emptiness, the coldness of their spiritually void remains. And to revisit a body once buried, once told farewell, would be doubly difficult.

I looked at the clock. Twenty-four hours until I was scheduled to meet Logan. I would spend the rest of the day and early evening here with the Robinsons, my Capitol Hill neighbors and very special friends. I figured a three-hour drive home, less than an hour to pack, and seven hours of rest before getting out to Dulles. I had with me my universal travel gear—cosmetics, multi-vitamins for women, electric toothbrush, and dental floss. As for the other necessities of everyday life, they can be found at my mother’s glitzy Beverly Hills condo, where I keep a closet full of clothes and shoes for occasions such as this one. Plans made, I sighed deeply. I would enjoy this day despite the gnawing in my middle and the zillion thoughts whirling around in my head. Lara? Alive? Not possible!

It was late in the summer, Labor Day weekend to be exact, the perfect time for sitting on a deck overlooking white sand and a foaming surf, which is where I found all three Robinsons finishing breakfast. I still held my high-tech phone in my hand.

I thought you weren’t going to touch that thing this weekend, Helen said. And then, You shouldn’t have. You look ghastly.

Nonsense. Just a routine message from the boss. Really, I’m fine. Except that I’m wondering if a Bloody Mary might settle my breakfast.

You’re not fine! (Helen is very observant.) Was it the Hollandaise? I thought it was perfect, but you never know when you don’t cook it and just use the blender.

I never cook it anymore. Even Julia didn’t. It’s not the Hollandaise. It’s an unexpected trip to L.A. tomorrow morning.

Make Maggie a Bloody Mary, Andrew told his son, and don’t tell me you’re too young to serve liquor.

Shit, Skyler offered in my defense, rising from the table and grabbing a giant blueberry muffin. This is a three-day weekend. So, what’s up?

What was up was what Logan had just told me was up, or soon would be—a casket we put into a million-dollar mausoleum, the occasion marked by a cemetery full of mournful American fans suffering the loss of the gorgeous Russian-born film star, Lara Langfeld. An urgent matter, was all I explained, which was not sufficient for Helen, my hyper-curious neighbor.

Like how urgent?

She said it was an urgent matter, Andrew shushed. So let’s leave it at that. And, he jabbed a thumb in the direction of the water, speaking of urgent, let’s see what’s happening with Reynaldo.

People like the Robinsons, who own a lovely old house on the dunes, are very hurricane aware. Their home is one of the few original dwellings left along this part of the coast, the rest having been sacrificed to development of high-end condos and rather ostentatious residences of mixed architectural heritage. It had been hit by more than one hurricane in its long years of standing guard on the coast, but never severely damaged.

Right, Helen said, turning up the volume on a small portable TV. Thank God it’s heading out to sea.

Televised images of Hurricane Reynaldo focused on a whirling, diaphanous mass with a clear, dark eye in the center, still an angry beast registering Category 3 on the Safer-Simpson Scale. Helen and Andrew watched intently as details about the rogue storm flashed on the screen. I watched as well, but my thoughts drifted, my mind rather like Reynaldo’s—fuzzy, circling, with Lara the dark center.

Andrew said, I told you Friday, or was it even Thursday, that we didn’t need to board up the damned windows. The storm wasn’t going to touch us.

Too bad you didn’t call the weather experts, Helen snipped. They’d love to have known.

I had become comfortably close to the Robinsons—Andrew, a Library of Congress medical librarian; Helen, owner of an air-conditioning and heating business; and Skyler, one of my favorite people in the world. He has just started his senior year in high school, is taller than anyone I know, shares my love of old movies, and owns the most sophisticated palate of any kid his age this side of the Tour d’Argent. We are on the same page of Julia Child when it comes to cooking; I’m in charge, and he’s my devoted sous chef. He wants to be an FBI agent because, he says, I’m his role model. The problem with this flattering idea is that he’s way too tall for the Bureau—a reality I haven’t discussed with him. Perhaps it won’t ever be necessary, given the college basketball scouts lurking in the shrubbery across the street. Skyler is not only exceedingly tall, but he is also exceedingly good looking, with sun-bleached blonde hair, keen blue eyes, and a terrific smile, which means there are girls in the shrubbery as well.

Carrying my carefully crafted Bloody Mary, I headed out to walk the shore alone, my bare feet dipping into the shallow water as it sighed its way back from the sand, my whole body reacting to the sensuous ambience of air damp with sea spray and filled with the call of circling gulls. I needed to forget about my boss, the demanding and often impossible Logan MacLean, and the movie star/spy/double-agent whom I had come to know so well. I shuddered.

Later, the others joined me for a swim before lunch. As for lunch, there was good French bread left from last night, so we made bruschettas with fresh Mozzerella, basil from Helen’s kitchen garden, and heirloom tomatoes from the open-air market. We used Sachet olive oil produced by my father’s family in the south of France.

Skyler attacked lunch with vengeance. I hope this will hold you until mid-afternoon, I told him.

Possible, but don’t count on it.

From the deck we watched a boisterous game of beach volleyball. Skyler wanted to join the fun, but a heated argument over who got to have him on which side caused him to try out his new surfboard instead. As for me, I tried out a new mystery and periodically managed to follow the plot. But my thoughts kept going back to Lara. The last time I saw her, she was alive and well and supremely gorgeous. When her casket arrived in Los Angeles, it was sealed. I imagined her as she might have looked lying inside, with hands crossed over her heart, a white silk pillow under her head, those Liz Taylor turquoise eyes closed.

Tomorrow there would be no need for imagining Lara. If I wanted, I could touch her.

Chapter 2

I have described my boss, the legendary FBI master-mind Logan MacLean, as a surly, mean-tempered, ill-mannered Scot—which, I now believe, is an inadequate description of the man. He’s tougher than that and, surprisingly, gentler. I’ve seen a caring, compassionate heart beating under his custom-made, LML-monogrammed shirts. But not often enough to make a big deal out of it.

To be honest, Logan is remarkable, if difficult. He has a doctorate in Forensic Science and notable expertise in the psychology of the human experience. It is the latter that has led to his being one of this country’s premier hostage negotiators. He is also remarkably skilled at getting suspects to confess to their crimes, and without using any torture beyond his personal magnetism. I never lie to Logan—unless it’s over the telephone, where he can’t stare into my transparent mind. He’s extremely old, nearly fifty, and still George Clooney-handsome, despite the fact that he wears old-fashioned, aviator-style glasses.

This morning, sitting beside him at the boarding gate, I was not in the mood for a cranky supervisor, struggling as I was with the prospect of opening Lara’s casket. And I was still smarting about losing a day at the beach.

So, I said, fill me in. What do we know?

Nothing, he answered helpfully.

Logan!

He looked beyond me, to where two men and an elderly woman had moved within hearing distance. Follow me.

I did. Now, seated a safe distance away, Logan said, As I told you when you were lounging around on the beach, the question has been raised as to whether or not Lara is in a box out in California. It’s imperative that we answer that question.

Right. Imperative for the Bureau, and for you personally, I wanted to say, but did not. Lara (born Tasya Petrovna) was not only our Russian double agent, but she also was Logan’s one-time lover. Her death, in her native St. Petersburg, was the end of a long and tragic story—well, perhaps not so long, but certainly tragic. As a young actress, she’d made her mark in European films, was discovered by a top Hollywood director while still in her twenties, and brought to the States. She was a phenomenal success her first time on an American screen. Beautiful, exotic, talented, she was box-office dynamite from Day One. Everyone wanted a piece of Lara.

As did the SVR, an inheritor of the KGB mantle. Vasili Selishanko, its head of worldwide counterintelligence (officially Directorate K), fell madly in love with Lara and, at some point during their torrid love affair, convinced her to spy for Russia while in the United States. The life of a film star provided great cover. Fast forward: Lara and Logan met at a Washington, D.C., charity event associated with the European Community Film Festival, and zap! Logan fell madly in love with Lara and, at some point during their torrid love affair—you guessed it—poor beautiful Lara became a neurotic, conflicted double agent, impossibly trying to be loyal to both Russian and American interests.

On the personal front, Logan wanted to kill Vasili, and Vasili had visions of Logan’s freezing his tush off somewhere in Siberia. Obvious complications led to Logan’s severing all personal connections with Lara and turning her over to me. I became her handler (with his behind-the-scenes meticulous oversight) for those last months before she died. Logan’s personal relationship with Lara did not end his career. His record was too clean, too legendary. Besides, he confessed all to our director, and cut his ties to the Russian beauty once he’d turned her.

Lara sent an intriguing message shortly before collapsing at her sister’s home near St. Petersburg. We received word that she had been hospitalized and, within days, that she had died of pneumonia. Her final message to us was, I’m reading a terrific new script that has a great role for me. I must hurry back to L.A.

What she really was saying was that she had critical information she needed to get to us. So critical, she would deliver it herself, as soon as she could return to the States. We were left hanging.

Lara did get back to us, of course, traveling in an elaborate casket we saw placed in the marble mausoleum she’d had built in Los Angeles two years earlier, when premonitions of an early death began to haunt her. I suppose that being a double agent can lead to ghostly attacks on one’s psyche. Why she chose California rather than her native Russia as a final resting place puzzled all of us.

Now, word that she had been seen alive (which I didn’t believe for a minute) was even more puzzling. I looked around. I lowered my voice and asked, Who saw what, where, and when? And how reliable is that Who?

Brow furrowed, eyes hooded, Logan replied with, Two reliable sources. Both HUMINT.

This means human, hands-on, covert activity rather than SIGINT, electronic collection of information via sneaky surveillance operations. Okay, I said, who said exactly what?"

An agent in Arkhangelsk reported that he’d heard that Lara was sighted walking with an elderly lady on the outskirts of the city. We, meaning not the Bureau but our friends across town, have a presence at Arkhangelsk—it’s where nuclear subs are sometimes born.

"He’d heard Lara was sighted? And that’s why you and I are here contemplating shoveling her out of the ground?"

Shoveling? Gawd, Sachet! We’ll be lifting her out of the same marble box we put her in. He paused, then, A second sighting in the same area was firsthand. An informant who’s considered reliable.

So, how close was he? How was this woman dressed? I mean, was she disguised, or was this world-famous movie star openly walking around in plain sight while everyone thought she was dead?

I, too, was skeptical, and still am. However, I spoke with the agent. He knew how she walked and carried herself. And yes, the woman was disguised. Had a headscarf, glasses, and bulky clothing. Still, he was convinced.

I argued the obvious. He could be wrong.

Most likely, Logan sighed, climbing out of a molded plastic chair and standing in front of me where he could look down and reinforce our relative positions at the Bureau. In any case, Agent Sachet, you and I are going to visit a California cemetery and oversee the exhumation of a particularly lovely body. Furthermore, you may have a new assignment if there is any need to pursue the Lara matter further.

What about Madam Lu? I was closing in on a woman we suspected was sending industrial secrets to Beijing.

Turn her over to Jerry Morita. He’ll love going after her.

I pulled out my phone and called my mother, Charlotte Gooding, LLP, a prominent California defense attorney who does business with sleazy, although rich, clients. Fluff up the pillows in the guest room, I told her. I’m coming for a visit.

Will Logan be with you? she tried to ask with a measure of disinterest. Logan calls her a knockout and she calls him a hunk. I lie awake sometimes worrying that they might one day get together, and I would have him around after hours. Maybe even on family vacations. If worse came to worse, I could go to France and live with my father, his latest wife (a rewind), and my lovely paternal grandparents. Except I’d have to join the family olive business, and I don’t think it suits me.

Logan will be with me. Or the other way around. And no, I’m not inviting him to dinner at your place.

What a pity, Mother said. I’ve got a new caterer who’s fabulous. Mother doesn’t cook.

Jasmine Hixon, Jazz, Logan’s unfailingly efficient assistant, had booked our flight to Los Angeles and a rental car she thought we could share. She placed him at the Beverly Hills Plaza, not as expensive as its name sounds, and really very nice. The only problem is, it’s less than two blocks from Mother’s condominium on Wilshire.

I put him there so that you two could share the car and be in touch easily, Jazz explained.

I could kill you for that, I told her.

Chapter 3

I watched while Brian Goodfellow, director of the very private St. Rose of Lima cemetery, held a metal tray in his hand, ready to collect the large brass screws about to be removed from the ornate mahogany casket containing the remains of the Bureau’s most exotic double agent. When the first screw hit the tray, the sound resonated in the elaborate, marble-floored sepulcher like the peal of a chapel bell; it resonated as strongly up and down my spine.

The whole business was bizarre. Lara’s private mausoleum looked from the outside like a giant marble birdcage with a circle of narrow, frosted windows near the top. At the entrance were fluted Ionic columns on each side; a winged cherub reclined on a cloud over the door. Inside, where the eerie silence was now broken by the sound of clanging screws, I noticed more winged cherubs—or angels, as the case might be—perched in niches eye-level high, dimpled knees swinging over the edge.

A large marble crypt resting on a sculpted base held Lara’s casket. The stone top already had been removed and was leaning against the base. What remained between us and a view of the dearly departed was the closed, intricately carved lid of the casket.

There were six of us in the chilly tomb—Sam Meza, SAC (Special Agent in Charge) of the Counterintelligence Division of the L.A. field office; Dr. Richard Bingham, FBI forensic specialist; Goodfellow and his screw-pulling assistant; Logan and I.

Outside, despite the efforts of cemetery security staff and city blue uniforms, literally hundreds of Lara’s fans mourned, most carrying flowers, some weeping. She’d been dead two years, but she remained as popular as any of the stars whose faces and cleavages still appear on the big screen. (I should have such cleavage.) Also outside were an ambulance and its crew, a Bureau photographer, abundant media, and a crime scene team in the event their talents were needed.

Boy, were they.

Goodfellow slowly—I would say ceremoniously—lifted the heavy lid and stepped aside without looking down. Logan moved forward, hands thrust in his pockets, eyes lowered, and stared at the remains. Finally, after what seemed a deadly still eternity, he shook his head and said, Not the Lara we came to know and love. My boss, ever the dour Scot with an attitude, crooked a summoning finger at me. Unthrilled as I was about looking at the possibly over-ripe deceased (who knew how proficient Russian morticians were?), I told myself that if I seemed hesitant, I would sully the image of all women in law enforcement. I approached the casket and looked down, intending to study the remains as if I were in the organic vegetable section searching out the best asparagus.

I swear my heart stopped. How…? I began, once I’d resumed normal breathing and my internal shock wave had diminished.

Say no more, Sachet, Logan cautioned.

I’m not slow. So, as evenly as I could manage, given the magnitude of the lie, I turned to Logan and said, "I was just about to remark how right you are. This is not the Lara we came to know so well." I tsked and clucked a wee bit to underscore my pity for poor Lara.

Wherever poor Lara was, she wasn’t there. What lay in the casket was indeed not the Lara we had come to know and etcetera. Instead, it was a shabby dressmaker’s dummy, with what appeared to be a sack of salt or sugar where the head should have been, decorated with a bright yellow happy face. Where Lara’s feet should have been was a pair of bejeweled spike-heeled shoes firmly attached to a small cement block. A delicate red heart was pinned to the faux Lara’s chest.

Dr. Bingham moved forward, but Logan stepped between him and the casket. We were a silent tableau—me against the casket, Logan in front of me, the others standing wide-eyed and transfixed. For a moment nothing happened, then Logan pushed me aside, firmly but carefully closed the casket, and began snapping orders.

Seal the top. He nodded at Godfellow. I’ll need to borrow that tool after you’ve replaced the screws. Remove the casket from the crypt. To me, he said, Call in the crime scene people and have them go over the whole place—except for the casket and the remains. We’ll handle those. To a bewildered Meza, he said, Have the ambulance crew fold up its gurney and stow the casket inside. And then, to all of us, Nobody views the remains at this time. Dr. Bingham, we’ll reschedule with you. Sorry about the confusion.

What the hell’s going on here, MacLean? Bingham wanted to know.

Logan stiffened. Later.

The doctor shrugged and let out a long sigh. I’ll expect your call. His reply was curt and his departure hurried.

A nanosecond later Logan continued with, I want the casket delivered to your place. This last was directed to the SAC, who was standing dead still, brows reaching for his receding hairline.

Lab?

Not yet. Your office. We want to have a little time with Lara.

Sam gawked. No doubt he was wondering what he was expected to do with a dead movie star in his office; more importantly, he likely was worrying about what his supervisor, the FBI Assistant Director assigned to Los Angeles, would have to say about Lara’s presence there. Logan? he began, and the boss interrupted with a brisk, Later, Sam. Let’s get this effing show on the road.

Mr. Goodfellow and the screw puller/replacer gave each other looks of total dismay. Logan glared at both, I bet reading their minds. And I bet what he saw was something like, These FBI people are cuckoo. Dead bodies don’t go to people’s offices. Plus, getting the casket out of its crypt is not going to be easy. We will bill the hell out of these whacky cashews.

I want a uniform with the casket at all times, Logan said to Sam.

I called in the crime scene team, thinking to myself that this was not the crime scene, and doubting that anything here would be of help. To my way of thinking, the scene of whatever crime had occurred was somewhere along the way from the hospital in St. Petersburg, where Lara died, to Pulkovo-2 Airport, to JFK, to LAX, to the hearse, to Mr. Goodfellow’s establishment.

We hung around until the crime scene experts got to work and the ambulance left for Sam’s office. Sam, meanwhile, had gone on ahead to prepare, clearly reluctantly, for Lara’s arrival. Before he left the mausoleum,