“I’m not aware of any Jamestown connection, beyond the fact that the victim checked into a Jamestown area motel that offers a business special called the sixteen-oh-seven.” I am getting exasperated.
“With all the publicity Jamestown has already gotten, that information alone is enough to make the media’s antennae go up.” He rolls the cigar in his fingertips and slowly raises it to his lips. “It’s projected that the two-thousand-seven celebration could eventually generate a billion dollars in revenue for the commonwealth. It’s our World’s Fair, Kay. Next year Jamestown is being commemorated on a coin, a quarter. News crews have been coming to the excavation site in droves.”
He gets up to stir the fire and I am taken back in time to his former rumpled suits and harried demeanor, to his cramped office overwhelmed by files and books in the District Courts Building. We tried many cases together, some of them the most painful landmarks in my history, those sorts of random, cruel crimes whose victims still haunt my mind: the newspaper carrier abducted from her route and raped and left to slowly die; the old woman shot to death for the hell of it while she was hanging up clothes; the multiple people executed by the Briley brothers. Mitchell and I anguished over so many awful acts of violence, and I missed him when he moved on to a higher calling. Success separates friends. Politics, espe- cially, is ruinous to relationships, because the very nature of politics is to re-create the person. The Mike Mitchell I knew has been replaced by a statesman who has learned to process his fiery beliefs through safe and meticulously calculated subroutines. He has a plan. He has one for me.
“I don’t like media feeding frenzies any more than you do,” I say to him.
He replaces the poker on its brass stand and smokes with his back to the fire, his face flushed from heat. Wood pops and hisses. “What can we do about it, Kay?”
“Tell Dinwiddie to keep his mouth shut.”
“Mister Headline News?” He smiles wryly. “Who has been very vocal in pointing out that there are those who think Jamestown was the original hate crimeagainst the Native Americans?”
“Well, I think it’s also rather hateful to kill, scalp and starve people to death. Seems there’s always been plenty of hate to go around since the beginning of time. It won’t be me using the term ‘hate crime,’ Governor. It’s not on any form I fill out, not a box to check on a death certificate. As you very well know, such a label is up to the prosecution, the investigators, not the medical examiner.”
“What about your opinion?”
I tell him about the second body found in Richmond late this afternoon. I worry the deaths are related.
“Based on?” His cigar smolders in an ashtray. He rubs his face and massages his temples as if he has a headache.
“Bondage,” I reply. “Burns.”
“Burns? But the first guy was in a fire. Why does the second guy have burns?”
“I suspect torture.”
“Gay?”
“No obvious evidence of it in the second victim. But we can’t rule it out.”
“Do we know who he is or if he’s local?”
“So far, no. Neither victim has personal effects.”
“Suggesting someone involved doesn’t want them identified. Or robbery. Or both.”
“Possibly.”
“Tell me more about the burns,” the governor says.
I describe them. I mention the case Berger had in New York, and the governor’s anxieties become more palpable. Anger flashes across his face. “This sort of speculation needs to stay in this room,” he says. “Last thing we need is another New York connection. Jesus God.”
“There’s no evidence of a connection, unless someone simply got the idea from the news,” I reply. “I can’t say for a fact a heat gun was used in the cases here, for that matter.”
“Do you find it a little strange that Chandonne’s murders have a New York connection? So the trial moves up there. Now we suddenly have two murders here that are similar to yet another New York murder?”
“Strange, yes. Very strange. Governor, all I can tell you with certainty is I’ve no intention of making the autopsy reports a major element in fueling other people’s political agendas. I will, as always, stick to the facts and avoid speculating. I suggest we think in terms of managing rather than suppressing.”