Murder in Foggy Bottom - Margaret Truman [0]
In Margaret Truman’s latest mystery, the scene opens with an obscure death in Washington’s Foggy Bottom, home of the State Department, shifts to mass murder in the downing of aircraft, and then moves on to mayhem in the streets of the new Moscow. Leaving an airport near New York, a D.C.-bound commuter plane falls to earth. At almost the same time, another crash occurs. And then…
Firmly ruling out coincidence, investigators seek means and motive. The means are soon apparent: small-scale weaponry with large-scale impact. Their country of origin? A place where nearly everything—hardware, information, love—can be found for a price. Max Pauling, a State Department investigator, seasoned, good-looking, and hard to fool, quickly takes off on a trail still as warm as the smoking wreckage.
A host of vivid characters people the narrative, including a lovely State Department analyst who finds herself attracted to undercover types; a militia leader in Idaho who leads his people into gunfire; a reporter at odds with his boss but not with a good story; and a secretary of state who loves baseball slightly more than her job.
Fast-paced and informative about flying, food, statecraft, and the violent “wetwork” under the dryly elegant exterior of diplomacy, Margaret Truman’s Murder in Foggy Bottom is another winner in the Capital Crimes series.
MURDER IN FOGGY BOTTOM
A Novel by
Margaret Truman
Capital Crimes Series: Book 17
Copyright © 2000
by Margaret Truman
eISBN: 978-0-307-41612-4
Dedication:
For Clifton,
my husband of
forty-three years
Foggy Bottom
A Washington, DC, neighborhood that was built on a low-lying swamp, at one time home to a glass factory, a large brewery (now the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts), and some of the city’s worst slums… it was named either for the miasmic fogs that once enveloped it, or the hazy foreign policy of one of its most visible current residents, the U.S. State Department.
Now a relatively quiet but trendy residential area with housing prices to match, it is also home to the Watergate hotel, apartments, and office and retail complex; George Washington University, the city’s second-largest land-holder after the federal government; the Corcoran Gallery of Art; and the omnipotent Federal Reserve. The Organization of American States, at Seventeenth and Constitution, is located precisely at the geographical center of the District of Columbia.
Murder is uncommon in Foggy Bottom.
But a few occur now and then.
Part One
Chapter 1
Monday Night
Washington, DC
The corpse was well dressed. Washington Post reporter Joe Potamos looked down at the body behind a bench in the pocket park in front of the hotel at E and K Streets, on the eastern edge of Foggy Bottom. The victim was a white male with neatly trimmed and combed salt-and-pepper hair. His suit was blue, shirt white, tie gray with small red-and-white flags.
“Canadian,” Potamos said to a tall, boxlike man writing in a small notebook.
“Huh?” Peter Languth muttered as he continued to write.
“Canadian. Those little flags are Canadian,” Potamos said. “The red maple leaf in the middle and those red blocks on each side. You don’t know that?”
Homicide detective Languth stopped writing and turned to look down at Potamos. Languth was six feet four; Potamos topped out at five-eleven. “You get off on flags, Joe?”
Potamos shrugged and started writing in his own long, slender, spiral-bound notebook. Uniformed officers stretched yellow crime-scene tape around the scene. A late-arriving EMS team knelt next to the body. Pressing in for a closer look were a half-dozen homeless men for whom the park passed for home in summer. One of them had alerted a passing squad car to the dead man’s intrusion.
“Get back,” Languth growled at them. In the humid atmosphere of the nation’s capital, the heavy air pressed down like a rubber blanket, capturing the men’s pungent body odor. “You guys ever hear of a shower?” Languth asked, wrinkling his bulbous nose.
“The hot water stopped