Read House Divided for Free Online Page A

completed the autopsy already? He was only shot yesterday.”
    “We’re pretty efficient,” Hopper said. “But like I was saying, after the autopsy when we couldn’t locate a next of kin, we cremated the body. I guess we really screwed up and I’m embarrassed. I hope cremation wasn’t against Mr. Russo’s religious beliefs.”
    Actually, this wasn’t bad news, DeMarco thought. Now he wouldn’t have to deal with the hassle of a funeral. It seemed odd that they would have cremated the body so quickly, but he could understand how they might not have been able to locate Paul’s next of kin. Paul’s Aunt Lena’s married name was Hennessy, not Russo, and he wasn’t sure how the FBI would know that people named DeMarco were related to Paul—other than the damn card in Paul’s wallet.
    “Where are his ashes?” DeMarco asked.
    “Give me your address and I’ll send them to you.”
    DeMarco gave Hopper his home address. “Can you tell me what you’ve learned about who killed him?”
    “We’re still investigating and we don’t have any suspects yet, but … well, I have to be honest with you, Mr. DeMarco. We think your cousin may have been dealing prescription drugs—illegally, that is. He was a nurse and he had access to things like OxyContin, and he may have been shot because of that. There are some pretty violent people in the world of drug trafficking.”
    DeMarco felt like telling Hopper the same thing he’d told Detective Glazer, that the Paul Russo he had known hadn’t seemed like the drug-dealing type. But the fact was, he didn’t really know anything about Paul’s circumstances in the last three or four years. So all he said was, “Do you have any proof Paul was doing anything illegal?”
    “No, it’s just a hunch based on the time he was killed and where he was killed. But like I said, we’re still investigating. I gotta go now, Mr. DeMarco, but I apologize again for not contacting you before we cremated the body.”
    “Look, I’m not going to make a big stink about the fact you cremated him without talking to me, but I’d appreciate it if you could keep me in the loop on the investigation,” DeMarco said. And then he did something he didn’t normally do: he flexed what little political muscle he had. “By the way, I’m a lawyer who works for Congress.”
    Lawyers, in general, can be a pain but a congressional lawyer could be a significantly larger pain to Hopper because there’s nothing employees in the Legislative Branch of government enjoy more than twisting the nuts of those employed by the Executive Branch. If Hopper was impressed, however, by the fact that DeMarco worked on Capitol Hill—along with several thousand other lawyers—he kept his awe hidden quite well. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, and hung up.
    Claire Whiting in motion: long-legged strides, staring straight ahead, intense, unsmiling, her heels striking hard on the linoleum floor. She was always in a hurry—a woman forever at war against the clock.
    She entered a room containing thirty cubicles, and in each cubicle sat two technicians, most wearing headsets, all pecking away at keyboards and studying the monitors on their desks. Large plasma screens were mounted on the walls of the room and fiber-optic cables snaked in thick bundles, invisible beneath the floor. The cables were connected to large Cray computers and rack upon rack of servers in nearby buildings. The room was always somewhat chilly because the temperature was set to meet the rigid needs of the machines and not for the comfort of human beings.
    The room was part of the Net.
    The word Net was not shorthand for Network, as one might assume. It was instead exactly what the name implied: a device for capturing things, in this case the whispers of a planet. The mesh of the Net consisted of acres of computers, thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable, fleets of satellites orbiting the globe, vast arrays of dish antennae on desert plains—and much,