Drowning Barbie by Frederick Ramsay Page A

snoring. The dinner and its sequelae would have no long-term effect on the life and times of the citizenry of Picketsville, nor on Ike and Ruth. After all, plans are made to be modified or, in this instance, remain unspoken.
    While the family attempted to stay on task, four miles away, two people, who should have known better, sat across the table from one another and downed the first of what would be many sidecars. By the end of the next week, one more body would be added to the count. It would not be discovered for several hours and its significance for several more.
    One of the two was George LeBrun, convicted felon, arsonist, and local terror. He had been put away for life-plus-twenty for murder, attempted murder, and assault on a police officer among other things. But a judge, at the cajoling of a member of the Richmond ACLU and backed up by the considerable talent of one of the country’s more prominent jurists and former member of the previous presidential administration, had been persuaded there were, or might reasonably be, certain technical irregularities with the evidence presented at George’s first trial and ordered a new one. The Rockbridge County prosecutor would assure local police and Ike’s office that re-conviction on all counts was a slam dunk. That was all well and good, but in the meantime, George posted bond and God only knew where he disappeared to. The betting was on Picketsville with revenge in his heart. Essie Sutherlin, nee Falco, would hear of his release on Monday and, unlike George, would really disappear. She would take her child and remain invisible until her husband, Billy, found her in a cheap motel in Bristol, Tennessee. He would consider and then reject the sensible possibility of joining her there.
    ***
    Meanwhile, back in the nation’s capital, Hannibal Colfax’s cynicism, combined with his superior’s ambition and the threat of a Congressional Oversight Committee visit to his small corner of the FBI, had resulted in one of those classic bureaucratic moments when progress and accountability cross paths and efficiency flies out the window. By late Friday, his section had, as he’d ordered, ground to a complete halt. All requests for information, some even vital to the solution of serious crimes in several parts of the country, piled up in in-boxes. Police departments from Albany, New York, to Albany, Georgia, from Bangor, Maine, to Bangor, Washington, waited while suspected perps with dental records on file roamed free. Within the remoteness of the alabaster-lined halls in the nation’s capital, the possibility that a Congressional committee might create as many problems as it solves is a topic rarely, if ever, discussed.
    At any rate, the dental chart belonging to the unidentified remains found in the woods outside Picketsville, Virginia, arrived, was logged in, and then sank deeper and deeper in a pile of similar requests forwarded hourly to the NDI/IR, all newly dispatched to it from all parts of the country and nearly all marked URGENT. They had continued to pile up on Saturday and Sunday. For all intents and purposes, on this weekend the National Dental Information/Imaging Repository did not exist. Thus, it would be days before a tentative ID would be forthcoming and a few more days before Ike would hear anything. And, when he did hear, it would not be what he’d hoped or expected.
    As Hannibal had expected, the arrival on Monday of the Congressional Oversight Committee turned out to be all “show and no go.” An array of politicians and their sycophant aides, following an unacknowledged but familiar choreography, pranced through Hannibal’s area poking into cabinets and asking questions about privacy and the potential breech of Fourth Amendment guarantees. He guessed they’d lifted the queries from the morning’s New York Times. An Op-Ed columnist, possibly tipped off by one of the members of the committee, had devoted three