“Oh, Mr. Lakewood?”

He craned his neck to see her. It looked like she was holding a giant turtle in her strong white hands. Except it couldn’t be a turtle this early in the year. It was a large rock.

“Careful with that,” he called.

Too late.

It slipped from her hands. No it didn’t! She opened her hands.

6

LANGNER’S SUICIDE NOTE KEPT TICKLING THE BACK OF Isaac Bell’s mind.

He used his pass from the Navy Secretary to reenter the Gun Factory, opened the Polhem padlock on the design-loft door again, and searched Langner’s desk. A stack of special hand-laid stock that Langner apparently reserved for important correspondence matched the paper on which the suicide note was written. Beside it was a Waterman fountain pen.

Bell pocketed the pen, and stopped at the chemist’s laboratory where Van Dorn maintained an account. Then he took a streetcar up Capitol Hill to Lincoln Park, a neighborhood that was flourishing as Washingtonians moved up the Hill from the congested swampy areas around the Potomac River, which turned foul in the summer heat.

Bell found the Langner home directly across the street from the park. It was a two-story brick row house with green shutters and a wrought-iron fence around a small front yard. The Van Dorn auditor investigating Arthur Langner’s financial affairs had uncovered no evidence of a private income. Langner would have had to purchase this new house on his Gun Factory salary, which, the auditor had noted, equaled that of top managers in private industry.

The house looked newly built—as did all but a handful of old wooden structures on the side streets—and boasted tall windows. The brickwork was typically ornate, flaring skyward to an elaborate dentated cornice. But inside, Bell noted in a glance, the house was anything but typical. It was decorated in a spare, modern manner, with built-in cabinets and bookshelves, electric lamps, and ceiling fans. The furniture was up-to-date, too, and very expensive—airy yet strong pieces made by the Glaswegian Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Where, Bell had to ask, did Langner get the money to pay for Mackintosh furniture?

Dorothy was no longer dressed in black but in a silvery gray color that complemented her eyes and her raven hair. A man trailed her into the foyer. She introduced him as “My friend Ted Whitmark.”

Bell pegged Whitmark as a hail-fellow-well-met salesman sort. He looked the picture of success, with a bright smile on his handsome face, an expensive suit of clothes, and a crimson necktie speckled with Harvard College’s insignia.

“More than a friend, I’d say,” Whitmark boomed as he shook Bell’s hand with a hearty grip. “Closer to a fiancé, if you get my drift,” he added, tightening his grip emphatically.

“Congratulations,” said Bell, squeezing back.

Whitmark let go with an easy smile, and joked, “That’s some shake. What do you do in your spare time, shoe horses?”

“Would you excuse us for a moment, Mr. Whitmark?” Bell asked. “Miss Langner, Mr. Van Dorn asked me to have a word with you.”