Pop Goes the Weasel

the Willard Hotel, near the White House. I had called the meeting. Sampson was there, too. He’d been reinstated in the department, but that didn’t stop him from doing what had originally gotten him into trouble.
    “I believe he’s crazy,” Jones said of Shafer. “He smells like a commode at boot camp. He’s definitely going down for the count. What’s your take on his mental state?”
    I knew Geoffrey Shafer inside and out by now. I’d read about his family: his brothers, his long-suffering mother, his domineering father. Their travels from military base to military base until he was twelve. “Here’s what I think. It started with a serious bipolar disorder, what used to be called manic depression. He had it when he was a kid. Now he’s strung out on pharmaceutical drugs: Xanax, Benadryl, Haldol, Ativan, Valium, Librium, several others. It’s quite a cocktail. Available from local doctors for the right price. I’m surprised he can function at all. But he survives. He doesn’t go down. He always wins.”
    “I told Geoff he has to leave Washington. How do you think he’ll take it?” Jones asked me. “I swear his office smelled as if a dead body had been festering there for a couple of days.”
    “Actually, his disorder can involve an accompanying odor, but it’s usually steely, like metal — very pungent, sticks to your nostrils. He probably isn’t bathing. But his instincts for playing the game, for winning and surviving, are amazing,” I said. “He won’t stop.”
    “What’s happening with the other players?” Sampson inquired. “The so-called Horsemen?”
    “They claim that the game is over, and that it was only a fantasy game for them,” Jones told him. “Oliver Highsmith stays in touch, mostly to keep tabs on us, I’m sure. He’s actually a scary bastard in his own right. Says he’s saddened by the murder of Detective Hampton. He’s still not a hundred percent sure that Shafer is the killer. Urges me to keep my mind open on that one.”
    “Is your mind open on it?” I asked, looking around the room at the others.
    Jones didn’t hesitate. “I have no doubt that Geoffrey Shafer is a multiple murderer. We’ve seen enough and heard enough from you. He is quite possibly a homicidal maniac beyond anything we’ve ever known. And I also have no doubt that eventually he’s going down.”
    I nodded my head. “I agree,” I said, “with everything you just said. But especially the homicidal-maniac part.”

Chapter 104
    SHAFER WAS TALKING TO HIMSELF again that night. He couldn’t help it, and the more he tried to stop, the worse it became; the more he fretted, the more he talked to himself.
    “They can all bugger off — Jones, Cross, Lucy and the kids, Boo Cassady the other spineless players. Screw them all. There was a reason behind the Four Horsemen. It wasn’t just a game. There was more to it than simple horseplay.”
    The house at Kalorama was empty, much too quiet at night. It was huge and ridiculous as only an American house can be. The “original” architectural detail, the double living room, the six fireplaces, the long-ago dead flowers from Aster florist, the unread books in gold and brown leather bindings, Lucy’s marmite. It was driving him up the twelve-foot-high walls.
    He spent the next hour or so trying to convince himself that he wasn’t crazy — more specifically, that he wasn’t an addict. Recently, he’d added another doctor in Maryland to his sources for the drugs. Unfortunately, the illegal prescriptions cost him a fortune. He couldn’t keep it up forever. The lithium and Haldol were to control his mood swings, which were very real. The Thorazine was for acute anxiety, which was fucking bloody real as well. The Narcan had also been prescribed for his mood swings. The multiple injections of Loradol were for something else, some pain from he couldn’t remember when. He knew there were good reasons, too, for the Xanax, the Compazine, the Benadryl.
    Lucy had already fled home to London, and she’d taken the traitorous children with her. They’d left exactly one week after the trial ended. Her father was the real cause. He’d come to Washington and spoken to Lucy for less than an hour, and she’d packed up and left like the Goody Two-shoes she’d always been. Before she departed, Lucy had the nerve to tell Shafer she’d stood by him for the sake of the children and her father, but now her “duty” was over. She didn’t believe he was a