Hanley turned away to check the bathroom and the closet for threats.

Brewer just stood there. Her face made of stone. She hid it well, but she was immediately devastated by Renfro’s death. Not because she was sad or sickened, but because it negatively affected her own prospects. Just the previous afternoon she’d let Renfro into her confidence, trying to orchestrate Hanley’s fall from grace. And now Renfro, her only way out of this morass of black ops and dirty work, had been taken from her.

She recovered somewhat, knowing she had to show Hanley she was focused on the matter at hand, not on her own rise through the Agency ranks. “You think Renfro knew Romantic was outside and about to come in?” It was the only thing that made sense to her.

Hanley returned. Said nothing, just kept looking at the dead man, the blood, and the rest of the room.

Brewer added, “I would say it’s safe to assume that Palumbo, Karlsson, and Wheeler are off the hook. I honestly didn’t think there was any way Renfro would be the mole, but I don’t see how there could be any other explanation for this.”

Hanley knelt down, looked at the man’s feet. He wore no shoes or socks.

Brewer watched her boss while he stood back up and walked around the room, slowly and silently.

She said, “I told Romantic, all things considered, this isn’t a bad outcome to this situation.” Hanley did not reply, just kept scanning. “I mean, no trial, no discovery process that could jeopardize operations, no publicity to this other than a few easy-to-deal-with articles about a CIA exec committing suicide. This is much more controllable than Renfro trying to make a run for it or having his day in court.”

She wasn’t feeling her words, just bolstering her cover. The last thing she wanted Hanley to suspect was that she’d had a clandestine meeting with Renfro, the man she now felt sure was a turncoat against the Agency and the United States.

But Hanley made no reply.

Brewer stared at him as he leaned over the body. She said, “I don’t understand, Matt. I thought you’d be pumping your fists in the air. You hated Renfro, you said yourself he was a threat to Poison Apple, and he was obviously the traitor who has been getting Operations and Support officers killed.”

Finally Hanley turned to her. “So . . . what you’re saying, Suzanne, is that you’re buying all this?”

Brewer did not understand. She walked to the foot of the bed and stood next to Hanley, shoulder-to-shoulder, looking over the body. “Buying it? You don’t think he shot himself? It looks pretty plain that he did. Hell, Matt, Romantic had eyes on the house. He didn’t see anyone coming or going after the wife left town.”

A dubious look came over Hanley’s face. “This looks stage-managed to me.”

Brewer laughed a little. “I guess you’ve seen more suicides than I have.”

Hanley walked around the room again, picking items off shelves and tables, looking them over, putting them back down. “No, not really. But I’ve sure as hell positioned bodies to make it look like a suicide a few times, and there’s something seriously wrong with this scene.”

“For instance?”

He turned back to the body and pointed. “Placement of the hands, for starters. How do you blow your head off, flop back onto the bed, and have both your hands fall into your lap with the firearm on top? It looks unnatural to me. Too convenient to pass my smell test.”

“Perhaps he held the gun with both hands. You can tell by the exit wound that he shot himself through the mouth. That would be awkward to do with one hand, I imagine.”

Hanley nodded, paused, then said, “An alternative theory is that the killer didn’t know if Renfro was right-handed or left-handed, so he hedged his bets and put the pistol in close proximity to both hands. I bet we find gunpowder residue on both, as well, but only because they strong-armed him to put his hands up to his face when they shot him.”

Brewer shook her head in astonishment. “Matt, if someone wants a CIA deputy director killed, you can be sure that someone would use professional killers. If professionals came in here intending to make it look like suicide, how would they not know if he was right- or left-handed?”

Hanley had an answer to this, as well. “What if proxies were used, just like in the UK and just like in Great Falls? What if someone hired the best asset they could find in a pinch, rushed them over here after Zack spent the last two days leaning on Renfro, and what if the shooter didn’t have the prep time or the expertise to find out which hand was the target’s dominant one?”

“A lot of ‘what ifs,’ in my opinion, sir.”

Hanley stood there silently, but he shook his head. “This is a bullshit crime scene, Suzanne. I can just feel it.”

“Sir, I don’t see anything that—”

He interrupted. “Give me a pen.”

Brewer made a face, pulled a pen from her purse, and handed it to Hanley. He leaned over the bed, over the body, and slid the pen between the man’s bloody lips.

“Why don’t you just go ahead and keep that, Matt.”

Hanley pushed the man’s mouth open and looked inside. “Gun went into the mouth, right?”

“Pretty obviously. No entry visible. Exit through the crown of the head.”

Hanley said, “Why is there a hole through his tongue?”

Brewer didn’t get it. “Meaning?”

“You know where your own tongue is; if you are going to stick a gun in your mouth, you are going to put the barrel above your tongue, not under it. Why would you pin your tongue to the roof of your mouth?”

“I . . . I don’t—”

“Whoever jammed the pistol in Renfro’s mouth here shoved the tongue up accidentally before squeezing the trigger.”

Brewer thought this over. “But who would murder him? Presumably the intelligence product he’d been handing out was valuable to the perpetrators.”

Hanley sat down on the chaise across from the bed, still looking at the body. “The only reason I can think of that his murder was made to look like suicide is if someone wanted to throw us off the scent of the real traitor.”

Brewer cocked her head. With a dubious voice, she said, “So not only did Renfro not kill himself, but he’s also not the mole?”

Hanley shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe not.”

“Dammit,” she said. “You were the one who insisted it was him.”

Hanley shrugged. “Maybe I just wanted it to be him.”

“Why? Why did you hate him so much?”

Another shrug from the big man’s shoulders. “He rubbed me the wrong way.”