First Daughter (41 page)

"Alli, I know Ronnie Kray frightened you terribly, but it would be helpful if you could tell me something more about what you saw. Anything at all."

Alli, still sitting rigidly, said nothing.

"I want to catch him, Alli. You want that, don't you?"

She bit her lip, nodded.

"You're the only one who can help me."

Tears began to run down her cheeks. "I wish Emma was here. She could tell you what you want to know."

"You can, too."

Her eyes squeezed shut. "I'm not brave like she was."

Despite his best efforts, they'd entered Chevy Chase. This was it, then. The end. Jack relented. "Alli, your father has agreed to let me pick the detail guarding you."

"I want you," she said at once.

He nodded. "I'll be there, just not the whole time. But you can absolutely trust Nina and Sam. I know them, I've worked with them. They won't let you down."

He turned onto the Carsons' street, a cul-de-sac, saw more Secret Service agents in cars and on the sidewalk. They all watched him as he drove toward the large federal-style brick house at the end of the cul-de-sac.

"Home," he said.

"It doesn't feel like it." Alli shifted in her seat. "Nothing feels right."

"As soon as you get back to your routine, it'll all feel as familiar as it did before."

"But I don't want to get back to my old routine!" She sounded like a spoiled child.

Jack pulled into the driveway where Edward and Lyn Carson were waiting. He shut off the engine, opened his door, but Alli made no move to open hers.

"Alli . . ."

She turned to him. There was desperation in her eyes. "I don't want to leave you!"

"You have a responsibility to your parents. Tomorrow you'll be the First Daughter. From now on, you have to act like the First Daughter. The whole country will be watching."

"Please don't make me."

"Honey, it's what has to happen."

"But I'm afraid."

Jack frowned. "Afraid of what?"

"To leave you, to be here, I don't know."

By this time, the Carsons, concerned, had come up to the car. Lyn Carson opened the passenger's-side door, leaned in.

"Alli? Baby?"

Alli, still turned toward Jack, silently mouthed,
Please help me
.

Jack felt torn into a thousand shreds. He had failed Emma, he didn't want to fail Alli as well. But what could he do? The president-elect had given him an order that he was powerless to ignore. Alli wasn't his child. So he did the only thing he could do. He leaned over, whispered in her ear, "I'll see you later, I promise. Okay?"

As he pulled back, he saw her nod. Then she turned, got out of the car and into her mother's arms.

"Jack."

Edward Carson was at his side as he got out of the car. The president-elect pumped his hand then impulsively embraced him.

"There are no words." His voice was clotted with emotion. "You've brought our girl back to us safe and sound, just as you promised."

Jack watched Alli. Her mother, arm around her waist, walked her up the brick steps to the open front door.

"That's right," Lyn Carson said. "Random House wants you to write a memoir about growing up to be the First Daughter."

"She's a special young woman," Jack said. "I want Nina Miller and Sam Scott assigned to her permanent detail. Nina and I were partners in finding Alli. I worked with Sam at ATF until he transferred to the Secret Service three years ago."

Carson nodded. "I'll make the necessary calls right away." He looked at his wife and daughter for a moment, before turning back. "Jack, Lyn and I would like you at the inauguration, up on the dais with us. You're like a member of our family now."

"It would be an honor, sir."

In the doorway, Alli turned, gave him a tentative smile, and with a sweep of her mother's arm, vanished into her world of privilege and power.

W
HO WAS
Ian Brady? In other, more normal circumstances, Jack would have been preoccupied with finding that out. However, this case was anything but normal. What concerned him now was not who Ian Brady was but why he had chosen that name. Clearly, his other aliases—Ronnie Kray and Charles Whitman—followed on in a straight line from the first.

It was Jack's experience—the experience of any knowledgeable lawman—that criminals, even the highly intelligent ones, chose their aliases for a reason. An FBI profiler who had been brought into the ATF office on a case some years ago had said that giving meaning to an alias was a subconscious urge criminals found irresistible. In other words, they couldn't help themselves. Of one thing Jack was certain: The name Ian Brady held special meaning for this man. The trick was to find out what that meaning was.

With his paranoia at full mast, Jack bypassed the computers hooked up to the federal network, which included his own at the ATF office in Falls Church. What was required, he thought now as he made his way out of Chevy Chase, was a public cybercafe. Twenty minutes of hunting
from behind the wheel of his car unearthed one on Chase Avenue, in Bethesda. He sat down at a terminal, typed the name Ian Brady, but all he got was a bare-bones recap from Wikipedia and
About.com
. On the other hand, after some false leads, he found a distributor of logwood, the substance Brady had inadvertently left on Calla Myers's coat. Taking down the address and phone number, he walked outside, checked the environment for tags. In the shadow of a storefront, he got out his cell burner, punched in the number of the distributor. He got nothing, no automated message, no voice mail. He wasn't all that surprised. The distributor was so small and obscure, it had a rudimentary Web site. Customers could order its product online, but other than that, the site looked as if it hadn't been updated in months.

S&W D
ISTRIBUTION
was on the outskirts of the curiously named Mexico, Pennsylvania, 160 miles north of Chevy Chase Village. It took Jack just under three hours bombing down I-83N and US-22W to get there. By the time he exited PA-75S, it was already late in the afternoon. The sun, low in the sky, was bedded on thick clouds into which it expanded and slowly sank. Shadows lengthened with the beginning of winter's long twilight.

S&W occupied a ramshackle building a stone's throw from the railroad tracks that brought Mexico all the business it was going to get. It was impossible to tell what color the structure had originally been painted or even what color it was now. Jack's heart sank because at first sight, the place looked abandoned, but then he saw a young woman come out the front door. She wore cowboy boots, jeans, a fleece-lined denim jacket over a ribbed turtleneck sweater. As he pulled up, she settled herself on the clapboard steps, shook out a cigarette, lit up. She watched him with gimlet eyes as he got out of his car, walked toward her. She had an interesting, angular face. Its slight asymmetry made her appear beautiful. She was slim and small. She appeared to be in her late twenties.

As he approached, he heard a train whistle. The tremor in the tracks built as the train thundered toward them. The unsettled air of its bow wave crashed over them like a hail of gunshots. The young woman, her long hair flying across her face, sat as calmly as if the only sound to be heard was the crunch of Jack's shoes on the pebbly blacktop. Smoke dribbled from the corner of her mouth, and now that he was closer, he could see the tattoos on the backs of her hands, either side of her neck: the four main phases of the moon. She must have dyed her hair black to match her eyes, but the tips were golden. She wore a silver skull ring on the third finger of her right hand. The skull seemed to be laughing.

In the aftermath of the cinder swirl, Jack flashed his ID, watched as her eyes tracked uninterestedly to the information. He began to wonder whether it was tobacco she was smoking.

"Do you work at S-and-W?" he asked.

"Used to."

"They fired you?"

"The world fired them. S-and-W is history." She jerked a thumb. "I'm just cleaning out the place."

Jack sat down beside her. "What's your name?"

"Hayley. Can you believe it? Ugh! Everyone calls me Leelee."

"How long did you work here?"

"Seven to life." She took a drag on her cigarette. "A fucking jail term."

Jack laughed. "You're a hard piece of work."

"It's self-preservation, so you can be sure I try my damnedest." She watched him out of the corners of her black eyes. "You don't look like a cop."

"Thank you."

It was her turn to laugh.

"How far along are you with the—" He jerked his thumb. "—you know?"

She sighed. "Not nearly far enough."

"I'm trying to track down a customer of S-and-W's," Jack said. "He's a tattoo artist who mixes his own pigments. I'm hoping he ordered logwood from you."

"Not too many of those," Leelee observed. "It's why S-and-W was overtaken by history. That and the fact that the owner never came around. The fucker stopped paying his bills altogether—including my salary. If I wasn't hired by the mail-order company taking over the building, I wouldn't even be here now." She shrugged. "But who cares? Odds are the new company'll go belly-up, too."

"Do you know something your new bosses don't?"

"That's the way the world works, isn't it?" She stared at the glowing tip of her cigarette. "I mean, we're all sheep, aren't we, persuading ourselves that we're different, that we're beautiful or smart or cool. But we all end up the same way—as a little pile of ashes."

"That's a pretty bleak outlook."

She shrugged. "Par for the course for a nihilist."

"You need a boyfriend," Jack said.

"Someone to tell me what to do and how to do it, someone to leave me at night to go out with the guys, someone to roll over in bed and snore his way to morning? You're right. I need that."

"How about someone to love you, protect you, take care of you?"

She tossed her head. "I do that myself."

"I see how that's working out for you."

Through her armor, she gave him a wry smile.

"Come on, Leelee, you need to believe in something," Jack said.

"Oh, I do. I believe in courage and discipline."

"Admirable." Jack nodded. "But I mean something outside of yourself. We're all connected to a universe more mysterious than what we see around us."

"Think so? Here's the truest thing I know: Don't for a moment let religion or art or patriotism persuade you that you mean more than
you do." She took another deep drag, gave him a challenging, alpha-dog look. "That comes from a play called
Secret Life
. I bet you never heard of it."

"It was written by Harley Granville-Barker."

Leelee's eyes opened wide. "Shit, yeah. Now I'm impressed."

"Then give me a hand here."

"I could bust your hump, but you've taken all the fun out of that." She swept her hair behind one ear. "Does your tattoo artist have a name?"

"Ian Brady," Jack said. "Or Ronnie Kray. Or Charles Whitman."

Leelee took the butt from between her lips. "You're shitting me."

"He was a customer, right?"

"More than." She didn't look as if she was interested in smoking anymore. "Charles Whitman owns S-and-W."

T
HE EVENING
was furry with sleet, but as Jack worked his way south toward the District, it became an icy rain his wipers cast off either side of his windshield. The roads were slick and treacherous, peppered with spin-outs and fender benders, which slowed him down considerably. He returned from Mexico with an address for Charles Whitman. He had no way of knowing whether this was Brady's current residence, but he wasn't going to take any chances. The approach had to be thought out in detail.

As soon as he entered the house, he turned on the stereo, along with the lights and his stove top. But the only meat he had—a steak—was frozen solid, so he turned off the burner, sat down at the kitchen table with a jar of peanut butter and one of orange marmalade. Using a teaspoon, he scooped out mouthfuls from one jar then the other.

Afterwards, he went through his LP collection without finding anything he wanted to listen to. That's when he came upon Emma's iPod. He'd stuck it on top of a Big Bill Broonzy album that contained two of his favorite songs, "Baby, Please Don't Go" and "C C Rider." Tonight, he didn't want to hear either of them.

He took up the iPod, plugged it in because the battery was low. Using the thumb wheel, he browsed through Emma's collection of MP3s. There were the usual suspects: Justin Timberlake, R.E.M., U2, and Kanye West, but he was startled to see tracks by artists he loved and had played for her: Carla Thomas, Jackie Taylor, the Bar-Kays.

Searching through the shelves that housed his records and video-cassettes, he found the box containing the iPod dock he'd bought but never used. He took it out, plugged it into the aux receptacle in the back of the stereo receiver. Then he put the iPod into the dock.

He decided to listen to something of Emma's at random. This turned out to be an album for some reason called
Boxer
, by a band called The National. He thought of Emma, imagined her listening to these muscular songs—he particularly liked "Fake Empire"—wondered what would have been going through her mind.

As the music played, he fired up his computer, went online. According to Leelee's records, the address where Brady had his logwood delivered was on Shepherd Street, in Mount Rainier, Maryland. He pulled up Google Maps, punched in the address, and clicked the
HYBRID
Button, which gave him both the map and the satellite photo of the area. The address was only five or six miles southeast of where he was born. The thought gave him the shivers.

Forty minutes later, he got up, rummaged around the house for several items he thought he might need, stuffed them into a lightweight gym bag. He checked his Glock, shoved extra ammunition in his pocket, grabbed his coat. On the way out the door, he called Sharon. There was no answer. He disconnected before her voice mail picked up. With a sharp stab of jealousy, he wondered where she was. What if she was out with another man? That was her right, wasn't it? Yes, but he didn't want to think about it. He climbed into his car, his heart hammering in his chest. Driving to Shepherd Street, he thought, this could be it, the end of a road twenty-five years long.