No Safe Place (69 page)

Despite himself, Bright laughed. “Duke Marz,” he mused. “How does old Duke feel about the death penalty?”

“Still against,” Stella answered crisply. Her distillation of Catholic teaching had its disadvantages, she knew, among them a stubborn consistency regarding what “life” meant—that it was sacred for a fetus, and even for a murderer. “But it’s the law in this state,” she continued, “so I’m bound to apply it fairly and judiciously. Which is what I tell people on those grim occasions when they ask.”

“If you run,” Bright responded, “they’ll ask. Charles Sloan
will make sure of that—it’s his ticket to a few votes in your neighborhood.”

Bright was playing her, Stella knew, like a fish on the line. And the mention of Charles Sloan was the bait—Sloan was Bright’s First Assistant and oldest associate, a veteran black lawyer now positioning himself as Bright’s political heir. But it was too early for either Sloan or Stella to push for a commitment and Bright, with an earlier race to run, was using that to keep them off-balance. Knowing this, Stella remained silent.

“So,” Bright continued. “How do you make a virtue of being a woman? And who votes for you on the East Side?”

The first question, though the easier, nettled Stella. “Since I joined homicide,” she answered, “I’ve put twenty-four murderers in jail for life, and three more on death row. My religious beliefs didn’t stop me, and neither did my sex. Where gender and religion help me is with other causes I believe in—like Catholic Charities or Big Sisters, or taking kids out of abusive or neglectful homes before they’re warped or murdered or tossed out on the streets.” Her voice slowed. “Women on the East Side know what that’s about, Arthur. A lot of them are already raising other people’s kids, and doing the best they can. By the time I’m through, they’ll know that I’ll be there for them.”

Bright gave her a dubious look. After a time, he asked, “Who’s advising you?”

“Dick Feeney,” Stella responded, naming a veteran political consultant. “Unofficially—I can’t pay him yet. But there are other friends I talk to, people who know other people. I’ve lived here all my life, remember.”

Bright fell silent. The defensiveness of Stella’s tone underscored his silent message—Stella was an amateur. “So has Charles Sloan,” he observed, “and he’s got a good ten years on you. That’s about a thousand church socials, United Way banquets, and speeches to cops, just waiting for his time to come.” His voice grew soft. “You know the problem. If I’m elected, the end of the rainbow is a special election—two thousand Democratic precinct committeemen jammed in an auditorium, voting for who gets to be interim prosecutor. Charles Sloan knows each and every one of them, from the
blacks to the last Lithuanian.”

Stella gazed at him equably. “As you say,” she answered, “I know the problem.”

Bright hesitated, and then smiled a little, acknowledging that, in this verbal game of chess, Stella had forced his hand: his election, after all, did come first. “And you know mine,” he said at last. “Charles is one of my oldest and most loyal friends in public life. And my core constituents in the black community, as loyal as they are, have taken to the idea of an African-American prosecutor. Support a white candidate over Charles, and some will say that I’m not as black as I used to be.”

There it was, Stella thought. “We all run those risks,” she answered, “when we cross the Onandaga.”

Bright studied his cufflinks. “Someone has to run them,” he murmured, “or this city will stay the way it is. God knows I’ve been trying.”

Despite their fencing, Stella felt an answering wave of sympathy. “I know.”

The quiet stretched, and then Bright looked into her eyes. “I need your help, Stella.”

“What can I do?”

“Campaign for me against Krajek. In Warszawa, and on the West Side. Talk to those friends of yours.” His voice grew soft again, “I need you, and you need me to win.”

Suddenly, Stella thought, she was not quite such an amateur. “And if you do?”

“No promises. But I’ll have a better idea of how you’d fare in an election. And so will you.”

This was the most she could expect, Stella knew—a door left ajar which, if she refused, would be slammed in her face.

“I won’t attack the stadium,” she told him. “You and I disagree about that.”

Bright watched her face. “I don’t need you to. What I need is you telling your friends and neighbors you believe in me.”

Stella paused for effect, and then gave the answer she had been prepared to give for months. “Of course I will,” she said with a smile. “I was just waiting for you to ask.”

Bright laughed in recognition of what was, quite plainly, the truth. “I’ll talk to my campaign people,” he answered easily. “They’ll be back to you soon.”

Stella nodded. “Good.”

Bright stood, then paused, studying the newspaper on Stella’s desk. “About the ballpark,” he told her, “that’s what makes you perfect to monitor this Tommy Fielding thing. People might think I’m trying to sling mud on Steelton 2000. You could soften that a little.”

With that, Bright left for an appearance at a day care center, and Stella resumed staring at the headlines.

Now, on Sunday, Stella read the police report again.

There were no signs of robbery or, in the first inspection of the bodies, of violence. It seemed that Fielding had eaten dinner before Welch arrived, leaving remnants of a ham sandwich and a beer. Tina’s clothes were carefully folded on a chair, and the bedroom lights were low. In the drawer of Fielding’s nightstand was a soft-core porn magazine,
Black Beauties
.

His autopsy had been delayed at the request of his wealthy parents, tracked down while on a luxury cruise of Southeast Asia. A few hours before, Stella had met with them—a courtly, soft-spoken father, a diminutive mother whose patrician facade concealed her intensity, and for whom death had not diminished her fierce sense of maternity. Tommy was the victim of a murder, she insisted: he had been orderly since childhood, a principled boy who had become a principled man with a deep aversion to drugs. Appalled by the prospective wreckage of an autopsy, drawn by Stella’s sympathy, they had extracted from her a promise she gave with some reluctance: to attend Fielding’s autopsy tomorrow.

Tina Welch, of course, had been autopsied at once. Although Stella did not yet have the report, Coroner Kate Micelli had called Stella with her tentative conclusion—that Welch was an addict, and had died from a massive overdose. Not that this ruled out murder, Stella reflected, but a double homicide by injection would be quite a complex task.

Pensive, she studied the work of the crime scene photographer.

In their nakedness, as pitiful as the camera was pitiless, Fielding and Welch lay on the bed, Fielding with his eyes shut, Welch staring back at the camera. Perhaps it was the apparent incongruity, Stella thought, or her own vestigial prejudice, but even in death they did not look like a couple. Unless it was her parents, she thought with sudden irony, sleeping with their backs turned to each other.

There were other photos, close-ups. Welch appeared much older than her twenty-three years evidenced by her driver’s license: there were the bruises of fatigue beneath her eyes, and her body, though slender, lacked muscle tone. Her skin looked ready to collapse upon the bone, the work of drugs and malnutrition.

Twenty-three, Stella thought, and began to examine the close-ups of Fielding. At thirty-four, he looked younger than that, with slicked-back black hair and sculpted features, and his body appeared fit and well muscled. She could imagine him at a picnic with a sporty pair of slacks and the sleeves of a pastel sweater, taken off in the warmth of summer, tied loosely around his neck. Here her admitted prejudice involved class, not race—to Stella, he looked like a friend of Peter Hall’s.

Whatever else, she concluded, these two were no one’s idea of Romeo and Juliet. But then Juliet was not a hooker, or Romeo enamored of
Black Beauties
. And Stella herself, she felt confident, had seen too much to be surprised by much of anything: she had long since learned how little we know about anyone’s life, even those we believe we know well.

Her telephone rang.

The sound, on a Sunday, startled her. It was Nathaniel Dance, the deep-voiced Chief of Detectives. The call was a surprise—it was a Sunday, and Dance seldom troubled himself with routine matters.

“I have a homicide,” he said. “A big one.”

Beneath the calm, something in Dance’s tone suggested that he had taken a trip to hell, and was reluctant to describe it. Reflexively, Stella answered, “It never rains but it pours …”

“It’s Jack Novak.”

At first, Stella could not speak. But even in her disbelief, her rebellion against what Dance had said, the professional in Stella understood his call.

“Does Arthur know?” she asked.

“Not yet. They say he’s out campaigning, on the way to a debate in your old neighborhood. I’ve been trying to reach him, but this is a message I can’t just leave with anyone.” His voice lowered. “I don’t want the press to find out before he does, somebody ambushing him. Especially at this debate.”

This, too, did not surprise her. In theory, Dance was above
politics. In truth, no cop—black or white—would have risen so high without an acute political sense. Dance was buying Arthur time, no doubt because he wanted Bright to become Steelton’s first black mayor, perhaps because Dance wanted to be Steelton’s first black Chief of Police. Whatever his motives, Dance had seen at once what Stella saw, too—that most homicides matter only to the victim’s family but that, every few years, a murder comes along which can ruin the prosecutor who touches it. This could be that case: the killing of Steelton’s leading drug lawyer, an old classmate and friend of Arthur Bright’s who, despite their roles as legal adversaries, was one of Arthur’s strongest white supporters.

“Who killed him?” Stella asked tonelessly.

“We don’t know. Homicide got an anonymous call, and went to Novak’s apartment. They knew enough to get me out here.”

Stella closed her eyes. Finally, she said, “Then I should come out, too.”

Dance himself was briefly silent. “The crime scene’s pretty rough, Stella.”

Did she only imagine, Stella wondered, a trace of compassion? But Nathaniel Dance knew many secrets. Even, perhaps, hers.

“Fifteen minutes,” Stella said, and hung up.

She could not permit herself to feel, she told herself. She did not have time, and the tears, when they came, might be difficult to stop.

She put on her coat and left the office. Only then did it occur to her that she had not needed, and Dance had not offered, directions to Jack Novak’s home.

A preview excerpt from
R
ICHARD
N
ORTH
P
ATTERSON’S

BALANCE OF POWER

available in hardcover from Ballantine Books in the fall of 2003.

Feeling the gun against the nape of her neck, Joan Bowden froze.

Her consciousness narrowed to the weapon she could not see: her vision barely registered the cramped living room, the images on her television—the President and his fiancée, opening the Fourth of July gala beneath the towering obelisk of the Washington Monument. She could feel John’s rage through the cold metal on her skin, smell the liquor on his breath.

“Why?” she whispered.

“You wanted him.”

He spoke in a dull, emphatic monotone.
Who?
she wanted to ask. But she was too afraid; with a panic akin to madness, she mentally scanned the faces from the company cookout they had attended hours before. Perhaps Gary—they had talked for a time.

Desperate, she answered, “I don’t want anyone.”

She felt his hand twitch. “You don’t want
me
. You have contempt for me.”

Abruptly, his tone had changed to a higher pitch, paranoid and accusatory, the prelude to the near hysteria which issued from some unfathomable recess of his brain. Two nights before, she had awakened, drenched with sweat, from the nightmare of her own death.

Who would care for Marie?

Moments before, their daughter had sat at the kitchen table, a portrait of dark-haired intensity as she whispered to the doll for whom she daily set a place. Afraid to move, Joan strained to see the kitchen from the corner of her eye. John’s remaining discipline was to wait until Marie had vanished; lately their daughter seemed to have developed a preternatural sense of
impending violence which warned her to take flight. A silent minuet of abuse, binding daughter to father.

Marie and her doll were gone.

“Please,” Joan begged.

The cords of her neck throbbed with tension. The next moment could be fateful: she had learned that protest enraged him, passivity insulted him.

Slowly, the barrel traced a line to the base of her neck, then pulled away.

Joan’s head bowed. Her body shivered with a spasm of escaping breath.

She heard him move from behind the chair, felt him staring down at her. Fearful not to look at him, she forced herself to meet his gaze.

With an open palm, he slapped her.

Her head snapped back, skull ringing. She felt blood trickling from her lower lip.

John placed the gun to her mouth.

Her husband. The joyful face from her wedding album, now dark-eyed and implacable, the 49ers T-shirt betraying the paunch on his too-thin frame.

Smiling grimly, John Bowden pulled the trigger.

Recoiling, Joan cried out at the hollow metallic click. The sounds seemed to work a chemical change in him—a psychic wound which widened his eyes. His mouth opened, as if to speak; then he turned, staggering, and reeled toward their bedroom.

Slumping forward, Joan covered her face.

Soon he would pass out. She would be safe then; in the morning, before he left, she would endure his silence, the aftershock of his brutality and shame.

At least Marie knew only the silence.

Queasy, Joan stumbled to the bathroom in the darkened hallway, a painful throbbing in her jaw. She stared in the mirror at her drawn face, not quite believing the woman she had become. Blood trickled from her swollen lip.

She dabbed with tissue until it stopped. For another moment
Joan stared at herself. Then, quietly, she walked to her daughter’s bedroom.

Marie’s door was closed. With painstaking care, her mother turned the knob, opening a crack to peer through.

Cross-legged, Marie bent over the china doll which once had been her grandmother’s. Joan felt a spurt of relief; the child had not seen them, did not see her now. Watching, Joan was seized by a desperate love.

With slow deliberation, Marie raised her hand and slapped the vacant china face.

Gently, the child cradled the doll in her arms. “I won’t do that again,” she promised. “As long as you’re good.”

Tears welling, Joan backed away. She went to the kitchen sink and vomited.

She stayed there for minutes, hands braced against the sink. At last she turned on the faucet. Watching her sickness swirl down the drain, Joan faced what she must do.

Glancing over her shoulder, she searched for the slip of paper with his telephone number, hidden in her leather-bound book of recipes.
Call me
, he had urged.
No matter the hour
.

She must not wake her husband.

Lifting the kitchen telephone from its cradle, Joan crept back to the living room, praying for courage. On the television,
a graceful arc of fireworks rose above the obelisk.

President Kerry Francis Kilcannon and his fiancée, Lara Costello, watched as a red flare rose above the Mall, bursting into a galaxy of falling stars which framed the Washington Monument.

For this rarity, an evening alone, they had left the annual party for staffers and retreated to the porch on the second floor of the White House. Spread across their table was a white linen cloth, a picnic of cheese and fruit, and a bottle of light chardonnay which cooled in a silver cylinder, a gift from the President of France. Lara took Kerry’s hand.

“When I was six,” she told him, “our father took us to the fireworks at Crissy Field. I remember holding his hand, watching all those explosions above the Golden Gate Bridge. That’s my last memory of being with him.”

Turning from the fireworks, Kerry studied the sculpted face—intense dark eyes, high cheekbones, pale skin framed by jet-black hair—which, to her bemusement, had helped Lara rise from a semianonymous political reporter for the
New York Times
to celebrity as a television journalist. Like many women, Kerry supposed, her self-concept had been fixed in adolescence: then she not had thought of herself as beautiful—though she surely was—but as the perfect student, the dutiful oldest daughter who must help her mother and sisters. It was the dutiful daughter who had achieved success, driven to make Inez Costello proud, to free her younger sisters from the struggle caused by their father’s desertion. Even at thirty-two, Kerry knew, her family still defined her.

“What I was hoping you’d remember,” he said, “is the scene from
To Catch a Thief.
Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in Monaco, watching fireworks from her hotel room.”

Lara faced him with an amused, appraising look. “I remember that they lay down on the couch, and then the camera panned away. The fireworks were a metaphor.”

“Uh-huh. Very 1950s.”

Leaning forward, Lara kissed him, a lingering touch of the lips, then rested her cheek against his shoulder. “This is the twenty-first century,” she told him. “No metaphors required.”

Afterward, they lay in his canopied bed listening to the last, faint whistling of fireworks. One table lamp still glowed—making love, and after, both needed to see the other’s face.

Smiling, she lightly mussed his hair. “You’re not too bad,” she told him. “At least as Presidents go.”

As she intended, this elicited the boyish grin which lit his face and crinkled the corners of his eyes. There had been too little lightness in Kerry’s life. Even his first success in politics, election to the Senate at age thirty, had been as surrogate for his brother, Senator James Kilcannon, assassinated in San Francisco while running for President. Lara had been nineteen then; she remembered watching the telecast of James’s funeral, the haunted look on Kerry’s face as he attended to his widowed mother. So that when, as a reporter for the
New York Times
, she had met him seven years later, the first thing she noticed was not his fine-featured face, incongruously youthful for a potential President, nor his thatch of chestnut hair, nor even the scar at the corner of one eye. It was the startling contradiction presented by the eyes themselves: their green-flecked blue irises, larger than most, gave Lara the sense—rare in a white male politician—of someone who had seen more sadness than most. Then, she had thought this an illusion, abetted by her memory of the funeral; only later, when Kerry shared the private history he had entrusted to almost no one, did she understand how true it was.

“If so,” he answered, “you’re free to take it personally. Tongue-tied Catholic boys from Newark don’t usually get much practice. Lord knows that Meg and I weren’t much good to each other, in any way.”

If only, Lara thought, Meg could be dismissed so simply.

But her existence affected them still—publicly, because Kerry’s lack of an annulment had forestalled them from marrying in the Church; privately, because their love affair had begun while Kerry was married. Its secrecy had saved Kerry’s chances of becoming President: only after his divorce and the California primary, when Kerry himself had been wounded by a would-be assassin, had they come together in public.

Now she touched the scar the bullet had left, a red welt near his heart. “
We’ve
been good to each other,” she said. “And very lucky.”

To Lara, he seemed to sense the sadness beneath her words, the lingering regrets which shadowed their new life. “Just lucky?” he answered softly. “In public life, we’re a miracle. Rather like my career.”

This aspect of his worldview—that good fortune was an accident—was, in Lara’s mind, fortified by his certainty that gunfire had made him President: first by killing James, the deserving brother; then by wounding Kerry, causing the wave of sympathy which, last November, had helped elect him by the narrowest of margins, with California tipping the balance. But this had also given him a mission, repeated in speech after speech: “to eradicate gun violence as surely as we ended polio.”

“Speaking of miracles,” she asked, “is your meeting with the gun companies still a go?”

“A handful of companies,” Kerry amended. “The few brave souls willing to help keep four-year-olds from killing themselves with that new handgun Dad bought for their protection. If you listen to the SSA, tomorrow will be the death knell of gun rights in America.” Suddenly, he smiled. “Though in preparing for the meeting, I discovered that it’s you who’s hellbent on disarming us.”

“Me?”

“You, and your entire profession.” Turning, Kerry removed a magazine from the briefing book on his nightstand; as he flipped its pages, Lara saw that it was the monthly publication of the Sons of the Second Amendment, perhaps Washington’s
most powerful lobby, and that its cover featured a venomous cartoon of Kerry as Adolf Hitler.

“‘Surveys,’” Kerry read, “‘have shown that most reporters for the major media live in upper-class homes, head and shoulders above most of us in fly-over country. Many took their education at Ivy League universities where they protested the Vietnam conflict, smoked dope, loved freely, and ingested every ultraliberal cause their professors threw at them.’” Pausing, he said wryly, “Truth to tell, they’re onto something. What was wrong with
you
?”

Lara propped her head up with one hand. “My mother cleaned houses. So I was afraid to lose my scholarship. Besides, I missed the war by twenty years.”

“It hardly matters—you caught up soon enough. Listen to this: ‘Once they graduated, they faced the prospect of going to work. What better way to earn a fat paycheck and change the world than become a reporter for ABC, or CBS or NBC or CNN or write for the
New York Times
?’

“That’s
you
,” Kerry added, fixing her with a mockaccusatory gaze, and then continued. “‘Having become gainfully employed, these men and women from Yale and Harvard and Brown and Princeton brought their own biases with them. Many do not know anyone who owns guns. Their only exposure to firearms comes when they report on the carnage left by a deranged shooter going “postal” …’”

“How about knowing someone who actually got
shot
?” Lara interjected. “Does that count?”

“Oh, that? That just means you’ve lost your objectivity. Like me.”

The rueful remark held an undertone of bitterness. This involved far more, Lara knew, than what his opponents claimed—anger at his brother’s death, or his own near death. Kerry was sick of bloodshed, weary of meeting, year after year, with families who had lost loved ones, of trying to comfort them with the same empty phrases. For him, his failure was both political and deeply personal. And Kerry did not live with failure—especially regarding guns—well.

“Sooner or later,” Lara assured him, “you’ll get Congress to pass a decent gun law.”

Kerry raised his eyebrows, exchanging bitterness for an
irony tinged with good-natured frustration. “Before or
after
we get married?”

Lara smiled, unfazed. “That I can’t tell you. But certainly before I find a job.”

This was another blind curve on the road to marriage. Though she was developing a degree of fatalism, the resignation of a would-be First Lady to the limitations of her new life, Lara had always been independent, beholden to no one for support or a sense of who she was. That Kerry understood this did not change what she would lose by marrying him—her own identity. Already she had been forced to take leave from NBC: the potential for conflicts of interest, or at least their appearance—that a powerful network might profit by employing the President’s fiancée—also applied to any other segment of the media. A brief flirtation with the presidency of the Red Cross—based on her high profile as a television journalist and experience in war zones—had floundered on the fear that major donors might want something from President Kilcannon. Other jobs had similar problems, and the best ones, Lara acknowledged, would take away from her public duties and her private time with Kerry. “I’m sorry,” she said at last. “I was being a brat. It may not seem so, but you’re actually more important to me than running the Red Cross.”

Though he knew this, or at least should, to Lara his expression betrayed a certain relief. “Then your fate is sealed, I’m afraid.”

“I guess it is,” she answered dryly. “I’m a fool for love.”