Pursuit (16 page)

Of course. It was just after one-thirty. The funeral was scheduled to begin precisely at two p.m. The dolorous tolling of church bells all over the city—that was the sound that was barely audible over the thumping of the helicopter’s rotors; she only just identified it—rang out in long peals of collective grief.

Throat suddenly tight, Jess leaned back in her seat, unable to watch further. Remembering the sweats-clad woman who’d done shots in the bar, who had been obviously frightened of something but was nevertheless determined to escape, whose arm she had taken and flight she had so disastrously shared, she ached inside. Closing her eyes, she said a silent prayer for the souls of Annette Cooper, and the Secret Service agent and the driver who had died with her. Then she added her own fervent thanks for being allowed to live.

When she opened her eyes, it was to discover that Marian was watching her, a sour twist to her mouth.

“Mr. Davenport is sick with grief about this.” Marian clasped her hands tightly in her lap. “He seems to feel that if he’d gone himself that night instead of sending you, Mrs. Cooper wouldn’t be dead now.”

The unspoken subtext was that she’d screwed up. The hard gleam in Marian’s eyes made the message unmistakable. Did Davenport share Marian’s view? Jess hadn’t thought of that. But her conscience was clear. Whatever had happened, she knew in her heart she could not have prevented it. She was as much a victim of the accident as the other three. The only difference was that she had survived.

So far.

That thought made her go cold all over. She tried to ignore it.

“If Mr. Davenport had gone that night instead of me,” Jess pointed out, “he might very well be dead now, too.”

That shut Marian up, just as Jess had intended. The other woman pressed her lips together and stared straight ahead.

Instead of looking down again, Jess carefully concentrated on the bright blue sky and cottony white clouds all around them. Though crisp, it was a bright, sunny spring day, with a brisk wind that blew the clouds around like feathers. The air, as she knew from her quick journey across the hospital rooftop to the helicopter, smelled sweet and fresh with scents of new grass and blossoming baby leaves and just-blooming flowers.

The day was too beautiful for a funeral.

Her phone began to ring. Jess’s eyes widened. The sound was so
normal,
so much a part of her ordinary, everyday existence before the accident, that in the context of what was happening to her now it was almost bizarre. It took her a second to realize what it was, and then she unzipped her purse, which the hospital had given to her mother along with a bundle containing the now-ruined clothes she had been wearing when the accident had occurred. Judy had brought the purse to the hospital that morning in anticipation of Jess’s departure later in the day. Fishing her phone out, she saw the number and name on her caller ID: Laura Ogilvy, one of her lawyer friends from work. No doubt calling to ask how she was and to glean all the gossip she could.

A glance at Marian, who looked on with way too much interest, made her initial reaction certain: She wasn’t going to take the call.

“You’re not going to answer?” Marian asked with disapproval when the call went over to voice mail to join the other forty-seven messages she had waiting.

“My battery’s low. Anyway, I don’t really feel like talking right now.”

Which was the truth: She didn’t. She was physically much stronger, although the outward signs of her injuries—the bruises, the stitches—were still apparent. Face it: Mentally, she was all over the place. She knew what she knew, she suspected what she suspected.

And she remembered . . . more than she wanted to.

The Watergate complex, famous for its explosion into the national conversation when it was the site of the notorious burglary that had torpedoed Richard Nixon’s presidency, was actually a semicircular grouping of upscale skyscrapers overlooking the Potomac that housed a hotel, apartments, and condominiums along with a variety of pricey restaurants and shops. As the helicopter set down atop one gleaming silver tower, Jess got a glimpse of a sparkling fountain set in a green lawn surrounded by neatly clipped hedges in a courtyard below. Then the runners settled, the motor was cut, and the rotors slowed. Jess unbuckled her seat belt just as the pilot opened the door.

He lifted the wheelchair from the cabin. Marian got out first, and Jess followed, climbing down into a cold, stiff wind that belied the day’s sunny brightness. Her back ached with every movement, and she was stiff as cheap new jeans, but she was able to walk the few steps to the wheelchair, which the pilot held for her, without feeling like she was going to collapse. Still, she sank into it thankfully, and was glad that it was motorized so that she could get to the elevator without relying on Marian’s help. The other woman’s expression was unyielding as she carried Jess’s suitcase.

It took just a few minutes to reach the apartment.

“Now that we’re here, I can tell you that Mr. Davenport will be busy for the rest of the afternoon. He’ll call me with further instructions sometime after six.”

Marian spoke behind her as Jess rolled across the spacious, gray-carpeted living room with its white leather couches and chairs and black Lucite tables toward the big picture window. Jess noticed that she was careful to subtly stress the
me
in that last sentence
,
thus confirming her impression that in Marian’s own mind at least, the woman was battling to retain the supremacy of her position in Davenport’s life.

Jess just nodded in reply. They were on the twelfth floor, so she had a panoramic view of the Georgetown Channel of the Potomac curving around Roosevelt Island below. There were no boats on the river below her, not even the big commercial barges that seemed to run continuously, and even as she wondered at it, it hit her that it was because the entire country, and especially D.C., was shut down in a paroxysm of grief over the terrible tragedy that was reaching its culmination at that exact moment.

Marian sank down on the couch and flipped on the TV.

The slow, sad notes of a military dirge caught Jess by surprise. She turned around. Her gaze was riveted by the pale stone and soaring Gothic arches of the National Cathedral filling the big TV. Her breathing suspended, her hands clamped around the edges of the wheelchair’s arms, and her throat threatened to close up.

She was watching the event live.

A military honor guard carried a flower-draped coffin up the wide front steps. Marines in dress blues stood at attention on either side. Behind the coffin came the President of the United States, his face as white and still as if it had been carved from marble, his two adult children and their families close behind him. They were followed by Wayne Cooper, the President’s father; his sister, Elizabeth; and a gaggle of other family members Jess didn’t recognize. A contingent of Secret Service agents glancing cautiously from side to side and receiving instructions via ear-buds formed a moving wall of protection that fanned out on either side of the family party and brought up the rear. The hearse and the long black motorcade surrounding it waited at the curb. In the opposite lane from the motorcade, boxy white news vans with satellite feeds formed a nucleus around which a heaving mass of reporters, held at bay by stern-faced lines of uniformed cops manning sawhorse barriers, narrated the proceedings for their various audiences. Other than the motorcade and the media, the street was empty, obviously having been cleared in anticipation of the arrival and eventual departure of the funeral cortege. Hundreds of mourners lined the sidewalk across the street from the cathedral, pressing up against more sawhorses controlled by more somber-looking cops. The camera panned the crowd, and suddenly thousands of ordinary citizens, dressed in everything from jeans and sweatshirts to business suits to the ethnic attire of many cultures, packed the shot for as far as the eye could see.

“. . . sensational story reaches its tragic culmination now, as the First Lady of the United States is carried in her coffin into the National Cathedral. Annette Wiley Cooper first appeared on the national scene five years ago, when her husband became Vice President upon the death of then Vice President Thomas Haynes. This past November, David Cooper won the presidency, and in the brief months since his inauguration, Annette Cooper cemented her hold on the affection of a nation. The causes close to her heart were education and literacy, and . . .”

“Mr. Davenport is there in the cathedral, you know.” Marian cast an evil look Jess’s way as she spoke over the TV. “I was invited to attend, too, but he asked me to stay with you instead.”

“I’m sorry you had to miss it.” Jess’s careful politeness was an attempt to neutralize Marian’s barely veiled venom. She didn’t think it worked, but at least the other woman shifted her gaze back to the TV.

Jess did, too, to find that on the screen now it was night, with the flashing strobe lights of an ambulance painting bright bursts of blue and red across the small, dark-haired figure on a stretcher that was being loaded into its open back.

With a shock Jess realized she was looking at a taped shot that had been filmed in the immediate aftermath of the crash, and that the victim on the stretcher was her.

She swallowed hard.

“. . . sole survivor of the accident, attorney Jessica Ford. So far investigators say she has been unable to remember any of the details of what happened that night, although it is believed that she was accompanying Mrs. Cooper on her doomed dash to the hospital at the request of Mrs. Cooper’s longtime friend and personal lawyer, and Miss Ford’s boss, John Davenport, who sent the car. . . .”

Suddenly Jess found herself watching another taped shot, of Davenport walking up the steps of the National Cathedral with his tall, blond, ex-model wife, Brianna, at his side. Fit and trim at fifty-eight, with thinning white hair and a thick white mustache set off by a tan that Jess knew was carefully maintained, he looked nothing if not distinguished. Both he and his wife, with whom he had two young children, were clad in black, both wore sunglasses, and both emanated Washington-insider glamour. It was clear that the scene had taken place only a short time ago, while the mourners filed into the church prior to the casket’s arrival.

“I hate to interrupt, but they’re getting ready to take Mrs. Cooper inside now.” Katie Couric broke in on the reporter’s recitation, and the shot turned live again as the coffin was carried into the sanctuary to the strains of
Ruffles and Flourishes.
Still walking behind it, President David Cooper bowed his head. One on either side of him now, his children clasped his hands.

Jess couldn’t watch any longer. Chest tight, throat burning, she thought of Annette Cooper as she had last seen her and felt a dreadful, tearing grief for the woman and her family. Tears springing to her eyes, she fled to the nearest bedroom.

And cried until she had no more tears left to shed.

She wasn’t prone to crying. In fact, she almost never cried. She was the stoic, practical oldest child who kept her head in any crisis and who everyone looked to for a solution to any problem. Ms. Fix-it, her mother called her. But since the accident—well,
Cry Me a River
wasn’t only the title to a song.

By the time she emerged into the living room again, it was nearly nine p.m. She had slept, been awakened by Marian with the news that Davenport would be there at nine, refused an offer of carryout for supper, then slept some more. Finally she had gotten up, taken a long shower, and dressed in anticipation of the meeting with Davenport. Restoring her glasses to her purse, she popped in a new pair of contacts for the first time since the accident. She blow-dried her hair into its usual no-nonsense style, and did what she could with what little makeup she possessed to cover the now yellowing bruises. Fortunately, Grace had packed one of her favorite work outfits, a black Armani skirt suit that she’d gotten on major sale at Filene’s Basement and wore with a white silk blouse, which, since Jess kept the entire outfit on a single hanger in her closet, her sister had included. Her good black heels, the expensive ones Grace had borrowed, were in there, too, and Jess had to fight off an instant, automatic flashback to last Saturday night as she slid her feet into them. Her favorite old sneakers, just like the ruined clothes she’d been wearing at the time of the crash, were presumably in the bundle that had been given to her mother. She had worn brand-new sneakers with a sweatsuit in the helicopter earlier, fearing that any departure from what she normally wore around the hospital would alert the Secret Service agents outside her room to her pending escape. But tonight, because she was meeting Davenport, she dressed as she would for work; looking professional was part of getting ahead.

The TV was still on when Jess rolled into the living room. So was a lamp beside the couch. The rest of the apartment was dark. The curtains were closed. Marian sat in a corner of the couch, her jacket discarded so that she wore only her lavender blouse and gray skirt, shoes off, slender legs drawn up beside her, the remote control in her hand.

Home movies of Annette Cooper growing up were playing on the screen. Jess took one look and refused to look again.

“Have you heard from Mr. Davenport?” she asked. It was obvious that he was not yet there.

Marian nodded and stood up, clicking the remote to turn off the TV.

“He asked me to bring you to meet him. Your appointment is at nine-thirty sharp.” Marian stuck her feet in her shoes as she spoke, then pulled on her suit jacket.

Jess frowned. “Where are we going?”

Marian scooped up a set of keys from the bowl on the coffee table and headed toward the door. Jess turned—she was getting really good at working the wheelchair—to keep her in sight.

“
We
aren’t going anywhere.” There was an unmistakable edge of bitterness to Marian’s voice. Her eyes were cold as they raked Jess. “He wants to meet with
you.
On your own. Tonight, I’m just your driver.”