Pursuit (41 page)

“You don’t think I have one, do you?”

“I’m hoping.”

“Oh, ye of little faith.” Mark stopped walking, turned her to face him, cupped her face in his hands, and kissed her again. A brief, hard kiss that nonetheless made her breath catch and her heart beat faster.

“Mark . . .” She curled her hands around his wrists.

“That conversation about whether you meant it about being in love with me? We ’re going to finish it. Later.”

Then, taking her hand, looking both ways, he hurried her across the street and into the dark environs of the park.

S
o what are we doing here?” Jess’s voice was low.

It was stupid, she knew, considering that she had an armed federal agent by her side who had just proved himself lethal in the extreme when conditions warranted, and ordinary criminals were the least of her problems anyway, but the dimly lit paths and shadowy areas beyond them gave her the shivers. They weren’t alone by any means, but only a few others—a trio of goths with black everything, a hulking teenager with a blue mohawk and a chain hanging from his jeans, a man in tattered clothing who was shuffling out of the light toward the tent city for the homeless that sprang up each night at the far end of the park—were visible. The rest lurked in the shadows, conducting their business under the trees, behind the bushes, in the lee of almost forgotten statues and monuments. Drunks sprawled on the grass, swigging from open bottles. A few teenagers made out. The heavy, sweet scent of pot wafted past in occasional drifts. The fact that the White House could be seen glowing like the proverbial beacon on a hill in the near distance didn’t seem to discourage anybody from anything. It was there, a fact of D.C. life, and it was ignored.

“I thought of somebody who might’ve seen the First Lady after she snuck out of the White House and before you picked her up at the hotel. Somebody she might have talked to.”

“Who?”

“A woman she met when she was touring a halfway house. Her name is Dawn Turney. A real sad case, was an accountant before she got addicted to crack and crystal meth. She got arrested, lost everything, went to jail, then went into the halfway house, supposedly cured. She and Mrs. Cooper used to meet privately sometimes to talk about the woman’s progress—one of her charity cases. Only we found out a few months ago that Dawn was also supplying her with drugs. We put a stop to the meetings—we thought—and then we found out that Dawn was hanging out here in the park, dealing and doing drugs. The First Lady found out, too, before we did. She would ‘accidentally’ run into her sometimes while she was out jogging at night and they’d do a drug deal with her detail looking on. Of course, they didn’t know what the hell they were seeing. They just thought it was a harmless chat with some fringe person she somehow knew.”

“You think she met this woman before going on to the hotel?”

Mark shrugged. “It’s possible. She had drugs in her purse that night. I checked. We ’d been weaning her off oxy, but when I looked inside the bottle she hid her pills in I saw she had some. Where’d she get them? My gut says here.”

Jess felt like a thousand unseen eyes were watching them through the dark. Her skin crawled at the thought. Two members of the hit-man contingent were dead. That didn’t mean there weren’t more. In fact, the hard truth was that of course there were more. She tightened her grip on his hand.

“Mark. I think we need to get out of D.C. I think we need to run away from here as hard and fast and far as we can.”

“Yeah, I think so, too.” The fact that he agreed with her scared her almost more than anything else had done. It told her that
he
thought the net was closing in, the situation was getting out of control, the odds of them being caught were ratcheting ever higher. “I want to talk to this woman first, see if she saw the First Lady that night and if she can shed any light on what was going on with her before somebody else tumbles to the fact that she might know something and gets rid of her. Then we ’ll get the hell out of Dodge while we try to figure out what to do.” He hesitated, but from the expression on his face Jess didn’t have any trouble divining the rest.

“I know that doesn’t mean they’ll quit coming after us.” Her voice was flat. A deep tiredness that she recognized as the forerunner of despair was creeping over her, making her suddenly conscious of the renewed ache in her legs and back, her growing headache, her need for sleep. “They’ll never quit, will they?”

“Not as long as they think we ’re a threat. The good news is, we’re doing a helluva job outrunning them.”

Jess shivered. “For now.”

“Now’s all we ’ve got. It ’s really all anybody’s got.”

They had reached the statue of Andrew Jackson on horseback that dominated this section of the park. It was set in a concrete circle that was barely visible as a pale ring around the monument. The lights surrounding it were out, either from lack of maintenance or, more likely, from deliberate vandalism. Benches leading up to it were mostly occupied. People milled around the circle, moving in and out of the nearby bushes and trees. Jess couldn’t see anyone clearly. They were dark wraiths weaving through darker shadows.

“Stay close,” Mark breathed as they left the path for the concrete circle, and Jess did.

They were accosted immediately.

“You got a twenty you can give me, man?” The punk was one of a group that had been smoking dope near the bronze horse’s raised forelegs. All Jess could see of him through the darkness was that he was under six feet tall and stocky, with long, stringy hair. He planted himself in front of Mark, still holding his joint, the tip of which glowed red. The smell of weed was strong.

“I’m looking for Dawn. She around?”

“You want to buy some shit, man? I got shit.”

“I want Dawn.”

“Who’s that looking for me?” A woman pushed through the group and came toward them. Reed-thin, with teased black hair that fell down past her shoulders and a face so pale it seemed to float through the darkness like an oval moon, she was wearing skinny pants and an oversized sweatshirt. “Who wants Dawn?”

Mark didn’t say anything, just turned his head to watch her approach. A few steps away, some of the swagger left her gait.

“Oh, it’s you.” It was clear from her tone that she recognized Mark and didn’t like him. “What do
you
want?” Then in an aside to her stringy-haired friend, she added, “Get out of here, Daryl, he ’s a Fed.”

“Oh, shit,” Daryl said, and disappeared into the shadows.

“I want to talk to you,” Mark said.

“About what?”

“Mrs. Cooper. Did you happen to see her a couple of hours before she died?”

Dawn crossed her arms over her chest and glanced away without saying anything. Jess could see the sudden tension in her body.

“I’m not looking to bust you or get you into any trouble. I just need some information.”

Dawn’s gaze fastened on Jess.

“Who’s that?” Her voice was heavy with suspicion.

“Nobody you need to worry about.”

“I ain’t talking about nothin’ in front of somebody I don’t know.” Her eyes rested on Jess.

“I’ll just go wait for you over there,” Jess said to Mark, nodding toward the nearby base of the statue. When he squeezed her hand, then let go, she took it to mean that he agreed with her assessment as to the best course of action and moved off. None of the shifting clumps of people eddying around them seemed to be paying her the least bit of attention, but still she didn’t go as far as the statue ’s base, because that was where everybody seemed to be hanging out and because it was really dark there and it would be easy to lose sight of Mark. Instead, she stopped just a few paces away, out of Dawn’s sight but close enough that when she turned around, she could still clearly see Mark. And, she thought, he could see her.

“So you saw Mrs. Cooper that night.”

Folding her arms over her chest and doing her best to fight off the shivers that assailed her, Jess realized she could still hear their conversation. Mark’s tone had made it a statement rather than a question.

“Maybe she bought some ’killers from me, I don’t know.” Dawn sounded sulky.

“Was she by herself ?”

“If she was here, she was.”

“She say anything or do anything to make you think she might be upset?”

Dawn hesitated.

“She was good to you, Dawn,” Mark said. “It would mean a lot to her memory if you could help us out with this.”

“Yeah, okay. She was real jumpy, said she needed the ’killers to help her calm down. Her hands were shaking when she paid me, you know? And she kept looking around, like she was expecting
you
to jump out of the bushes.” She said that last with a touch of venom.

“She say anything about why she was upset?”

Dawn shook her head. “Only other thing she said was she asked me about e-mail. She asked me if I knew how to e-mail something. A video that was on her phone. I said, hell, no.”

“A video—” Mark began, but broke off as the sound of footsteps pounding through the grass in front of the statue caused him to look sharply around. Pulse leaping, Jess took an automatic step back, her eyes widening as her gaze shot past him.

To discover what looked like an onrushing wall of men.

“Mark Ryan?” one of them called.

“Run,”
Mark barked in her direction as he whipped around, his hand diving for his gun.

Jess screamed it in her head as she was almost knocked off her feet by Dawn’s sudden dash away. Even as she regained her balance, even as her eyes found Mark again, there was a whistling sound and he groaned and staggered and then dropped, just dropped like a stone, falling to the concrete like he ’d been shot.

A sudden unwanted vision of how the man Mark had shot dropped flashed into her head.

Mark had crumpled just like that.

Her heart gave a great thump. Her feet rooted to the spot. Her mouth opened to shriek, but her throat had closed up so tight no sound could escape. Then, without warning, she was hit by a wall of people, borne backward by the stampede of cursing, shouting bystanders fleeing the scene, and for a moment she could no longer see Mark.

She got knocked on her butt, and by the time she managed to scramble to her hands and knees and look again, there was a quartet of men in suits standing over Mark, three of them with guns drawn, one reaching down as though to check his vital signs.

Mark didn’t move. Didn’t make a sound. Just lay there facedown on the pale concrete around the statue. It was too dark and she was too far away to tell if he was breathing, to see if his chest rose and fell.

Everything in her wanted to go to him, run to him, fling herself down on top of him and do what she could to save him.

But there was nothing she could do.

Even as she faced that terrible truth, one of the suited men started glancing around, scanning the dark. As if he were looking for—what? Her?

They knew who Mark was—they had called him by name. That meant they almost certainly knew about her.

Jess rolled onto her hands and knees and started crawling away. The short, crisp grass was cold and damp beneath her palms. The scent of earth was strong. Bottles, cans, still-smoldering cigarette butts, all kinds of assorted trash that had been flung down in the mass exodus created what was basically an obstacle course in her path, and she did her best to dodge them. As soon as she judged she was far enough away so that they couldn’t see her, she reeled to her feet and stumbled rubbery-legged into the dark.

It was only as her vision blurred that she felt the tears that were pouring thick and fast down her cheeks.

J
ess had never been so cold in her life. Her teeth chattered. She shivered like she would never stop. She felt like she was freezing to death from the inside out. Her throat ached. Tears rolled down her cheeks. Sobs racked her.

She was running, lurching, staggering, scrambling away from him as fast as she could go. Leaving him lying there like that was tearing out her heart. But to go back, to let herself be taken as well, would do him no good. If they succeeded in killing her, too, they would get away with it. The truth of who they were and the terrible things they had done would never be known.

And if Mark wasn’t dead—please, God, please—maybe there was a chance that she could still save him.

If she could just come up with a plan in time. She latched onto the thought with a feverish urgency. It was all that kept her from going to pieces.

What she needed was proof that the First Lady had been murdered. Proof that she had been running from something and they had killed her before she could get away. Proof she could take to, say, the
Post.
She would go to their headquarters and tell everyone there what was happening, what she suspected, what had happened to Mark, to their own Marty Solomon, Davenport, Marian—all of them. And show the proof.

Which she didn’t have.

Without proof, would anyone listen? Yes. Would they believe? Hmm. Would they print her words, her claims, and at least get them out there for the public to judge for themselves? She thought so, given her status as “the survivor,” but she couldn’t be sure. Washington was a company town, and whoever was behind this had the kind of power and influence that could maybe find a way of making the story disappear. Just like they could make her disappear.

Maybe she should run straight to the police. The FBI. Somebody like that. But that might be an even faster route to disappearing. Unless she chose the right agency, the right cop or agent, she could be whisked away easily, never to be heard from again. No, she should go to the
Post,
tell her story, and have them call both the police and the FBI. Even if they took her away, even if they made her disappear, at least there would be witnesses. Lots of witnesses. Not even killers as ruthless as these could take out a whole newsroom, plus assorted innocent, uninvolved cops and FBI agents, too. Because there had to be more who weren’t involved than who were. The trick lay in knowing which was which.