Seven Grams of Lead (35 page)

He nodded to the driver, the SUV pulled away, and he pulled her into a warm embrace. “You okay?” he asked.

As she’d told her campaign staff, this John Doe, whose real name was Lloyd David, looked as good as Michelangelo’s
David
, dressed in an Armani suit. She realized, with some surprise, that she no longer thought of him as more than a friend and a lawyer.

“For the first time in a long time, it feels like I’m not behind enemy lines,” she said, adding, for the fourth time since arriving in D.C., “Where’s Russ Thornton?”

“Theoretically, with his attorney,” David said. “I was hoping you knew, actually.”

She shook her head. “Last time I talked to him, the marine guard was dragging me off to a holding room.”

“Well, you’ll know as soon as we do.” He held the door and trailed her into a palatial corridor.

It was nice for a change to be someplace that wasn’t a deathtrap.

“The partners who’ll handle your defense can meet you here or at the office,” he told her. “After all you’ve been through, if you want to rest first, they’ll understand.”

“I’m ready to get on the witness stand right now.”

“I figured you’d say that. There are a few more clothing-shop bags in the room. Pick out what you want, and as soon as you’re ready, we’ll be ready.”

He pushed the elevator button. The brass doors parted, revealing a cavernous mahogany elevator. She leaned against the stout brass handrail, deriving a measure of contentment from its solidity. David inserted a key card and selected the top floor. The car rose quietly, as though drawn by a hot-air balloon.

He regarded the mirrored ceiling. “You look great as a blonde.”

“I had
too much
fun as a blonde,” she said.

The car coasted to a stop, the doors hissing open. He ushered her to a corner room, where he held his key to the handle. When the lock disengaged, he pushed the door inward, waving her ahead. Stepping across the threshold, she gazed into his eyes, which were as beguiling as ever. Yet she thought of Thornton, which made her wonder why David had been hoping she knew where Thornton was.

“How did they get to you?” she asked.

He whitened. “How did you know?”

“I didn’t.” She was probably the more surprised of the two. “I’ve learned that sometimes it pays to ask.”

“I had no choice.” He eyed the ceiling. “But there may be a solution.”

Mallery heard what sounded like a quarter dropping into a vending machine’s coin return tray. A crimson dot appeared between David’s eyebrows, and he crumpled to the carpet, revealing a matching crimson starburst on the wallpaper where his head had been. Shock belted her.

“As Pasteur said, ‘Fortune favors the prepared,’ ” came a soft voice behind her.

A brawny military type in a porter’s uniform, pushing a luggage trolley. He held a pistol with a long barrel—a silencer, she guessed.

“Don’t go anywhere,” he added.

For a moment she remained in place. Then she leaped into the hotel room, landing in a marble foyer and immediately whirling around, slamming the
door shut, snapping the deadbolt, and slapping the security latch into place. Another coin-return sound and a projectile of some sort flew at her face, missing by a fraction of an inch and shattering the mirror behind her. It left a circular gap in the door. The deadbolt cylinder, she realized, plucking it from the glass shards piled beneath the remains of the mirror.

The man opened the regular lock with a key card, then rammed the security latch to pieces with the heavy luggage trolley.

“Don’t do more stupid things and there’s a chance you won’t die,” he said, “at least of unnatural causes.”

Keeping the gun pointed at her, he used his free arm to lift David from the carpet as though he were no heavier than a golf bag.

“What will it take for you to let me go?” she asked.

The man flopped David onto the trolley. “You mean how much money?”

“Is that what you want?”

“You don’t have enough.”

Good, she thought. They were negotiating. “How much is enough?” she asked.

He ran a hand over his sandy crew cut. “Not to be immodest, but I can’t put a price on my life.”

If, like Firstbrook, he had been coerced or just following orders, perhaps they could reach another type of deal.
There may be a solution
were David’s last words.

“Who would kill you?” she ventured.

“Glad you asked,” he said.

“Why?”

“It tells me you don’t know, which is more than ample compensation for having to give up this suite. Thanks to your late attorney, we need to relocate.” He pointed at one of the two large duffel bags on the trolley. “I need you to curl up in here and be as quiet as its current contents.”

He leaned over and unzipped the duffel bag, stuffed with white hotel towels—to make the bag appear full on the way up to the room, she surmised. And now he’d replace the towels with bodies.

“I won’t do it,” she said.

“What makes you think you have a choice?” He kneeled to remove the towels, not a simple job.

This was her chance.

She reached back with the hand that had been cupping the deadbolt cylinder, then threw a fastball. It struck him in the temple with a clonk that must have been heard all the way down in the lobby. Eyes going white, he toppled toward the trolley, landing in a seated position, his spine cracking against one of the thick brass stanchions. Still he was able to raise his pistol and snap the trigger. Something pierced her right thigh. A rocket, it felt like, boring through bone and tissue before bursting into flames. She hadn’t imagined that a bullet could be so painful. Or that anything could be.

Thornton turned Langlind’s
Ford Expedition onto Independence Avenue. The ultramodern Hirshhorn Museum loomed ahead like a spacecraft touching down on the National Mall. If the basis for choosing the art museum were smaller crowds, it was a poor choice, he thought, taking in the line snaking from the entrance. His mind played a feverish montage of other “big man” candidates—the twenty-foot-tall statue of Jefferson, its neighbor the thirty-foot Martin Luther King, the bronze FDR.

If worse came to worst, he thought, he could use Langlind’s phone to text Mr. X requesting a new location
2 b on safe side.

He checked the phone. As he’d feared, the local police scanner site’s live audio feed now included an
Alexandria PD dispatcher’s request for units to respond to a 911 call at the address he’d just left. A code 36: murder.

Further complicating matters, he had just ten minutes until the meeting time. Still he drove another five blocks before pulling into a parking spot across from a McDonald’s on 4th Street Southwest. The police dispatched to the Alexandria house would almost certainly figure out that Langlind’s Expedition was missing. Thornton had to assume that the SUV was equipped with a LoJack or comparable system. The precise location of a stolen-vehicle recovery system within a vehicle was known only to the company that installed it. Parking too close to the Hirshhorn could electronically clue the authorities to his whereabouts. As would his safety net, Langlind’s cell phone. He exited the Expedition, crossed 4th Street, and tossed the phone into an open side of the truck delivering Coca-Cola to the McDonald’s.

As he continued toward the Mall, he spotted a Capitol PD cruiser in an intersection two blocks up Independence. He was thankful he’d worn a disguise to keep Mr. X from recognizing him. It would help with police, too. He hoped. From the cedar-lined his-and-hers closets in the master bedroom in Selena Seldridge’s house in Alexandria, he’d taken one of Langlind’s custom-made business suits. Several sizes too big, the suit made him look bulkier, an effect augmented by two of Langlind’s cashmere sweaters, which he wore underneath. Hair extensions from Seldridge’s
closet hung down the back of his neck, like a mullet. He’d topped them with a traditional Stetson. Incredibly misguided, all of this, an inner voice warned.

Just as he stepped onto Independence, the Capitol PD cruiser slid to a stop fifty feet ahead. Two policemen bounded onto the curb in front of him, causing his stomach to plummet. The cops blew past him, weaving through the crowd of pedestrians before turning down 4th Street. Toward Langlind’s SUV? Thornton suspected that a seasoned operator would abort the meeting rather than risk capture, or risk that Mr. X had gotten wind of Langlind’s demise. But taking these risks was Thornton’s only option.

Approaching the museum entrance, he added a swagger befitting his appearance, which he thought of as “oilman with a rockabilly side.” He joined the line for the metal detector. None of the fifty seniors descending the tour bus gave him a second look.

Inside, a security guard beckoned him through the metal detection portal. He hoped that the clips holding the hair extensions in place were plastic. His four layers of clothing, two too many for the mild afternoon, caused him to sweat enough as it was. While passing through the portal, he mopped his brow with the outermost of his four left sleeves. The guard waved him ahead. Thornton tipped his cap, intending to appear polite; his true intent was concealment. Why give the security camera a free shot?

The building was shaped like a doughnut, the
exhibits within a ring that surrounded an outdoor sculpture garden. Other than exchanging a smile with a young woman strolling a happy toddler, Thornton had no interaction with any of the patrons. At the sign for the Mueck installation, he turned down a long corridor that ended at the untitled sculpture, a photorealistic portrayal of a middle-aged bald man sitting in a corner, naked, head in hands, the agony in his eyes unmistakable even thirty yards away. Three times the size of life, Thornton judged, based on the man in a trench coat standing beside the sculpture. Mr. X? If so, alone, unless he had associates elsewhere—Thornton took note of the men’s and women’s rooms at the corridor’s midpoint. No one else was in the corridor, whose bare white walls emphasized the sculpture.

Apparently sensing Thornton’s arrival, the man in the trench coat glanced over his shoulder. Taking in Thornton without recognition, he turned back to the sculpture. Which gave Thornton a fairly good idea of why and on whose orders Catherine Peretti had been murdered. The man in front of him was her husband, Richard Hoagland.

Thornton said, “I
want to help,” by which he meant he wanted to learn why Peretti had been killed, so he could help the prosecution in the coming murder trial.

Hoagland’s blank stare flickered to recognition, then to shock. “Russ, what are you doing here?”

“Exactly what you encouraged me to do: investigating.” It now seemed likely to Thornton that by making the suggestion, Hoagland had really meant to discourage him. “And I have a question for you: Is the secret to your hedge fund’s success the information that you collect using eavesdropping devices implanted in people’s heads?”

Hoagland chuckled. “Have you been talking to one of our competitors?”

“Look, I get it. In your business, the only crime is being on the wrong side of a deal. Littlebird wasn’t just the chance of a lifetime, but one for which you would risk the wrath of God. If someone threatened to expose the operation, even a family member, your bosses wouldn’t hesitate—”

“Russ?”

Thornton waited.

“I actually have to run to a meeting.” Hoagland turned to go. “Call next time you’re in town, and let’s get together.”

“Hang on.” On the chance that Hoagland was afraid to talk, rather than just unwilling, Thornton grabbed him by the elbow. This drew strange looks from the young couple wandering down the corridor. Thornton released Hoagland with a laugh, as if the move had been horseplay, but added under his breath, “My Littlebird was removed. If there’s one in your head, it’s out of commission.”

“How could that be?” Hoagland was transfixed. Or a hell of an actor.

“Haven’t you heard that the listening post in Bridgetown is a pile of rubble?”

“No. What happened?”

“According to the authorities, I blew it up.”

“Why would you do that?” Hoagland asked.

An odd question if he had any inkling of the truth, thought Thornton. “I didn’t,” he said. “Actually, the last thing I would have wanted was to destroy the evidence. Whoever you’re covering for was responsible,
and took out a security guard and a local cop in the process. If you give me names, maybe we can get you enough brownie points to avoid doing time.”

Hoagland paused, as though reflecting. “I can’t help you,” he said finally.

“Think of it as helping Emily and Sabrina.”

“That’s exactly what I’m doing. Catherine was told what would happen if she talked, and obviously it wasn’t an idle threat. Afterward, it was made very clear to me that if I said anything, the next funeral wouldn’t be mine; it would be one of the girls’. Not both. Just one.”

“Incremental incentive?”

Hoagland exhaled. “Now you have some idea of what I’m up against.”

“I’m glad to know you’re not responsible for Catherine’s death. But what happens when whoever they are decide they’ll sleep better if you’re no longer around? Tell me the real story; I’ll post the details to my site. I won’t mention your name, but you’ll no longer be a liability for the bad guys because a quarter of a million readers will know the truth. Also the bad guys will have their hands full with law enforcement agencies.”

Hoagland hesitated and then said, “Catherine promised me she wasn’t going to tell anyone, so I don’t know this for sure, but I believe that in going to see you, she was planning to expose the ‘bad guys.’ And how did that work out?”

“Unfortunately, they were already onto her. But
they’re not onto you—for now. The thing is, that window won’t be open long. Whoever they are, they won’t worry about murders. They’ve actually pinned a couple on me. In fact, the police are looking for me.”

Four of the seniors from the tour bus joined the young couple already admiring the sculpture.

Hoagland stepped closer to Thornton, opened his mouth as though about to speak, then, apparently thinking better of it, sighed.

Hearing police chatter reverberate from a radio around the corner, Thornton’s stomach tightened. “Look, I know it’s a DOC operation,” he said—a guess, but not entirely a blind one.