The Inner Circle (41 page)

As he slid it out and flipped the blade open, the lasts bits of snow were blown from the tree bark.

Across the field, both Beecher and Dallas had their backs to him.

The tornado was about to start swirling a whole lot faster.

83

National Archives,” a familiar voice says through my phone. “How may I direct your call?”

“Katya, it’s Beecher. Can you transfer me over to Mr. Harmon in Presidential Records?” Standing in the snow and reading the confusion on Dallas’s face, I explain, “The goal is to find what really happened on February 16th, right? The problem is, the only record from the sixteenth is that police report, which is a record that Palmiotti created himself. But what if we could find out where Palmiotti and Wallace were on the seventeenth… or even the eighteenth?”

Dallas’s eyes tighten as he tries to put it together. He knows the problem. Twenty-six years ago, Wallace wasn’t President. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any presidential records.

“Okay, so when this happened… Twenty-six years ago, the President was… back in college,” Dallas adds, quickly doing the math.

Dallas knows how the Archives work. He knows what we keep. And knows that when Wallace or any other President gets elected, the very first thing we do is start a file for them. But most of all, we start
filling that file—
by preserving that person’s history. We start collecting photos and family pictures, mementos and birth records and elementary school reports.

It’s how we have those baby photos of Clinton—and how we know what was written in Bush’s and Obama’s fifth-grade report cards. We know those documents are eventually headed for a presidential library, so the moment a new President is elected, the government starts grabbing everything it can. And best of all, guess who’s in charge of storing it?

“You think there’re records from where Palmiotti was on February 16th?” Dallas asks.

“We know he was in Ohio. The police report says so. He and Wallace were both home from college, which means—”

“This is Mr. Harmon,” a curt voice snaps through the phone. As one of our top people in Presidential Records, Steve Harmon doesn’t apologize for being impatient, or for referring to himself as Mr. Harmon. A former navy man, all he cares about are facts.

“Mr. Harmon, this is Beecher calling—from Old Military.”

“Katya told me.”

“Yes, well, er—I have a request here for some records from when President Wallace was in college, and—”

“Most of those records haven’t been processed yet.”

“I know, sir, but we’re trying to track down a particular date—the week of February 16th—back during the President’s final year of college.” As I say the words, even though she’s way down the path and nearly a football field away, Clementine glances over her shoulder. I don’t care whose daughter she is. No way can she hear me. She turns away and continues walking. “It’s for a friend of the foundation,” I tell Harmon.

In Archives terms,
friend of the foundation
means one of the bigshot donors who help sponsor so many of our exhibits.

From the silence on the phone, I know Mr. Harmon’s annoyed. But he’s also well aware that the only reason we’re still allowed to display one of the original Magna Cartas is because a friend of the foundation—the head of the Carlyle Group—loans it to us.

“Put the request in writing. I’ll take a look,” Mr. Harmon says.

The click in my ear tells me he’s gone.

“Wallace’s college records?” Dallas asks as I put away my phone and we both stand there, our feet eaten by the snow. “You really think the smoking gun’s in some old English paper? ‘What I Did During Spring Break—And How We Hid Eightball’s Body,’ by Orson Wallace?”

“There’s no smoking gun, Dallas. What I’m looking for is a timeline. And if we’re lucky, this’ll tell us whether, during that week, Wallace came back to class or was so traumatized by what happened, he spent some time away.”

“So you’re looking for attendance records? Hate to remind you, but they don’t take attendance in college.”

“And I hate to remind you, but you have no idea what they take. Maybe when Wallace got back to school he spoke to a guidance counselor, and there’s an incident report still floating in his old student file,” I say as I look over Dallas’s shoulder, where Clementine is just a tiny speck of coal in the white distance.

Another twig snaps back by the treeline. “We should get out of here,” I say.

Watching me watching Clementine, Dallas follows me to the graveyard’s concrete path, which still holds the trail of her impacted-snow footprints. “Beecher, do you have any idea how the Culper Ring has managed to successfully stay secret for over two hundred years?”

“Trust.”

“Exactly. Trust,” Dallas says. “Two hundred years of trusting the right people. Now let me ask you a question: Did you tell Clementine everything I said about the Culper Ring?”

“You told me not to.”

“I did. But the point is, you listened. And y’know why you listened? Because even though, when it comes to Clementine, there’s a little voice in your pants that’s been telling you what to do—when you thought about telling her about the Culper Ring, there was a second voice—the voice in your head—that told you
not
to. For whatever reason, something in your brain told you that Clementine shouldn’t know this one. And that’s the voice you need to listen to, Beecher. It’ll lead you far better than the voice in your pants,” he says as he steps out onto the concrete path and plants his own snow footprint right over Clementine’s.

“I appreciate the talking-penis analogy, but let’s be honest, Dallas—if I didn’t have Clementine with me this morning, I never would’ve even gotten in to see Nico.”

“And that’s so bad?”

“If Nico didn’t see that sheet, we wouldn’t’ve gotten here,” I point out, catching up to him and holding out the empty rock.

“What’re you talking about?”

“The coordinates. North 38 degrees, west 77 degrees—”

“Go back,” Dallas says, stopping on the path. “You showed him the actual invisible ink sheet?”

“No, I—” I pat my jacket pockets, then my jeans. Don’t tell me I—

“
What
, Beecher? You
gave
Nico the sheet?”

“Of course not. In the rush… we were so excited… I think I left it.”

“You didn’t
leave
it, Beecher. He
took
it. Didn’t you see
Silence of the Lambs
? He absolutely
took
it—which means in your quest to figure out who’s messing with the President, you gave the full story to the mental patient who once tried to assassinate one!”

I try to tell myself that Nico doesn’t know that the note was for Wallace, but it’s drowned out by the fact that there are only two types of people who ever come to see Nico: fellow crazies and desperate reporters.

“You better pray he doesn’t have access to copiers or scanners,” Dallas says, reminding me exactly what’ll happen if Nico puts that sheet of paper in the hands of either of those two groups.

I look downhill, checking for Clementine. She’s gone. In her place, all I see is Nico and the calm, measured way he said
thank you
when I left. He definitely took it.

“Don’t tell me you’re going back to St. Elizabeths,” Dallas calls out, though he already knows the answer.

“I have to,” I tell him as I pick up speed. “I need to get back what Nico took from us.”

84

It was something that the one with the ungroomed beard—Dallas—it was something Dallas had said.

Squinting through the front windshield as the morning sun pinged off the piles of soot-capped snow, the barber couldn’t help but notice the sudden increase in the number of the neighborhood’s liquor stores and laundromats. Of course, there was a barbershop. There was always a barbershop, he knew, spying the hand-painted sign with the words
Fades To Braids
in big red letters.

Kicking the brakes as he approached a red light, he didn’t regret holding back at the cemetery. He was ready. He’d made his peace. But when he heard those words leave Dallas’s lips, he knew there was still one box that needed to be checked.

Twenty-six years ago, he’d acted in haste. Looking back at it, though, he didn’t regret that either. He did the best he could in the moment.

Just as he was doing now.

As the light winked green, he twisted the wheel into a sharp left turn, fishtailing for a split second in a mass of gray slush. As the car found traction, Laurent knew he was close.

This was it.

He knew it from the moment he saw the building in the distance.

He knew it as he felt the straight-edge razor that still called to him from his pocket.

He knew it as he saw—parked at the top of the hill—the silver car that Beecher had been driving.

And he knew it when he spotted, just next to the main gate, the thin black letters that spelled out those same two words that had left Dallas’s lips back in the cemetery.

St. Elizabeths.

The greater good would finally be served.

85

It takes me nineteen minutes to drop Dallas at the Archives, eleven minutes to drive his silver Toyota back to St. Elizabeths, and a full forty seconds for me to stand outside, working on my story, before I push open the front door of Nico’s building.

“I… hi… sorry… I think I left my notebook upstairs,” I say to the guard, feigning idiocy and holding up the temporary ID sticker that she gave me a little over an hour ago.

The guard with the bad Dutch-boy hair rolls her eyes.

“Just make it quick,” she says as a loud
tunk
opens the steel door, and I take my second trip of the day through the metal detector.

“Don’t worry,” I tell her. “I’ll be lightning.”

Trying hard to stand still, I fight my body as it follows the rhythmic sway of the rising elevator.

An hour ago, when I was standing here, I was holding Clementine’s hand. Right now, I lean hard on that thought, though it does nothing to calm me.

As the doors rumble open and I step out, the same black woman with the same big key ring is waiting for me.

“Forgot your notebook, huh?” she asks with a laugh. “Hope there’s no phone numbers in there. You don’t want Nico calling your relatives.”

I pretend to laugh along as she again opens the metal door and leads me down the hallway, back to the day room.

“Christopher, can you help him out?” the woman asks, passing me to a heavy male nurse in a freshly starched white shirt. “We got some more visitors coming up right now.”

As she leaves me behind, I take a quick scan of the fluorescent-lit day room: patients watching various TVs, nurses flipping through various clipboards, there’s even someone feeding coins into the soda machine. But as I check the Plexiglas round table in the corner…

No Nico.

“Who you here for again?” the heavy male nurse asks as he fluffs pillows and straightens one of the many saggy sofas.

“Nico,” I say, holding up my ID sticker like it’s a badge. “I was here seeing Nico, but I think I left my notebook.”

He does his own scan of the area, starting with the round table. He knows Nico’s routine.

“I bet he’s in his room—711,” he says, pointing me to the swinging doors on the far left. “Don’t worry, you can go yourself. Nico’s got room visitor privileges.”

“Yeah… no… I’ll be quick,” I say, taking off for the swinging doors and reminding myself what they first told me: This is a hospital, not a prison. But as I push the doors open and the bright day room narrows into the far smaller, far darker, far quieter hospital hallway, the sudden silence makes me all too aware of how alone I am back here.

At the end of the hall is an internal metal staircase that’s blocked off by a thick glass door so no one on this floor can access it. I still hear the soft thud of footsteps as someone descends a few floors above.

Counting room numbers, I walk past at least three patient rooms that have padlocks on the outside. One of them is locked, bolted tight. I don’t even want to know who’s in there.

By the time I reach Room 711, I’m twisting out of my winter coat to stop the sweat. Nico’s door also has a padlock and is slightly ajar. The lights are on. But from what I can tell, no one’s inside.

I look back over my shoulder. Through the cutaway in the swinging doors, the male nurse is still watching me.

“Nico…?” I call out, tapping a knuckle softly on the door.

No one answers.

“Nico, you there?” I ask, knocking again.

Still nothing.

I know this moment. It’s just like the moment in the original SCIF: a scary door, an off-limits room, and a spectacularly clear opportunity. Back then, I told Orlando we shouldn’t be that guy in the horror movie who checks out the noise coming from the woods. The thing is, right now, I need what’s in those woods.