Three Jack McClure Missions Box Set (101 page)

With her fingertips caressing the desktop, she wondered what secrets lay within the depths of her uncle’s burlwood castle. She started from the bottom up, figuring that secrets were safest in the depths. The left lowest drawer held a strip of hanging files, all pertaining to InterPublic Bancorp—memos, letters, quarterly P&Ls, and the like. She pawed through them with little interest, the bottom of the file holders scraping against the bottom of the drawer. The drawer just above was not as deep. It contained the usual stacks of pads of various sizes, packs of yellow pencils, a red plastic child’s sharpener, gum erasers, and various sorts of tape. How very neo-Luddite of Uncle Hank, she thought. Save for some spent pencil shavings and a broken bit of pencil lead, the top drawer was entirely empty. The wide middle drawer directly above the kneehole was filled with the sort of accumulated odds and ends—paper clips, staples, rubber bands, and Hi-Liters in several colors—endemic to all offices. The three drawers on the right held, variously, stacks of political magazines like
The Atlantic
; a half-filled bottle of single-barrel bourbon, along with a pair of shot glasses in a holder; a paper packet of cough drops; a metal flask, dry as a bone inside; and a grease-stained take-out menu from First Won Ton, in Chinatown. She scanned it quickly. One item, a Chef’s Special, spicy fragrant duck with cherries, was circled in pencil. Beneath the menu was a photo of Caroline and her mother. Caro was young, ten or eleven maybe, but already you could see that she strongly resembled her mother, Heidi, who was tall, slim in an athletic way, blond—pale as a ghost, really—with a high, intelligent forehead and light eyes; it was impossible to tell what color from the photo and Alli didn’t remember her well enough to recall whether they were blue or green or hazel. Mother and daughter looked like two equestrians, models out of a Ralph Lauren ad. Sad now to think of Heidi somewhere on the West Coast and Caro in the particular level of limbo reserved for the disappeared. Alli put the photo and the take-out menu back, and closed the drawer.

Perhaps there was nothing.

She sat back on her heels, rocking back and forth thoughtfully, as she stared at the desk. On an impulse, she pulled open the drawer with the hanging files. She pushed them back and forth on their metal tracks, listening to the scraping, dry as an insect’s chirrup. All at once, a frown creased her face and, pushing the files as far as she could to the rear, she peered down at the bottom of the drawer. Looking again at the outside, it appeared as if there was a two- or three-inch differential. Rapping a knuckle against the bottom of the drawer, she heard a hollow echo, but feeling around there was no way in. Pulling the files toward her, she drew the drawer out to its fullest extent. A tiny half-moon indentation in the wood presented itself.

Hooking her fingernail into it, she pulled and was rewarded with a meticulously milled rectangular piece of the drawer’s bottom detaching itself. Inside the hidden cubbyhole she found a cell phone, and that was all. She double-checked the space before fitting the cover back on, pushing the files back into place, and closing the drawer.

She walked to the study door, pressed her ear against the carved and polished wood, and heard the murmuring of her uncle’s voice as he talked with other men, then the muffled slam of the front door. Crossing to the window, she was just in time to see her uncle and Jenkins climb into the backseat of a gleaming black Lincoln Town Car, which immediately drove off in a spray of gravel.

Returning to the wing chair, she curled up and examined the cell. Though it was a brand she recognized, the model was one she had never seen before. She wondered whether it was an old model. Most people threw away their old cell when they got a new one; they did not hide it away in a secret compartment of their desk. She pressed the On button. The phone lit up immediately, connecting to a network. So it wasn’t an old phone, or, if it was, its SIM card was still active. Plus, the battery was fully charged.

She waited for the network to give her a signal, but nothing showed except a tiny red SOS.

“Shit on a fucking stick,” she muttered. She’d heard stories of certain hotel chains using wireless dampers to keep their clients from using cell phones in their rooms, forcing them to use the hotel’s more expensive wired system, but why would Uncle Hank employ one in his house, except as a security measure.

She stuffed the phone in her pocket and tried to get a grip on her rising panic.

*   *   *

Interviewing Arjeta Kraja was proving frustrating, principally because she seemed to have vanished.

“It’s as if she never existed at all,” Pete McKinsey said when he, Naomi, and Jack rendezvoused in the small suburb closest to Fearington.

“Her name doesn’t come up in any government database,” Naomi said, consulting her PDA. “Nor does she possess a driver’s license, health insurance, or even a Social Security number.”

“Family?” Jack asked.

“Negative.” McKinsey shuffled from one foot to the other as if he were itching to go someplace.

“Friends?”

“Not anyone we could find when we canvassed the area.”

“So either she’s a ghost,” McKinsey said.

Jack nodded. “Or she’s an illegal immigrant.”

“Either way,” Naomi said, “she’s gonna be a bitch to find.”

“Which is going to take time,” McKinsey said.

They were talking like partners now, or an old married couple.

“Time is the one thing we don’t have,” Jack told them, and because he didn’t want to tell them about his leaving with Paull, he gave them a song and dance about Alli’s legal status, as if Jenkins had given him an update. “So we need to find the girl now.”

McKinsey was clearly unhappy with being given what was, in his estimation, an impossible task. “How do you propose we do that?”

*   *   *

Twilight, the bar both Billy Warren and the elusive Arjeta Kraja had supposedly frequented, was on a seedy section of M Street, about as far from the tony shops and town houses as you could get and still be in Georgetown. A sign on the door said that it was closed, but when Jack hit the brass plate the door opened. When they walked into the dimly lit interior, they were greeted by air that smelled burned.

Detective Willowicz, smoking idly, sat on a tipped-back chair, his ankles crossed on a table. Detective O’Banion was behind the bar, drinking what appeared to be whiskey from a shot glass. No one else appeared to be around.

Williowicz exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Well, what do we have here?”

“Place is closed,” O’Banion said. “Wassamatter, can’t read?”

“I could ask the same of you,” Jack said, then to Willowicz: “I thought I told you the case had been turned over to my department.”

Willowicz contemplated the glowing end of his cigarette. “I think I might have heard something of that nature. What’s your memory of it, O’Banion?”

O’Banion pulled at his earlobe and shrugged. “In this town, anything’s possible.” He poured himself another shot. His fingernails were filthy.

“So what are you doing here?” Naomi said.

“Satisfying an itch.” Willowicz watched them with a jaundiced eye.

“Checking the liquor license.” O’Banion swallowed his whiskey. “Shit like that.”

“The Metro police need detectives for that?” McKinsey was shuckling back and forth like an engine revving up. “You guys must really have screwed the pooch.”

O’Banion laughed nastily and slammed the shot glass down on the bartop. “Shut it, Nancy.”

“Where is everyone?” Naomi said. “The day manager, the bartender?”

“We just got here,” Willowicz said.

“How the fuck should we know?” O’Banion added.

“That’s enough,” Jack said. “You two can clear out.” He took out his cell. “Your captain is waiting.”

Willowicz dragged his feet off the table and stood up. “The thing of it is, my partner and I don’t like being treated like second-class citizens.”

“Then stick to your own turf.”

“We see this situation and it reeks,” Willowicz said. “Where you see a former president’s daughter, we see a perp.”

“No,” Jack said, “you see an easy way to wrap up this case. It doesn’t matter to you if she’s guilty or not.”

“Oh, she’s guilty.” O’Banion came around from behind the bar. “Guilty as fuck.”

“It’s just a matter of time before we prove it.” Willowicz brushed by them and out the door, O’Banion hard on his heels.

“Metro has a hard-on for Feds.” McKinsey relaxed visibly. “We’re always treading all over their cases, so all they can do is shit on us.”

“The hell with them.”

“Seriously.” Jack turned and walked toward the short corridor that led to the restrooms and the rear. “Where the hell is everyone?”

Then he paused. What had he sensed or smelled?

“Blood,” Jack said, sprinting down the corridor. He heard Naomi and McKinsey just behind him.

“McKinsey,” he called. “Restrooms.”

He heard McKinsey banging open the doors, then his raised voice: “Clear!”

Two men sat in side-by-side chairs facing the far wall of the small, cramped kitchen. Jack came around to face them. It was not a pretty sight. Both their faces looked like sides of raw meat. Blood had spilled down the front of their shirts, buttons ripped off, the flaps spread open. More blood oozed down their necks onto their chests. Based on their clothes, one seemed to be the bartender, the other the day manager.

Naomi knelt in front of the bartender. “Dead.”

Jack pressed two fingers against the manager’s carotid. “So’s this one.”

Both McKinsey and Naomi drew their firearms simultaneously.

“What the hell is going on?” Naomi said.

“It answers the question,” Jack said, already on the move, “why there were Metro detectives where there should have been no Metro detectives.”

6

“Well?”

“Everything has gone according to plan.”

Henry Holt Carson nodded. His shoulders were hunched against the brittle wind. The sky looked like porcelain and it seemed to him as if the sun would never shine again. Like the residents of Seattle, he was getting used to the gloom.

“Paull is gone?” he asked.

President Crawford nodded. “And, as you predicted, he’s taken Jack McClure with him.”

“Good.”

Carson looked around him. This time of year the Rose Garden was a rectangle of mush and fertilizer, the sturdy rose stems prickly and dangerous as a porcupine’s back.

“I still don’t quite understand,” the president said.

Carson closed his eyes for a moment. A pulse beat in his forehead and he was certain a migraine was coming on. As was his wont, he fought against it. “They were too close to my brother.”

Crawford’s brow furrowed deeply and he snorted like a horse. “Do you think they suspect?”

“I don’t know.” Carson put a hand to his head. Yes, a migraine, definitely. “I hope to God they don’t.”

“But McClure—”

“My brother told me all about McClure’s monstrous brain.”

“Then you know it’s only a matter of time before he figures it out. That can only lead to more blood being spilled.”

“Yes,” Carson said through gritted teeth. He did not nod or move his head in any untoward way. “That’s why I want him gone. By the time he does figure it out, it’ll be too late. The only way to him that wouldn’t cause suspicion was through Dennis Paull.” He clamped down on the migraine but, as always, it was getting the better of him.

“Still, I worry.”

“The American people pay you to worry.”

Carson turned, fumbled in his trousers pocket, opened the silver-and-gold pill case, shook two pills into his mouth, and swallowed them with the little saliva he had left. The migraines seemed to suck him dry, until his tongue felt as if it were as big and unwieldy as a zeppelin.

The president eyed his Secret Service detail, circling the garden like a murder of crows. He took a hesitant step toward his friend. “Hank, I think you’d best sit down.”

Carson waved him off. “I’m fine.”

“Of course you are. But, you know, I find I’m a little peaked.” He sat on a stone bench. “Here, sit down beside me so we can continue our private talk uninterrupted. I haven’t much time before the budget meeting.”

Carson came and sat, holding his body as delicately as if it had turned to glass, which, in a way, it had.

Crawford looked away for a moment, out over the grounds to Washington itself. The White House was like a pearl sitting in the middle of an oyster, peacefully protected. However, today the president felt anything but peaceful.

“I knew this job was going to be difficult,” he said after a time, “and I prepared myself for it.” He stared down at his hands, folded priestlike in his lap. “But as for the complications…” He allowed his voice to drift off like mist off the Potomac.

“Life
is
complications, Arlen. The higher you climb the more they pile up, until you have one cluster-fuck after another.”

“Well, then, this must be the mother of all cluster-fucks.” Crawford took a breath. “Then again, maybe we’re not speaking of complications at all, maybe it’s
compromises
.”

Carson said nothing; he was too busy trying to keep his thoughts from being shredded by the cyclone of his migraine.

“Maybe it’s selling the house down the river without even a wave good-bye.”

Suddenly, the president’s words flooded into his brain, and he turned his head ever so gently. “For the love of God, do not tell me that you have cold feet, not at this late date. Fuck, Arlen, I moved heaven and earth with both the party caucuses and Eddy to get you the vice president’s position. We had a plan, from the very beginning we had a plan.”

“No, Hank,
you
had a plan.”

“Have it your way.” Carson massaged his temples, slowly and methodically. “What mattered then is the same thing that matters now. You hitched your name to my star. You rose as I rose.”

“You need me, Hank.”

The laugh caused Carson some pain. “Are you trying to convince me, or yourself? The truth you keep avoiding is this: You need me far more than I need you. If you bail on me now there will be dire consequences. You knew from the very beginning, when you’re in, you’re in for life. Your decision is irrevocable.”