Justice

by Karen Robards

  “You’re putting yourself in danger, Jess.” His voice was very quiet.

  “I’m just doing my job, Mark.”

  “If that’s the case, then changes are going to have to be made in your job.” His tone had gone grim.

  There it was, that assumption of authority, that presumption that he knew what was best for her, that drove her around the bend.

  “You can’t tell me what to do.”

  “On things like this, I can.”

  She stiffened. Her eyes narrowed. “Oh, no, you can’t. You’re out of my life, remember? As in, buh-bye.”

  He looked impatient. “Not anymore, I’m not. I’ve got orders to keep you out of harm’s way. So keep pushing, and you’ll find yourself locked away in a safe house somewhere so fast your head will spin.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  He laughed.

  “You better not.”

  “Right now I’m thinking it’s probably a hell of a good idea. We should have pulled you out of circulation from the get-go.”

  “Is that you talking, or your puppet master?” His puppet master being the Secret Service director of Internal Affairs, Charlie Hasbrough, who’d taken on responsibility for her safety when she’d survived a concerted effort on the part of rogue government agents to kill her. Hasbrough had come up with her current incarnation of Jessica Dean, complete with blond hair, when she’d refused to leave D.C. and had, instead, stubbornly insisted on staying put, getting on with her life and taking the plum job she’d been offered with Ellis Hayes. She didn’t know who her refusal to abandon her life and go into hiding in the hinterlands had irked more, Hasbrough or Mark. Or the whole shadowy netherworld of government-connected spooks who apparently spent multiple lifetimes lurking around keeping track of who was doing what to whom and thinking up ways to keep them from talking about it.

  “Me.”

  She smirked. It wasn’t something she generally did, but in this particular instance, his refusal to give any outward indication that her potshot about Hasbrough annoyed him—which she knew it did—annoyed her so much that she had to up the ante.

  “You mean Hasbrough’s not pulling your strings anymore?”

  “I mean I haven’t heard from him about this. Probably because he’s on vacation, and nobody else out of the millions who’ve been following the Phillips trial has connected cocounsel Jessica Dean with Jessica Ford, the sole survivor of the car crash that killed the former First Lady.” He smiled back at her, and although it wasn’t a particularly nice smile, it didn’t quite descend to the level of a smirk. “Yet.”

  “Your point being …?”

  “The deal was that you were just going to blend into the background, keep your head down, and not attract attention if you were left alone.”

  Along with keeping her mouth forever shut, those were the terms on which she’d been allowed to more or less resume her old life. Mark, among others, had been in favor of sending her somewhere far, far away until the shock and questions swirling around the death of former First Lady Annette Cooper had faded. Explanations other than accident seemed to delve deep into the realm of crackpot conspiracy theory territory, which was already starting to happen. With the capital and, to a lesser extent, the nation just starting to recover from the trauma of the resignation of President David Cooper in the wake of the tragedies that had befallen him, there was a concerted agreement on the part of those in the know—a small, tight-knit, high-ranking cabal of spooks whose identities Jess wasn’t totally clear on, a few government officials, Jess and Mark, and a minuscule number of assorted others—that the truth must never get out.

  In other words, no further rocking of the ship of state was going to be allowed, and woe betide anyone who made any more waves.

  “Do you actually expect anyone to connect Jessica Dean with Jessica Ford? Jessica Ford is old news.”

  “Not now that she’s just been on TV as the lawyer who got Tiffany Higgs to say she was lying when she accused Senator Phillips’s idiot son of rape. Hell, it wasn’t even four months ago that your picture was on every TV station and in every newspaper and magazine in the world, if you care to recall. I think somebody just might remember you.” The sarcasm was unmistakable.

  “I had dark hair then. And I wore glasses.” Actually, she still did wear glasses, sometimes. Unlike the contacts she had in at the moment, they served as a barrier between her and the world when she needed one. She popped them on, and the world looked different. And saw her differently. They served as her own personal combination shield and invisibility cloak.

  “Oh, wow, big change. That’ll definitely fool ’em. No chance anyone will see through that.” They stopped for a red light as he shot her a disgusted look. Then his gaze shifted to her hair, and some of the hardness around his mouth eased. “Oh, by the way and just for the record, baby, you make one red-hot, smokin’ blonde.”

  That was so unexpected her brows twitched together. “What?”

  “You heard me: of course, you were plenty hot as a brunette, too. You sure you don’t want to marry me?”

  The question hit her like a shaft to the heart. Then indignation bubbled inside her. How dare he tease her? First he broke her heart, then he made jokes? He’d proposed as part of his hiding-in-the-hinterlands proposition—his exact words had been “How about if I go with you, and we make it a honeymoon?”—and despite her mild case of marriage phobia she’d been crazy enough in love with him that she had hovered on the brink of taking him up on it. Then she’d walked in on him and Mary Jane Cates, and she’d faced the unpalatable truth that her first instincts about him had been right on: the guy was an incorrigible player.

  That kind of ongoing heartbreak in her life she did not need.

  “Look, if that’s all you have to say …”

  Seething, she reached for the door handle. If she couldn’t find a cab, she’d take the metro. Or she’d walk. Fifty blocks if necessary, in Christine’s too-big shoes. Or no shoes at all. Anything that would get her away from him.

  “Leonard Cowan’s dead.” The abrupt change in his tone stopped her cold. It was his Secret Service agent’s voice, authoritative and clipped, with none of his usual distinctive Texas drawl left to it. She looked back at him, registered the hard set of his jaw, the purposeful glint in his eyes, and her anger was torpedoed by a sudden, sharp stab of fear. Her hand dropped nervelessly away from the door handle. She sank back in her seat with her eyes still glued to his face. The light changed to green, and the Suburban rolled on.

  Mark might have been teasing before. He was dead serious now.

  “Is that somebody I should know?” She might not have been able to immediately place the name, but she knew the answer, knew the context. It was there in Mark’s face. The dead man was somehow connected to the terrible knowledge they shared.

  The knowledge that she secretly feared was going to get them killed one day.

  “Cowan was David Cooper’s valet. He worked for him the whole time he was in office, and before, as far back as Texas. I—and probably a whole lot of other people—have to assume that he was privy to all the president’s secrets. Probably knew pretty much everything that went on in Cooper’s life. If you get my drift.”

  She did. Jess felt her stomach knot. “How did he die?”

  “Suicide. Shot himself in the head. They found him just after dawn this morning, in his car in Rock Creek Park.”

  Jess felt a shiver rush down her spine, and she fought the urge to close her eyes. “I don’t suppose you’re telling me this because there’s any chance it really was a suicide?”

  “Anything’s possible, but I wouldn’t want to bet my life on it. Word is he had a drinking problem. My guess is somebody got tired of worrying he wouldn’t keep his mouth shut.”

  Just like somebody might one day get tired of worrying that she and Mark wouldn’t keep their mouths shut. All the pent-up anxiety that she’d almost managed to push from her daily consciousness over the past few months came rushin
g back.

  “Oh, my God.”

  “Yeah.”

  Jess felt sick. Lately every time fear raised its ugly head she’d managed to push it away by telling herself that the danger was past, that the world had marched on, that no one was interested in hurting her—or Mark.

  Now the terrible certainty that this thing would never be behind them exploded like an IED in her brain. Their secret, shared knowledge that the former First Lady had been murdered was something they could never escape.

  “They’re going to kill us, too, sooner or later, aren’t they?” Folding her arms across her chest, barely repressing a shiver, she spoke very quietly.

  “I got friends in high places. They tell me the answer’s no.”

  Jess made a skeptical sound. “And you believe them?”

  “As long as they believe we’re not going to talk, they’re better off not killing us. Any kind of suspicious death of the sole survivor of Mrs. Cooper’s car crash would raise a lot of questions nobody wants to see raised. And if they take you out, they have to take me out, because I sure as hell wouldn’t keep my mouth shut and they know that, too. Then there’s your family, who they probably suspect know more than they should. And my guys at work, who don’t know everything but know something. Enough to make them uncomfortable. And—well, any number of people could know just a little bit too much. So we’re talking about eliminating a good number of people, which is always a chancy thing. As long as they think we continue to pose no threat to them, I believe they’ll let us be. Keep the status quo intact and all that.”

  “How sure are you of that?”

  His mouth quirked a little. “About as sure as I am of a lot of things. Fairly sure.”

  “Great.”

  “Which brings us back to the little matter of you on CNN. Not smart.”

  “You know what? I don’t really need you to tell me that.”

  “Looks like you need somebody, so I’m going to say it one more time: what you want to do is remain quietly anonymous at least if you won’t let us get you out of here, which I still think would be the smartest thing you could do, at least for a while.”

  “I’m not going to run and hide. Anyway, we both know there’s nowhere on earth I could go that your friends couldn’t eventually find me.”

  He couldn’t argue with that, because he knew it was true as well as she did. When he—or the powers-that-be above him—had originally suggested she leave the capital, it had been to remove her from the reach of inquisitive reporters. Not to protect her from the Alphabet Soup gang, as she called the CIA, FBI, DEA, SSA, and all the other initial heavy government agencies who had her in their sights.

  Instead of arguing the inarguable, he said, “Anonymous means you keep out of the public eye, just to be clear.”

  “I’m trying, okay? What happened at the end of that trial was totally unexpected.”

  His answering grunt she took as his acceptance of the truth of what she was telling him. A moment later he added, “Congratulations, by the way. On the win. That’s a big one.”

  She looked at him a shade mistrustfully. He hadn’t been exactly supportive of her career to date. What he’d wanted her to be, as he’d made clear in those few lost days when they’d been madly in lust and she’d been actually trembling on the brink of saying yes to him, was a part-time lawyer and his full-time wife.

  “Thanks.”

  “I was betting he’d be found guilty, myself.”

  Jess almost blurted out so was I, but she thought better of it. Best to keep her view of what had happened to herself until she’d had time to think it over. Then Mark stopped at a traffic light, and she looked away from him long enough to notice their surroundings. It was full dusk now, with stars just beginning to twinkle in the purple sky and only the thinnest line of fluorescent orange on the horizon to mark where the sun had been. The trees here were tall and round with foliage and growing out of postage-stamp-sized yards. The people on the sidewalks were a wholesome mix of mostly family types and college kids. Streetlights cast long shadows over the hustle and bustle that was Washington Circle. She took a deep breath, both relieved and a little sorry to realize she was almost home.

  “You want to grab a coffee or something?” Mark asked as the light changed and he drove on. He knew where she lived as well as she did, knew they were almost there. Pearl’s Coffee Shop was right around the corner, and stopping for coffee and maybe a meal at Pearl’s had been something they’d done, when they’d been together. Just remembering hurt, and the pain made her angry at him all over again.

  “With you? No.”

  He gave her a glinting look. “You ever hear of forgive and forget?”

  She laughed.

  “Jess—”

  “Just take me home, would you please?”

  His jaw tightened, but he didn’t reply, which suited her just fine. She looked away again. Talking to him, seeing him, having him so close, was making her ache inside. The fact was both appalling and infuriating. She should have been over him by now. It was just that …

  Don’t be an idiot. Face the fact that it was just a fling and move on.

  She took a deep breath, stared out the window. Her apartment was in Foggy Bottom, not far from where she’d gone to law school. Of course, as a law student she never would have been able to afford the spacious, two-bedroom, third-floor apartment she now shared with her sister Grace, but it was good to live in a familiar neighborhood. She knew every inch of it, from the university to Kennedy Center to Pearl’s, where breakfast was three dollars and the soup was to die for, to the less savory fringes that bled into downtown. When it was dark like this, it wasn’t hard to imagine that the colorful nineteenth-century town houses that lined the streets were still home to the area’s earliest residents: the poor Irish, Germans, and African Americans who’d once worked the surrounding factories. In fact, with the deepening shadows disguising many modernizing details, it was as though time had stood still. Mist from the Potomac, just starting to creep westward as night fell, could have been the factory smoke that had once lain over everything and given the low-lying district its name.

  Jess was just registering with a faint, wry smile the bicycle shorts and miniskirts and baggy jeans worn by a gang of kids rushing toward the metro stop—there went the whole nineteenth-century vibe right there—when someone emerging from the depths caught her eye.

  A slender young woman whose long, straight blond hair hung halfway to her waist, wearing a floaty-skirted sundress that didn’t quite reach her knees, popped into view, leaping nimbly up the stairs that led down to the metro. Her head was down, and her hair and skirt billowed behind her. As she reached the top, she looked around, then darted across the sidewalk toward the newspaper stand on the corner. A man stepped out of the shadows near the large brown column that marked the entrance to the metro to stride purposefully after her. Catching up a heartbeat later, he grabbed her arm. She jumped as her head swivelled around toward him, then she seemed to try to pull away. He shook his head and she stopped struggling and stood still, looking up at him. There was something about her posture, and that of the man—he was a tall, well-built man with dark hair in a dark suit—that set off alarm bells in Jess’s head.

  Especially since Jess was almost positive the young woman was none other than Tiffany Higgs.

  Tiffany was walking away with him now. His hand still gripped her arm. She looked—afraid.

  Something’s wrong …

  “Stop.” Her tone was so urgent that Mark stood on the brakes. As the car jerked to a halt, Jess pushed open the door and scrambled out.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  By the time Jess’s feet hit the sidewalk, she’d lost sight of her quarry. They’d disappeared behind the newsstand. Driven by a sense of urgency that she couldn’t quite explain, she hurried toward the newsstand herself, desperate to catch a glimpse of them. The misgivings that had assailed her earlier—had Tiffany’s recantation been somehow coerced or forced?—filled her with unea
se. Granted, she hadn’t been close enough to see the expression on the young woman’s face, hadn’t even been close enough to be absolutely, one hundred percent certain that it was Tiffany. But somewhere deep inside she was convinced that it was, and she felt that what she had just witnessed was Tiffany in trouble.

  Felt it so strongly that when she ran right out of one of her pumps—and when had she started to run?—she kicked off the other one and left them both behind. Barefoot, she dodged around knots of pedestrians, deaf to their chatter, so focused on the darkness on the other side of the newsstand that she barely felt the grit or the heat of the pavement beneath her soles or noticed the curious glances she was attracting.

  “Hey, want a newspaper?” A wizened old man working the booth waved the Post at her as she sprinted past. She didn’t even bother to shake her head in reply. Bursting past the side of the stand, she stopped dead, looking all around: a lot of concrete, sidewalk, curbs, streets. A three-way intersection, brightened by a streetlight and tinged an eerie green from the glowing top orb of a stoplight. Multiple storefronts, in front of her, to her right, and, across the street, to her left. Some lighted, some not. Filled tables outside, in front of a busy café. People walking, lots of people, singly, in pairs, in knots, on this sidewalk and the one across the street and the one catty-corner, at the top of the intersection. Cars cruising past with their headlights on now because it was dark. A bicycle rack with two bikes chained to the bars. A row of knee-high shrubbery. A wastebasket, big, wire mesh, chained to the light pole. The sounds of stop-and-go traffic, people talking and laughing, muffled music probably leaking from somebody’s iPod. The smell of popcorn—a kid nearby was scarfing it.

  No fluttering sundress no matter which way she looked. No slender blonde being frog-marched away by a tall, dark-haired guy in a dark suit.

  In other words, no Tiffany.

  Where are they?

  “Tiffany?” Jess called. Then, her voice growing stronger, she tried again. “Tiffany?”