Justice

by Karen Robards

  “Somebody pushed me in, or tackled me or something. A man. He forced me all the way to the bottom of the pool and held me there until my dress got stuck in the drain.”

  Mark didn’t ask if she was sure. His hands curled around the ends of the chair’s wooden arms. Then he abruptly got to his feet and came to stand beside the bed. His face changed, hardening and tightening, and his eyes turned from their usual clear ocean blue to an opaque shade of denim as they slid over her.

  “That means the attack in front of my apartment probably wasn’t just random either.” Her voice was very small as she followed her thoughts to their logical conclusion. “I think”—she remembered the cologne—“it was the same man.”

  For a moment they simply stared at each other.

  “To hell with this. We’re getting you out of D.C. If I’d been a minute or two later, you’d be dead now.” Mark sounded angry, violent even.

  To hear it put so bluntly made Jess’s stomach clench. It was true, she knew. At the thought of how close she’d come to dying her heart beat faster.

  All my life, since Courtney, my worst fear has been that I would drown.

  Okay, deep breath. It didn’t happen.

  “That won’t help.” Keeping her voice steady required an effort, but she managed it. “If this is some government assassin type trying to kill me, no place is far away enough, and you know that as well as I do. If it’s not, the way to stop him is to catch him. I think I saw him, Mark.” The memory of a tall, black-haired man with a long face and a narrow jaw swam through her mind. Distance and darkness had kept his features indistinct to a certain degree, but she was convinced she had seen him before. Her pulse raced as she searched for the elusive link—and then a pair of memories came together in her mind and she knew when and where. “I think he might have been the same man I saw with Tiffany that night after the trial ended. You know, when I got out of the Suburban to talk to her.”

  “I remember.” A hint of wryness touched his expression. Then his eyes hardened again. “How sure are you of that?”

  Jess hesitated, mentally comparing what she could remember of the two images. “Not one hundred percent. I’d say it’s a possibility. A good possibility.”

  “Think you could describe him to somebody? I know a forensic artist who does really good work.”

  “You mean have somebody sketch him? That’s a good idea.” Jess hesitated. “I didn’t really see him close up either time. I can’t quite picture his nose, or his mouth, or even his eyes. What’s in my mind is just kind of a general face. You know, the shape, long, angular, with a narrow jaw, and the coloring, and the position of the features.”

  “It can’t hurt to try.” He managed a small smile for her. “Okay. Tell me what happened. I saw you come out of the ladies’ room, but then the lights started blinking and I lost you.”

  “I wanted to tell Pearse that I was going to be representing Tiffany. He was over by the pool, and I was walking toward him when I looked around and saw this man—the man. He saw me, too. Then the lights went out and … he tackled me. Or somebody did. Boom, and I was in the pool.”

  “You never got a look at him while he was pulling you under the water? Not so much as a glimpse?”

  “No. It was dark. And—once I was in the water, I was so scared.” As soon as she said it she started to shake inside. Then she realized that she wouldn’t have confessed that to anyone but him. And what part of over did that have anything to do with?

  Her breath blew out in a little sigh.

  Mark didn’t say anything. Instead his lips thinned and his eyes narrowed. He walked over and picked up his phone from a little pile of shoulder holster, wallet, and keys that lay atop his folded coat on a cart near the bed. Jess assumed he’d had the presence of mind to shed those things before leaping into the pool after her. She wondered about his shoes, but she guessed he’d kicked them off, too, and then put them back on again to go to the hospital.

  “What are you doing?” she asked as he punched in a number.

  “What does it look like? Making some calls.”

  “To whom?”

  “First, Hasbrough. Second, MPD. I want to make sure there’s a priority on this, and some kind of coordination so that the left hand knows what the right hand is doing. After that, some guys I know. Twice in the last week somebody’s come after you. This needs to stop now. Third time just might be the charm.”

  Jess looked at him in sudden alarm as the ramifications of putting her situation out for public consumption hit her.

  “Oh, my God, Mark, no. Stop. Wait. I don’t mind Hasbrough, but you can’t call the police. I can’t cause some big stink about being attacked at Mr. Dunn’s party. The police will question everybody—not just the people who work at Ellis Hayes but the guests … the clients.” Jess almost shuddered at the thought. “It’ll be this huge thing. If Mr. Dunn thinks I come with all these problems, I’ll get fired. Or maybe not fired but … pushed aside. Eased out. I might as well kiss my career good-bye.”

  “It’s better than being dead.”

  “Mark—” But she broke off and listened as the call went through and he spoke to Hasbrough, describing what had happened, taking Hasbrough through the different possibilities, suggesting that if it hadn’t been an attempt to silence Jess about what had really happened to Annette Cooper, then it might have had something to do with the Phillips trial that had just ended. When he disconnected, Mark looked slightly less grim.

  “We’re going to get this guy, whoever he is,” he told Jess. “Keeping you alive has just become job one. Hasbrough promised to pull out all the stops. We got the uber-cops working this thing now, baby.”

  “Then we don’t need to involve the police.”

  Mark looked at her hard. “Your career is really that important to you, isn’t it?”

  Jess knew the answer without a shadow of a doubt. “Yes.”

  “Christ.” He shook his head. “Okay, we don’t involve the police. They probably wouldn’t be a lot of help at this point anyway. And you’re right, they’d stir up a lot of shit. I don’t want this guy going to ground before we catch him.”

  Jess sighed with relief. As terrifying as it was to know that someone was trying to kill her, she had every faith that Mark and his associates would do whatever it took to both keep her safe and find and stop whoever it was. When that happened, she wanted to have her career intact. Then something occurred to her that she’d been too shaken to wonder about before.

  “How did you know I was in the pool?”

  “Pure damn luck.” He looked grim again. Jess’s expression urged him to continue. “You were over there by the restroom one minute and then I didn’t see you. I came looking for you, and then the lights started going on and off and they made that announcement asking everybody to go to the upper terrace and it was like a tidal wave of people all heading in the same direction. I almost went up the path with everybody else, thinking you’d gone that way. But something made me take one last look around first, and I saw your shoe, one of those sparkly high heels you were wearing. It was in the pool, floating on top of the water, the sequins or whatever catching the light. Then I looked down, into the water, and saw this dark shape, and I knew it was you, and I dove in.”

  “Thank God you did. I would have drowned.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So how did you manage to get me loose? The drain—”

  “I ripped the hell out of that damned dress.”

  The most fleeting of smiles touched Jess’s mouth. “Grace will—”

  Before she could complete the thought, she was interrupted by a way-too-familiar sound from just beyond the curtain. It made her stiffen with dismay.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Did you …,” Jess began, looking at Mark as her mother’s voice reached her ears for the second time.

  He was saved from having to reply by Judy’s sudden eruption into the room, followed by Maddie’s. Judy wore an orange T-shirt and green floral cropp
ed pants—mismatched and obviously hastily pulled on—with white slides. Her heels clacked on the smooth hard floor as she made a beeline for the bed. Maddie was in a sundress and flip-flops, her hair in a ponytail, her stomach sticking out to there.

  “Oh my goodness, Jess, when Mark called and told us what had happened, I about had a heart attack. My poor little girl!” Judy swooped on her, wrapping her in the tightest of hugs. Over her shoulder, Jess glared accusingly at the traitor, who’d risen to his feet at her mother’s entrance. He responded with an apologetic half smile and a slight shrug.

  “We brought you some clothes.” Maddie held up the plastic grocery bag she was carrying. “Mark said you needed some. How did you manage to fall into a pool?”

  “Just clumsy, I guess.” Jess suffered her mother’s hug and smiled at her sister before shooting Mark another killing glare. At least he hadn’t told them that it hadn’t been an accident. Of course, when he’d talked to them—it must have been while the doctor had been examining her—she hadn’t yet told him the full story.

  “Of all the horrible things to happen. I can’t believe it.” Jess saw the pain shining in her mother’s eyes and felt her heart contract. Of course, as Courtney’s mother, her suffering would have been even worse than Jess’s. For all these years afterward, Judy had kept going, putting the tragedy behind her, taking care of her remaining daughters and living her life as best she could—but in that instant Jess saw that the terrible well of grief was still there.

  “I’m okay, Mom.” Contrite at her perfunctory response to the previous hug, she held out her arms to her mother, and this time, when Judy enfolded her, Jess hugged her tightly back. For a moment the two of them, the only two who could, shared the memory, the sorrow, the love they both still felt for she who was lost. Then Judy straightened with a sniff and a smile and a pat on Jess’s shoulder before turning to look at Mark. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart for being there to fish her out.”

  “My pleasure,” Mark responded as Judy hugged him, too, while Maddie, to whom the tragedy was only a distant, though moving, family story, rolled her eyes and dropped the plastic bag on the bed beside Jess.

  Maddie said, “What I don’t understand is what happened to your dress. Grace said it was the most gorgeous thing ever.”

  “It got caught in a drain. If Mark hadn’t—”

  “I had to park three lots over.” Sarah pushed through the curtain before Jess could finish. She was perfectly adequately dressed in white shorts and a tee, but her hair was all bouncing fat ringlets, as if she’d just pulled curlers out of it, and her face was bare of makeup. Obviously when the call had come in she’d been ready for bed. Her eyes went straight to Jess, moved over her as if in swift evaluation, and her face reformed into its usual placid lines. She said to Jess, “Just so you know, there are all kinds of people out in the waiting room on your behalf. In long dresses and tuxes, yet.”

  “Oh, no,” Jess moaned.

  “I heard them asking for you at the desk. The nurses aren’t letting anybody but family back.”

  Jess was horror-stricken. “I’ve ruined the party.”

  The doctor came into the room. He looked briefly surprised to see so many people in the small space, but the news was good: Jess was free to go.

  “You’re coming home with us for the night,” Judy said to Jess when the doctor left, in a tone that brooked no opposition. “If Grace is sleeping elsewhere—and, yes, I know about her new boyfriend, girls—I don’t think you should spend the night alone.”

  “There’s Mark, Mom,” Sarah reminded her in a low but perfectly audible undertone.

  “Do you think they’re sleeping together again? So soon?” was Judy’s equally low-voiced but audible rejoinder. She then looked at Mark. “Are you sleeping …?”

  Before Judy could finish the embarrassing question, Jess jumped in. “I’m coming home with you, Mom, don’t worry.”

  Another unannounced, unexpected visitor made her stiffen and clutch the blankets closer.

  “Had to pull rank to get back here, but I just wanted to see how you were doing for myself,” Mr. Dunn boomed, standing in the opening of the now parted curtain. He was still in his tux. His age was all too evident beneath the harsh emergency room lights, but he still looked every inch the rich, influential man he was. His blue eyes were bright as they met Jess’s. “You certainly gave us a fright, young woman.”

  If she could have, Jess would have crawled under the bed. “I’m so sorry to have spoiled the party, Mr. Dunn.”

  As he came toward the bed to take her hand and pat it consolingly, Jess spotted her team—Pearse, Andrew and Hayley, plus Lenore and Christine—hovering in the hall behind him. She gave them a little wave and Andrew lit up his tie at her, which made Jess smile. She suddenly felt like a real, accepted part of the team, and it boosted her spirits. Then they came in, too, and Jess spent the next few minutes making introductions and reassuring everyone that she was fine, perfectly fine.

  She said it so much that she almost believed it herself.

  It was quite some time before she was finally able to get dressed and leave the hospital.

  In the world of spooks, there were good guys and there were bad guys. Sometimes they were interchangeable. Usually, Mark liked to think he was one of the good guys. But now the lines were blurring, and he was going to do whatever the hell he had to do to keep Jess safe.

  Which was why he had left Jess cocooned in the bosom of her family with a couple of undercover agents, sent over by Hasbrough, on stakeout duty outside and why he was breaking into an apartment in Congress Heights in the middle of the night.

  He’d spent most of the day off the grid, working with some people he knew to ID that partial picture they had of the perp who’d attacked Jess. He’d left one Service guy running the partial through all kinds of databases in hopes of a hit, which so far hadn’t materialized. He’d also taken a copy to the forensic artist he’d spoken about, who just happened to be an old friend of his. Okay, so her name was Mallory, and they’d been lovers, and it hadn’t been that long ago, maybe a year, which was probably going to make Jess see pea green if she learned of it, which, if he could prevent it, wasn’t going to happen. Why borrow trouble? He and Mallory had parted friends, and she was willing to do him a favor by trying to re-create a face using measurements and norms and whatever. How she did it he didn’t know exactly, but he did know she was good at her job. And she’d promised to have something for him—a sketch of a face—in a couple of days. When she did, he’d take Jess to her and see what the two of them could come up with, and how it compared. The only really distinguishing feature they’d been able to pull off the partial was a round scar on the guy’s right hand. They’d run that through all the databases, too. So far, nothing.

  The DNA was going to take a little longer, ten days to two weeks, maybe. And that was the timetable Mark got by calling in every favor anybody in the lab had ever owed him. Most cases languished for months, he was informed. There was simply too much stuff coming in, more every day, some of it on the most horrific cases imaginable, and everybody needed results tomorrow.

  Tonight’s attack had cranked up the urgency meter. There was no longer any doubt: somebody wanted Jess dead.

  His emotions, as he’d realized that it had been her under the water of that pool, had been something he didn’t care to think about just at present. Right now, what he had to be was a pro on a job. The personal he could deal with later.

  As Mark had expected, there was a trip wire just inside the door of the apartment, which was pitch black. He identified the spider-silk-thin gleam of silver via a quick sweep of his flashlight, then sidestepped it. See, that was the trouble with cheap apartments where bad guys liked to hide out: you had to provide your own security. Which the smart ones did, in a rudimentary, but effective, fashion. From experience, Mark knew that the trip wire was attached to a weapon that would have blown a hole through his chest if he’d been unwary enough to touch it. Fortunatel
y, he wasn’t that unwary.

  Rusty, though, he was forced to admit. Which was why the only warning he got was a soft snick that he recognized just a split second too late as a knife blade being extended before somebody leaped on him out of the dark, knocking his Glock out of his hand, going for the kill.

  The fight was short, violent, and very nearly lethal. It would have been lethal if he hadn’t ended up the victor, pinning his quarry to the cheap-feeling wall to wall carpeting and holding the guy’s own knife to his throat.

  “Getting old, Gooch,” he said amiably to the man lying spent and panting beneath him.

  “What the fuck do you want, Ryan?”

  “Believe it or not, I got a job I want to offer you.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “You ever hear of something called a phone?”

  “I didn’t realize you were taking calls.”

  “You for real about the job? When I saw you come creeping across my living room, I figured you were moonlighting as a hit man.”

  “If I was moonlighting, you’d be dead.”

  “True that.”

  “So you interested?”

  “You want to get off me, we’ll talk.”

  “You planning to jump me again if I let you up?”

  “Where’s the paycheck in that?”

  Good point. Mark got up, cautiously, keeping the knife, picking up his Glock and the flashlight. Of course, Gooch probably had a dozen other weapons near at hand. Sometimes you just had to trust that the other guy wasn’t going to let paranoia, or vengeance, or something like that outweigh monetary considerations.