The Nomination

by William G. Tapply

  He’d be back.

  She made a pot of coffee, ate a muffin, had a glass of orange juice, poured a mug of coffee.

  Then she went back to the front window and looked down at the street. She smiled.

  He’d exchanged the white Ford Focus for a shiny new blue Toyota Camry. He was sitting there across the street with his window rolled down and his elbow on the ledge, sipping from a Styrofoam cup and pretending to read the newspaper that was propped against the steering wheel. Same sandy hair, same bland, forgettable face, same wraparound sunglasses.

  Okay, good, thought Jessie. Today’s the day.

  She packed her daypack and got dressed—khaki walking shorts, black T-shirt, hiking boots.

  At seven-thirty she filled her travel mug with coffee, slipped on her sunglasses, pulled on her Oakland A’s cap, slung her daypack over her shoulder, and left her apartment.

  When she emerged onto the sidewalk, she darted her eyes behind her sunglasses at the man in the Camry. He was casually turning a page of his newspaper. He gave no sign that he’d noticed her.

  Jessie strolled down the sidewalk to where she’d left her Civic. She stopped a few times to say good morning to some neighbors, pet their leashed dogs, agree that it was indeed another beautiful day in California.

  Just a carefree young woman on a Saturday morning, off for a hike but in no hurry. Lived in the neighborhood. Carol Ann Chang was her name.

  She got into her car and headed down 24th Street.

  In the mirror she saw the blue Camry following along. He had, of course, scouted out the area and located the place where she’d left her car overnight.

  He stayed about half a block behind her all the way through the city to the Golden Gate Bridge.

  The Saturday-morning traffic on the bridge was light. He kept four or five cars between them. A few times she lost him in her rearview mirror, but then she spotted him again.

  She turned on her directional signal a quarter of a mile before the Stinson Beach exit. She wanted to be sure he knew what she was doing. A moment later, his directional began flashing.

  She followed the winding road into the parking lot at Muir Woods. At quarter past eight on a Saturday morning, the lot was already filling up.

  Jessie got out, slipped her daypack onto her shoulders, sauntered over to the building where she paid her three-dollar visitor’s fee, and then lingered there until the blue Camry pulled into the lot.

  The guy in the wraparound sunglasses got out and stretched his arms, looking around casually, letting his eyes slide right past her. He was wearing sneakers, blue jeans, and a lightweight blue windbreaker zipped halfway up over a plaid shirt. Jessie noticed the slight bulge over his left hip at his waist, though she doubted anybody else would.

  She waited for him to pay his fee, then began strolling along one of the well-worn pathways into the ancient woods, and despite her jittery, nerved-up mood, she was, as always, awed by the grandness of the ancient redwoods and the vast stillness of the forest. Some of the trees were a thousand years old and reached 250 feet into the sky. The understory, perpetually shaded by the high canopy of foliage, was sparsely vegetated—mostly moss and ferns and a scattering of shrubs, and some old fallen trees silently rotting away beside their big stumps.

  There was no chitter of birdsong, no buzz of insects. Just that awesome shady silence.

  There weren’t many other people on the trails yet. Now and then Jessie spotted somebody or heard the echo of laughter or voices. She walked slowly, pausing often to look up into a tree or to bend to examine a fern or a wildflower or a mushroom, watching out of the corner of her eye to make sure the man in the windbreaker hadn’t lost her.

  He was there, fifty feet or so behind her, keeping pace, as slow and as casual as she, biding his time, waiting for the right time and place to make his move.

  Whenever the opportunity came along, Jessie chose the less-traveled trail, and after half an hour, the voices and the laughter faded and she was certain that the two of them were quite alone.

  She figured he was having the same thought and had started looking for his opportunity.

  Pretty soon she found what she was looking for—a narrow, little-used trail that angled away from the main pathway and twisted steeply up to a ridge. Here the trees were sparser and not so tall, and the undergrowth was thicker. Head-high evergreens and thick shrubbery crowded against the edges of the trail.

  Jessie climbed the path to the ridgeline, then stopped and listened.

  She couldn’t see him, but she could hear him coming along behind her. The bushes scratched against his nylon windbreaker and his sneakers scraped against the roots and fallen leaves in the trail. He was moving purposefully now. He was no longer maintaining his distance from her, no longer pretending to be just another hiker admiring the redwoods.

  Now he was trying to catch up with her.

  How would he do it? When he got to where she could see him, would he call to her and wave and grin sheepishly and tell her he thought he might be lost? Would he suddenly cry out and pretend he’d sprained his ankle?

  She didn’t figure he was stupid enough to think he could sneak up behind her.

  However he intended to play it, when he felt he was close enough, he would simply pull out his weapon—she guessed it would be a .22 automatic with a suppressor—and shoot her three or four times in the chest. When she went down, he’d shoot her once more in the head.

  He wouldn’t say anything. He’d just smile, point his gun at her, and shoot her.

  When you fired a .22 handgun with a suppressor, it sounded like a rubber band snapping against the palm of your hand. A sound the woods would absorb.

  He’d make sure she was dead, he’d tuck his gun into his belt under the windbreaker, and he’d retrieve the ejected cartridge cases. Then he’d follow the trails back to his rented blue Camry in the parking lot. He’d head directly to the airport, making one call on his cell phone along the way. He’d disassemble his gun and throw the parts into different Dumpsters along the way. He’d turn in his car, buy a plane ticket with cash, and fly home, wherever that was.

  Jessie had a different plan.

  She lingered at the ridgeline until she glimpsed the guy coming up the trail behind her. When she was pretty sure he’d spotted her, she started down the other side of the ridge where the trail began to descend, then slipped off the trail into a thick stand of young evergreens. Paralleling the trail, she crept silently back up the slope to the crest of the ridge where the trail curved sharply around a boulder the size of a Volkswagen.

  Jessie crouched on the uphill side if the boulder right next to the path and listened. He was coming fast now. He’d lost sight of her, and she sensed panic in his movement. He’d be scanning the trail far ahead of him, trying to glimpse her, to get her back in his sights.

  She took off her daypack, then removed her cap and her sunglasses and put them into the pack. She snapped on a pair of latex gloves. She set the pack on the ground behind her where it wouldn’t get in the way.

  He was close. On the downhill side of the big boulder. In a minute he’d walk right past her. She could hear him panting. He was out of shape, sweating probably, stumbling against the roots in the trail, moving awkwardly.

  Excellent.

  Suddenly he was standing right beside her, pausing to look around and catch his breath, so close she could reach out and touch him.

  He was taking deep breaths and peering down the twisting trail ahead of him. He wiped his wrist across his forehead—and that’s when Jessie made her move. One quick step and she was behind him. Her left forearm levered against his throat under his chin and snapped his head back. A cry died in his chest. He gagged and clawed at the arm that had closed off his windpipe. She increased the pressure and dragged him backward away from the path into the underbrush.

  All of Jessie’s weight was focused on her bone-hard forearm wedged against his throat. He was gasping for air. Tiny strangulated cries gurgled and died in hi
s chest.

  Without decreasing the pressure on his throat with her left forearm, Jessie curled her right arm around his body to where she’d seen the lump under his jacket. She traced the outline of the bulge with her fingers. It was, as she’d thought, a square handgun, an automatic.

  The gun was the confirmation she needed before she did what had to be done.

  After a minute, the man went limp in her arms. Jessie let him slump to the ground. She straddled his chest and moved both hands along the sides of his neck until she found the soft places behind the hinges of his jawbones just under each ear. She dug her fingers into the thin layers of skin and muscle and drove them hard against the carotid arteries. She could feel the vessels pulsing rhythmically, pumping blood into the man’s brain.

  She pushed hard, focusing all of her strength on her fingers, compressing both arteries, shutting them down. Unless you constricted both carotids at the same time, you wouldn’t do much harm.

  Constrict them both, and you could do lethal damage.

  She felt the man’s blood vessels balloon and flutter under her fingers as his heart fought against the blockaded arteries, tried to force blood through to the brain.

  After about two minutes, he let out a little sigh and went still.

  She moved so that she was kneeling beside the man and looked down at him.

  He lay there on his back. His eyes were half-lidded and unfocused, staring blankly up at the California sky. His mouth hung open, and foamy mucous dribbled over his chin. His skin was pale and shone with sweat.

  Jessie picked up his wrist and found his pulse. It was racing, erratic, panicky. He was not dead. Not quite.

  She let his arm fall to the ground.

  If a heart attack didn’t follow the stroke, and if medical help came soon enough, the man’s life might be saved, although the stroke would probably leave him paralyzed, brain damaged, speechless, vegetative. Jessie was no doctor, but her training had been thorough.

  She sat back on her heels and hugged herself, and then she felt the sobs rising in her chest, the tears welling behind her eyes, her stomach clenching. She shut her eyes tight and forced herself to breathe slowly.

  After a few minutes, the horror at what she’d done, the regret, the sadness, the overpowering sense that she was living in a sorrowful place and time—all those feelings passed. No matter how civilized the world might appear, the fittest always survived. Kill or be killed. No mercy.

  She’d had no choice. It was done.

  Jessie reached inside the man’s windbreaker and pulled out the pistol that he’d tucked into his belt in front of his left hip. It was, as she’d expected, a .22 automatic with a long suppressor screwed onto the end of the barrel. A professional killer’s weapon.

  She retrieved her daypack and shoved the automatic into it.

  She found the man’s sunglasses in the path where they’d fallen. She picked them up with a stick and dropped them onto the ground beside him where he now lay, twelve or fifteen feet off to the side of the path, half hidden in the underbrush.

  She knelt beside him to search him thoroughly.

  She fished his wallet out of his hip pocket. The name on his driver’s license was Leonard P. Lesneski, from Richmond, Virginia. She didn’t bother counting his money. A couple hundred dollars, it looked like.

  Stuck in with the bills was a plastic magnetized key card. For his hotel room, Jessie assumed.

  She put the wallet, with all its contents, back into the man’s hip pocket.

  Then she went through his other pockets. His cell phone was in one pants pocket. Jessie left it there. In the other pants pocket was a ring of keys and, separate from the key ring, another key with a plastic tag attached to it. This would be for the rental car. Jessie kept the car key and put all the other stuff back into his pocket.

  She finally found what she was looking for tucked in his shirt pocket. She didn’t know exactly what it would be—an old photograph, perhaps, or a printout of descriptions and directions, or at least an index card with her address on it.

  It turned out to be a photocopy of that damn newspaper clipping with the picture of her at the clinic.

  Finding the photo in his pocket assured Jessie that she had killed the right man. She wouldn’t have lost too much sleep if he hadn’t had her picture in his pocket. The .22 automatic was good enough. But it was better this way.

  She sat on the ground beside the man and thought it through.

  They’d find Leonard Lesneski—his damaged or dead body—eventually, of course. Maybe this morning, maybe not for a few days. A middle-aged man, not in the best of shape. They’d ID him by what they found in his wallet. He’d been climbing a steep side trail when the clot smashed into his brain. He’d staggered and stumbled off the path and crashed into the bushes.

  Poor guy. Bad luck to have his stroke all alone in a remote corner of Muir Woods National Monument on a pretty Saturday morning in May.

  They’d link the rented blue Camry to him without too much trouble—it would be the only car left in the lot after closing time that evening.

  She doubted if they’d figure out that poor Mr. Lesneski’s stroke had not been spontaneous. But if they did, if some sharp-eyed coroner noticed bruising on the sides of the anonymous man’s neck, and if the autopsy report speculated that he had been assaulted by somebody proficient in the deadly arts, the case would frustrate the investigators and soon find its way to the bottom of the pile. No suspects, no clues, no witnesses, no crime-scene evidence. Jessie had made certain of all that.

  If life were a television show, they’d relentlessly track her down.

  But this was the real world. Jessie Church knew how things worked in the real world.

  Whether the man lived or died—either way was okay with Jessie—it would take a while for the information to filter back to Howie Cohen in his cell in F.C.I. Cumberland.

  Cohen, of course, would understand exactly what had happened to Leonard P. Lesneski. Howie Cohen knew what Jessie Church was capable of.

  She’d bought herself some time. That was all.

  She stood up, peeled off her gloves and stuffed them into her daypack, put on her sunglasses and green baseball cap, and hunched the pack onto her shoulders. She paused to survey the area with her cop’s eye. There were no anomalies. Whoever eventually spotted the man in the bushes would trample the path and the grass and the bushes and destroy any trace of Jessie Church before the police decided to consider it a crime scene, if they ever did.

  Jessie turned and headed back through the silent woods to the parking lot. She passed a few hikers along the way, exchanged smiles, said, “Nice day for it.” Just another Saturday hiker.

  As she’d expected, the parking lot was packed with vehicles when she got back to it. On a perfect California Saturday in May, Muir Woods National Monument, just fourteen miles north of San Francisco, was always mobbed.

  The lot was full of cars but empty of people. Those who had arrived early enough to park here were already hiking in the woods. It was still too early in the morning for them to begin returning to their cars.

  Those who arrived after this lot was full would have to park in one of the satellite lots.

  So there was nobody around to see the young woman with the sunglasses and the cap pulled low over her face and the daypack on her shoulders unlock the blue Camry, look into the front and back and under the seats, then pop the trunk and remove the small carry-on-sized suitcase, the leather briefcase, the laptop computer, and the camera case. There was nobody to notice that she left the key in the ignition before she shut the doors, or to see her carry the suitcase and the briefcase and the laptop and the camera case to the undistinguished gray Honda Civic on the other side of the lot.

  Jessie Church had no illusions. As far as the police were concerned, she figured she’d gotten away with murder.

  But Howie Cohen would know.

  CHAPTER 7

  Simone sat in her wheelchair watching the evening shadows spread
over the meadow and seep into the valley outside the porch windows. Her hands wrestled with each other in her lap. The tremors were bad today.

  Jill was standing behind her, brushing Simone’s long hair in soothing, rhythmic strokes, and one of Jill’s soft, tinkling New Age CDs was playing over the speakers. Jill was humming along with the music.

  Dr. Mattes had not tried to soothe her. Simone had made it clear to him long ago that she had powerful intuitions and that she would always know if he dissembled or equivocated or tried to hide or distort any speck of truth from her.

  So he told her the truth.

  “Your disease is progressing, Simone,” he said after he’d finished examining her a few hours earlier. “Pretty much as we’ve expected. The spasticity in your legs and arms. The tremors. The sensitivity to heat. The sudden dark moods. The moments of confusion. They’re getting intense, and more frequent and more frightening, aren’t they?”

  Simone had nodded.

  “I’ll leave some prescriptions with Jill,” he said. “They will help with your symptoms. But . . .” And then the dear man had shrugged and smiled and left the thought unspoken.

  Simone knew the rest of it without being told. She would become increasingly confused. She’d begin to lose her memories. Gradually but inexorably her body would betray her and she’d descend into a nightmare of dark, disconnected thoughts and wild random images.

  Soon she’d become too much for Jill to care for, and inevitably . . .

  Well, that was her fate.

  Eleven years ago, when the double vision had started, Dr. Mattes had delivered his awful diagnosis. Primary progressive multiple sclerosis. The disease would develop steadily, he told her, with few remissions. There was no way to predict how rapidly it would consume her body, but there was no cure, no miracle, no escaping her fate.

  The onset of this particularly acute form of the disease, he’d told her, typically first appeared in people over forty. Simone believed that she’d not yet had her fortieth birthday back then eleven years ago. But maybe she was older than she thought. Maybe fate had sent this disease as a clue that might help her piece together her childhood, to trace her life back to her birth.