At five fifteen that afternoon, Lindy pulled up to the gates of the Qatari embassy in her little red car. She pushed her oversize sunglasses back on her head, and the guard greeted her with a nod of recognition as he scanned the entries on his clipboard. “The ambassador is expecting you.”
She nodded. She’d exchanged her skirt and blouse for a bright orange dress with a cobalt blue scarf tied over her head, bold colors so eye-catching they all but eclipsed her features.
“Who is this with you?” the guard asked.
“A friend. Alsama Kouri.”
“ID please.”
Leigh could barely see through the small mesh screen in her burka. She had to grope for the tote bag at her feet to pull out the passport from the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. The man took it into the guardhouse to photocopy, and Lindy’s breath caught as he paused to study it.
“Careful,” Leigh warned her. “Don’t screw this up.”
“I won’t,” Lindy hissed.
Not deliberately, Leigh was certain of that much. It took the girl only thirty minutes that morning to appreciate that she had a greater investment than anyone in the success of Devra’s extraction. She spent the whole day cloistered in a conference room at Leigh’s office without a phone or a computer and nothing to read but her own dossier. While John was out organizing the supplies they’d need, Leigh walked her through the pages, now neatly tabbed and annotated for ease of reading. Multiple copies of the same file were spread out over the table in envelopes addressed to Lindy’s boss, his boss, and his boss, all the way up to the secretary himself. With courtesy copies to Senator Brockhurst and the FBI. Copies of the delivery instructions were there, too: if Devra wasn’t safely away by the end of the day, the files would be hand-delivered to the addressees in the morning. All the envelopes were in the firm’s fire safe now, with the delivery instructions in the hands of Polly and two of Leigh’s partners.
The guard returned with the passport, a counterfeit John procured that day from a source he declined to reveal. The photo was of some anonymous Afghan woman, and the guard held it open to that page as he bent to peer into the vehicle. This was the moment of truth; the mission would nose-dive if he asked Leigh to remove her head covering. But John had watched other veiled women pass through these gates unchallenged during his surveillance, and he felt confident this would work.
The guard closed the passport and handed it in. “Go through.”
Lindy put her sunglasses back on and drove through the gates to the circular drive and looped around the burbling fountain to the visitors parking lot. She parked and passed the car keys to Leigh, who dropped them in the tote bag, a red polka-dotted carryall that was as distinctive and hopefully distracting as Lindy’s outfit. She gathered up her burka and stepped carefully out of the car and up the stairs to the entrance of the embassy. It was difficult to manage the steps through the long folds of fabric and even more difficult to see where she was going through the mesh over her eyes She felt like she was inside a character costume at Disney World, clumsy and disconnected, with only a narrow tunnel of vision out into the world.
A few members of the embassy staff were at their desks inside, the men in Western attire, the women in hijabs. A young man in a business suit sat at the reception desk, and Leigh recognized him: he was the attaché who had run up to the gates buttoning his shirt the night of Devra’s distress call. He greeted Lindy by name. “The ambassador is in his office,” he said. “You may go up.”
“Thanks, Fadi.”
Leigh followed her into a small elevator. Lindy pressed the button for the second floor, and as the doors slid shut, Leigh leaned around her and pressed the button for the third floor.
Lindy stared ahead as the elevator cranked to life. “I want all the copies, too,” she said.
“You’ll get them. The day the divorce is final.”
“Not that you care? But it’s not like I was passing classified documents in those envelopes. It was basically celebrity gossip for the Mideast diplomatic set. Who’s dining with whom, who got invited to the White House. It was nothing.”
“You’re right,” Leigh said. “I don’t care.”
The bell dinged, and Lindy got off at the second floor without another glance at Leigh.
The doors closed again and the elevator rose to the third floor. It opened directly on the foyer, a small room with heavy hangings draped on the other three walls. Leigh pulled the fabric aside on one wall and found a door. Two other doors were hidden behind the other hangings. She could hear the clang of pots and pans behind the door on the right, and the center door was most likely the entrance to the formal rooms. She hoped the door on the left would lead to the bedrooms and other private rooms. That was where she thought she’d find Devra.
She slipped through that door into a smaller hallway. From behind another door on the right, she could hear the tinny sound of studio audience laughter. She opened it a crack. A TV glowed blue in the dimly lit room. A game show was on the screen, and a dark figure lay on a chaise in front of it.
Leigh came through and pushed the door shut, and as Devra’s gaze swung her way, she pulled off her head covering.
Devra’s eyes flared wide. She struggled to pull herself to her feet. “Leigh! What are—?”
Leigh put a finger to her lips. Devra wore a loose caftan that didn’t disguise how much weight she’d lost since their last meeting. Her cheeks were hollow, and dark circles hung under her eyes. “I can get you out of here,” Leigh whispered. “There’s a car waiting outside and I’ve booked a hotel room for you. The question is: is that what you want to do?”
Devra stared at her. This was the real moment of truth. When she cried Help me, please help me! I want to leave!—was it a momentary impulse that she’d thought better of since? It was the basic question that almost every client of Leigh’s faced. Did she really want to leave the known world for the unknown? Could she face the uncertainty of a new life on her own?
Devra pressed her hands to her gaunt cheeks. “Yes!” she cried. “I do!”
Leigh stripped off the burka. Under it she wore an orange dress identical to Lindy’s, albeit two sizes up. In the tote bag was a blond wig and a cobalt blue scarf, and she put them on and handed the burka to Devra. “Put this on.” She looked at her watch as Devra pulled the garment on over her caftan. “You have five minutes to pack, but you can only take as much as you can fit in this tote.”
“There is nothing here I want.”
They crept out to the foyer. The elevator had returned to the ground floor, and they had to wait frozen and silent until it rose to the third floor again. They hurried on and Leigh lunged to press the button and close the doors. She put on a pair of oversize sunglasses as the elevator descended to the first floor.
“Walk slowly,” she whispered as they stepped off, and Devra matched her pace to hers as they approached the reception desk. The attaché named Fadi glanced up from his screen. “Have a pleasant evening,” he said, and Leigh waggled her fingers in farewell. Devra nodded and clutched the tote tight.
A few embassy staffers were departing for the day and heading for their cars in the parking lot. They nodded greetings to Leigh and Devra as they passed, and one of them stared a moment at Leigh’s orange dress, but no one paid any particular attention to Devra as they walked to the Mini Cooper and got in.
Leigh checked her watch one more time before she started the engine. It was five forty-five, and by the time she looped around the circle drive, the FedEx truck was at the gate, as it was every day at this time. The guard was huddled with the driver, checking the list of packages and envelopes against his clipboard, and Leigh drove around them and out into the street.
They traveled two blocks before Devra let out her breath. It whooshed like a gust in a wind tunnel inside her headdress. “No one follows?”
Leigh glanced up at the mirror. “Not yet. But jus
t in case—” She pulled over to the curb behind the blue minivan as John jumped out from the driver’s side and opened the passenger door for them.
“Who is that?” Devra cried in alarm.
“A friend,” Leigh assured her. “A very good friend.”
An hour later Devra was settled into a luxury suite in a hotel five miles away. The room was booked under an alias, as if she were a movie star, and the staff had already been briefed on the protocols for their guest’s privacy. Her meals would be delivered to her room along with anything else she might desire. She wasn’t to contact anyone other than the hotel manager, the concierge, or Leigh herself; whatever she needed would be routed through one of them.
The suite was exquisite. Nearly two thousand square feet in tasteful tones of celadon and robin’s egg blue, with two bedrooms, a living room, separate dining room, and full kitchen, all with panoramic views of the Tidal Basin. A golden cage, but still a cage, Leigh thought grimly, no better than her quarters at the embassy or her harem at home. But at least now the countdown clock could start on her divorce proceedings. Six months from today, Leigh could file the petition, and the cage door could begin to open. Assuming Devra could hold out that long. Not to mention the $100,000 retainer that was paying for all this.
The chief concierge arrived with the room service waiter and a dinner cart. Her name was Simone, and her hair was lacquered and her nails polished to a high sheen so that she gleamed like a fine automobile. She would see to Devra’s day-to-day needs for as long as she was in residence. They reviewed the details of those needs while Devra picked at her meal and stared out the floor-to-ceiling windows. Ten stories down people were enjoying a bustling nightlife, but they looked tiny and artificial from up here, like CGI figures in a battlefield epic.
“I hope this is all to your satisfaction,” Leigh said when it was time to take her leave. “If anything isn’t what you want, please tell me.”
Devra seemed dazed by all that had transpired in the last several hours. “I didn’t know enough to want this,” she said. “Any of this. It’s like a dream.”
“Take your time. Get some rest. We’ll talk in a few days about where we go from here.”
John was waiting outside, and when Leigh emerged from the hotel lobby, he flicked a cigarette into the gutter and opened the door of the minivan for her. “Everything go okay?”
“Perfectly.”
“What floor’s she on? I’ll go up and do some recon.”
“Oh, John, you’ve done enough already. More than enough.”
“You sure? I don’t mind.”
“No, it’s fine, really.” She sank into the seat with a sigh. It had been a long day, but the hard part was over now. “John, seriously—what can I do to thank you?” she asked as they pulled out from the curb. “Besides handling your own case for free.”
“You mean it?”
“Of course. Have you had any luck yet?”
“Hmm?” He was distracted by a traffic snarl in front of the Washington Monument.
“With Bryce’s school records.”
“Oh. Right. No, I hit a brick wall. I’ll have to figure something else out. But at least we had a good day today, didn’t we?”
“We sure did.”
He merged onto Seventeenth Street, and she settled in for the ride, relaxed and happy with the satisfaction of a job well done. It was the best she’d felt since—she didn’t know how long.
No, she knew. It was he best she’d felt since then.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Pete got another email from Duke that week, this one inviting him to a southern-style barbecue at the Gazebo Quad during parent-family orientation week. All summer he’d been getting news and announcements and reassurances for parents, and now that August was here, the emails were coming in fast and furious. Kip had to be getting his own emails, too, but he never mentioned them. He must have received his roommate assignment by now, too, but he didn’t mention that either. When the twins started college, they had most of their gear packed by this date. They’d had long conversations with each of their prospective roommates and made almost daily runs to Bed, Bath and Beyond for plastic storage cubes and beds-in-a-bag and unauthorized minifridges. So far Kip hadn’t even opened a duffel.
But he was still In. The admissions office either didn’t know or didn’t care about the manslaughter charge, and they hadn’t yanked his grant money either. It was right there as a deduct on the first-semester tuition bill. A bill that Pete didn’t plan to pay until after the due date. Not because he was running behind on all his bills, though he was, and not because he’d have an easier time paying it with the bail refund he’d receive after Kip’s case was closed, although that was also true. No, he was delaying payment for the same reason Kip hadn’t gone out sheet-shopping. Because Duke might not happen. And to his shame, Pete had done the calculations: it would be cheaper for him to pay the point-and-a-half late fee on the tuition bill if Kip was acquitted than to wait for a refund and lose the time-value of his money if he wasn’t.
He wasn’t sure what Kip’s calculations were. Whether he was scared or resigned or too paralyzed to think. Though paralyzed wasn’t the right word. Lately he’d been working like a demon around the job site. That morning he helped the painters tape up their plastic sheets and spread their drop cloths, and now he was out digging holes with the landscapers. Pete didn’t tell him to do either one, and he wouldn’t have, anyway. Those were both fixed-price subcontracts, so Kip’s free labor wasn’t saving him a dime. It must have been saving Kip, though, from having to think too much about what was coming after August 10.
What was coming now, on August 3, was Shelby Randolph in her black BMW. The driveway was blocked with half a dozen trucks, so she parked down on the road and picked her way through the gravel in her lethal-looking heels. Kip’s spine snapped up like a rubber band when he saw her. He dropped his shovel and trudged up the hill in a parallel path to Shelby’s. “I’ll go wash up,” he said to Pete at the door and brushed past him into the house.
The paint fumes were too strong for an indoor meeting. Pete showed Shelby to the makeshift table on the terrace—a plywood sheet over sawhorses—where the men ate lunch and took their coffee breaks. It was set up under the pergola, and the sun shone through the slats and laid diagonal stripes across the striated surface of the plywood. Shelby sat down and swung her legs under the table.
“You met with the new prosecutor?” Until last week a middle-aged woman named Andrea Briggs was running the case. Now some kid named Seth Rodell was in charge. That was good news, Pete had thought, a downgrade, until Shelby quietly shook her head. Andrea had been bumped down to second chair. Rodell was the rising star.
“Let’s wait for Kip, shall we?” she said now.
Right. Kip was the client. Her adult client. This little fiction they maintained.
She swept her gaze over the rear elevation of the house across the bluestone patio, past the pool, and up to the windowpanes winking in the sunlight. “Place looks good,” she said.
“Have you seen Leigh?”
She kept her eyes on the house. “I’m not going to talk to you about Leigh, Pete.”
“I only want to know if she’s okay.”
“Of course she’s not okay. Her daughter died and her husband left her.”
His fists clenched under the table. “You know that’s not the whole—”
“Of course I know. When she asks if you’re okay, I say No, his son got arrested and his wife kicked him out. Both statements are true, but it doesn’t solve a damn thing. So I have nothing more to say on the subject, okay?”
“Okay,” Pete said, stung.
“Look,” she said. “It’s an impossible situation. For both of you, but also for me. She’s my best friend. I should have been beside her, helping her get through these few last months. But Kip’s my client, and I had to b
e there for him, too, and it turned out I couldn’t do both. I should have withdrawn when he changed his story about who was driving, but I didn’t realize how bad things were going to get.”
“Nobody did.”
“In any case, it’s too late now. There’s nothing to do but get through it.”
Get through it. She made it sound like crawling through a tunnel and coming out into sunshine on the other side, and maybe that would be true for her. When this case was over, her life would revert to normal. Back to her glamorous life and her billion-dollar cases in the city. But Kip’s tunnel might come out somewhere even darker.
He came out of the house with his arms scrubbed up to his elbows. Droplets sprayed off his hair like a dog giving himself a shake. “Hey,” he panted as he sat down next to Pete on the bench seat. “’S up?”
“I had a meeting with the prosecutor today,” Shelby said. “He’s put an expiration date on their plea offer. We have until Thursday nine a.m. to say yea or nay.”
“Why so soon?” Pete thought the offer would be good until the minute before the jury returned a verdict.
She shrugged. “The usual. He doesn’t want to prepare for trial if he doesn’t have to.”
Everything was usual for Shelby. She couldn’t appreciate how unusual this experience was for anyone else. To have to decide in three days—less—whether your kid goes away for a guaranteed two years or rolls the dice and risks five times as long. To have to decide if you were going to let him go away under any circumstances. Take off for Canada and both become felons.
“We exchanged exhibits and witness statements today. There were no surprises. So let me preview exactly what their case will consist of.” She picked up her notes. “First they’ll put on the neighbor who called nine-one-one. We know what he’s going to say. Next up will be the arresting officer, Denise Mateo. Then your two friends from the party. Then the ER doctor to testify about Chrissy’s condition when she arrived and about Kip’s statement that she hit her head. Finally, the neurosurgeon to establish the nature of the injury and to offer his opinion as to the cause of death.” She looked up from her notes. “That’s a capsule of the prosecution case.”
House on Fire (ARC) Page 33
