Split Second

by David Baldacci

  then, poof, she gets married, has babies and retires. All that training, money, time, down the drain.”

  Michelle couldn’t believe she was listening to this, but she remained silent.

  “But when you came on board, I thought, now this gal has what it takes. You were the poster woman for the Service. The best and the brightest.”

  “And with it came high expectations.”

  “Every agent here has high expectations thrust upon them, nothing less than perfection.” He paused and added, “I know that your record was spotless before this. I know that you were moving up rapidly. I know that you’re a good agent, but you messed up, we lost a protectee and an agent lost his life. It’s not necessarily fair but there you are. It wasn’t really fair for them either.” He paused again, and his eyes took on a faraway look. “You may stay with the Service in some capacity. But you’ll never, ever forget what happened. It’ll be with you every minute of every day for the rest of your life. And that will hurt you far worse than anything the Service could do to you. Trust me.”

  “You sound pretty sure about that.”

  “I was with Bobby Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel. I was a rookie cop in L.A. when RFK came through. I just stood there and watched a man who should have gone on to be president bleed to death on the floor. Every day since then I’ve wondered what I could have done differently that would have prevented it from happening. It was one of the major reasons I joined the Service years later. I guess I wanted to make up for it somehow.” His gaze caught hers. “I never did make up for it. And, no, you never forget.”

  CHAPTER

  9

  WITH THE PRESS staking out her townhouse in suburban Virginia, Michelle checked into a hotel in D.C. She used the breathing space to snatch a quick, informative lunch with a girlfriend who happened to be an FBI agent. The Secret Service and the Bureau didn’t always see eye-to-eye. Indeed, in federal law enforcement circles the Bureau was the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in relation to all the other agencies. However, Michelle liked to remind her FBI buddies that their agency had been founded with seven former Secret Service agents.

  Both women were also members of WIFLE, or Women in Federal Law Enforcement. It was a support network with conventions and annual meetings, and though her male colleagues loved to rib her about it, WIFLE had been a great tool for Michelle as she confronted issues at work related to her gender. Her friend was clearly nervous about meeting with Michelle, but Michelle had helped her earn an Olympic silver medal, thereby securing a bond that almost nothing could break.

  Over Caesar salads and iced tea Michelle was given the results of the investigation thus far. Simmons was a member of the security service that had guarded the funeral home, although he wasn’t supposed to be on duty that day. In fact, the funeral home was only patrolled at night. Simmons—of course, that wasn’t his real name—had disappeared. The paper trail at the company was useless. None of Simmons’s information checked out: stolen Social Security number, fake driver’s license and references, the works, all expertly done. He’d been employed there less than a month. Thus far, Simmons was a major dead end.

  “When he came running up, I thought he was just some green rent-a-cop, so I commandeered him and put him into action. We didn’t even search his van. Bruno was obviously hidden in the back somewhere. I played right into his hands. Gave him a perfect opportunity to kill one of my men.” In her misery Michelle put her face in her hands. With an effort she recovered, pushed a forkful of lettuce in her mouth and chewed so hard her teeth hurt.

  “Before they pulled the plug on me, I found out that they got the slug out of Neal Richards. It was a dumdum. Probably never get a ballistic match, even if we lay our hands on the probable weapon that fired it.”

  Her friend agreed and then told Michelle that the van had been discovered in an abandoned barn. It was being run for prints and other microscopic indicators, but nothing had turned up thus far.

  Mildred Martin, wife of the deceased, had been found at her home, working quietly in her garden. She had been planning to go and see her husband later that night with friends and family. She hadn’t called John Bruno and asked him to come to the funeral home. Her husband had been Bruno’s law supervisor, and they’d been close. If the candidate wanted to come and see her dead husband, he could have; it was simple as that, she told investigators.

  “Yet why did Bruno scramble his schedule and go to see Martin at the funeral home at the last minute?” asked Michelle. “It was just dropped on us out of the blue.”

  “According to his staff, he received a call from Mildred Martin that morning asking him to come and see her husband at the funeral home. And according to Dickers, Bruno’s chief of staff, Bruno was agitated after getting the call.”

  “Well, a close friend of his had died.”

  “But Dickers also says Bruno already knew that Martin was dead.”

  “So you think there’s more to it?”

  “Well, she picked a time when there weren’t that many people at the funeral home. And a few things Bruno said after the call led Dickers to believe there was more to the meeting than simply paying last respects.”

  “So that may be why he pushed me so hard to leave them alone in there?”

  Her friend nodded. “Well, depending on what the widow had to say, I suppose Bruno would want it to be private.”

  “But Mildred Martin said she didn’t call.”

  “Somebody impersonated her, Michelle.”

  “And if Bruno hadn’t come?” She answered her own question. “Then they would have just left. And if I’d gone in with him, they wouldn’t have tried it, and Neal Richards…” Her voice trailed off. “What else do you have?”

  “Our thinking is that this had been planned for some time. I mean, they had to coordinate a lot of different things, and they executed it to perfection.”

  “They must have had inside sources on Bruno’s campaign. How else would they know his schedule?”

  “Well, one way was his campaign’s official Web site. The event he was going to when he took a detour to the funeral home had been scheduled for quite some time.”

  “Damn it, I told them not to post his schedule on the Web. Do you know that a waitress at one of the hotels where we stayed knew more about Bruno’s itinerary than we did, because she’d overheard Bruno and his staff talking about it? They don’t bother to tell us until the last minute.”

  “Frankly, with all that, I don’t know how you do your job.”

  Michelle looked at her sharply. “And having Bruno’s mentor conveniently die? I mean, that started the whole chain of events.”

  The woman was already nodding. “Bill Martin was elderly, had terminal cancer in its late stages and died in bed during the night. Under those circumstances no report was filed with the medical examiner, and no autopsy was conducted. The attending physician signed the death certificate. However, after what happened, his body was posted, and toxicology tests were run on the postmortem samples.”

  “And they found what?”

  “Large amounts of Roxanol, liquid morphine, which he was taking for pain, and over a liter of embalming fluid, among other things. No gastric contents because those had been drained during the embalming. No smoking gun really.”

  Michelle eyed her friend closely. “And yet you don’t look convinced.”

  Her friend finally shrugged. “Embalming fluid gets into all major vessels, cavities, solid organs, so it’s tough to be accurate. But under the circumstances the medical examiner took a sampling of the middle brain, where typically the embalming fluid doesn’t penetrate, and she found a spike of methanol.”

  “Methanol! But that’s a compound of embalming fluid, isn’t it? What if the embalming fluid did get in there?”

  “That’s a concern. And in case you didn’t know, there are differences in embalming fluids. High-budget embalming fluids have less methanol but more formaldehyde. Low-budget ones, like Martin’s, have higher levels of pure methanol. A
dded to that is that methanol is found in lots of things, like wine and liquor. Martin was reportedly a heavy drinker. That might account for the spike, the M.E. couldn’t be sure. Bottom line, though, for a man as terminally ill as Bill Martin it wouldn’t have taken a large dose of methanol to kill him.”

  She took out a file and flipped through it. “The autopsy also found organ damage, shrunken mucous membranes, stomach lining torn, all markers for methanol poisoning. And yet he had cancer throughout his body and had undergone radiation and chemotherapy. All in all the M.E. had a mess on her hands. The probable cause of death was circulatory failure, but there are lots of reasons a very elderly man with a terminal illness would have died from circulatory failure.”

  “Yet killing someone with methanol, knowing he’d probably be embalmed without an autopsy, that’s pretty ingenious,” said Michelle.

  “Actually that’s pretty damn scary.”

  “But he must have been murdered,” said Michelle. “They couldn’t just wait around hoping Martin would die on his own and then have his body at the funeral home precisely when Bruno was passing through.” She paused. “List of suspects?”

  “I really can’t say. It’s an ongoing investigation, and I’ve already told you more than I should have. I might have to pass a polygraph on this, you know.”

  When the check came, Michelle was quick to grab it. As they walked out together, her friend said, “So what are you going to do? Lie low? Look for another position?”

  “The ‘lying low’ part, yes; the ‘looking for another job,’ not yet.”

  “So what, then?”

  “I’m not ready to give up my career at the Service without a fight.”

  Her friend eyed her warily. “I know that look. What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking you’re FBI, and it’s better that you don’t know. Like you said, you might have to pass a polygraph.”

  CHAPTER

  10

  THE WORST DAY of Sean King’s life had been September 26, 1996, the day Clyde Ritter died while then Secret Service agent King was focusing on something else. Unfortunately the second worst day of his life happened to be right now. His office had been filled with police, federal agents and technical crews asking lots of questions and not getting lots of answers. Amid all this forensic foraging they’d taken fingerprint samples from King, Phil Baxter and their secretary; for elimination purposes, they said. That could cut both ways, King well knew.

  The local press had arrived too. Fortunately he knew them personally and gave vague answers that they accepted with little comment. The national press would be coming very soon, because there was something extremely newsworthy about the murdered man. King had suspected it, and those suspicions were confirmed when a contingent of folks from the U.S. Marshals Service showed up on his doorstep.

  The dead man, Howard Jennings, had been employed at King’s law practice as a title searcher, proofreader, overseer of trust account records and a gofer, sort of a jack-of-all-trades. His office was on the lower level of the law building. He was quiet, hardworking, and kept to himself. There was nothing whatsoever remarkable about what the man did for a living. However, he was very special in one respect.

  Jennings was a member of WITSEC, the program more popularly known as witness protection. Forty-eight years old with a degree in accounting, Jennings (that, of course, wasn’t his real name) had once been gainfully employed as a bean counter for a criminal organization operating in the Midwest. These folks specialized in racketeering, extortion and money laundering and used arson, beatings, disfigurements and the occasional homicide to get their point across. The matter had attracted great national attention because of the lethality of the organization’s methods and the complexities of the case.

  Jennings had quickly seen the light and helped send a slew of very dangerous folks to penitentiaries. Yet some of the most deadly had escaped the federal net; hence his enrollment in WITSEC.

  Now he was a corpse and King’s headache was just beginning. As a former federal agent with high-level clearances, King had dealt with WITSEC in some joint efforts between the Secret Service and the U.S. Marshals. When Jennings interviewed with him, his background check and other due diligence made King suspect that Jennings was in the program. He didn’t know for certain, of course; it wasn’t like the Marshals Service would confide in him about the identity of one of its people, but he had his suspicions, suspicions that he’d never shared with anyone. It had to do with Jennings’s paucity of references and work background, something that would occur when one has wiped out his former life.

  King was not a suspect in Jennings’s murder, he was told, which, of course, meant that he was probably near the top of the list. If he informed the investigators that he believed Jennings was WITSEC, he might very well find himself in front of a grand jury. He decided to play dumb for now.

  He spent the rest of the day calming down his partner. Baxter was a big, burly former UVA football player who’d spent a couple of years in the NFL riding the bench before going on to become an aggressive and highly competent trial lawyer. However, the ex-jock was not used to corpses in his office. That was a form of “sudden death” he wasn’t very comfortable with. King, on the other hand, had spent years at the Secret Service working counterfeiting and fraud involving very dangerous gangs. And he’d killed men as well. Thus he was better equipped to deal with a murder than his partner was.

  King had sent his receptionist, Mona Hall, home for the day. Mona was a frail, nervous type, so the sight of blood and body would not have set well with her. However, she was also a confirmed and accomplished gossip, and King had no doubt that the local phone exchange was being burned up with wild speculation about the homicidal goings-on at the offices of King & Baxter. In a quiet community such as Wrightsburg, that could lead the topics of conversation for months if not years to come.

  With the building now shut down by the feds and under around-the-clock security, King & Baxter had to move its legal operations temporarily to its partners’ homes. That evening the two lawyers carried out boxes, files and other work to their cars. As beefy Phil Baxter drove off in his equally large SUV, King leaned against the hood of his car and stared up at his office. With lights ablaze, the investigators were still going hard and heavy in there, scrutinizing the place for any clue as to who had put a bullet into the chest of Howard Jennings. King took in the mountain vistas behind the building. Up there was his home, a place he’d built out of the ruin of one life. It had been good therapy for him. Now?

  He drove home, wondering what the next morning would bring. He ate a bowl of soup in the kitchen while he watched the local news. There were pictures of him on the screen, references to his career at the Secret Service, including his disgraced exit, his law career in Wrightsburg and assorted speculation about the dead Howard Jennings. He switched off the television and tried to focus on some work he’d brought home. However, his attention kept wandering, and he finally just sat in his den surrounded by his world of lawbooks and boring documents and stared into space. With a jolt he came out of his musings.

  He changed into shorts and a sweater, grabbed a bottle of red wine and a plastic glass and went down to the covered dock behind his house. There he boarded the twenty-foot jet boat he kept there along with a fourteen-foot sailboat and a Sea-Doo personal watercraft or PWC, which was akin to a motorcycle on water, plus a kayak and a canoe. About a half mile across at its widest point, and perhaps eight miles long with numerous coves and inlets, the lake was very popular with recreational boaters and fishermen; stripers, bluegill and catfish filled the deep, clear waters. The summer was over now, the renters and seasonal residents gone.

  His vessels were on power lifts, and he lowered the jet boat into the water, fired it up and turned on the running lights. He hit the throttle and went out about two miles, breathing in the brisk air, letting it wash over him. He entered an uninhabited cove, cut the engine, dropped anchor, poured a glass of wine and contemplated his no
w grim-looking future.

  When news spread that a person in the WITSEC program had been murdered in his law office, King would once more be in the national spotlight, something he was dreading. The last time, one tabloid went off the deep end, running a story actually claiming he’d been bribed by a violent, radical political group to look the other way while Clyde Ritter was gunned down. Well, the libel laws were still alive and well in the United States, and he’d sued and won a large settlement. He’d used this “windfall” to build his house and start life anew. Yet the cash hadn’t come close to erasing what had happened. How could it?

  He sat up on the boat’s gunwale, kicked off his shoes, stripped off his clothes and dove into the dark water, stayed under for a bit and then came up sucking oxygen. The lake was actually warmer than the outside air.

  His career as a Secret Service agent really came crashing down when a video of the assassination, taken by a local TV news crew covering the Ritter event, was released to the public. It clearly showed him looking away from Ritter far longer than he should have. It showed the assassin drawing his gun, pointing it, firing, killing Ritter, and all the while King had been staring off, as though in a trance. The clip even showed children in the crowd reacting to the gun before King realized what was going on.

  The media had chosen to excoriate King, no doubt fueled by the outcry of Ritter’s people and not wanting to appear biased against an unpopular candidate.

  He could recall most of the headlines: “Agent Lets Eyes Wander While Candidate Dies”; “Veteran Agent Blows It”; “Asleep at His Post.” Or the one that read, “So That’s Why They Wear the Shades,” which under different circumstances might have actually made him chuckle. Worst of all, though, he’d been largely shunned by his fellow agents.

  His marriage had fallen apart under the strain. Actually it had started to fall apart long before that. King had been gone far more than he was home, sometimes leaving on an hour’s notice, with no fixed return date. Under those pressing circumstances he’d forgiven his wife’s first affair and even the second. The third time, however, they separated. And when she quickly agreed to a divorce after his world fell in, well, he couldn’t say he’d spent a lot of time crying about it.

  And yet he’d survived it all and rebuilt his life. And now?

  He slowly climbed back on board the jet boat, wrapped a towel he kept in the boat around his middle and drove back. Instead of going to his dock, he cut the engine and running lights and pulled into a small cove a few hundred yards down from his place. King quietly dropped the small mushroom anchor in the water to keep his boat from drifting into the muddy bank. Up near the rear of his house a beam of light was arcing back and forth. He had visitors. Perhaps it was the media sniffing around. Or perhaps, he thought, Howard Jennings’s killer had come looking for another score.

  CHAPTER