I sent Barack on his way. He disappeared back toward the car. I was all alone. If I ran into trouble, I’d call him. Or 911. Or both. Cell phones give you the illusion of protection, but are no real help if things really get rough. Same as guns. Most gun-fights are over within seconds. There is rarely enough time for a victim to pull their piece. There’s something powerful about the illusion of protection, though. Something comforting.
I eyed every stranger who passed me, looking for some sign that they were the caller who’d promised me the one thing that had been eluding me. Justice. I hadn’t told Barack about the caller’s promise. The word was so vague as to be meaningless. And besides, justice meant different things to different people.
Like a mirage in the desert, an ice cream stand materialized just ahead. A sign announced PEE-WEE PENGUIN‘S ICE CREAM IGLOO in rainbow-colored letters. There was a mascot, too: a friendly-looking penguin with a scarf and stocking cap, holding an ice cream cone. Another sign promised: SEVEN FLAVORS AND TOPPINGS.
Let’s just say it was no Baskin-Robbins.
I joined a line of half a dozen adults and a handful of kids. There were no mysterious lurkers in the trees nearby. In fact, I was probably the most mysterious person around, since I was still wearing my sunglasses. The sun was on its last legs, and the streetlights along the Riverwalk had already kicked on.
The bug-eyed teenager in the window leaned out to take my order. “Nice shades,” he said. Something about the way he said it told me he was ribbing me.
“One scoop, chocolate chip.” I cracked my wallet. “Waffle cone.”
“I’ve got this,” a woman’s voice said from behind me. I turned my head.
Abbey Todd.
I instinctively flinched. My body remembered what she’d done to it earlier. I relaxed, however, when I saw that she didn’t have any high heels in her hands. She was wearing flats now. Her long hair was gone—it had been a wig all along, I realized. Clever girl.
She paid for my cone and we headed down the pathway. The old industrial district’s streetlights were visible upriver. We were a mile away from where this whole thing had begun. Right here, God willing, was where it would all end. If Abbey came through on her promise, that is.
I took a seat on a bench. We were close to the water and the gnats were swarming, which meant we’d get bitten to holy heck. It also meant we had the riverbank to ourselves.
“How’s the ice cream?” she said.
“Good, but I’ve had better. There are too many chips, which overwhelms the vanilla. If I’d wanted chocolate, I’d have ordered chocolate.”
“You’re welcome.”
If she expected a thank-you, she’d wait a long time.
A light rain started to fall. I pulled my hood up.
“You told me you had answers,” I said. “Who are you with? The DEA? The FBI?”
“You have my business card,” she said.
“Delmar Investigations, right? How big’s this outfit?”
“You’re looking at the entire outfit right here.”
An ice cream headache stabbed me between the eyes. It was nothing compared to the headache I’d been living with for the past two days.
“Sorry, brain freeze,” I said, pinching the bridge of my nose. “So tell me about this justice you promised.”
She paced in front of the bench. “We’ll get there. But first you have to realize this is all highly confidential. Not to mention there’s a lot of money on the line for the insurance company that retained me.”
“How much?”
“Enough for them to retain me,” she said without a hint of arrogance.
“If you’re not supposed to tell me anything you’ve discovered, why are you doing it?”
She swatted at a swarm of gnats. “I’ve been asking myself the same question. I could lose business over this. I could lose my license. I didn’t know Finn Donnelly. Everything I know about you I learned online. I didn’t even vote for you.”
“For which race?”
“Any of them,” she said. “I wasn’t old enough.”
“Not even in 2012?”
She shook her head. “Turned eighteen two days after the election.”
I didn’t have to do any math to know that she was only a few birthdays past drinking age. My first reaction was that she was too young to help me. That’s exactly what I’d been, once upon a time: too young. And the people of Delaware not only gave me the time of day, they actually sent me to the US Senate.
“So why are you here, talking to me? With everything on the line.”
“I guess because…it’s the right thing to do. Does that make sense?”
“It makes sense,” I said. “It makes all the sense in the world.”
40
Abbey Todd hadn’t set out to be the Sam Spade of corporate investigations. That was just the way things worked out. She’d always had an insatiable curiosity for the world around her. The world was made of onions, she said. She couldn’t stop herself from peeling away the layers.
“I started working crowdsourced cold cases at thirteen,” she told me, without stopping to explain what any of that gobbledygook meant. “I caught my first serial killer before I even had my first kiss.”
She’d been heavily recruited both by law enforcement agencies and by Silicon Valley, but found that she liked working on her own too much to slog away inside a government or corporate office. I asked if she’d considered college.
She said she hadn’t even taken the SAT.
Abbey started her own private-investigation business while still in high school. There wasn’t much money in it. “Nobody took me seriously,” she said.
“Because you looked like a cheerleader?”
She scrunched her face up. “Because I wore braces.”
From then on I decided to keep my mouth shut while she talked.
Abbey was drawn into insurance-fraud claims investigations by a friend on a message board. I assume she meant an online message board, because I was beginning to get the feeling she’d lived most of her life in front of a screen.
Unlike most of her criminal and civil cases, her insurance-fraud investigations promised serious sums of money. Enough that, if she played her cards right, she could be her own boss after graduation.
Five years later, she was one of the top investigators on the East Coast in her particular area of expertise: life-insurance fraud. That’s how she came to be involved in Finn Donnelly’s case.
“It looked like it was going to be easy,” she said. “He died under suspicious circumstances not long after taking out his policy. There were drugs involved. Twenty-four hours, I figure. Twenty-four hours and I’d be home. I was so confident I didn’t even give my key to anyone to take care of my cats.”
“Are your cats going to be okay?”
“They’re very resourceful,” was all she said.
“So what changed your mind? When did you realize this wasn’t an open-and-shut case?”
“When the president and vice president stumbled into the deceased’s motel room.”
I felt my face flush.
“There was more, of course. The heroin in Finn’s pocket was powder, in a baggie. Ninety-five percent of the heroin in this town is black tar from Baltimore. It’s sold in small quantities in—”
“Balloons.”
“You’ve done your homework.”
I didn’t say anything. Taylor had lied to us, but he’d been smart enough to pepper his story with enough truthful details to make sure it would check out. He wasn’t as dumb as he pretended to be.
Abbey said she contacted a friend at the Drug Enforcement Agency to see if he knew how an Amtrak conductor might have encountered this specific kind of heroin. “And that’s when I learned Finn Donnelly was already under investigation by the DEA.”
If learni
ng about Finn’s death was a shock, this was an electrocution. I knew I wasn’t going to like what she said next.
“He’d been running drugs for an outlaw biker gang,” she said. “They’re not competing with the local dealers who traffic from Baltimore to Wilmington. They’re operating on a bigger scale, up and down the East Coast.”
“The Marauders.”
“You’re familiar with them?”
“I’ve heard of them.”
Finn knew the Amtrak security protocols inside and out. He knew when the drug dogs came through on sweeps. He knew the undercover Amtrak narcotics detectives. On his daily route, he could move product unmolested across half the eastern seaboard.
“Why didn’t the DEA bust him?” I asked.
“It takes time to build a case. My contact didn’t give me all the details. Either because he doesn’t have them, or because they’re so close to making a move that they don’t want to risk upsetting the entire house of cards.” She stopped pacing. “So that’s where we’re at now.”
“If this is true…do you think he stepped in front of that train on purpose?”
“I know what the engineer, Alvin Harrison, told the police. I’ve read the preliminary findings from the transportation board. Finn Donnelly was lying on the tracks—a ‘trespasser,’ in their parlance. Either asleep, unconscious, or…”
“Dead.”
“We’ll know a little more when we get those blood test results. But they’re not going to tell us the full story. I’d say he knew the DEA was onto him. My best guess is he got high to numb the pain of what he was about to do and then laid down on the tracks. He may not have even been thinking about his life insurance policy at the time. He just wanted out.”
“There was a map,” I said.
“A map?”
“With my address. The police found it on the train, at his desk. You don’t know anything about that?”
She shook her head. “I assumed you were involved in the case because he was your friend.”
“He was my friend.”
“Then maybe he wanted your help. Maybe he thought you could help him cut a deal with the DEA.”
“I once told him that if he ever needed my help, he could look me up. I thought he’d ask me to help move a bookcase or something.” I shook my head. “If all you’ve got is bad news, why’d you ask me to meet you here? It sounds like you’ve finished your report. You’re convinced this was a suicide.”
“I didn’t promise you good news. I promised you justice. As in the truth.”
I thanked her for letting me know what she’d discovered, even if it hadn’t been what I’d wanted to hear. As Khaled Hosseini writes, it’s better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie. I wanted to believe that she was a liar. She’d passed Steve’s background check, but so had Finn. Still, in my heart of hearts, I couldn’t deny that all the pieces were falling into place. It wasn’t her fault if I didn’t like the picture.
We shook hands and she started to walk away.
“Oh,” I said, calling out to her from the bench. “One more thing.”
She turned her head.
“Thanks for the ice cream,” I said.
41
Barack was waiting for me in the Challenger. I slipped behind the wheel.
“Remember the woman from the motel? Abbey Todd?”
“The one who gave you the shiner at the Donnellys’ place,” Barack said.
“She has a friend in the DEA,” I said. “They were shadowing Finn before he died on the tracks. We can stop waiting on those blood test results to see if he was high because it doesn’t matter. We can stop worrying about whether that was his blood at the motel. Everything I didn’t want to believe about him…it was all true.”
I brought Barack up to speed on what Abbey had told me. He didn’t seem surprised by any of it.
Sirens wailed in the distance. We’d heard so many sirens these past two days, and I hadn’t ever noticed. The noises of the city faded into the background when you weren’t listening for them.
Barack took some time before speaking. I could tell he was analyzing everything in his mind, trying to make sense of the chaos. Rain pattered on the roof of the car, like spent casings from an automatic weapon.
Finally, he said, “Whatever Finn did, he did it for Darlene. For love.”
“Is that what people do for love? Would you do that for me?”
“You’re my best friend, Joe. Michelle and our family are part of the Biden clan, through the good times and bad. I already told you that if anyone messes with you, they mess with me. That’s what family means. C’mon, Joe, I know I’m not the only one who misses our weekly lunches. You and me, we’re like the Three Amigos. Only there’s two of us.”
If he expected a laugh from that line, he was in for a rude awakening. “Best friends talk to each other,” I shot back. “All we’ve been doing is talking over one another. You haven’t called or texted me in how long, and then you show up and expect everything to be the same?”
“You never called or texted me either. I thought you wanted to keep your distance.”
“Why would you think I wanted to avoid you?”
“Because if you want to have any shot in the next election, you have to step out of my shadow. I thought that was obvious.”
“Your shadow’s not a bad place to be right now. Your approval rating—”
“Nostalgia for a bygone era. I leave office, and suddenly Obamacare becomes popular? It’s flattering, but it says more about the current administration than it does about me. The truth is that I failed, Joe. I had my eight years. There were some wins, but they were few and far between. The slate’s being wiped clean. If anything, we’re going backward.”
“If you failed, then so did I. I was there every step of the way.”
Barack didn’t say anything.
“But,” I added, “I don’t think you failed. I’ve been in this game longer than you. You’ve got to have patience. It takes more than eight years to build a legacy—and it takes more than a term or two to reshape the world. Change happens incrementally.”
“That sounds like something I said.”
“If it is, I’ll be sure to give you proper credit,” I said with a small laugh.
Barack smiled. For a split second, we felt like friends again.
Only for a split second.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” he said.
“And I’m sorry for dragging you so deep into this. I feel like an idiot.”
“It’s been a strange weekend, Joe. I would say it’s been fun, but there’s nothing fun about people dying.”
“It got my heart rate up,” I said. “There’s that.”
More silence.
Finally, Barack said, “Why don’t you and Jill come over for brunch next weekend? Michelle would love to see you guys. You could bring the grandkids down. Stay the night. There’s plenty of room.”
His offer was tempting.
It was also too little too late.
“I appreciate what you’ve done for me this weekend, Barack—I really do—but it’s time for us to go home. And by that I mean for you to head back to the swamp, and for me to head back to the Lake House.”
“Joe—”
“I need a little space. It’s for my own good, right? Isn’t that what you said?”
“Don’t be like that.”
“Be like what? Upset? I have a right to be upset. Our little adventure this weekend was just fun and games to you. I see it in your eyes. To me it was personal…It doesn’t matter now. It’s over. With any luck, I can sweet-talk Esposito into keeping my name out of the news, or at least reducing me to a footnote. But that would be par for the course, wouldn’t it? I’ve never been anything more than a footnote.”
“You weren’t a footnote to me. Yo
u were my vice president. You were also my friend.”
“Friends back each other up.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I thought you were going to cover me tonight.”
“You told me not to. You said you wanted to go meet your mystery man alone. You’re not seriously mad about that, are you?”
“If I’d been in your shoes, I would have never let you do something that stupid.”
“No offense, but I would never do something that stupid.”
“So that’s how it is, huh? Just another case of ‘Joe being Joe.’”
Barack placed a hand on the dash. “Joe—”
“Don’t ‘Joe’ me this time,” I said, starting the car. “Don’t ever ‘Joe’ me again.”
Barack’s silence spoke volumes. He and I were through—this time, for good. It wasn’t Barack’s call. It was mine. I drove him back to his Escalade in the Waffle Depot parking lot, and we parted ways without another word.
42
I was halfway home when I remembered our pal T-Swizzle still handcuffed inside the storage unit. The unit was climate-controlled, so there was no chance of him overheating. Still, he would cause me a heck of a lot of trouble if he started screaming his head off and was discovered by some Nosy Nellie. Although I was tired, I phoned Dan and told him to meet me at the storage facility. I said I had a gift for him.
I arrived before Dan. I knelt low and unlocked the padlock. Before I could roll the garage door up, there was a cough from behind me.
It was Dan, half shrouded in darkness. He must have parked somewhere out of sight.
“Jumpin’ Jesus on a pogo stick, you scared me there, Dan.”
He stepped out of the shadows. “There is no federal investigation. I had a friend check with Service headquarters. You lied to me, Joe.”
I rose to my feet. “We didn’t have much choice. I just wanted the details kept out of the paper, at least until the funeral.”
“But after the funeral, you kept up the lie. What’s your excuse for that? You told me this afternoon you wouldn’t do anything stupid, and here you are. You say you’ve got a ‘gift’ for me. I’m afraid to ask what it is.”
Hope Never Dies Page 17
