Expose

by Saranne Dawson

  Sam slid into the booth beside her without waiting for her to move over, and in that brief contact her smug thoughts were stripped away. She shrank into the corner and waited for her body to begin obeying her brain. Meanwhile, Sam was Joe Cool, introducing himself to Carole as though she didn’t know who he was, and apologizing for being late.

  Then Sam eyed her cheesecake and commented that it was no wonder her refrigerator contained nothing but Lean Cuisine frozen dinners. Kate ignored him and took a big bite, but when she saw Carole’s glance go from her to Sam, she wondered if his comment had been intended to demonstrate a relationship between them—intimacy by refrigerator, as it were. It wouldn’t be the first time Sam had done such a thing. Before they were married, he’d always managed somehow to establish their relationship any time another woman showed an interest in him—which, with Sam, was quite often.

  The waitress reappeared and Sam ordered coffee, then picked up the fork in front of him and began to help himself to her cheesecake. Kate thought he was carrying it a bit far this time. “We’re divorced,” she announced to Carole.

  “Oh!” Carole stared from one to the other in surprise.

  “We really hate each other, but we put on a good show,” Sam told her, giving her his dazzling TV smile.

  After Sam’s coffee arrived, they quickly settled down to business. Carole had told Sam very little over the phone, but Kate soon found out that his instincts had, as usual, been right on target. She’d met James Crawford for drinks after work only a few days before his death.

  “Jamey wasn’t much of a drinker,” she told them. “But he got a little buzzed that night. He even asked me to drive him home. I knew something was really bothering him, but every time I asked, he just said he couldn’t tell me—that it could be dangerous for me to know.”

  “Tell us what he did talk about,” Sam urged her. “Maybe there’s a clue in there somewhere.”

  “All he said was that there was something he was probably going to have to do, and it could really cause him trouble in his career, so he had to be careful.

  “I asked if there was anyone he could talk it over with, and he said he was going to see Professor Jacobs, his adviser, as soon as he got back. He was away at a conference or something. But I know he never talked to him, because I called Professor Jacobs afterward.”

  “It sounds to me as if you don’t believe that James was killed by a mugger,” Kate commented.

  Carole sighed. “I don’t know. It just seemed too coincidental. I mean, Jamey was really wired that last time I saw him—almost paranoid. He insisted that we meet at this place in Tacoma Park, instead of where we usually met—a bar near the Hill. And even then, he kept watching the door as though he expected to be followed or something.”

  She frowned. “I remember that when we left and were walking toward his car, he suddenly stopped—sort of froze—and swore. Then he relaxed and we went on. The only other person in the lot was a man walking toward the bar, and it seemed to me that Jamey must have mistaken him for someone else.”

  “What did he look like?” Sam and Kate asked simultaneously.

  “It was so long ago, it’s hard to remember. I think he was kind of tall and sort of wiry—you know, like a runner. That look anyway. And I remember that he was bald—or nearly bald. I remember that because the lights from the bar were reflecting off his head.”

  Kate and Sam exchanged glances. The description fitted Armistead to a tee. But neither of them said a thing.

  “Do you know what Jamey was doing for Congressman Newbury?” Kate asked.

  “Not much, from what he told me. He wasn’t very happy about being stuck with Newbury to begin with, because everyone knows his reputation. But still, he’s important and Jamey thought that would at least mean that he’d get to work on some interesting stuff. But as it turned out, even though the guy I worked for wasn’t as influential, I was the one who worked on the interesting projects.

  “Jamey said that he spent a lot of his time sitting in on boring hearings that Newbury didn’t want to attend, and taking notes for him. But according to him, that was better than spending his days at a computer, which is what they’d have had him do if they’d known how good he was.”

  Kate felt Sam’s sudden alertness even before he spoke, asking just how good Jamey was on computers.

  “He was a real hacker. He told me that he’d gotten into trouble in high school when he and a couple of his friends tapped into some networks illegally. He never did anything wrong, but he just couldn’t resist trying to get into restricted systems. It was a game for him, a challenge.”

  “And you’re saying that the people in Newbury’s office didn’t know he had these skills?” Sam asked.

  “No, they didn’t.”

  “Did he ever say that he might have been doing some hacking in Newbury’s office?” Kate asked, by now as in trigued as Sam was.

  “Well, he never actually said that he was, but I got the impression he might have been, when no one was around.”

  “WHERE’S YOUR CAR?” Sam asked the moment they’d said good-night to Carole.

  Kate explained.”Did you see the van?’’

  Sam nodded. “Yeah, but I never got close enough to get the license number or see what it said on the side—thanks to that accident.”

  “Was anyone injured?” she asked fearfully.

  “No. It looked worse than it actually was. But your name was taken in vain a few times—or your car was, at any rate.” He shook his head. “It’s a miracle that you haven’t gotten yourself killed.”

  “Maybe my luck is about to run out,” she replied, thinking about the van.

  “Not if I can help it,” Sam replied, wrapping his hand briefly around her neck in an old gesture of affection. “Come on. Let’s go get your car.”

  She climbed into the Porsche, thinking that Sam was being entirely too blase about all this. Was it an act—or had he really changed? She’d hated his protectiveness, but she wasn’t sure she liked its absence, either.

  They both agreed that it was looking more than likely that Crawford had been killed for his knowledge, not his few dollars.

  “He must have discovered something in the computer,” Kate said. “But would Newbury and Armistead be dumb enough to leave anything incriminating in the computer?”

  ’They might be, if one of them fancied himself a real expert and thought he could bury it well enough.”

  “But that would mean that they discovered what Crawford had done.”

  “Right. They could have caught him in the act—or else he left his prints all over it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If Crawford broke into a restricted file, he might have tripped up and left evidence of his hacking.”

  “Oh.” Kate was fairly good with computers, but she certainly wasn’t a hacker. Neither was Sam, although she now recalled that he’d done a series of articles on illegal hacking into sensitive government files.

  “The problem with hackers—and what usually gets them into trouble—is that they tend to think they’re smarter than anyone else. So Armistead, or whoever, could have thought he had set up a file no one else could access, and then Crawford figured he could get in and out without leaving any sign that he’d been there.”

  “Do you think we should take this information to Detective Coldron?”

  Sam shook his head. “Not yet. I think I’ll rattle Armistead’s cage a bit first. I’ll start asking around about his computer skills, and make sure that word gets back to him. If we’re right, he’s going to get real scared real fast.” He glanced briefly at her as they pulled into the lot where her car was parked. “I’ll also make sure that word gets to them that I’m the one nosing into this. That’ll take the heat off you.”

  “You’ll probably have Armistead wetting his pants,” she muttered. “With me, he’s likely to be only mildly nervous.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short. He’s obviously taking you seriously enough to have hire
d someone to bug your car and follow you.”

  He pulled up beside her car, then reached into the glove compartment and took out a flashlight. “What’s that for?” she asked as he started toward her car.

  “I just wanted to check it before you start it,” he replied, then dropped to the pavement and disappeared beneath the Toyota.

  “Check it for what?” she demanded.

  He didn’t answer her. After a few moments, he crawled back out and told her to unlock the door and pop the hood. She did as he asked and repeated her question as he began to explore the engine.

  “Sam!” she gasped as the reason for his behavior belatedly dawned on her. “Are you looking for a bomb?”

  He slammed down the hood and switched off the flashlight. “Just being careful. I don’t think they’d go that far, but I thought they might have done something like cutting the brake lines.”

  She stared at the car. “Are you sure that they didn’t do something?”

  “About ninety-nine percent certain.” He handed her the keys to the Porsche and took her keys. “You drive the Porsche. Follow me—and try to restrain yourself.”

  “I can’t do much else if I’m following you,” she grumbled, thinking that he was being overly dramatic. To her way of thinking, there was a big difference between just following someone to see what they were doing and who they were talking to, and actually trying to hurt or kill that person.

  On the other hand, though, if Newbury and Armistead were responsible for Crawford’s death, then they had already killed to protect their secret—whatever it was.

  JAMES WALDEN, Brookings’s expert on drug policy, settled into his chair like a man settling down for a lengthy discussion on his favorite topic. The difference between people like him, who could examine things at their leisure, and a reporter with a deadline was a constant aggravation to Kate—even though she didn’t actually have a deadline at this point. Maybe she didn’t even have a story.

  “Well,” he began, “as you probably know, drug legalization is an interesting issue because it cuts across party lines and ideologies. Politicians are all over the place on this one.”

  “Why is that, do you think?” Kate asked.

  “I think it’s because it’s the most intractable problem of our time. Conservatives have generally favored stiffer sentences and actions designed to cut off the supply at the borders or sooner. But they admit that it hasn’t worked. We’ve instituted mandatory sentences that have resulted in overcrowded prisons, which has often meant that the more violent, nondrug-related offenders get out faster. And cutting off the source hasn’t worked, either. Drugs are more plentiful and cheaper than ever before.

  “Liberals place great stock in education and prevention programs in the schools, and for a time, that appeared to be working. But all it really did was to prevent some kids from experimenting, while the hard-core addicted population has remained the same or even increased.

  “Liberals also want to spend more money on treatment, but studies have shown a mixed record of success at best and almost no long-term success with the hard-core types who cause most of the crime.

  “It’s almost a case of both sides throwing up their hands and saying that if we can’t get rid of illegal drugs, we might as well make them legal to gain some control over them. One of those reports I gave you has some information on European countries where they’ve been either legalized or at least decriminalized.’’

  Kate glanced at the thick stack of material he’d given her. Think tanks like the Brookings Institution produced reams of material on public policy issues. Unlike reporters, they weren’t limited to a few carefully worded paragraphs. As someone who was forever exceeding her word limit, she envied them.

  “Do you think that will ever happen?” she asked.

  Walden gestured with one hand. “There’s a fifty-fifty chance, I think. A lot depends on Congressman Newbury’s position, and from what I’ve heard recently, he’s wavering.”

  “That’s what I understand, too. But he was always opposed to legalization in the past.”

  “Yes, but he’s probably thinking just like all the others who’ve changed their positions that nothing else has worked, so why not try it?”

  Her mind on the “follow the money” rule, which applied to Newbury more than to just about anyone in Congress, Kate asked him who would benefit from legalization.

  “That’s hard to say—except for law enforcement, of course. The drug companies, maybe—depending on whether or not they decided to get into production and distribution. Most of them have stated publicly that they have no interest in it, but we could be talking big money here.”

  KATELEFT BROOKINGS loaded down with several pounds of reports, stashed them in the trunk of her car and took off for Baltimore. As usual, traffic was heavy on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, but she still tried to keep an eye out for the dark van. At one point, she saw one behind her, but the next time she checked, it was gone.

  She was on her way to talk with Mary Scofield, the mother of the New Leaf graduate who’d gone berserk. Her contact at the Baltimore Sun had worked his magic.

  But she was having a difficult time focusing on the New Leaf story, and wondered if she should give up on it altogether—or at least set it aside for the time being. What with her many other assignments, something was going to have to go, and that seemed the most likely candidate. Otherwise, the Newbury-Armistead thing was going to fall completely to Sam, who had all the time in the world right now.

  When she left the house this morning, Sam had been wandering around with a coffee mug in one hand and the cordless phone in the other, wearing only an old pair of jeans and looking rumpled and sexy the way he always did in the morning. She had only to conjure up the memory to feel that throbbing heat in her treacherous body.

  It was becoming increasingly clear that Sam hadn’t just moved into the basement apartment—he’d moved into the whole house. He needed her computer because he had only a laptop at the moment. He needed the cordless because the phone downstairs was stationary. He didn’t like his own kitchen because it was too small, and besides, it didn’t have a microwave. He didn’t have a coffeemaker, either.

  Kate sighed. The weekend loomed ahead. Open house at George’s—with Sam. Dinner with Geri and Rob—and Sam. And now Sam was talking about driving out to the cabin on Sunday if the weather was going to be decent.

  You could always just say no, she reminded herself. But it wasn’t easy. It was rare for any two couples to get along as well as she and Sam had gotten along with Rob and Geri. The two brothers were very close, and Kate had liked Geri from the beginning. She was fond of Rob, as well. In many ways he was a toned-down version of his more dynamic brother.

  What did Sam really have in mind? she wondered. She didn’t doubt that he was still attracted to her, but more than once, she’d detected a wariness in him—something she’d certainly never seen before. Was it only because he didn’t know how she felt—which was certainly understandable, because she didn’t know herself? Or did he, too, not fully understand his feelings?

  She thought wryly that their divorce was every bit as complicated as their marriage had been. Geri had once remarked that they couldn’t seem to live with each other, but she doubted that they could live without each other, either.

  Chapter Five

  “I saw it coming, you know—like a storm cloud out over the harbor. He just wasn’t himself.”

  Kate stared at the small, sad, soft-spoken woman who sat across from her in the tiny living room. Somewhere in her words lingered the lilting speech of the Caribbean. Mary Scofield was a widow who worked in a local nursing home. She got Social Security benefits for Charles and his eleven-year-old sister, and somehow they managed. An older brother had recently joined the marines.

  “Could you describe what bothered you…how he was different?”

  “Mostly, it was just little things. He was moody a lot of the time. I know kids that age can be that way, but it seeme
d different with him.” She sighed and smoothed away a nonexistent wrinkle in her skirt. “His brother came home on leave and he saw it, too. He said it was like Charles was fighting with himself.”

  “Was he seeing a counselor?” Kate asked.

  Mary Scofield shook her head. “He wouldn’t go. He said he’d had enough of that at the camp.”

  “What did he have to say about his time at the camp?”

  “Oh, he mostly liked it—at least after he’d been there for a couple of months. Families were allowed to visit one weekend a month, and I remember how different he was from one visit to the next. It just seemed to happen so suddenly, you know?”

  “After about three months?” Kate questioned, recalling what Tony DiSalvo, the counselor at New Leaf, had told her.

  “Yes, I think that’s about when it was. That’s when he stopped complaining about the place and stopped blaming everyone else for what had happened. It was scary, in a way, to see so much change so fast.”

  “Why do you think he attacked the people at school?”

  “I just don’t know. It wasn’t like he went after anyone who’d been giving him a hard time. He liked the teacher he hurt. And he didn’t even know the kids that well. It seemed like something inside him just snapped all of a sudden.”

  “How was he that morning—before he went to school?”

  “The same as he had been—kind of quiet and…I don’t know how to describe it. I think Robert, my oldest, had it right. It was like he was fighting with himself all the time. Sometimes he seemed scared, too. I found him crying in his room one evening. He hadn’t cried since he was little. But when I asked him what was wrong, he just said he was scared and he didn’t know why.”

  “Scared of someone?”

  Mary Scofield shook her head. “No, he said it wasn’t anyone. He just said that he felt scared all the time.”

  “What have the doctors at the hospital told you?”

  She made a sound of disgust. “Not much. They say he hasn’t improved and that they have to keep trying different drugs. I know a little about medicine, so I asked if they’d done a brain scan. I thought maybe there could be a tumor or something. They said they had, and it was normal. They just keep asking me if there’s a history of mental trouble in my family, and I keep telling them that there isn’t any. Most of the time, they act like they don’t believe me.”