The doctor’s name was Gore, the irony of which was not lost on Carolla. He had lost his license to practice medicine several decades ago after a scandal involving illegal prescriptions and prostitutes. He was nearly seventy and rarely left his house anymore. The house was mostly dark inside, just a single lamp in a hallway and a desk lamp in the spare bedroom where Santiago was seated in a folding chair with his shirt off.
Gore had disappeared into the kitchen to retrieve something from the refrigerator. He returned carrying a syringe and a bottle of beer. He was barefoot, his hair a silver rats nest of unruly curls, and he was dressed in a bathrobe over a stained wife-beater T-shirt.
Gore took a long pull from the beer then set the bottle down on the window sill.
“What happened to you?” he asked the huge Mexican seated in front of him.
Santiago didn’t say a word.
“Don’t worry about it,” Carolla said. “Just patch him up.”
“He’s lost a lot of blood.”
“Take care of it.”
“This is gonna cost you,” Gore said.
Carolla unfolded a wad of twenties and dropped them on the floor.
Gore collected the cash and quickly counted it. He wasn’t pleased.
“This isn’t what we agreed on.”
“File the rest with insurance,” Carolla growled sarcastically.
“I’m too old for this.”
“So go die already, old man, or shut up.”
The doctor fumed about the underpayment as he attended to the Santiago’s wound.
“He’ll need surgery,” he said.
Carolla ignored the comment.
“Otherwise he’ll never regain full use of this arm.”
“Will he live?”
“He needs blood. I can stop the bleeding and sew it up and do my best to prevent infection, but if infection sets in he’s going to be in serious trouble.”
Carolla didn’t seem concerned. He wasn’t. He didn’t care if Santiago died right there in the doctor’s spare bedroom. He was more concerned with having again failed to complete their task as instructed and having to report back to Blackwell with the bad news.
Gore pushed the plunger to force the air from the syringe, then stabbed the needle into the meat of the Mexican’s arm. Santiago didn’t flinch, didn’t make a sound. Gore dug around with tweezers for half an hour before finally managing to fish out the pieces of the bullet, then labored for another twenty with needle and thread to close up the wound. Sweat was running down his face. Periodically he would reach for the beer bottle and take a swig.
While the doctor worked, Carolla sat on the porch steps and reported back to Blackwell that Nick Cortland was still alive. The conversation went about as Carolla had expected.
“The Mexican might die,” Carolla said.
“Bury him where no one can find him,” Blackwell replied indifferently.
“What about Cortland? Do you want me to go after him again?”
“Let me think about that. You don’t seem to be good for anything. I might have to bring in better help to get the job done.”
Carolla closed his cell phone and cursed under his breath. It was very clear he was going to get fired. That wasn’t good because he had gambling debts to pay off. He stood on the porch, facing the doctor’s house. Drapes were drawn over the windows. The lawn was overgrown with weeds. The paint on the siding was faded and flaking. Gore’s weakness for prostitutes had cost him everything. Everyone, it seemed, had a weakness.
Carolla went back inside to see if the Mexican was still alive.
* * *
It was a good crowd. Good and noisy. The senator from New York seemed to be popular in California. It was a small liberal arts university with a decent basketball team but a crappy football program. Harrison Shelby was scheduled to speak in front of the university library, and it was a fine evening for an outdoor event.
The senator met with the president of the university and spent half an hour glad-handing members of the faculty before giving his speech. He seemed to have an endless supply of energy. His charm was effortless. For the occasion he had been meticulously outfitted in a carefully selected pair of chinos with a pale blue shirt, the sleeves pushed up to his elbows, and no tie.
Not a word of the speech was his own. It had been slapped together in the hours before the event by his crack team and approved by the senator after a couple of quick read-throughs. It was generic and safe and made a weak attempt to appeal to the optimism of the young audience. Shelby smiled at the crowd and spoke into the microphone and let his charisma do all the work for him. He opened with a joke that got the proper amount of laughs but would be forgotten within seconds.
Shelby noticed a face near the front of the crowd that distracted him for a beat. He stuttered for a few seconds before getting back on track and finding his place on the printed page. The face had seemed strangely familiar but he couldn’t quite place it. It had been a man in a ball cap with a mustache staring up at him with his arms crossed, standing directly in front of him, twenty feet away, with no expression at all, just staring.
A minute later he looked again but the man was gone. Shelby searched the crowd but saw no sign of him. He had no idea why the face had distracted him. He finished his speech as his eyes continued to pass over the attentive student body. As he wrapped things up, his campaign manager ushered him through a door and down a hall to another door where his car was waiting. Ten minutes later they were at their hotel. Shelby took a shower, standing in the steamy water, still trying to figure out where he might have seen that face in the crowd before.
* * *
Dexter was proud of himself. It had been a rush of adrenaline getting so close to the senator without being recognized. He had gone right to the front and looked him in the eyes. Twenty feet away. His body was still buzzing from the thrill. Harrison Shelby had noticed him, he was sure of it. He’d seen the look of uncertainty in the senator’s eyes. Amazing!
Dexter was still wearing the ball cap and fake mustache when he returned to his rental several blocks away from the university campus. It was parked on a street lined with frat houses. He glanced around, noting the Greek letters, nostalgic for a moment about his own college days so many years ago. He had partied hard. Too hard, probably. He certainly could have studied more, taken his education more seriously, but he wouldn’t change a thing even if he had a time machine. There was no point regretting anything about life, Dexter thought. You had to roll with the punches and take things one day at a time. Regret was simply wasted energy. Dexter regretted nothing.
He had used a small digital camera to take pics of the senator’s security staff. They had been wearing dark suits with radio earphones in their ears. For the moment, security wasn’t a major factor. Down the road, if the senator started winning primaries and became the RNC nominee, security would make Dexter’s task nearly impossible to achieve. So it was now or never.
Dexter drove through traffic to the hotel where the senator was staying. He parked the rental in the hotel parking structure and carried his backpack inside. He’d already made reservations. He stood in line at the desk with his pack hooked over one shoulder and watched the world from behind the smoked lenses of his glasses. Check-in at the desk was quick and easy. He paid with a disposable credit card and took the elevator to the top floor. He had requested a room at the top facing east. Finding the hotel and room number where the senator was booked had been a simple matter of hacking into the hotel’s mainframe.
His gear was in a duffel hidden in the closet in his room. Dexter stripped down and showered. His body pulsed with nervous energy. He paced the room wearing only his underwear, doing push-ups and sit-ups to quiet his nerves. Then he took the digital camera and set it on the bathroom counter. He studied the photos of Senator Shelby, taken from twenty feet away. The pics were HD quality and crystal clear. He glanced at the pics, one at a time, then stared at his own face in the mirror. He carefully peeled the fake mustach
e from his upper lip, then used a pair of scissors to trim his hair. The next step was to apply just a touch of hair color to make a perfect match and complete the transformation. The finished product was, of course, startling.
He stepped away from the mirror. His pulse was racing.
He stared out the window at the city lights spreading out in the night. They were like billions of stars twinkling from the surface of the earth. The lights in his room were off and his reflection was visible in the glass. Suddenly, he was calm. Everything was ready. No detail had been left to chance. It was only a matter of hours now. Tonight was the night.
CHAPTER 29
“You might want to sit down for this.”
In the minutes between the 911 call and being driven to the hospital, Whitney had told me something that blew my mind. She was right, it was big. Big with a capital B. The word big didn’t begin to describe the level of impact her little secret had on my brain.
“Terry Burgess had a twin brother,” she said.
I had been sitting on the floor in the hallway of my apartment, the flat of one hand pressed against the hole in my abdomen, blood leaking between my fingers. I was feeling dizzy and the pain was like fire spreading through a forest.
“That’s not true,” I said. “Terry was an only child.”
She shook her head.
“I knew Terry better than anyone, better than his wife,” I insisted.
“Well, sorry to break it to you, Nick, but apparently, there was at least one thing about his life he never told you.”
“A twin? That’s crazy.”
“It’s fact,” she said.
I was in pain, bleeding, mind reeling from the home invaders and the attack, so her words sounded especially ridiculous at that moment. Terry had been as close as a brother to me, maybe even closer than most brothers, and I was confident there was little or nothing I hadn’t known about the man.
“I’m beginning to doubt everything you’ve said to me today,” I told her.
“I’ve already told you that he was adopted, and you admitted that you had no idea. Right?”
“You haven’t proven anything. Just saying it doesn’t make it true.”
“Terry and his brother were born two minutes apart. Identical twins. They were adopted to different families and never lived together. They were never known to one another until years later. Their biological mother’s pregnancy would have been scandalous and thus was kept very secret. Their birth parents were wealthy and the pregnancy was the result of an illicit affair. She had been pressured to have abortions, but in those days aborting would have been even more scandalous. So she delivered the boys and immediately gave them away.”
Quite a story, but I still wasn’t buying it. Terry’s life had been nothing exciting. He was born into the ad business and followed in his father’s footsteps. Nothing more to it. Whitney’s tale didn’t add up for me. I was trying to figure her angle. What was she after? Was she even telling the truth about Ellen? I knew absolutely nothing about this woman and had probably trusted her too much from the moment I met her based on nothing but her ability to sell a narrative.
“How would you know any of this?” I asked.
“Ever heard of research?”
“What would make you start looking into his background in the first place?”
“We were hot on the trail of Ellen’s biological father. All you have to do is start at square one, follow the trail of bread crumbs, collect all the pieces and be very stubborn and patient. We only found out about Terry after we had found his brother.”
“You found the brother?”
She had stared at me without blinking, then offered a small nod.
“Why do I have a bad feeling about what you are going to tell me?”
“Because it changes everything.”
“Where did you find his brother?”
“Washington, D.C.”
I felt a chill walk up my spine and make the small hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
“Tell me about him.”
“There is only one thing you really need to know.”
“OK, then, hit me with it.”
Just then there was a knock at the door. The police had arrived. I rocked forward and got to my feet to look through the fisheye lens. There were several NYPD uniforms out there. I was glad to see them, but I hesitated before opening the door. I turned to Whitney. She was still seated on the floor, looking up at me.
“Tell me,” I said.
“Terry’s twin brother is currently running for president of the United States,” she answered.
* * *
Two hours after that conversation, I was released from the ER and sat with Whitney Greene at a coffee shop at Forty-Seventh and Broadway. It was early morning and my memory of the last time I’d slept seemed distant.
“What is his name?” I asked.
“The brother?”
I nodded. There was a large cup of black coffee on the table before me with steam rising. My head felt thick from the painkiller Dr. Johansen had supplied me.
“Harrison Shelby. He’s a U.S. senator from New York.”
“Did Terry know about him?”
“Yes, but they didn’t meet until college.”
“How sure are you of that?”
She shrugged. “Ellen and I followed a trail of paperwork and asked a ton of questions. At the end of the day it wasn’t really that complicated to figure out.”
Suddenly, a huge realization slapped me in the face. I had been sitting, staring at my untouched coffee, piecing together the events of the weeks, juggling the seemingly random information I’d been confronted with, and out of the blue a big, fat conclusion occurred to me.
“How much of what you’ve been telling me is the truth?” I asked.
“I haven’t lied to you.”
“How do I know I can trust you?”
“What do you have to lose?”
Good question. Maybe nothing. Maybe a lot.
“If I’m able to believe a word you have told me, then I’m forced to draw some rather astounding conclusions.”
“I agree.”
“So I’m going to ask you the ten million dollar question,” I said.
“I’ve been waiting.”
I took a deep breath. “Is Ellen’s biological father Senator Harrison Shelby?”
Whitney didn’t flinch. Her expression didn’t change.
“I believe so,” she said.
“That’s why she is missing, isn’t it? And that’s why those men attacked us at my apartment. Because Ellen was blackmailing the senator because of his run for the presidency. This was her moment to cash in on his dirty little secret. He is wealthy and powerful, and she was in a position to bring his world crashing down if he didn’t play ball.”
“Something like that.”
“How close did she get to Shelby?”
“They talked face to face.”
“How much did she ask for?”
“Millions.”
“And he turned her away.”
She nodded.
“Then his people sent someone to clean up the mess for him. That’s why Ellen is missing.”
“That’s my best guess, yes.”
“What was your involvement?”
Whitney had a cappuccino. She sipped from it and then folded her arms over her chest. “I was involved only up to a point,” she said. “She showed interest in locating her biological father, and I couldn’t begrudge her that. Her biological mother was dead, and she desired answers. She was a very curious child. She wanted to meet him, and though I voiced the need for caution and the need to temper her expectations, there was nothing I could do to dissuade her. She was determined to know where she came from, so I helped in whatever way I could, but I had no idea how far she intended to take her pursuit of him.”
“You knew she was going to blackmail Shelby?”
“No, not until later, and by then it was too late, but I made it clear
I wanted nothing to do with that. I became very scared and worried about her all the time. She cut off communication with me for long periods and the only way she would talk to me is if I didn’t try to talk her out of doing what she was planning to do.”
I watched her face, her eyes. Then my gaze drifted to the clouds in my coffee. I pondered the words and instinctively read between the lines. There was a lot to be culled from the information she was giving me, but I needed more than she was offering, and I still didn’t trust her. I didn’t even trust myself at the moment. I was fumbling along trying to keep my head on my shoulders and simply think straight. Easier said than done.
If what she was saying was true, it was no wonder Ellen had ended up missing. I didn’t expect to see her alive ever again. Senator Shelby wouldn’t be able to afford to let her walk away. There was too much chance that she would open her mouth. Even if he’d paid the money, there was no guarantee she wouldn’t come back for more. Because when people get what they want its rarely enough to satisfy them. That’s the nature of greed.
Then I thought about Veronica Wagner. How had she gotten tangled up in all of this? I knew I’d had dinner with her and Terry, but why had she wound up dead in my apartment? What had been the sequence of events?
“When was the last time you heard from Ellen?” I asked.
“The morning before she disappeared.”
“When did she talk to Shelby?”
“Last week.”
“How did that meeting go?”
“Not good. She blindsided him and he played dumb. She told me he was a very charming man and a polished politician. He brushed her aside like a bug. He lives a very charmed life and I’m sure he feels untouchable.”
“So you think he sent someone to take care of her?”
“Absolutely.”
“What about the those men tonight?”
“My only guess is that they were there for you.”
Dead and Gone Page 16
