Blood Trust jm-3

by Eric Van Lustbader

  She walked to the study door, pressed her ear against the carved and polished wood, and heard the murmuring of her uncle’s voice as he talked with other men, then the muffled slam of the front door. Crossing to the window, she was just in time to see her uncle and Jenkins climb into the backseat of a gleaming black Lincoln Town Car, which immediately drove off in a spray of gravel.

  Returning to the wing chair, she curled up and examined the cell. Though it was a brand she recognized, the model was one she had never seen before. She wondered whether it was an old model. Most people threw away their old cell when they got a new one; they did not hide it away in a secret compartment of their desk. She pressed the On button. The phone lit up immediately, connecting to a network. So it wasn’t an old phone, or, if it was, its SIM card was still active. Plus, the battery was fully charged.

  She waited for the network to give her a signal, but nothing showed except a tiny red SOS.

  “Shit on a fucking stick,” she muttered. She’d heard stories of certain hotel chains using wireless dampers to keep their clients from using cell phones in their rooms, forcing them to use the hotel’s more expensive wired system, but why would Uncle Hank employ one in his house, except as a security measure.

  She stuffed the phone in her pocket and tried to get a grip on her rising panic.

  * * *

  INTERVIEWING ARJETA Kraja was proving frustrating, principally because she seemed to have vanished.

  “It’s as if she never existed at all,” Pete McKinsey said when he, Naomi, and Jack rendezvoused in the small suburb closest to Fearington.

  “Her name doesn’t come up in any government database,” Naomi said, consulting her PDA. “Nor does she possess a driver’s license, health insurance, or even a Social Security number.”

  “Family?” Jack asked.

  “Negative.” McKinsey shuffled from one foot to the other as if he were itching to go someplace.

  “Friends?”

  “Not anyone we could find when we canvassed the area.”

  “So either she’s a ghost,” McKinsey said.

  Jack nodded. “Or she’s an illegal immigrant.”

  “Either way,” Naomi said, “she’s gonna be a bitch to find.”

  “Which is going to take time,” McKinsey said.

  They were talking like partners now, or an old married couple.

  “Time is the one thing we don’t have,” Jack told them, and because he didn’t want to tell them about his leaving with Paull, he gave them a song and dance about Alli’s legal status, as if Jenkins had given him an update. “So we need to find the girl now.”

  McKinsey was clearly unhappy with being given what was, in his estimation, an impossible task. “How do you propose we do that?”

  * * *

  TWILIGHT, THE bar both Billy Warren and the elusive Arjeta Kraja had supposedly frequented, was on a seedy section of M Street, about as far from the tony shops and town houses as you could get and still be in Georgetown. A sign on the door said that it was closed, but when Jack hit the brass plate the door opened. When they walked into the dimly lit interior, they were greeted by air that smelled burned.

  Detective Willowicz, smoking idly, sat on a tipped-back chair, his ankles crossed on a table. Detective O’Banion was behind the bar, drinking what appeared to be whiskey from a shot glass. No one else appeared to be around.

  Williowicz exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Well, what do we have here?”

  “Place is closed,” O’Banion said. “Wassamatter, can’t read?”

  “I could ask the same of you,” Jack said, then to Willowicz: “I thought I told you the case had been turned over to my department.”

  Willowicz contemplated the glowing end of his cigarette. “I think I might have heard something of that nature. What’s your memory of it, O’Banion?”

  O’Banion pulled at his earlobe and shrugged. “In this town, anything’s possible.” He poured himself another shot. His fingernails were filthy.

  “So what are you doing here?” Naomi said.

  “Satisfying an itch.” Willowicz watched them with a jaundiced eye.

  “Checking the liquor license.” O’Banion swallowed his whiskey. “Shit like that.”

  “The Metro police need detectives for that?” McKinsey was shuckling back and forth like an engine revving up. “You guys must really have screwed the pooch.”

  O’Banion laughed nastily and slammed the shot glass down on the bartop. “Shut it, Nancy.”

  “Where is everyone?” Naomi said. “The day manager, the bartender?”

  “We just got here,” Willowicz said.

  “How the fuck should we know?” O’Banion added.

  “That’s enough,” Jack said. “You two can clear out.” He took out his cell. “Your captain is waiting.”

  Willowicz dragged his feet off the table and stood up. “The thing of it is, my partner and I don’t like being treated like second-class citizens.”

  “Then stick to your own turf.”

  “We see this situation and it reeks,” Willowicz said. “Where you see a former president’s daughter, we see a perp.”

  “No,” Jack said, “you see an easy way to wrap up this case. It doesn’t matter to you if she’s guilty or not.”

  “Oh, she’s guilty.” O’Banion came around from behind the bar. “Guilty as fuck.”

  “It’s just a matter of time before we prove it.” Willowicz brushed by them and out the door, O’Banion hard on his heels.

  “Metro has a hard-on for Feds.” McKinsey relaxed visibly. “We’re always treading all over their cases, so all they can do is shit on us.”

  “The hell with them.”

  “Seriously.” Jack turned and walked toward the short corridor that led to the restrooms and the rear. “Where the hell is everyone?”

  Then he paused. What had he sensed or smelled?

  “Blood,” Jack said, sprinting down the corridor. He heard Naomi and McKinsey just behind him.

  “McKinsey,” he called. “Restrooms.”

  He heard McKinsey banging open the doors, then his raised voice: “Clear!”

  Two men sat in side-by-side chairs facing the far wall of the small, cramped kitchen. Jack came around to face them. It was not a pretty sight. Both their faces looked like sides of raw meat. Blood had spilled down the front of their shirts, buttons ripped off, the flaps spread open. More blood oozed down their necks onto their chests. Based on their clothes, one seemed to be the bartender, the other the day manager.

  Naomi knelt in front of the bartender. “Dead.”

  Jack pressed two fingers against the manager’s carotid. “So’s this one.”

  Both McKinsey and Naomi drew their firearms simultaneously.

  “What the hell is going on?” Naomi said.

  “It answers the question,” Jack said, already on the move, “why there were Metro detectives where there should have been no Metro detectives.”

  SIX

  “WELL?”

  “Everything has gone according to plan.”

  Henry Holt Carson nodded. His shoulders were hunched against the brittle wind. The sky looked like porcelain and it seemed to him as if the sun would never shine again. Like the residents of Seattle, he was getting used to the gloom.

  “Paull is gone?” he asked.

  President Crawford nodded. “And, as you predicted, he’s taken Jack McClure with him.”

  “Good.”

  Carson looked around him. This time of year the Rose Garden was a rectangle of mush and fertilizer, the sturdy rose stems prickly and dangerous as a porcupine’s back.

  “I still don’t quite understand,” the president said.

  Carson closed his eyes for a moment. A pulse beat in his forehead and he was certain a migraine was coming on. As was his wont, he fought against it. “They were too close to my brother.”

  Crawford’s brow furrowed deeply and he snorted like a horse. “Do you think they suspect?”

  “I don�
��t know.” Carson put a hand to his head. Yes, a migraine, definitely. “I hope to God they don’t.”

  “But McClure—”

  “My brother told me all about McClure’s monstrous brain.”

  “Then you know it’s only a matter of time before he figures it out. That can only lead to more blood being spilled.”

  “Yes,” Carson said through gritted teeth. He did not nod or move his head in any untoward way. “That’s why I want him gone. By the time he does figure it out, it’ll be too late. The only way to him that wouldn’t cause suspicion was through Dennis Paull.” He clamped down on the migraine but, as always, it was getting the better of him.

  “Still, I worry.”

  “The American people pay you to worry.”

  Carson turned, fumbled in his trousers pocket, opened the silver-and-gold pill case, shook two pills into his mouth, and swallowed them with the little saliva he had left. The migraines seemed to suck him dry, until his tongue felt as if it were as big and unwieldy as a zeppelin.

  The president eyed his Secret Service detail, circling the garden like a murder of crows. He took a hesitant step toward his friend. “Hank, I think you’d best sit down.”

  Carson waved him off. “I’m fine.”

  “Of course you are. But, you know, I find I’m a little peaked.” He sat on a stone bench. “Here, sit down beside me so we can continue our private talk uninterrupted. I haven’t much time before the budget meeting.”

  Carson came and sat, holding his body as delicately as if it had turned to glass, which, in a way, it had.

  Crawford looked away for a moment, out over the grounds to Washington itself. The White House was like a pearl sitting in the middle of an oyster, peacefully protected. However, today the president felt anything but peaceful.

  “I knew this job was going to be difficult,” he said after a time, “and I prepared myself for it.” He stared down at his hands, folded priestlike in his lap. “But as for the complications…” He allowed his voice to drift off like mist off the Potomac.

  “Life is complications, Arlen. The higher you climb the more they pile up, until you have one cluster-fuck after another.”

  “Well, then, this must be the mother of all cluster-fucks.” Crawford took a breath. “Then again, maybe we’re not speaking of complications at all, maybe it’s compromises.”

  Carson said nothing; he was too busy trying to keep his thoughts from being shredded by the cyclone of his migraine.

  “Maybe it’s selling the house down the river without even a wave good-bye.”

  Suddenly, the president’s words flooded into his brain, and he turned his head ever so gently. “For the love of God, do not tell me that you have cold feet, not at this late date. Fuck, Arlen, I moved heaven and earth with both the party caucuses and Eddy to get you the vice president’s position. We had a plan, from the very beginning we had a plan.”

  “No, Hank, you had a plan.”

  “Have it your way.” Carson massaged his temples, slowly and methodically. “What mattered then is the same thing that matters now. You hitched your name to my star. You rose as I rose.”

  “You need me, Hank.”

  The laugh caused Carson some pain. “Are you trying to convince me, or yourself? The truth you keep avoiding is this: You need me far more than I need you. If you bail on me now there will be dire consequences. You knew from the very beginning, when you’re in, you’re in for life. Your decision is irrevocable.”

  The president shook his head. “That was then. From where I’m sitting now—”

  “You’re sitting in the perfect place for what needs to be done. Fate had a hand in this, the same fate that took Eddy from me. Scales of justice.”

  Now it was Crawford’s turn to laugh. “What a hypocrite you are, Hank. There is no justice in this world. It’s men like you who see to that.”

  * * *

  OUT ON the street, there was no sign of O’Banion or Willowicz. Jack called in to the Metro detectives’ unit. Willowicz and O’Banion existed, Carson’s lawyer had been read their jackets, but the real Willowicz and O’Banion were on temporary leave. So who were these two masquerading as the Metro detectives, and who were they working for? The only way to find out was to ask them, so Jack sent McKinsey and Naomi out to search the surrounding blocks. Maybe the bogus detectives got careless and left some trace behind, though he doubted it. Those two were hardened professionals who left nothing to chance.

  He stayed behind, preferring to check the crime scene without distractions. While he studied the two new victims, his mind was feverishly at work. First Billy Warren gets himself tortured and killed, but not before the perp goes to the trouble of setting Alli up as the killer. Then Arjeta Kraja goes missing. Billy, Alli, and Arjeta were all seen here at Twilight, and now the manager and bartender, the two people who might have had some information about the trio, wind up murdered by two goons pretending to be O’Banion and Willowicz.

  He bent down to check that his finding here with the bartender was the same as the one he’d noticed on the manager. Yes, it was true: In both cases the bone just below the left eye socket had been fractured, just as it had been on Billy’s face.

  He recalled the fracture beneath Billy’s left eye. Ever since then he’d been going under the dubious hypothesis that Arjeta Kraja had killed Billy. After all, excluding Alli, she was the prime suspect in the triangle, and, further, if she were in love with Billy, she’d have reason to want to pin the murder on Alli. It was a shaky premise because the fracture was precise. It couldn’t have been made by someone in a rage. Further, the theory didn’t explain Billy’s torture. If she loved him, she might, in a rage, kill him. But torture him? No way.

  And now, with these two murders, the hypothesis was evaporating altogether. Arjeta Kraja killing these two in league with O’Banion and Willowicz? It didn’t track for him. Of course, O’Banion and Willowicz could be behind all three murders, but how to explain the deliberateness of the fracture?

  The bogus O’Banion and Willowicz were obvious muscle; working stiffs. Someone far more clever than they had mapped out this scenario. Something was horribly wrong, but even with racking his brain, he couldn’t figure out what. He didn’t have enough pieces of the puzzle yet.

  One thing was for certain, however: The link between these murders and Billy’s completely exonerated Alli. So he called in to his office to get the crime scene covered. He directed them to have the three corpses sent to his old friend Egon Schiltz, an ME he trusted absolutely. He was about to head out onto the street in search of McKinsey and Naomi when an image flashed through his mind, and he turned back.

  The manager’s left hand was on the table, the palm open as if offering something when he was killed. His right arm hung down at his side, partially obscured by the table. Jack went around and took a longer look at what his brain had glimpsed the first time. The manager’s left hand was a fist, so tight the nails had scored bloody half-moons in the skin of his palm.

  Crouching down, Jack pried open the fingers one by one. Something bright and shiny dropped to the floor. He picked it up and, rising to his feet, took it over to the light streaming in through one of the windows flanking the front door. It was a small metal badge, such as one would pin to a lapel or a collar. It was octagonal and had some writing on it, but all Jack’s brain saw was the shape. The writing itself was a tiny whirlpool of moving units. He tried to concentrate, as Reverend Myron Taske had taught him to do, by creating the entirely quiet spot in the air just to the right of his head. He tried looking at the badge from that viewpoint, which allowed him to calm the whirlpool of mysterious symbols, painstakingly turn them into the three-dimensional letters he had learned to identify, so he could read. All he could discern was that the badge contained no words in English. As to what language the words might be, he had not a clue. He had learned to speak many languages, perhaps in compensation for his difficulty in reading, but it was moments like this, when he was confronted by the wall of hi
s dyslexia, that still vexed him.

  Fighting the intense frustration and helplessness that threatened to overwhelm him, he picked his way to the plate-glass window, as if daylight and the passing traffic could calm him. He wondered why the club manager had been so desperate to hold on to the badge, to keep it hidden from his killers. At the same time, he was calculating who to take the badge to—a linguistics professor, an expert in local criminal gangs, or an underground slacker. The possibilities were virtually endless and made his head hurt.

  He stared out the window. It had begun to rain, rather a soft gray mist that muted colors and softened edges so that everything seemed the same, like time-abraded soapstone, the present already faded into a past that could never be retrieved.

  All at once, he felt a cool breeze stroke his cheek.

  “Emma?”

  “I’m here, Dad. It seems easier to be near you when…”

  Jack, hearing his dead daughter’s voice in his head, stared at the corpses.

  —When I’m near someone dead, I understand.

  “Not dead. Newly dead. Before the body has cooled. While the spirit is still undecided about whether to go into Darkness or into the Light.”

  —But, you, Emma, you’ve chosen neither. How is that possible?

  “How is life possible? How is any of this possible?”

  —I have no answers, Emma.

  “Neither do I.”

  —Nevertheless, I’m happy you’re here.

  * * *

  OUT ON the street, McKinsey and Naomi split up. McKinsey went east, Naomi west. McKinsey had been seconded into the Secret Service after a stellar six years as a Marine in first the Horn of Africa and then Fallujah. Again and again, he had engaged the enemy at whites-of-their-eyes range and lived to not tell the tales. Those grisly tales were locked away in his brain, under lock and key demanded by the various security acts his government imposed on him. He was proud of those secrets, proud of the kills he’d made in the service of his country, for he fervently believed in protecting America, whatever it took. He would have willingly given his life for that belief, but, when it came to war—and specifically guerilla warfare—he was too smart, too wily. The Marines were sorry when he was rotated out for the second time. Then the DoD decided it had a more important task for him.