“Jack, you are our only shot. If you don’t do this, all we can do is wait for the FBI to sort this out on their own terms and on their own schedule. By that time, your father could be part of an administration that is neck-deep in a congressional investigation. And time will only tell who is left holding the bag. Is that what you want?”
Jack considered it. She’d punched exactly the right button. He couldn’t help but fear that his father was descending into the land of no return-especially after his conversation with Andie.
“Jack, is that what you want?”
“No,” he said, gripping the phone tighter.
“So, you’ll meet with Elizabeth?”
Suddenly, Jack was all too aware that the FBI was asleep in his bed. But it didn’t change his mind.
“Yeah. I’ll do it.”
Chapter 25
Paulette was in her car when an idea came to her.
Tomorrow’s schedule was busier than usual, starting at 6:00 A.M., when she and the congressional correspondent, the chief political consultant, and the senior legal analyst were slated to begin taping a four-part segment on the political and legal ins and outs of the Harry Swyteck nomination. Paulette should have driven straight home and gone to bed. Instead, she drove home, grabbed the key to Chloe’s apartment, and hopped right back in her car.
There was no available parking on the street, so Paulette pulled around to the back alley and squeezed her car in between a Dumpster and a utility poll. She climbed out, and the car door closed with an empty thud. The quiet alley was dimly lit, a single yellow-tinted light glowing at the street entrance. While the cold night air had felt good upon stepping out of Club SI, it now made her cinch up her coat and walk quickly. The click of her heel echoed in the alley, and it made her stop and look around. The backs of the surrounding buildings were covered with burglar bars. Not another human being was in sight. The sounds of the city had seemed to evaporate. Urban quiet. It reminded Paulette of her first job as a crime-beat reporter-that eerie, ghost-town effect that marked high time for crime. Her gaze drifted toward Chloe’s apartment building, and she could see the lone window in the corner with its second-story view of the alley. She thought for a moment of Chloe all alone, looking out her window toward trash cans and the backs of buildings. Then her thoughts turned to a stranger standing in this very spot, looking up toward Chloe.
Paulette shook off the image and started toward the rear entrance to the building.
The back door was locked, but Chloe’s passkey still worked. Paulette pushed the door open and climbed the stairs to the second floor. The police tape was gone, and there was absolutely nothing about the door to Chloe’s apartment to tell the world that a young woman had been murdered. Weird, but even though she’d attended the funeral and written the obituary, Paulette had a fleeting thought that if she knocked, Chloe might answer. Murder was against the natural order of things, and it could play terrible tricks on the mind.
Paulette inserted the key. The tumblers clicked, the lock disengaged, and Paulette opened the door. She was about to switch on the light, but she stopped. From where she was standing, she could look all the way across the little efficiency and out the lone window in the corner. In the darkness, with the alley lit behind the building, she could actually see the very spot where she’d been standing and looking up toward Chloe’s apartment just a few minutes earlier. She walked across the room in the dark and tried to pull the Venetian blinds shut. They were broken, however, and the slats wouldn’t close all the way. It gave Paulette an eerie feeling. She wondered if it had ever occurred to Chloe that she was on permanent display.
Paulette went back and switched on the light. She would make this quick.
The forensic investigators had left the place reasonably undisturbed-nothing like the way they would have dissected an actual crime scene. The rent was paid through the end of the month, and one of the tasks on Paulette’s to-do list was to sort through Chloe’s belongings and clear things out. Tonight, however, her focus was on just one of Chloe’s possessions. A prized possession. Her autographed photograph of Vice President Grayson.
The framed photograph was still hanging on the wall. Paulette crossed the room and took it down.
She hadn’t studied it closely on her last visit, the morning after Chloe’s death, when the homicide detective had brought it to her attention. Seeing it then had triggered only sadness. A seemingly unimportant detail, however, had lodged in her brain-and with all the recent talk of the vice president’s daughter, her sadness had morphed into suspicion.
Elizabeth Grayson was in the photograph.
Paulette moved closer to the lamp for a better look. The pose seemed almost candid, or perhaps it was a staged pose that had broken down into something more casual. The vice president was seated on the corner of his desk. Chloe was standing next to him. Elizabeth was right beside Chloe. Right beside her-with her arm around Chloe’s shoulder. The two women were smiling widely, heads tilted to the point where they were almost touching.
Paulette laid her hand atop the photograph and covered the vice president. With him out of the picture, the photograph told an entirely different story. There was nothing forced about the connection between the two women. Chloe and Elizabeth looked like old girlfriends, a couple of college-aged women cutting up and having a laugh in the White House.
Suddenly, the vice president’s betrayal was of a whole new magnitude.
Shit, Chloe. How could you have done that to a friend?
Paulette put the photograph back on the wall and switched off the light. One last glance through the half-opened blinds re-kindled that I’m being watched feeling, and she resolved to come back and clean out Chloe’s apartment in the daytime. She locked the door on her way out, took the rear staircase to the back entrance, and started toward her car. She hadn’t parked far away, but the night was turning colder, and the walk across the cracked concrete seemed longer than it was. Paulette didn’t frighten easily, but she was eager to get out of there. She reached into her purse as she approached, disengaged the lock with the keyless remote, and opened the driver-side door. Her hand was actually shaking as she aimed the key at the ignition-and the tip had just touched the slot when she felt the plug of cold metal behind her right ear.
She froze.
“Don’t make a sound,” the man said. He was behind her in the backseat with his gun to her head.
“What do you want?” said Paulette.
There was silence. Enduring silence. The man couldn’t or wouldn’t tell her what he wanted. Paulette did not take that as a good sign. Suddenly his left hand was at her throat. She gasped, about to scream, but he shoved a bottle in her open mouth.
“Drink,” he said.
Paulette couldn’t have swallowed if she’d wanted to. The barrel of the gun pushed more firmly against her skull.
“I said drink.”
Paulette’s heart raced with fear, but whatever was in the bottle had to be better than a bullet in the brain. She tilted her head back, and the warm liquid poured down her throat. It was bitter and a little salty, unlike anything she had ever tasted. She coughed through the last few swallows.
“All of it,” he said.
She closed her eyes tightly and forced the rest down. When she finished, he took the bottle from her lips.
“Good girl,” he said, though his voice seemed strangely distant, as if she were hearing only the tail end of an echo. “Now we wait. We wait. We…waaaaaait.”
Chapter 26
The scream woke Jack at dawn, and he shot bolt upright in the bed. The window shades were drawn and the room was still dark, but Jack immediately sensed that the other side of the bed was empty.
“Andie?” he said, but he didn’t wait for a response. He heard something-muted voices? — and ran toward the kitchen.
“Whoa!” said Theo, shielding his eyes. “Forty-year-old naked man. Not pretty.” Jack quickly wrapped himself in a towel from the hallway linen closet and entered the kitchen. Andie was st
anding at the counter, already dressed for work and making coffee.
“What was the screaming about?” said Jack.
“Oh, you mean Andie?” said Theo. “There’s a black man in the house, there’s a black man in the house!”
Andie swatted him. “I didn’t say that. I just didn’t expect someone to be standing in the kitchen.”
Jack said, “What are you doing here, anyway?”
“Time to go fishin’, dude. Dolphin are running.”
Jack had a three-year lease on the most modest waterfront property on Key Biscayne, one of the original “Mackle houses” that were built mostly for World War II veterans who were brave enough to live in what was, at the time, little more than a mosquito-infested swamp. The house originally sold for twelve thousand dollars, and the current owner was renting it out to Jack until market appreciation added three more zeros to the land value-which wasn’t far in the offing. It was basically a two-bedroom concrete shoe box, but it came with over one hundred feet of waterfront and a dock. Four years ago, Jack and Theo had gone boating, and by the end of the day, they were too tired to load the boat onto Theo’s trailer. Jack said he could dock it overnight. It was still there.
“Coffee?” said Andie.
“Sure,” said Theo.
“She was asking me,” said Jack.
Andie poured a cup for each of them. Jack enjoyed the aroma before drinking. Theo gulped his, then said, “I hear President Keyes is a real coffee carouser.”
“Connoisseur, Webster.”
“Sorry, I don’t speak Latin.”
“It’s French.”
“Technically, it’s English,” said Andie, reading from the web-page on her iPhone. “Derived from old French. Originally from cognoscere, which is Latin.”
“I was right!” said Theo.
“Whose side are you on?” Jack asked Andie.
Theo poured himself more coffee. The guy couldn’t get enough of anything that was free.
“So,” said Theo, “did you at least have coffee with the prez in the White House before you got canned?”
“I didn’t get canned.”
“That’s what the paper said.”
“Shit, it was in the newspaper?”
“Jack,” said Andie, “you were fired, okay?”
“I repeat: Whose side are you on?”
She didn’t answer. Her gaze was still fixed on the display screen of her iPhone, but she had turned very serious.
“Something wrong?” said Jack.
“I-” she started to say, then stopped. Jack knew she’d received one of those FBI e-mails that she couldn’t tell him about.
She looked up and said, “Turn on the television.”
Jack grabbed the remote and switched on the set. Andie took the control from him and tuned to CNN. On-screen, a reporter was standing outside a three-story apartment building. The red banner with white letters at the bottom of the screen identified her as Heather Brown, and her location was listed as the LaDroit Park neighborhood of Washington, D.C.
“That’s where Chloe Sparks lived,” said Jack.
Andie raised a hand, telling him to listen.
The reporter continued: “It was in an alley directly behind this apartment building, at approximately four o’clock this morning, that police found a white sedan. Police have confirmed that the vehicle belongs to CNN reporter Paulette Sparks.”
“Hey,” said Theo, “isn’t Paulette the reporter you-”
“Quiet!” Jack and Andie said in stereo.
The wind was kicking up in Washington, and the reporter fought to keep her hair out of her face. “CNN has also learned that the car’s engine was running, but the lights were off, and the first officers on the scene did not see anyone behind the wheel. As the first officer approached, he saw what he described as a hose running from the exhaust pipe into the car through the rear window, which was opened just a crack.”
“A hose?” said the anchor.
“Yes,” said Brown. “A regular rubber garden hose. It was then that they shined their flashlights inside the vehicle and saw a body slumped over the console. The door was locked, and police shattered the driver-side window. Paramedics were notified immediately, and the victim-described as a white female in her early thirties-was taken to George Washington Medical Center.”
“Any report on her condition?”
“I don’t have that information.”
“Has the victim been positively identified yet?”
“I’m told that she has, but police are not releasing her name until her family can be contacted.”
“Of course we don’t want to speculate,” said the anchor, “but Paulette Sparks is like family to many of us here. We are all deeply concerned. Our thoughts and prayers are with Paulette and the Sparks family right now.”
The anchor switched gears to another breaking story. Jack switched off the television and looked at Andie.
The look on her face said it all, but she verbalized it anyway. “It’s Paulette.”
Jack glanced at Theo, then back at Andie. “Is she going to be all right?”
Andie drew a breath before answering.
“She’s dead.”
Chapter 27
Jack caught a mid-morning flight into Reagan National Airport and called his father as soon as the plane touched down. Harry had a full day of meetings at the White House, but he didn’t have to guess what all the urgency was about. By lunch-time, Paulette’s name had been released to the public, and the story was all over the news. The two men met in private in the only vacant office in the West Wing-Vice President Grayson’s old office.
“Sounds like she killed herself,” said Harry. The office was barely wide enough for the camelback sofa in the center of the room. Harry sat at the far end of it, near the window, and Jack was in the armchair beneath the brass chandelier.
Jack shook his head. “Not Paulette. No way.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“First of all, she wasn’t even close with her sister. This idea that she was so upset over Chloe’s murder that she drove over to her apartment and took her own life just doesn’t wash.”
“It may seem far-fetched to you. But by definition, anyone who commits suicide has lost perspective.”
“This was not a suicide,” said Jack. “Paulette called me last night. She was not a woman on the verge of checking out. I could feel her energy, her excitement.”
“About what?”
Jack told him about Chloe’s notes and the reference to someone other than Jack and Paulette’s sister getting an e-mail about bringing down the Keyes presidency.
“Where are those notes now?”
“I’ll bet they’re gone,” said Jack. “And if they have disappeared, that’s the nail in the coffin for the suicide theory, if you ask me.”
“Have you reported this to the FBI?”
“I told Andie this morning.”
Harry nodded, but not in agreement. He was simply thinking.
“What would you like me to do?” he said.
“Be honest with me,” said Jack.
“Of course.”
“The other day, when we were out jogging. When you, you know-”
“Fired you?”
“Well, you didn’t really fire me.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Okay, all right. I got fired. F-I-R-E-D. Is everybody as happy as a pig in a pile of shit now?”
Harry glanced around the room. “Jack, it’s only you and me here.”
“Never mind. This is important, and I need you to be completely straight with me.”
“I’m starting to resent the implication that I would be anything less than that.”
“You’re right,” said Jack. “I’m sorry. Let me just put this to you, and we’ll go from there. The other day, when I got f-f-”
“Fired.”
“Yes. You were really upset with me for putting my trust in Paulette Sparks.”
“I was upset with yo
u for putting that level of trust in a Washington reporter. Any Washington reporter. It just so happened to be Paulette Sparks.”
“And now it just so happens that she’s dead.”
Harry’s mouth was agape. “Are you suggesting that I-”
“No,” said Jack. “Not even when you were governor and signing death warrants for my clients did I call you a murderer to your face. That’s not what this is about.”
Harry checked his watch.
“Am I holding you up?” said Jack.
“I don’t mean to be rude, but I have a meeting with the chief of staff in five minutes.”
“Okay,” said Jack. “Here’s the thing. I told you how determined Paulette was to find out who sent me and her sister those e-mails about President Keyes. I also told you that she thought Vice President Grayson had been murdered.”
“So?”
Jack narrowed his eyes, more like the way he would press a witness than speak to his father. “You’re the only person I told.”
Harry folded his arms-a defensive gesture, it seemed to Jack.
“I see,” said Harry.
“So my question to you is this,” said Jack. “Did you tell anyone what I told you?”
There was a knock at the door. The chief of staff poked her head into the office.
“The president is going to join us for our three o’clock,” she said. “Let’s not keep him waiting.”
Harry nodded, as if to tell her that he needed just a moment more, and she closed the door.
“I have to go,” said Harry, rising.
“I’d like an answer before you go anywhere,” said Jack. “Did you tell anyone what I told you about Paulette?”
Harry took a deep breath, and he seemed to hold it for the longest time. Then he looked out the window, his gaze fixed so long that Jack, too, needed to turn and see what had caught his attention. There was nothing.
“Dad? Did you tell anyone?”
Harry started to shake his head, but then he shrugged and said, “I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember?”
“No. I truly don’t. But if I had, don’t you have to believe I would remember?”
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