Founders' Keeper (A David and Martin Yerxa Thriller - Book 1)

by Ed Markham

  FOUNDERS’ KEEPER

  A David and Martin Yerxa Book

  By Ed Markham

  .

  Text Copyright © 2015 Ed Markham

  All Rights Reserved

  .

  For My Dad

  For Kelly

  .

  Table of Contents

  Part I

  Tuesday, September 5

  Wednesday, September 6

  Thursday, September7

  Friday, September 8

  Part II

  Thursday, September 14

  Friday, September 15

  Saturday, September 16

  Sunday, September 17

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note to Kindle Readers

  Preview of Son of a Gun

  Part I

  Tuesday, September 5

  Chapter 1

  SENATOR DEKE JACOBSEN switched on the cabin light. His reflection appeared in the car’s windshield, superimposed on the dark stretch of rural Maryland interstate that raced by in his vehicle’s headlights.

  He’d been out the door, fully dressed with coffee in hand, by 3:45 in the morning.

  Balancing a small stack of index cards on top of the steering wheel as he drove, he glanced at his first talking point:

  - Public health and wellbeing.

  He switched off the cabin light. His eyes refocused on the road while his mind took up the formal statement he’d spent most of the long Labor Day Weekend preparing.

  Deke wrote all of his important speeches at his family’s vacation home near Ocean City, on Maryland’s Atlantic coast. He’d purchased the house a few weeks after claiming electoral victory as the state’s youngest-ever senator.

  “You’re going to be such a pain in the ass after this,” his wife Katie had joked at his election-night celebration.

  “Come on, my ego isn’t that big,” he’d said. “Just remind the girls it’s Senator now, not Daddy.”

  Two years into his first term, the memory of that victory gave him confidence on days when he needed a shot of brio—days like today. He’d emailed his speech to two of his staffers and told them to be at his D.C. office in the Hart Building by 6:30 a.m. in order to prepare. Be there or be square (and fired), he’d written, only half joking.

  He could’ve left Ocean City for D.C. the night before. But he relished his habitual drive from the shore to the Capital in the pre-dawn silence—that time before the world rolled over on its side, exhaled, and rose for the day.

  As the lush farm country whipped by in the blackness outside of his car, Deke rehearsed the opening lines of his statement.

  “The health of our nation begins with the health of its citizens,” he recited out loud. “In Maryland, my home state, childhood obesity has more than tripled in the last thirty years. Obesity among Maryland adults is also on the rise, and the story isn’t much different across the country. There are reasons for that, and most have nothing to do with idle treadmills.”

  After months spent pumping up awareness of the diabetes and obesity epidemics at the state level, he and Senator Tim Enright, a Maine Republican, were set to formally introduce a bipartisan bill that, if passed, would impose sugar and sodium restrictions on meals served in fast food restaurants nationwide. It was Deke’s first attempt to enact major legislation since taking office, and it was sure to draw a lot of press—not to mention plenty of vitriol from the personal freedom crowd.

  On Route 50, the farmland began to break up among frequent highway exits and empty shopping centers. It had been an unseasonably chilly night, but already the temperature was rising, pulling fog inland off the bay. When he reached the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, Deke cracked his window. He could smell the fog in the air.

  As he drove up and onto the long plateau of the bridge, the road curved slightly to his left and he could make out a set of red taillights in the distance. He paid little attention to them. Whipping past the span’s support cables at fifty-five miles per hour, he looked out over the dark water and tried to discern the horizon through the haze of the bridge's lighting.

  Get ready, he told himself. Big day for you.

  When he turned his attention back to the road, he was surprised to see the taillights in the distance were rapidly approaching. He could see that the car they belonged to was turned sideways, partially blocking two lanes. As the scene came into sharper relief, Deke dropped his index cards and gripped his steering wheel with both hands. “Oh shit,” he said out loud. He stopped thirty yards short of the green Mercedes sedan.

  A woman lay sprawled in the road near the car, face down. Long curls of auburn hair spread out on the pavement around her head. Her arms were pinned beneath her body, which was wrapped in a long gray raincoat.

  Without hesitating, Deke got out of his car and walked quickly toward her. “Ma’am?” he shouted. “Can you hear me? Are you all right?”

  The woman groaned softly and hunched her shoulders as though trying to push herself up.

  He started to run toward her, and as he did he pulled out his phone to call 9-1-1. But he dropped the phone when the woman rolled quickly onto her side, revealing a snub-nosed revolver. The abruptness of her movement caused the wig on her head to slide back, and Deke was almost as startled by the woman’s sudden shift in appearance as he was by the gun in her hand. In the light of his car’s headlights, her face was white as salt and topped with a glowing crescent of orange-red hair.

  As he stared at her and at the revolver, a peculiar word materialized on his lips: Banshee.

  A burst of light flashed from the woman’s hand. At the same moment, something hot and heavy slammed into Deke’s stomach. The force of the bullet dropped him to his knees, and the word on the tip of his tongue was replaced with blood.

  The woman rose and slipped the revolver into her pocket, her movements lithe and certain. She was tall, at least six-foot, and Deke thought her hands looked impossibly long as they hung at her sides. Her wig had slipped farther back on her head, exposing more of her fiery hair.

  Still kneeling—his already numb fingers trying but failing to keep the life from leaking out of the ragged wound in his stomach—he watched the woman walk quickly to the railing of the bridge. She lifted something coiled from the side of the road and approached him carrying what looked like a snake. She pulled the snake apart, and he realized it was a noosed length of rope only as she slipped it around his neck. He tried to speak but could manage only a groan.

  The woman stepped behind Deke, and he felt her gun barrel press against the back of his head. She whispered to him for a few seconds, her voice like venom dripping in his ear. Then she instructed him to walk to the bridge railing.

  Deke staggered to his feet and shuffled in the direction the gun barrel nudged him, his mind oddly vacant. When he reached the railing, he had to lean against it to keep from falling to his knees.

  “You’re going to die now,” the woman said. “There’s no escaping that. But I’ll spare your wife and daughters if you lift one leg over.”

  A wet gasp escaped from between Deke’s lips. He thought of Katie and the girls, and did as he was told.

  He lay along the railing, one toe still brushing the top of the road while the other dangled a few hundred feet above the Chesapeake Bay. He looked at the horizon in the distance—a line of black above which the sky was beginning to brighten from blue to gray.

  And then he was falling, past the bottom of the bridge and into the morning fog.

  Chapter 2

  DAVID YERXA DROVE on the shoulder of Route 50. The rain had stopped, but a light morning mist was still
dusting his windshield, creating halos around the hundreds of brake lights he could see clogging the lanes ahead. He drove with both hands on the wheel and the radio off.

  As he approached the Chesapeake, he could see a barricade blocking the westward span of the Bay Bridge. Two county police officers stood outside of their cars and in front of the barricade, the lights of their cruisers flickering and flashing off their metal belt buckles and badges and patent leather hat brims.

  When the police officers saw the gray Lincoln cross the median and head for their post, their heads snapped around and their postures went rigid. One of them took two big steps forward and lifted a hand to his sidearm. Then he noticed the FBI credentials David was holding up. His expression mellowed and he waved him through.

  David could tell cops were wound up. He understood why.

  He started to pull forward but stopped when he’d advanced a few yards past the police line. “Officer,” he called back. The tone of his voice was calm—edgeless but not soft, like a polished stone. Most of the people he worked with had never heard him raise it.

  He pointed through his windshield at a separate barrier of yellow police tape, which was stretched across two thirds of the bridge fifty yards up the road. “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Don’t worry, there’s room for you to get past.” When the cop realized David required a more thorough explanation, he added, “Schrade, the county executive, likes to be interviewed at big crime scenes, and he doesn’t like standing outside the tape. So we set up two lines—a real one, and another one farther out for him to stand inside while he talks with the press.” He chuckled. “Schrade’s a real piece of work.”

  David peered up the road at the second police line. He pulled out his cell phone, held it up, and took a photograph.

  The cop’s eyes narrowed. “What’d you take a picture for?” he asked.

  Without answering, David rolled up his window and continued on toward the second barricade. After he’d passed it, the ensuing stretch of road was eerily deserted, though in the distance he could see a news helicopter floating above the bridge.

  He stopped thirty yards short of the senator’s vehicle, which was surrounded by more than a dozen vehicles, including an ambulance, two fire trucks, several forensic vans, and the assorted cruisers and unmarked vehicles of the police officers, detectives, crime scene technicians, death investigators, and other law enforcement personnel who had already converged on the scene like a carpet of flies on an animal carcass.

  He climbed out into the damp breeze and retrieved his black waterproof jacket from his car’s back seat. Unlike most of the other men at the scene, David wasn’t wearing a suit. Instead he was dressed in charcoal twill trousers, dark boots with heavy rubber soles, and a gray T-shirt. He wore no jewelry apart from the FBI identification around his neck and the firearm strapped to his side.

  The news helicopter hovered a hundred yards overhead, its propeller blades beating the foggy air. The sound reminded him of the nimble AH 64 Apaches and tubular transport Chinooks that had operated around the U.S. Foreign Office in Pristina. His mind shoved the memory away as he pulled on his jacket.

  He took a few steps toward the locus of activity and spotted a familiar face; Lauren Carnicero stood in one of the small clusters of people working near the senator’s vehicle. She was speaking animatedly to two of the county police officers, both of whom had at least ten years on her. David watched her jab a finger at the bridge beyond the crime scene, nearly striking one of the cops in the face as she did so. He smiled to himself.

  He caught her eye, and she separated herself from the group. A half dozen heads turned to follow her progress, though none of them belonged to the two cops she’d been balling out. Lauren’s bark had plenty of bite.

  Tall and strong-limbed, she had the upright, shoulders-back posture David associated with athletes. She wore a waterproof windbreaker over her pantsuit, and her long brown hair fell from a navy baseball cap in damp tendrils. She wore no makeup, and the letters “FBI” were printed on both her hat and jacket.

  “Butch,” he said as she approached.

  Within their division of the FBI, Lauren had distinguished herself both for her skill as an investigator and for her temper, which even minor provocations caused to flare like a campfire spritzed with gasoline. A few months after she’d joined David’s section, another agent had mentioned that Carnicero meant butcher in Spanish, and the nickname had attached itself to her almost immediately. She’d never protested, even when “Butcher” dwindled to “Butch” among her colleagues. In fact, David could tell she appreciated the handle—that she wore it like a badge of acceptance—and so he made a point of using it.

  “These local guys don’t seem to get it,” she said by way of greeting, her green eyes wide and hot. She had to shout to be heard above the sound of the news helicopter. “Either that or they don’t understand the concept of a secure crime scene. I can tell they’re a little dazed by all this, and I understand that. But give me a fucking break.”

  “Don’t hold back on them,” he said, grinning a little as he lifted a hand to his brow in an effort to hide his face from the roving, high-definition eye of the news chopper’s camera.

  Standing side-by-side, they looked almost like siblings. Both had dark hair, though David’s was black, not brown. Like Lauren, he was tall and round-shouldered—more solid than muscular. But his complexion was lighter than hers, and his eyes were the pale blue of shallow, very cold water—of full veins beneath thin skin.

  He swept those eyes around the scene and caught a glimpse of the senator’s tarpaulin-covered body. He stared at it for a few seconds, and then turned back to Lauren.

  “You should have seen it twenty minutes ago,” she said, reading his expression. “There were still cars backed up on the other side of Jacobsen’s vehicle, and traffic was down to a crawl on the eastbound span thanks to gawkers trying to catch a glimpse of the body. At that point we’d only just pulled him up.”

  Her mouth tightened, and he watched her swallow the disgust that had crept up her throat. He turned to regard the lines of traffic creeping past them a quarter mile away on the opposite span of the bridge, and said, “Big audience.”

  Lauren nodded. “There are already cell-phone videos up on YouTube showing the senator dangling off the bridge. What is wrong with people?”

  David didn’t answer her. Instead he used his phone to take a picture of the cars passing slowly on the opposite arm of the bridge.

  “You were right, by the way,” she said, eyeing him closely as he put his phone away. “About our sub ditching rural settings. How’d you know he would do that?” When he didn’t answer her, she gestured toward the senator’s car and said, “His signature may be changing, but he did leave us his usual bullshit.”

  He looked from Jacobsen’s vehicle to the tarp-covered body stretched out on the asphalt. “I’ll start with the victim,” he said.

  Her lips pressed themselves into a thin line. “I’ve already seen him. Mind if I pass?”

  “Of course not.”

  He approached the senator’s body and lifted one corner of the tarpaulin. The noose was still looped around Jacobsen’s neck. It ran out from under the tarp to where it was knotted to the bridge railing. The senator’s curly blond hair was wet from the morning rain, and trickles of blood had run from his eyes, staining his cheeks red. The force of the drop and the snapping of the rope had dislocated his jaw, which hung askew above a broken and battered neck. His shirt and pants were soaked in blood from the wound in his stomach.

  David lowered the tarp gently.

  As he stood, he noticed a small pack of black-suited men looking at him. They were young and sported stiff ski-slope haircuts and pastel-colored shirts that matched their neckties. They threw him stares like chin-high fastballs, and he knew right away that they were the county’s homicide detectives.

  One of them called to him, “Aren’t you going to check for signs of rape?” The other two
sniggered.

  David looked at them without speaking, and their grins faded. They shuffled nervously from one foot to the other and eventually lowered their eyes to the cups of coffee in their hands.

  He turned away from them and was about to join Lauren by the senator’s car when he noticed a police officer standing near the side of the road. The cop was bent at the waist and eyeballing the rope where it was tied to the bridge railing. David walked to him and introduced himself.

  The cop had steady eyes and a gray moustache. The name on his jacket said C. GROVE. He shook David’s hand, and then he glanced at the group of young detectives. “I heard what that one said. Disgusting, and disrespectful.”

  “They’re just frightened,” David said. When Officer Grove scoffed, he added, “They don’t have experience with anything like this, and it’s human nature to become insular and defensive when threatened.” He turned his eyes toward the detectives. “See how they’re all clustered together on their own, elbows held close to their sides and their shoulders hunched?”

  The cop looked at the pack of detectives and then regarded David closely. “You seem pretty young yourself to have seen much of this,” he said. “How old are you? Thirty-five?”

  David pointed at the section of rope he’d seen Grove examining. “Something grab your attention here?”

  Grove looked at him for a second before answering. “I was just admiring this clove hitch,” he said.

  “Clove hitch,” David repeated. “Is that a type of knot?”

  “Sure is. Pretty useful if you’re a sailor or farm worker, but that’s not so many people these days.”

  “Which of those are you?”

  “I look like the sailing type to you?” Grove smiled and gestured toward the land east of the bridge. “I grew up on a farm near Sudlersville, ’bout an hour up 301.” He looked as though he could almost see his old hometown on the horizon.