Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
ALSO BY KAREN ROBARDS
Guilty
Obsession
Vanished
Superstition
Bait
Beachcomber
Whispers at Midnight
Irresistible
Manna from Heaven (a novella)
To Trust a Stranger
Scandalous
Paradise County
Ghost Moon
The Midnight Hour
The Senator’s Wife
Heartbreaker
Hunter’s Moon
Walking After Midnight
Maggy’s Child
One Summer
Nobody’s Angel
This Side of Heaven
Green Eyes
Morning Song
Tiger’s Eye
Desire in the Sun
Dark of the Moon
Night Magic
Loving Julia
Wild Orchids
Dark Torment
To Love a Man
Amanda Rose
Forbidden Love
Sea Fire
Island Flame
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Publishers Since 1838
Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
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Copyright © 2009 by Karen Robards
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Robards, Karen.
Pursuit / Karen Robards.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-02456-0
1. Women lawyers—Fiction. 2. Traffic accident investigation—Fiction. 3. Presidents’ spouses—Crimes against—Fiction. 4. Adultery—Fiction. 5. Conspiracies—Fiction. 6. Washington (D.C.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3568.Q196P
813’.54—dc22
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
http://us.penguingroup.com
AS ALWAYS, THIS IS FOR
DOUG, PETER, CHRIS, AND JACK,
WITH LOVE.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First of all, I want to thank my wonderful editor, Christine Pepe, who has done such a great job with this book. I also want to thank my agent, Robert Gottlieb. More thanks go to Leslie Gelbman, Kara Welsh, and everyone at Signet, and to Stephanie Sorensen in Publicity. Finally, to Ivan Held and the rest of the Putnam family, many thanks for your continued support.
I couldn’t do it without any of you!
1
Is she there? Do you see her?”
As Jessica Ford pushed through the smoked-glass door in front of her, cell phone clamped to her ear, urgency sharpened John Davenport ’s voice to the point where the alcohol-induced slurring of his words almost disappeared.
“Yes,” Jess answered, her hand tightening around the phone as the door swung shut behind her, because the lady was and she did.
On the fringe of a raucous crowd intent on watching a televised basketball game, the First Lady of the United States was sitting alone at a table for two in a dark, secluded corner of the hotel bar, knocking back a shot of some undetermined golden liquid with the stiff wrist and easy gulp of a practiced drinker. Wearing a generic black tracksuit with white stripes down the sides and white running shoes. With her trademark short blond hair tucked up beneath a baseball cap pulled low over her eyes. The sheer unlikelihood of her presence in this mid-priced hotel just a few blocks from the White House at ten minutes past midnight on a Saturday night, plus a strategically placed leafy potted ficus near her elbow, was all that stood between her and a Texas-size scandal.
Jess felt butterflies at the realization.
“Thank God.” Davenport’s tone was devout. “Tell her . . .”
A cheer from the basketball fans made it impossible for Jess to hear the rest. Grimacing, fearing disaster with every way-too-fast beat of her heart, she hurried toward the corner.
Even knowing what she did, her mind boggled at what she was being asked to do. She was not the First Lady’s handler.
“I couldn’t hear you. It’s kind of crowded in here,” Jess said into the phone as the cheering died down.
“Shit.” Davenport added a few more choice words under his breath. “Just get her out of there, would you?”
“Yes.” Jess had already learned not to say “I’ll do my best” to her formidable boss. He would snap that he wasn’t paying for her to do her best, he was paying for her to do it. End of story. The phone disconnected with a click in her ear. Okay, the problem was now officially hers.
Where the hell is the Secret Service when you need them?
Casting another glance around, she had her answer: Nowhere useful, obviously. There wasn’t a black suit in sight.
Davenport had said the First Lady would be alone. Silly of her to have doubted the all-knowing one.
“Mrs. Cooper?” she asked in a low voice as she reached the table, mindful of possible listening ears. Besides the First Lady and the basketball fans, there were only a few other patrons in the small, wood-paneled room. No one seemed even remotely interested in the solitary woman in the corner.
Still, it never paid to take chan
ces. She needed to get her newest problem out of there fast.
The First Lady continued to stare at her now-empty shot glass. If she’d heard Jess speak to her, she gave no indication of it. Clearing her throat, Jess tried again.
“Mrs. Cooper? Mr. Davenport sent me.”
That did it. The brim of the baseball cap tilted up. The look Mrs. Cooper gave her was tense, wary.
“Who’re you?”
Jess attempted a reassuring smile. It felt tight.
“Jessica Ford. I work for Mr. Davenport.”
The blue eyes that seemed so soft and gentle on TV and in magazine spreads narrowed. Tonight they were red-rimmed and puffy, devoid of obvious makeup, and hard. The attractive, round-cheeked face was puffy, too, and pale, but still instantly familiar in the way a fuzzy copy of an iconic photograph is familiar. The lines seemed blurred, the angles less defined, the features indistinct, but the subject was definitely recognizable.
It was impossible to miss that Mrs. Cooper had been crying.
They fight a lot. She and David. All you need to do is hold her hand and nod sympathetically until she gets it out of her system, Davenport had said.
David being the President. Of the United States. And before she could get busy with the hand-holding, Jess first had to coax his wife—one of the most recognizable women in the world—out of a packed hotel bar she had no business being in. Without anyone recognizing the icon in their midst. Jess could already almost feel a posse of gossip-hungry reporters panting at her heels.
FIRST LADY FLEES WHITE HOUSE, the headlines would scream.
Oh, jeez. If she screwed this up, she would probably lose her job. For sure, her boss would go crazy. The world would go crazy. The image of the weepy, sweats-clad, runaway First Lady would be plastered on every TV screen and on the front page of every newspaper and magazine in the world. The political fallout would be incalculable. The personal fallout would be incalculable. And hers would be the first head on the chopping block.
This was way too much responsibility. Jess felt her palms grow damp. She clasped them in front of her. Do not wring them.
She didn’t, but she still must have looked less than reassuring because the First Lady’s expression turned hostile.
“I don’t know you. I want John.”
Perfectly manicured pink nails drummed the table. Then Mrs. Cooper’s well-tended hand curled around the cell phone lying beside the shot glass. Davenport was the First Lady’s old friend and personal lawyer. Jess was a lawyer, too, junior grade, who had been working for the filthy-rich mega-firm of Davenport, Kelly, and Bascomb, the most prestigious and powerful of the giant legal firms operating in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol, for just under a year. Although officially known as an associate, Jess sometimes thought her main duty consisted of asking “How high?” when Davenport said “Jump.” When Davenport had hired her part-time during her second year at George Mason School of Law, which catered almost equally to older night-schoolers wanting to change careers and hardscrabble kids with crippling student loans and no money, such as herself, Jess had been giddy with excitement over her good fortune. This was her big chance, an opportunity to grab the golden ring for herself and her family, and there was no way she was going to blow it. If she had to work a hundred hours a week, she would work a hundred hours a week. If she had to put up with crap from the Ivy League blue bloods in the corner offices, she would put up with crap. If she had to be more efficient, more knowledgeable, and more determined than everybody else to get where she wanted to go, then that’s what she was going to do.
That was the game plan. And so far it was working. She’d been offered a full-time position upon graduation, and she did the prep work on many of Davenport’s most important cases. The drudge behind the star, that was her. For now. Not forever.
Jess definitely knew who Annette Cooper was. Not surprisingly, although the First Lady had been in the office a number of times while Jess had been there and Jess had once been sent to hand-deliver some papers to her, Mrs. Cooper didn’t remember her.
Wallpaper, that’s what I am, she thought as Mrs. Cooper punched a single button on the phone and lifted it to her ear while running suspicious eyes over Jess. Jess took quick mental inventory in conjunction with Mrs. Cooper’s sweeping look: twenty-eight years old but younger-looking; chin-length mahogany hair pushed haphazardly behind her ears; square-jawed, even-featured, ivory-skinned face with a hastily applied minimum of makeup imperfectly concealing a scattering of freckles; hazel eyes complete with contacts; five-two, slim, regrettably flat-chested; dressed in her favorite go-to black pantsuit with a black tee and, unfortunately, well-broken-in black sneakers (she usually wore heels when working because she needed the height). She was wearing the sneakers because her new roommate, her college-student sister, Grace, had apparently “borrowed” her good black heels without asking and had scattered the rest of her meager shoe wardrobe around the walk-in closet they now shared.
“You sent a flunky?” Mrs. Cooper spoke in an outraged tone into the phone. Davenport presumably had answered. There was a pause, and then Mrs. Cooper swept another condemning look over Jess. “Are you sure? She looks fifteen years old.”
Jess tried to shut her ears and keep her face impassive even as she positioned herself between her new charge and one of the couples. Luckily, the noise level in the bar made it extremely unlikely that they could hear a thing.
Jess only wished she were so lucky. That she had not yet succeeded in impressing Mrs. Cooper was excruciatingly clear.
“Not when you do something like send over a teenage stand-in. This is it, do you hear? I mean it. I need you.”
Whether fighting with her husband was a regular feature of Mrs. Cooper’s life or not, she sounded both angry and desperate. Her voice was low but increasingly shrill. She blinked rapidly. Her cheeks had flushed a deep, distressed pink.
Uncomfortable, Jess glanced away.
I’m counting on you for this, Davenport had said in the phone call that had interrupted Jess’s sleepy viewing of a Lifetime movie from the cozy comfort of her bed and sent her scrambling out of her pj’s and into the car he had sent to pick her up. From the way Davenport had slurred his words, it was obvious he’d been imbibing pretty heavily.
In no shape to babysit Annette tonight, was how he had unapologetically put it. Anyway, I’m not home. It’d take me an hour or more to get there. While you . . .
Her apartment was maybe ten minutes away.
As she had scrambled into her clothes she’d thought, This is a chance to get to know the First Lady. It’s inner-circle stuff, the kind of thing that any newbie lawyer would kill for. It could lead to a promotion. It could lead to a whole lot more . . . everything. Responsibility. Prestige. Money. Always, in the end, it came down to money.
The story of her life.
“But I need you. This is an emergency. Do you hear? This is it,” Mrs. Cooper told Davenport again, louder than before, drawing Jess’s attention back to her. To Jess’s horror, big tears started to leak from the First Lady’s eyes and roll down her cheeks. Her face crumpled, her mouth shook, and so did the hand holding the phone. Jess shot a sideways glance at the next table, then tensed at the sound of a footstep behind her. Pivoting, using her body to block the sight line to her illustrious charge as best she could, she confronted a waiter who was clearly intent on checking in with the customer at the corner table.
Yikes.
“I tell you, it’s true,” Mrs. Cooper continued in what was almost a sob, growing louder with every word. Sight lines she could block, Jess thought despairingly. Voices, not so much. “It’s a nightmare. You have to help me.”
“We don’t need anything else, thanks,” Jess said brightly to the waiter.
“You sure?” The waiter was maybe mid-twenties, a slight guy with dark hair and eyes. His gaze slid past Jess, seeking Mrs. Cooper, who was—thank God—silent again, apparently listening to Davenport now. Jess could only hope that the woman’s head was once again
down, with the baseball cap obscuring her face.
Taking a sliding step to the left with the intention of more completely blocking the waiter’s view, Jess nodded.
“I’m sure.”
“That’ll be twelve dollars, then.”
Twelve dollars. Okay, Jess, pay the First Lady’s bar bill.
Jess opened her shoulder bag, felt around in the zipper compartment where she kept her money, came up empty, looked down and suffered a split second of horror as she discovered that Grace had “borrowed” her cash along with her shoes. She didn’t really want to hand over a credit card, because she had some sort of barely coalescing idea that it would be better if there was no hard evidence that she—and, ergo, Mrs. Cooper—was ever in this bar. Besides, the object was to break land speed records getting the First Lady out of there and waiting for her card to be returned would not facilitate that. Before she could completely panic, she remembered the emergency twenty-dollar bill she kept folded away at the bottom of the zippered compartment of her purse from force of habit now, although it had begun at her mother’s insistence when she had gone to her first—and only—high school dance.
Honey, believe me, you don’t want to have to count on any man for anything, not even a ride home.
Words to live by, Mom.
Jess handed the twenty over, and the waiter hurried away.
Enjoy the tip. A tinge of regret about forking over money she didn’t even owe colored the thought. The whole twenty was gone, of course. Because she couldn’t wait for change.
“As quick as you can,” Mrs. Cooper said, her tone urgent. “Hurry.”
Jess turned back to the table in time to see the phone snap shut. Mrs. Cooper lowered it, holding it clenched tightly in her hand. Then she looked up at Jess. Her jaw was hard and set. Her eyes were still damp, but tears no longer spilled over. Instead, the soft blue glinted with—what? Anger? Determination? Some combination of the two?
“I can’t believe that bastard sent you instead of coming himself.”
Jess blinked. The reality of the woman in front of her juxtaposed with the First Lady’s saccharine image was starting to make her head spin.
Pursuit Page 1
