Grace snorted. “Well, I hate to be the one to break this to you, but he’s too young for you.”
“Then it’s a good thing I’m not interested in him, isn’t it?” Judy bit into her pizza with dignity. “I’m just real grateful to him for everything he’s done for Jess.” Her gaze shifted to her oldest daughter. “Not that you seem to be very grateful yourself. You were downright snippy, missy.”
Jess chose that moment to pick up her slice of pizza and take a cautious bite. Since she couldn’t tell her mother the truth, the best thing would be not to tell her anything at all. And she couldn’t talk with her mouth full, could she?
“You know, I think he likes you,” Grace said to Jess. “He’s been coming by to see you a lot.”
Yes, because he’s scared to death I’m going to remember something about the accident and tell somebody.
Right out of nowhere, that was the thought that popped into Jess’s head.
It was followed almost immediately by another: What happens if I do remember something? What if it’s bad? As in, it provides evidence that Mrs. Cooper’s accident was no accident?
Jess felt cold sweat prickle to life around her hairline at the thought.
There it was again, that thing she hadn’t wanted to face.
I don’t think it was an accident.
She swallowed convulsively, and the tiny bit of pizza she was chewing caught in her throat and nearly choked her. It was suddenly as tasteless as a mouthful of rocks, and as hard to get down.
Now that the thought had taken form and shape in her mind, it was impossible to dislodge.
She couldn’t prove it, of course. And she didn’t want to. Didn’t even want to have the idea taking root like an impossible-to-eradicate weed in her mind.
Because she knew what would happen if she did remember something that blew the whole accident scenario out of the water, knew it with the kind of conviction that no amount of evidence to the contrary was ever going to be able to change.
If I remember, they’ll kill me.
12
He’d told the truth. At least, every word he’d said had been the truth.
That was the same thing, wasn’t it?
No. Hell, no. Mark knew that was the answer even as he asked himself the question. What he’d said, while absolutely factual, was actually a pathetic lie.
And the need to tell such a lie was still worrying him.
The lab results had come back clean, just as he’d said. Everything that had been tested had checked out perfectly. There had been no traces of anything that shouldn’t have been in that IV bag anywhere on it or in it. Nothing that shouldn’t have been there in the tubing, either.
As for the catheter, the soft little tube that had actually delivered the contents of the IV into her vein, it was missing by the time the apparatus got to the lab and Brooks got his hands on it.
Given the chain of custody, it almost certainly hadn’t been attached when he’d stowed the bag in his pocket. Because if it had become dislodged in his pocket, or in the transfer to Brooks—who had been horrified by Mark’s less-than-protocol handling of the evidence and had promptly plastic-bagged everything—in the grocery store parking lot where they had agreed to meet, one of them would have found it.
Yep, everything had been clean. Every test Brooks had run had revealed nothing except the standard saline solution.
Which was the problem.
Mark had obtained Jessica’s medical file. The one that started with her arrival in the emergency room, where the IV line had been placed.
According to the file, there was a whole raft of medications that should have been in that IV fluid.
They weren’t there.
None of them. Not one. No trace.
Just plain old saline solution. Generic. Standard.
No trace of her blood or DNA on the tubing, although usually when an IV was inserted there was a little bit of a backflow as the nurse made sure she or he had a vein.
Not in this case. Nada.
No catheter, either. Nothing at all to connect the unit to her.
If the thing had ever been used, Brooks said he couldn’t tell it.
Which meant what, exactly?
That the IV unit he’d removed from her room and had tested was not the one that had been used on Jessica Ford.
There were other possibilities, of course, because there were always other possibilities, but in this case they were so convoluted he got a headache trying to work them all out. The bottom line was, the most likely explanation under the circumstances was that the IV units had been switched, probably in the brief period that had elapsed from the time she had pulled it from her arm to the time he’d burst into the room.
Which meant she almost certainly had been attacked right there under his nose in her hospital room, just as she had claimed.
And the attacker, upon realizing that he’d failed in his objective, which Mark was going to assume was Jess’s murder, knew that the doctored bag could provide solid evidence of what had gone down, grabbed the incriminating IV bag, put up a fresh one, which he would have brought with him for just that purpose, and somehow made it out of the room without being seen by him or anyone else.
Mark tried for what must have been the hundredth time to visualize the room as it had looked when he had barreled into it. He’d been on high alert, looking all around, ready to take down an intruder—but in thinking back on it, the room never quite became clear to him. He remembered it being filled with shadows and distracting things, including a dividing curtain that swayed in the breeze of the opened door, a bed that moved as he went past it, and that damned open bathroom door.
At the time his primary focus had been on locating Jess.
Someone could have slipped out.
While he’d knelt beside her. No, wait, wouldn’t the hospital personnel racing toward the room have noticed someone coming out the door? So the next window of opportunity would have been in the mass confusion after everyone else had arrived in the room.
The simple thing to do, of course, would be to check the security tapes and see who was in the vicinity around the time of the attack who shouldn’t have been there. There were two cameras in each corridor, filming everything that went down in them. Spotting a suspicious individual should have been a piece of cake.
But the cameras for the third floor had mysteriously turned up without film in them, an oversight on the security staff ’s part—or something more ominous?
Mark’s vote went to something more ominous.
“Goddamn it, Lowell, don’t tell me nothing went down in that hospital.”
Despite the accusation in it, Mark’s voice was hushed as he slid into the red vinyl corner booth where the Chief of Staff was already sipping a cup of coffee while he looked over the menu.
They were meeting at the IHOP on the fringes of Anacostia, a troubled D.C. neighborhood where the press would not expect anybody to turn up.
“God Almighty, are you still going on about that?” Lowell shook his head in disgust. “I already told you, whatever did or did not happen there had nothing in the world to do with us.”
Mark’s eyes narrowed as they fastened on Lowell, but before he could reply he saw the waitress, a tiny gray-haired grandma-type in IHOP’s trademark uniform and sensible shoes, bearing down on them. Only three of the other booths were occupied. Two guys who looked like truckers plowed through an enormous breakfast in one, an AARP-type couple who probably went with the RV parked outside nibbled doughnuts and read the paper in another, and the third was occupied by an old street guy with grimy fingers nursing a cup of coffee.
“Can I get you some coffee?” the waitress asked. When they nodded, she poured each a cup.
Caffeine was something he desperately needed at the moment. He had spent most of the previous night at Quantico, where the death car, as the press were now calling it, had been taken via flatbed truck after the accident and where it was now being held in a warehouse to keep the teleph
oto lenses of the press from getting any more ghoulish shots of it. Officially, he didn’t have clearance to look at it, but unofficially he had friends in the Bureau who gave him access to the car and to the files that went with it. The official cause of the crash—an overcorrection made at a high rate of speed, possibly because of an animal of some sort on the road, although that last was pure speculation—had already been determined. It had been trumpeted all over the world, and given that the world supposed Mrs. Cooper to have been rushing to a dying friend’s bedside when the crash occurred, it even made sense.
Since Mark had been around when that particular bit of spin had been decided on (because Mrs. Cooper did indeed have a friend in the named hospital that night), he knew damned well it wasn’t true. Which once again begged the question: What the hell had the First Lady of the United States been doing in that car?
Mark knew that he would never pass another peaceful night until he had the answer.
The waitress left. Mark fixed Lowell with a grim look.
“Jessica Ford doesn’t know squat about the First Lady’s habits, and doesn’t remember anything about the accident. Nothing, you understand? She’s no threat to anybody. I want to make that crystal clear.”
Lowell took another sip of coffee and met his gaze over the rim of the cup.
“You sure about that?”
The waitress returned, asking if they were ready to order.
“I’m ready,” Lowell said, and told her what he wanted.
For the sake of not attracting attention, or at least Mark assumed that was his motive, Lowell had clapped an Orioles cap on his head, and removed his expensive suit jacket. His blue shirt and rep tie were generic enough in appearance to go unnoticed. Mark was similarly attired, minus the baseball cap, although his white shirt and gray tie were genuinely generic, bought on sale at Macy’s. Lowell’s round, ruddy face was well known in government and political circles but unlikely to be recognized here. Unless they were very unlucky, knowledge of this meeting would stay between the two of them, which was how they both wanted it.
The waitress looked at Mark.
“You?”
He ordered, too, bacon and eggs and toast and orange juice. He figured he needed the energy. Just like he hadn’t been sleeping, he hadn’t been eating well since the crash. His stomach was too tense; he felt like if he swallowed more than a few bites, it would come right back up.
It didn’t help that everywhere he looked, from TV to the front page of newspapers and magazines to black-bordered “in memoriam” billboards looking down over the expressways, he saw Annette Cooper’s face.
My watch. He couldn’t get the guilt out of his system.
The waitress left.
He eyeballed Lowell.
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
“Really? Then why did she call Davenport last night and tell him she thinks there’s something wrong with what’s being said about the accident?”
Mark blinked. He didn’t know why he was surprised, but he was. He knew how this worked: broken legs and arms, burglarized offices, “accidental” fires—those were all in a day’s work in the high-stakes world of politics. An illegal wiretap or two was hardly even worthy of mention.
“You monitoring her phone calls?” He kept his voice carefully even.
“What do you think? Of course we are. The funeral’s in two days’ time, and nobody wants any kind of crap about Mrs. Cooper getting out to spoil it. The lady—and the family—deserves to be allowed to rest in peace.”
Mark couldn’t argue with that. But he sure as hell could raise a stink over the method of containment he was becoming increasingly convinced someone had tried to employ. He decided to call Lowell’s bluff and see what reaction he got.
“So somebody did try to kill Jessica Ford that night in the hospital.”
“No. Hell, no.” Lowell glared at him. “I already said that, all right? As far as I know, nobody did anything to little Miss What’s-her-name in the hospital or anywhere else. What do you think I am?”
While Mark debated about whether or not to tell him, the waitress arrived, bringing their food. She slapped it down in front of them, asked if she could get them anything else, and took herself off when they declined.
“You get the word out to whoever’s interested that Jessica Ford is not a threat,” Mark said. The thing was, Mark knew that Lowell might be telling the absolute truth and still somebody in the big, amorphous, interconnected circles of shadow people who protected the President and his family might have targeted her in the panic following the First Lady’s death. “I’m taking care of it. You tell them that.”
“I tell you what you need to do.” Lowell dumped ketchup on his eggs. Mark had to look away. His stomach was bothering him again, knotted so tight he knew he wouldn’t be able to choke down so much as a bite of the triangle of buttered toast he’d picked up. He put it back down on the plate without even making the attempt. “You need to get her to sign a secrecy agreement—offer her whatever money you have to—and get her the hell out of town until this blows over. I’ve checked into her background—she doesn’t have a pot to piss in, and never has. Comes from nothing. She’ll be glad to get the money. And to keep her mouth shut for it.”
“The problem with a secrecy agreement,” Mark pointed out in measured tones, “is that it exists. If she doesn’t know anything, it clues her in that there just might be something to know. And if it somehow goes public, it makes it look like there’s a conspiracy. Like somebody has something to hide.”
“Hell, we do have something to hide. There’s no reason in the world for anybody to know that Mrs. Cooper had a problem, or that she was out there trying to score drugs when she died.”
“You sure that’s what she was doing?”
“It’s looking like it. Why else would she sneak off like that? With that amount of money in her purse?” Lowell shoveled down his doctored eggs with enthusiasm. Watching was making even the coffee turn sour in Mark’s stomach.
“I don’t know.”
There was a lot he didn’t know, Mark reflected—like what state Mrs. Cooper had been in when she left the residence that night, or if anybody besides Prescott had been with her when she’d headed out to the Rose Garden. One reason he was having so much trouble figuring out those things was that he’d been put on official leave: Just as he had suspected, his had been the first head on the chopping block. He was still on the payroll, still in the loop; he was still working, as was evidenced by his careful coordination of the babysitting of Jess Ford. But all that was on the QT, at the behest of Lowell and the rest of the President’s inner circle. Because they knew he was loyal, knew he’d keep his mouth shut, knew he’d get the job done for them. For the record, though, he was in deep shit, complete with all the media finger-pointing that came with it. The worst thing about it was being denied access to the very things he needed to use to get answers. Answers to the questions about that night that were eating him up. The White House surveillance tapes, for example, were not available to him; they’d been turned over to the investigative arm of the Secret Service. Between them and the FBI, the crash probe was being conducted at the highest levels, as his boss had assured him when he’d pressed for access. Lowell had refused to intervene.
Your job is to handle the survivor, Lowell had said. Let the trained investigators handle the investigation.
The trained investigators who didn’t know anything about Mrs. Cooper, and thus had no clue what to be on the lookout for. Which, maybe, was the point.
Or maybe he was just growing increasingly suspicious with age. And experience.
“So what do you suggest?” Lowell stabbed a sausage link with his fork and took a huge bite.
“We pay her off, but we channel the money through someone else. If it comes from us, she’s immediately suspicious about why, right? What we don’t want is for her to start asking herself that. We just want her to take the money, keep her mouth shut, and fade out of the picture.”
“Amen to that. You sure you can fix it?”
“I’m sure.”
“So we’re good?” Lowell polished off the last of his meal and took a quick last swallow of coffee as he stood up.
Mark looked up at him. “As long as nothing else happens to Miss Ford.”
“Nothing did happen to her.”
The waitress had seen Lowell stand up and was heading their way with the check. Mark stood up, too, his stomach as tight as a clenched fist, his breakfast uneaten. What he needed, and he hated to admit it, was a cigarette. He’d quit four years ago, gone cold turkey since, and now he was craving nicotine in the worst way.
The truth was, as he’d discovered about himself before, he really didn’t handle stress all that well.
“Was there something the matter with the food?” the waitress asked as she handed him the bill. Lowell was already on his way out the door. Mark understood: Mark had requested the meeting, so breakfast was on him.
“Turns out I wasn’t hungry after all.” Mark put a couple of twenties down on the table, more than enough to cover the food and a tip, and followed Lowell.
Who was already gone.
Funny, he reflected as he pushed through the door into the gray bleakness of a cold April dawn and felt the chill of the rushing wind bite into him, he didn’t feel any better about things now than he had before the meeting.
The day was just getting started, and it was already on its way downhill. And he still had Prescott’s funeral to attend.
13
In the end, avoiding the media had been surprisingly easy, Jess reflected as she looked out the concave glass window of the helicopter that was at that moment carrying her toward D.C. Avoiding Mark Ryan, who’d been hovering around her and her family like a hungry bat with a cluster of mosquitoes in its sights, had been equally simple: She’d simply waited to go until he wasn’t around. Leaving the hospital by helicopter had worked like a charm; apparently, no one had expected it. Of course, it also helped that her exodus had been carefully timed to coincide with Annette Cooper’s funeral service.
Pursuit Page 11
