Exclusive

by Sandra Brown

  “So you know her very well.”

  He dodged that missile by saying, “I know David even better.”

  “You actually believe he and his top aide are responsible for blowing up my house?”

  “Haven’t you been listening? Hell, yes, I believe it. Spence must have arranged it before leaving for Jackson Hole. When it’s discovered that tonight’s only fatality was your dog, they’ll try to dispose of you by some other method.”

  Whey-faced, she sucked in a quick breath. In a voice that was huskier than usual, she said, “You’re telling me that my life’s not worth the paper it’s printed on.”

  “Essentially, yeah.”

  She rested her forehead in her palm. “I think I’m going to throw up.”

  “Don’t,” he said sharply. “We can’t create a scene. Breathe through your mouth.”

  Gray sat tensely until her nausea passed. After a while she asked for a glass of water, and he signaled the waitress. She noticed that Barrie wasn’t feeling well. “Is she okay?”

  “Morning sickness,” Gray said, thinking how goofy his fake smile must look. “Except she gets it at night.”

  “Oh, that’ll pass after the first few months, honey. How far along are you?”

  “Uh—”

  “Three months,” Gray said.

  Patting Barrie on the shoulder, the waitress offered to bring her a cup of hot tea. “She’ll be fine,” Gray said. “But thanks.”

  Reassured, the waitress moved away. Barrie took several sips of water. “You lie very well.”

  “You don’t.”

  “I know.”

  Gray realized that she was still in shock. Tears were close to the surface.

  “I’ve dragged you into this, haven’t I, Mr. Bondurant?”

  He gave an indifferent shrug.

  “I have,” she insisted tremulously. “Because I went to see you, your life’s in danger too. You share the story they can’t allow to be told.” The more she talked, the more anxious she became.

  “You took an awful risk by coming here. You should have stayed in Wyoming. If you go home now, maybe they’ll forget that you know. They’ll think that you dismissed me.”

  He was amused by her naiveté but kept a straight face. “They don’t forget. They don’t leave any loose ends, either. Geography doesn’t matter. They want whatever happened to the baby, and whatever’s going on with Vanessa, to be deep-sixed. And our curiosity along with it.”

  “How’d you get here so fast?”

  “I trashed Spence’s computer and turned in his rental car by dropping the keys and the paperwork into the quick-checkout box at the airport. Then I used the return portion of his ticket.”

  Knowing there were a limited number of commercial flights into Jackson Hole, Barrie asked, “Were you on my plane?” He nodded. “I didn’t see you.”

  “You weren’t supposed to.”

  “Oh.” She paused, trying to figure out how he had escaped her notice. “Why didn’t you just warn me somewhere along the way? If you had, Cronkite might still be alive.”

  “I miscalculated. I didn’t expect their first warning to be the coup de grâce. I thought they’d start with a veiled threat, like your source at the hospital probably received. But they’re not screwing around. They didn’t want you scared into silence—they wanted you dead.”

  “So you’ve said.” She gnawed on her inner cheek. “Where’d you leave it with Spence?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, how’d you get hold of his airline ticket? How’d you manage to elude him?”

  He held her stare for a long time, wondering how much he should tell her. Finally, all he said was, “I didn’t.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Daily, this is Gray Bondurant. Gray, Daily Welsh.”

  Barrie loved Daily for not making an issue of their showing up on his doorstep at two o’clock in the morning. He didn’t chastise or barrage them with questions. He merely grunted as he stepped aside and waved them in.

  It was obvious they’d gotten him out of bed. Spikes of thinning gray hair radiated from his scalp like the points on the Statue of Liberty’s crown. He was wearing a threadbare undershirt and a pair of boxer shorts that reached almost to his knobby knees. A pair of black socks did nothing to flatter his white, virtually hairless legs.

  Upon leaving the coffee shop, they’d agreed that they needed a place to stay where they could rest, regroup, and decide what their next course of action would be. Gray had followed her directions to Daily’s house. Now, she could tell what he was thinking: If this was the best they could do in terms of refuge, their future was indeed perilous.

  Daily’s little house was hardly a fortress, and, to a stranger’s eye, he appeared to be a terribly ill man whose life depended upon his modest pension check and breathing apparatus—all of which was entirely, and unfortunately, correct.

  “I know this is a terrible imposition, Daily,” Barrie said as he went around the living room switching on lamps. “But there was nowhere else to go.… They killed Cronkite.”

  His hand froze on a light switch. “Killed Cronkite? Who did?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I’ve got all night.”

  The pain in his expression reflected what she was feeling. He opened his arms, and she walked into them. Customarily she was the one to hug him, while he acted the curmudgeon and spurned her displays of affection.

  This time, he not only initiated the embrace but held her, patting her back, a bit awkwardly but earnestly. “Sick sons of bitches. What’d they do, poison his food? If I ever catch ’em… Who did it?”

  Barrie stepped away from him and removed her glasses to dry her eyes. “There’s a lot to tell.”

  Daily went automatically to his recliner, wheeling his canister of oxygen with him. She took her usual seat on his sofa. Gray remained standing. So far, Daily had shown no curiosity about why the retired national hero had emerged from seclusion and was standing in the center of his living room in the middle of the night.

  Now, he nodded toward Gray. “What’s he doing here?”

  “My house was blown up tonight.”

  “Blown up? You mean like ka-boom?” He looked at her, then at Gray, then back at her.

  “It’s gone, Daily. Destroyed. Everything. Including my tape library,” she said bitterly, thinking about the irreplaceable videos that had taken years to collect. “Bondurant thinks the back door was booby-trapped. Cronkite went in ahead of me, through his doggie door.”

  Daily was aghast. “Who would do such a thing?”

  “The President.”

  “Excuse me? The President of the United States?”

  “Bondurant thinks the explosion was meant to kill me because of the questions I’ve been asking about Vanessa’s health and her baby’s death,” Barrie explained.

  “Jesus.” Daily looked up at Gray. “What makes you think—Sit down, for chrissake. You’re making me crane my neck.”

  For the first time in hours, Barrie felt like smiling. Gray sat down on the only other available spot—beside her on the sofa.

  “What makes you think Merritt would go this far to keep Barrie quiet?” Daily asked him.

  “He dispatched Spencer Martin to handle me simply because I’d talked to her.”

  “Define ‘handle.’ ”

  “Assassinate.”

  “I thought you two were friends.”

  “We were. Nevertheless, he came to Wyoming to assassinate me because he was afraid that Barrie had told me her theory about the baby’s death. That should give you some indication of how determined they are to put a lid on her story before it gets out.”

  Frowning, Daily smoothed down a few spikes of his crown. “You sure about this?” he asked skeptically.

  “He’s sure,” Barrie said. “Tell him, Bondurant.”

  While he recounted for Daily the peculiarities of Spencer Martin’s visit to Wyoming, she wondered how she could have failed to reco
gnize Gray among the passengers on her flight back to Washington. She hadn’t paid much attention to her fellow travelers, but wouldn’t he have stood out? Obviously he’d made certain that he wouldn’t. His talent for being a chameleon did not increase her confidence in him. In many ways it made her more mistrustful.

  “So, as far as anybody knows, Spence Martin was never in Wyoming,” Daily summarized.

  “He didn’t touch anything inside my house except the silverware he ate with, and I washed that. His avoidance of touching anything was one of the first warning signals I picked up.”

  “Where’s Martin now?” Daily asked.

  Gray was stone-faced. The awkward silence stretched out until Barrie was forced to answer. “Mr. Bondurant is disinclined to say how he managed to escape him.”

  She glanced at the rigid profile of the man seated beside her. She didn’t doubt that he could kill someone, even a former friend. His cold eyes and that narrow slash of a mouth indicated he was capable of it. If he’d killed Spencer Martin in self-defense, that was excusable. But could she take his word for that?

  Daily put into words a question that she’d been asking herself. “Wouldn’t Spence Martin have checked in with the President by now?”

  “Ordinarily, yes. He even excused himself from the room on the pretext of placing a call to the White House. But he wouldn’t have called until he could give David a full report, including my extermination. David’s probably pacing the floor tonight wondering why he hasn’t heard from Spence, but he can’t send anyone to Wyoming to look for him because Spence wasn’t supposed to be there.”

  “Sooner or later somebody’s bound to miss him and start looking,” Barrie remarked.

  “Spence never had family or close friends,” Gray said. “David and his administration have been Spence’s entire life. To understand that, you have to understand where Spence came from. He was a frail, nerdy kid, bullied in school, picked on for being small. But he was much smarter than the average kid.

  “All those years of being the bullies’ target made him determined to become the best bully of all. He achieved that goal—he came to be the most feared bully in Washington. It’s understood that crossing Spence is tantamount to spitting on the Oval Office. Spence wouldn’t have informed anyone where he was going. He accounted only to David.”

  “Even the President’s top aide can’t be that autonomous,” Barrie argued. “The Department of Justice, Attorney General Yancey, the FBI, the—” She broke off when Gray began shaking his head.

  “Bill Yancey’s a good man,” he said. “Almost too good to suit the administration. Yancey and David have locked horns several times since his appointment. But believe what I’m telling you. Spencer Martin’s network of agents is as elite and ruthless as the Third Reich’s SS. They operate like moles in every government agency, including the Secret Service. Spence’s men are kept on standby at all times. If his orders countermanded ones they’d received through official channels, Spence’s would be the ones these guys obeyed.”

  Barrie hugged her elbows. “You’re scaring me.”

  “These are some scary characters. Most of them are specially trained troops who have retired and don’t have a war to fight.”

  Barrie wondered if he was aware that he’d also described himself.

  “If it’s something really vital,” Gray added, “Spence would do the job himself.”

  “Like assassinating a former recon buddy.”

  Gray acknowledged Daily’s remark with a grim smile. “Right. Like that. Although most often he would assign the job to someone else. Usually it’s done with Spence out of town, so he’d have an alibi if the actual perpetrator got caught or left traceable evidence. I’m sure he made an arrangement like that for Barrie’s townhouse. It’s not unusual for him to be away. It will be a while before anyone becomes curious enough to start asking questions.”

  “Merritt will be curious.”

  “Once David learns that I’m alive,” he said in response to Barrie’s statement, “he’ll know that Spence failed to accomplish what he went to Wyoming to do.”

  That sobering comment silenced them for a time. Finally, Daily turned to Gray. “I admire what you did over there in the Middle East.”

  Gray acknowledged the compliment with a slight nod. “But?”

  “But forgive me for saying that you could be feeding us a barrel of bullshit.”

  The insult seemed to have no effect on him. “You have every right to be suspicious. It’s no secret that there was tension between David and me when I left Washington.”

  “Because of his wife.”

  Barrie couldn’t believe Daily’s temerity. He was saying the things, asking the questions, she hadn’t dared.

  “Vanessa was part of the final rift, yes.”

  “Then why should I believe anything you’ve told us?”

  “In other words, I could be making all this up in the hope of crushing David Merritt’s presidency.”

  “The thought crossed my mind,” Daily admitted with his characteristic candor.

  With more composure than Barrie would have expected, Gray said, “I didn’t start this. I didn’t seek out Miss Travis with a hot story. She came to me with questions about the baby’s death, questions that mirrored my own suspicions.”

  That came as a surprise and made her angry. “Why didn’t you tell me that? You led me to believe that you thought I was the worst kind of opportunist. You—”

  “Let the man talk, Barrie,” Daily said. He looked at Gray. “What aroused your suspicions?”

  He rose and began to pace while he talked. “Vanessa can be charming and sweet. But she can also be the most exasperating, self-centered, manipulative creature God ever made. She’s strongly influenced by her father and by David, but I’ve seen her turn their machinations to her advantage, and without them realizing it.”

  “You’re not painting a very favorable picture of her. In fact, the woman you’ve just described fits my earlier impressions of her,” Barrie admitted.

  “My point is that, despite her problems, I know Vanessa wanted a baby more than she wanted anything,” he said. “I know that with certainty. She was willing to go through anything to have a child, even though doctors discouraged pregnancy because of her illness.”

  “Illness?” Daily looked at them quizzically.

  “She’s manic-depressive,” Barrie explained, then told him what Gray had told her.

  “Son of a gun,” Daily said, dumbfounded.

  “It’s a pity she hasn’t made her condition public,” Barrie remarked. “Thousands of people could have benefitted from knowing about it. Other patients would have been encouraged by her ability to live a full and rewarding life in spite of the illness.”

  “Until recently,” Gray said.

  “Right,” Barrie agreed.

  “She should not have been left alone that night.”

  “It was reported that the White House nanny had requested the night off to handle a family emergency,” Daily reminded them.

  “Her request was made in advance. The question is: Why wasn’t there a stand-in nanny?” Gray said. “Why was Vanessa left alone to care for the baby, with only David and Spence as backups in case of emergency, when everyone concerned knew that Vanessa was often incapable of handling emergencies?”

  “Being manic-depressive, Vanessa would have far more than the normal feelings a woman experiences following the birth of a child. Feelings of resentment, inadequacy, entrapment, and so on.” Barrie looked at Gray. “That’s why you didn’t share your suspicions with anyone, isn’t it? You wanted to protect her.”

  “I was protecting her with my silence, but not in the way you mean. You see, I don’t agree with you. Vanessa did not smother her baby.”

  “I’m confused,” Barrie said irritably. “You agree that he didn’t die of SIDS.”

  “Correct.”

  “That makes no sense,” she said softly. “If Vanessa didn’t smother him, then who…”


  The argument died abruptly on her lips. She glanced at Daily, who had been following the discussion. Their eyes connected, held, and she saw that his sudden realization matched hers.

  She swung back to Gray. “Merritt?”

  He nodded.

  “But why?”

  “What would make a man hate a three-month-old enough to kill it?”

  She did not need to think about it. “If the baby wasn’t his.”

  He nodded brusquely, then turned his back on her and walked to the window.

  Of course. This explained so many prevalent questions. Vanessa’s distress and utter helplessness. The waiver of an autopsy. The violent attempts to stifle the story. Bondurant’s involvement. Especially Bondurant’s involvement.

  Slowly her gaze moved to him. He was still standing with his back to the room, peering through the crack in the faded draperies.

  Daily stood. “Well, I think accusing the President of the United States of baby killing is enough excitement for one night. At least it is for an old fart like me. I’m going back to bed. You two are welcome to stay here as long as need be.”

  The trolley carrying his oxygen tank had a squeaky wheel. It could be heard as he made his way down the hall and into his bedroom. When he closed the door behind him, a thick silence descended over the house.

  Barrie said quietly, “The President gave me his hearty approval to interview her.”

  “To throw everybody off track. Which is more suspicious: publicly addressing an issue, or keeping it hush-hush?”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  “I’d bet everything I own.”

  “You’re afraid for Vanessa, aren’t you?”

  He turned around and looked at Barrie, but he said nothing.

  “As long as she appeared well adjusted,” Barrie said, organizing her thoughts as she spoke, “you dismissed your suspicions about the baby’s death. But when you saw my interview with her, you realized that she wasn’t herself, even considering her fluctuating moods and behavior. That caused you to entertain more doubts. Then I came to see you, and my theory echoed what you’d feared all along—that the baby’s death wasn’t caused by SIDS. Spencer Martin’s visit clinched it for you.