by Ana Barrons
“Like me, Michael worked in the Public Defender’s office in Connecticut for a while.”
“I remember you talking about that a long time ago, down at the lake,” Gabe said.
Joy smiled. “We go back a long way.”
“Yes, we do.” And it wasn’t going to do her a damn bit of good if she had harmed Kate.
She sighed. “Anyway, there was a guy we both defended, an alleged murderer. Tyrell King.”
“You and Michael worked together on his case?”
She nodded. “He was a nasty piece of work. Liked to use a knife on women. In the end Michael got him off and he walked. Free as a bird. I found a note in Drew’s desk with Tyrell’s name circled.” She took a long sip of wine. “There was a phone number below it. I assumed it was Tyrell’s.”
“Is that all?”
She put a hand to her forehead. “I didn’t want him to know I was suspicious, but I wanted to know what in the world he was doing with Tyrell’s number. So I went into his office for something and, well, snooped through his cell phone calls.”
“What did you find?”
“A couple of dozen calls to and from that number. And he had it listed on his phone as TK.”
“There’s not a whole lot I can do with that,” Gabe said. “Not unless there’s some evidence that this Tyrell actually did something illegal on Michael’s behalf.”
She fiddled with her wineglass. “There may be. In the office. I’ll have to take you there.”
“What is it?”
She swallowed. “A tape recorder. I set it up in the office to record Michael’s conversations. It will be one-sided, but if he’s talking to Tyrell I’ll know it.”
“Can’t use that in court,” Gabe said.
“And isn’t that ridiculous? Under the Global Intel bill we’d be able to use covertly obtained information to confiscate his cell phone and anything else we wanted.”
Yeah, and to hell with the Constitution.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
Anger blazed in Ben’s eyes as he entered the room. Joy leaped to her feet.
“When did you get here?” she asked. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“I sneaked in the back door,” Ben said, eyes moving back and forth between Joy and Gabe. “Don’t tell me you’re starting up with Gabe now that Drew’s gone? Is it just Kate’s men you’re interested in?”
Joy threw Gabe a dark glance but didn’t respond to Ben’s question. “Gabe’s here on police business.”
“Ah,” Ben said, looking directly at Gabe. “You do have an unusual way of conducting police business with attractive women.”
Gabe reached into his back pocket and pulled out a few photos. “You both might be interested in these,” he said, and dropped them on the table. He watched Joy’s face change from puzzled to disgusted to angry. Ben was too busy staring at the photos to see her reactions to them.
“So, your boyfriend swung both ways,” Ben said after a few moments. “Be hard to ID a guy with a camera hiding his face.” By the time he looked at Joy she’d managed to mask her horror, but not her anger.
“I told you we weren’t lovers,” she snapped, directing it at her husband. “There’s the proof.”
Ben studied his wife, and Gabe saw the first shred of doubt cross his old friend’s face. “Actually, you never did say you weren’t lovers. You didn’t respond at all whenever I brought it up.”
Joy raised her chin. “I didn’t think your insinuations deserved a response.”
“Uh-huh,” Ben said, his expression impossible to read. “Well, I came by to pick up some of my things. Don’t let me disrupt this little tête-à-tête.”
“Actually, we’re just leaving,” Gabe said. He picked up the photos and stuck them back in his pocket. “Joy and I are going down to the Cannon House Office Building to check out some things.”
Ben turned to Joy. “I’ll be gone by the time you get back.”
To Gabe’s surprise, Joy moved to stand in front of Ben. In a low voice she said, “Even now that you see your suspicions were wrong? Please, honey. Just wait for me.” She gestured toward the wine bottle. “Sit on the couch and have some wine, and we’ll talk when I get home. I won’t be long.” When Ben didn’t reply she put her hand on his chest. “Wait for me, Ben. There are some things... I’ll explain if you’ll wait, okay? If you still want to leave after we talk I’ll help you pack.” She moved closer and whispered, “But I can be very persuasive.”
Gabe pretended not to hear.
“Where’s Kate tonight?” Ben asked, and Gabe realized he was talking to him.
“Busy,” Gabe said. He wasn’t about to mention that the feds had taken her into custody. It was Joy or Michael Clark—or both—who belonged there, not Kate. He would prove that if it was the last thing he ever did. But right now he had to play along with Joy, make her believe he trusted her and find out what she knew.
“Ben?” Joy said. “Will you wait?”
“I’ll think about it,” he said.
Chapter Thirty-One
When they’d left, Ben spent a few moments staring at the front door. So Drew was gay? Okay, bisexual. That had to piss off Joy big time. No, he had no illusions that the affair never happened. He knew his wife too well. If he’d accused her falsely she would have let him know about it in no uncertain terms. Joy might be good at fooling her colleagues and constituents, but she didn’t fool him. At least, not for long.
He sat on the couch and poured some wine into Joy’s glass, then sat back. Something was niggling at him, like an itch he couldn’t quite reach. Both Gabe and Joy had been lying, that much was clear. Gabe had been cozying up to Joy for a reason, and it wasn’t sex. Ben had seen him with Kate and the chemistry between those two was explosive. He took a sip of the wine. The attraction between Gabe and Kate had never been far from the surface, not even when Steve was alive. Maybe the bullshit Gabe had put her through all these years had been about his guilt, not hers.
He knew all too well how insidious guilt could be.
His gaze roamed about the room, stopping at photos of him and Joy, their families, several of Jeremy. They’d had some good years together. Maybe they would’ve had children eventually, if he could ever have persuaded Joy that her job wasn’t all that mattered. But, truth be told, the job was everything to her. If she’d actually been in love with Drew her grief wouldn’t have run its course so quickly. More likely the affair was an extension of the job. It was power Joy loved. How had he ever thought she would be happy married to a cardiologist?
“I don’t have time for this shit,” he muttered, then tossed back the rest of the wine and stood. No sense waiting for Joy to get back. She would just try to feed him more lies, and he wasn’t interested.
When he got to their bedroom the door was locked. What the hell? Who was she locking out? The answer was clear of course—she was locking him out. “Bitch,” he said aloud. But when had she done it? He hadn’t told her he was coming over tonight, and every other time he’d stopped by the bedroom had not been barricaded. Had she locked it when Gabe came over?
He tried the knob again, pushing and wiggling, but the more he fiddled with it the angrier he became. Goddamn it, this was still his room, and he’d be damned if he let her lock him out like he was some sort of intruder. Was there something in there she didn’t want him—or Gabe—to see?
Practical as always, he considered the cost of replacing the door, and decided it was worth it. He took a few steps back, then lunged at the door, throwing all his weight into it as though he were making a full body tackle. He felt something give, so he did it again. And again. Each failure pissed him off more than the last. After throwing his upper body against it five or six times he was ready to use his feet. It only took two good kicks to break the lock.
The overhead light and both bedside lamps were on, and Joy’s white MacBook was sitting on the bed. A quick scan around the room revealed nothing unusual. So what was the big deal? He went to
the bed and picked up the laptop, fully expecting to be denied access, since she’d never shared her password. But this time all he had to do was press a key and the screen lit up.
At first he didn’t know what he was looking at. The column on the left side of the document was a list of initials, none of which registered with him. Beside each set of initials were strings of letters with numbers underneath most of them, but not all. Further down the list there were no numbers beneath the letters. His heart rate picked up and he sat down. The comforter was warm where the laptop had been.
He was looking at a code of some kind. He glanced at the spine on a thick book lying open beside it. Don Quixote. He reached for it, swallowing hard. The itch was back, and a part of him wanted to shut down the laptop and leave the house. Quickly. Before he figured out what was going on.
He flipped back to the first page and saw that the book had belonged to Drew Franklin. There were little scraps of paper between the pages and faint circles around some of the letters. He set the book back down and studied the Word document on the laptop. Definitely a code. He closed his eyes for several moments, then scrolled down the page until the next page came up. This time there were names of places with large numbers beside them. Belize: 14,000,000. Liechtenstein: 3,000,000. Geneva: 4,000,000. Canary Islands: 12,000,000. Costa Rica: 8,500,000. The list went on.
“Shit,” he said. This was crazy. Joy was cracking codes to numbered accounts holding obscenely large sums of money. And he strongly suspected it was Drew’s money—or, more likely, Kate’s.
Ben closed the laptop and ran his hands over his face.
Okay, he had to get a grip. There was nothing illegal about having numbered offshore accounts in and of itself. The illegality was usually where the money had come from. Drew must have moved Kate’s money into numbered accounts only he and Joy could access.
White-hot pain lanced his gut. How could she? No matter that being a successful politician required her to tell her share of lies and half-truths, make secret deals, compromise to win support for what she believed in. What he was looking at stunk of felony theft, of betrayal beyond that of the marriage vow.
“What have you done, Joy?” he whispered.
Hypocrite, his conscience whispered back.
Slowly he straightened and opened the laptop again. He leaned against the pillows Joy had left propped up and began a thorough search of her files, noting that several of the letters had Drew’s name in the signature line. Apparently she’d drafted letters for him in addition to her other services. As he read, her smell surrounded him, along with the memories of all the times they’d made love in this bed. When his vision went blurry he wiped his eyes on his shoulders and called himself twelve kinds of fool for caring.
Sometime later—he had no idea how long after he’d begun—he found a document he wished to God he’d never seen. It made him physically sick to read it, and he stopped midway through. His finger hovered over the delete button, then retracted. Then hovered, then retracted. Finally he closed the laptop, set it down beside him on the bed and closed his eyes.
Someone was going to prison for a long time.
He slid one hand behind the pillow and pulled out the scrap of satin that had been there every night he’d shared with his wife, and held it to his nose. It was all that was left of the blanky Joy had slept with since she was a child. Her security blanket. They never talked about it. It shared the bed with them night after night, conferring a comforting energy Joy depended on. It had come along on their vacations, and on the rare occasions it didn’t make it back into their suitcase, he had turned around without question and gone back to get it.
Could an inmate have a blanky in prison?
* * *
“Thanks, Sam,” Joy said to the Capitol police officer who had accompanied her and Gabe to her office suite in the Cannon House Office Building. “I’ll call downstairs when we’re ready to leave.”
“Good enough, Mrs. Stuart,” the officer said, and strolled down the hall.
Joy unlocked her office door, reached out to her left and flipped on the overhead light. She and Gabe stepped inside the outer office, where her administrative assistant and other aides had assorted desks and tables. Six padded seats for visitors were lined up along the wall beside the door.
“It was easier not to explain why I wanted to get into Drew’s office,” she said by way of explanation, but Gabe hadn’t asked. More likely she was nervous. They’d spoken little in Joy’s car—she had insisted they take hers—on the way over. She’d been taking deep breaths, calming herself, but her fingers had gripped the steering wheel so hard her knuckles were white.
“Must have come as quite a shock,” Gabe said, leaning back against the door, arms crossed over his chest.
“Hmm?”
“The photos,” he said.
“Oh,” she said, casual as could be. “Well, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t surprised.”
“So, what now?”
“Now we wait until I’m sure Sam is gone and we go down the hall to Drew’s office.” She was fiddling with things on people’s desks, straightening pictures, checking the soil in a couple of potted plants on the window ledge. Gabe watched. And waited.
A minute or so later she said, “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”
“I’d rather come with you,” he said.
“If Sam comes back, or if anyone else shows up, it’ll raise a lot of questions if we’re both in Drew’s office.”
“He’s dead, Joy,” Gabe said dryly. “I’m a cop.”
“Everyone knows the FBI is in charge of this investigation. Just... trust me, okay? It’s better if I go in there myself.”
He pretended to acquiesce. “Fine. I’ll be waiting.”
Joy left, and he gave her thirty seconds to get where she was going before he stepped out into the hallway. There were security cameras mounted discreetly near the ceilings, and he didn’t want to attract attention, so he stood there for a few moments and then sauntered down the hallway in the direction of Drew’s office.
Joy’s scream didn’t have far to travel, and she was still screaming as Gabe pounded down the hallway with his gun in his hand. He burst into the office and smelled that familiar metallic scent of blood at the same instant he saw what she was screaming about.
Michael Clark was slumped over his desk with half his head blown off, a gun in his blood-soaked hand.
Chapter Thirty-Two
“Oh, my God.” Kate stood in her foyer and gazed around at the wrecked house. Pictures had been torn off the walls and smashed. Cushions had been ripped apart, lamps and tables overturned. Even the china cabinet in the corner of the dining room had been knocked over. She should care about the shards of fine china and crystal strewn about the floor, but she didn’t. Frightening as it was that someone had done this, all she felt about the ruined pieces of her life with Drew was... nothing. She had never really cared about the trappings of wealth, other than those things that entertained Jeremy.
Mancuso was talking rapidly into his phone, but Kate wasn’t interested in what he had to say. She headed toward the stairs and, right on cue, he said, “No, Mrs. Franklin. Don’t go up there.”
She turned to him and said slowly. “I am going up to my bedroom, Agent Mancuso, and I am going to pack a bag and get the hell away from this house.”
Mancuso signed off and said, “I need you to wait until the cops get here. This house is a crime scene.”
Right. The D.C. cops. Gabe. The searing pain of his betrayal fueled her determination. “I don’t need to wait,” she said. “I’m getting my things—assuming there’s anything left intact—and I don’t give a damn what you or the cops or the CIA or anyone else wants me to do. You boys can go through and have a blast picking through my life.” She turned back to the stairs and continued up. He followed her silently.
Her bedroom was as trashed as the lower floor. “Holy shit,” Mancuso said from behind her. “I’m afraid I have to insist—”
“Save it,” she said, and proceeded to the bathroom. Her toiletries were strewn across the counters and the floor, and bits of broken glass glinted up at her. She spun around and nearly ran into Mancuso’s chest. It was all she could do not to slap him. Hard. She pushed past him and went to her closet. The clothes on hangers had been thrown on the floor and someone had poured something over them. It smelled like a mix of perfumes and cleaning fluid. She sighed heavily.
“Let’s go downstairs and wait for the techs, Mrs. Franklin.”
She headed for the bedroom door. No way she was going to wait around for Gabe to show up and offer more of his bullshit. He’d taken advantage of her when she was most vulnerable and thrown her to the wolves. She wouldn’t make that mistake again.
At the doorway she stopped. She turned and crossed the room, stepping over torn sheets and smashed furnishings to her bedside table and pulled open the top drawer. The picture of her and Steve and Gabe was still there. The photo was creased and worn, particularly over Gabe. Tears welled and she shook her head, remembering the hundreds of times she had stared at that face, run the tips of her fingers over it, even held it to her lips.
Careful to preserve the part with her and Steve, she tore off Gabe’s face and let that piece drift to the floor. The rest she put in a zippered pocket of her purse. At the last minute she remembered to grab her phone charger, which was, miraculously, still hanging from the wall socket. Alison had left half a dozen messages on her cell during the day, frantic because she didn’t know where Kate was. Wait’ll she heard that she’d been in FBI custody all that time. And that her house had been trashed. Their next conversation would be a long one.
She opened a door at the far end of the hallway and climbed a set of stairs to her studio at the top of the house. Before she even reached the top landing the overwhelming smell of resin and turpentine told her that her sanctuary had been breached. She stared from the doorway at the destroyed canvases, busted up easels, paint-coated walls and floors, allowing the fury to roll over her. Who could possibly hate her this much?
