Unthinkable

by Brad Parks

  Was it because of Nate and the gun? Surely she was being ridiculous. Nate would never hurt her.

  Some things were just unthinkable.

  And, really, what was more likely: That her very dependable, very agreeable, very loving husband—who had never lied to her and hated firearms—was suddenly trying to hide that he had bought a gun?

  Or that her three-year-old daughter had conflated a gun she’d seen on a screen with a real-life gun?

  That had to be it.

  So she was mostly trying to put this odd feeling of apprehension out of her mind. But then it kicked up again as she parked in the garage across from her office and began weaving her way through the fountains.

  Then, just as she was about to enter the front doors of CMR’s glass tower, Jenny saw a woman loitering nearby.

  She was older. Sixties. Seventies. She had hair whose orange coloring could have only come from a bottle. She had a solid build, larger on top than on bottom—the kind of woman whose sons, if she had any, would have become linebackers. She wore a plain red T-shirt that billowed on her, jeans, and bright-white sneakers.

  The woman stood out because in this part of Richmond, at this time in the morning, there were really only two sorts of people on the street: those who were going to work, who walked with an unmistakable direction; and those who didn’t have homes, who tended to move with less purpose.

  This woman was neither. She was rooting through a grubby, floral-patterned bag that looked like a Vera Bradley knockoff and was too large to really be called a purse. More of an on-the-go bag.

  But Jenny could have sworn that, a moment earlier, the woman had been staring at her and was now only pretending to look for something in her bag—all the while keeping Jenny in the corner of her eye.

  Even stranger was that, as soon as Jenny saw the woman, that prickle of danger that had been with her all morning grew even stronger.

  Jenny tried to tell herself she was being ridiculous. She was quite sure she had never seen this orange-haired woman before. There was no concrete reason to suspect her of anything.

  She could have just been a little lost on her way to . . . somewhere. And maybe she was looking in her purse for her phone.

  Nevertheless, when Jenny reached her office, she tapped out a quick email to Baraz “Barry” Khadem, a former high school football star, army intelligence officer, and Virginia State Trooper who was now CMR’s director of security and investigations.

  Barry’s job, in football terms, involved both offense and defense. He coordinated the gathering of information for the many legal actions in which the firm was involved, dispensing both staff investigators (all of them, like Barry, former cops) and freelancers alike. That was the offense.

  The defense involved making sure CMR’s people and image—which, when combined, were what made the firm a billion-dollar-a-year business—were protected.

  After requesting a meeting with Barry as soon as he had a moment, Jenny tried to put all the weirdness out of her mind and prepare for her first meeting of the day.

  The man visiting her was a college professor who realized his sharpened pencil and similarly pointed mind could give him a lucrative side hustle as an expert witness in statistics. For $5,000 a day (his rate when testifying), or $2,000 a day (his rate when consulting), he could make math sing to juries and judges alike. He had been certified as an expert over a hundred times in both state and federal courts.

  He arrived promptly at nine. Appropriately nebbish, the man set up his laptop and, one password later, had it communicating wirelessly with the conference room’s smart board.

  Jenny had barely introduced herself when he dived into his analysis, bringing up a map of the Richmond area with census divisions drawn on it.

  Then he began what might as well have been a lecture to one of his advanced analytics classes. The rate of lung cancer diagnoses—both nationally and, by coincidence, in Virginia—was fifty-six per hundred thousand people per year. But that was not the case in the census tracts near the Shockoe Generation Plant, where all the 280 clients in Jenny’s lawsuit resided.

  There, the professor reported, the rate of lung cancer had consistently been four, six, or even ten times the average.

  The chance of that happening randomly in one tract was small. The chance of that happening randomly in a cluster of tracts all packed together in one section of Richmond, Virginia, was astronomically miniscule.

  One in 1.6 billion, to be exact.

  “So not random,” Jenny said.

  “Decidedly not,” the professor said. “I can walk you through the entire analysis and overwhelm you with numbers like I would in court, or I can just skip to the end: in my expert opinion, this is a cancer cluster. If this was water, and you were looking at one clear point source, the defendant would be begging to settle. The problem is, it’s air. I’m unaware of anyone being able to successfully use this kind of analysis with air. Because how do you prove who tainted the air? What you have is not a statistical problem, but a legal problem.”

  Jenny didn’t need to be told that the Clean Air Act was one of the more misnamed pieces of legislation ever passed. It was actually a license to release a certain amount of pollution. That it could claim to be cleaning the air was only because, prior to its existence, there was no limit to what a company’s smokestacks could spew into the atmosphere.

  “I’m aware,” Jenny said. “Believe me, I’m aware. Though I may have a trick up my sleeve there. Now, let’s go back to—”

  Just then, from outside the glass window of the conference room, she saw the imposing shape and shaved head of Barry Khadem.

  “Actually,” Jenny said, “would you excuse me for a quick moment?”

  Jenny retreated into the hallway.

  “Sorry to bother you,” Barry said. “But your email made it sound kind of urgent.”

  “It might be, or I might just be losing my mind,” Jenny said. “But I think I’m being watched.”

  CHAPTER 10

  NATE

  All throughout Tuesday evening and into Wednesday morning, I felt like the only way to gain any clarity on the jumble of thoughts now muddling my mind was to return to Dominion State Hospital and see how much more Buck might be willing to say.

  If I could convince him the doctors really couldn’t use our confidential conversations against him in a court hearing, maybe he’d be more forthcoming.

  Like, had he seen any actual evidence to back up these outrageous claims about historic assassinations? Or was it just mythology, the Praesidium equivalent of the Arthurian legends?

  And, yes, if Buck really was being paid off by Lorton Rogers, I would just get more runaround. But if I kept pushing, I was sure his story would eventually crack. And then I’d know this was all just part of the ruse.

  There were just two immediate problems with my plan to revisit Buck. And they were currently finishing up breakfast. I couldn’t exactly take two toddlers into the high-security unit at the mental hospital.

  I thought about dropping them at my in-laws’ again, but I was out of excuses as to why I would do so. Besides, Jenny already thought I was losing my mind. I didn’t want to give her more evidence of how true that was.

  There were other options, though. And the first—and best—was my friend Kara Grichtmeier.

  She was a fellow stay-at-home parent who lived two blocks over and also had two little girls who were about my girls’ age. We had met at a Mommy & Me class (where I was the token daddy) and immediately hit it off.

  Then it turned out we also frequented the same coffee shop. And the same playground. And the same grocery store. Our worlds—both small—almost perfectly overlapped. It was only natural we’d become friends.

  When I first started, uh, seeing her, I worried about what Jenny would think. In addition to being smart, kind, and randomly irreverent, Kara was, quite inconveniently, a knockout: shimmering hair, flawless skin, nicely toned legs.

  To diffuse any potential jealousy—and to m
ake it clear I wasn’t trying to hide anything—I had the genius idea of hiring a babysitter for all four kids and going out on a double date with our spouses.

  Greg Grichtmeier turned out to be every bit as attractive as his wife. He was this big guy with a chiseled jaw and the kind of thick, wavy hair that belonged on a politician or a TV weatherman. He was also gregarious, charismatic, and, of all things, an accountant.

  In a prime example of just how small a town Richmond was, he was a partner at the city’s premier accounting firm. Its biggest client? Commonwealth Power & Light, of course.

  I had never mentioned the lawsuit to Kara. CP&L buttered a lot of bread in the Grichtmeier family. If and when this thing exploded into something public, contentious, and nasty—something that required everyone even remotely involved to pick sides—it was entirely possible I’d lose my friend.

  And that would be a shame. Because after that first double date turned out to be a smashing success—a lot of eating, drinking, and uproarious conversation—we had since made it a regular thing. Kara and Jenny became fast friends, as did Greg and I. Even Greg and Jenny clicked.

  Kara and I had since established a kind of childcare cooperative. If either one of us had to ditch our kids for a few hours—for a doctor’s appointment or some other engagement where dragging along the kids was either inconvenient or impossible—we knew we could rely on each other. It had worked out nicely that I had tended to need her about as often as she needed me, so no one felt like they were being abused.

  It was now nine thirty. I called and found her amenable to taking the girls around noon. This would give me plenty of time to hustle out to Williamsburg, talk with Buck, and get back home. Jenny would never know I had been anywhere.

  My plan was set. As I halfheartedly played with the girls that morning, I once again thought through the CP&L angle, feeling more certain the power company had to be involved somehow, and that the bed I had been strapped to was in J. Hunter Matthews’ guest room.

  With the Rembrandt. Which felt like something that was verifiable. You didn’t just own a Rembrandt and have people not know about it. When your friends and guests came over, you showed it off, right?

  That was still in the forefront of my mind as I pulled up to the Grichtmeiers’ town house at noon. Once I got the girls settled, I turned to Kara and lobbed out what I hoped sounded like a casual inquiry.

  “Hey, this is a random question, but have you ever been to Hunter Matthews’ place?”

  “Hunter Matthews,” she said, wrinkling her brow. “You mean CP and L Hunter Matthews? J. Hunter Matthews?”

  “Is there any other?”

  “Right. Uhh, yeah, Greg and I were there at a fundraiser for a hospital maybe two years ago? The firm paid our way. It was one of those thousand-dollar-a-plate deals. His wife, Heather, is a big do-gooder. And I know because ever since that night we’ve been Facebook friends. She’s one of those Facebook addicts who friends everyone she’s ever met and then posts four status updates a day about how amazing she is. Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, nothing really,” I said. “I was just reading a piece about him in a magazine and was kind of daydreaming about what it must be like to have that much money. Did you know he owns a Rembrandt?”

  “No kidding.”

  “Yeah. I think the article said it was in one of the bedrooms. Did you see it while you were there?”

  “I might have. Honestly, I get all the dead European artists confused. I know it’s impressionism if it’s a bunch of dots, and it’s early Renaissance if Jesus looks like a tiny bodybuilder. Otherwise it all kind of blends together.”

  “Yeah, I hear you,” I said, like this was all nonchalant. “What was the house like?”

  “Oh, you know. It was one of those boss places along the James River. You can actually see it from two eighty-eight. All I could think is how long it would take to clean it.”

  I laughed, because that’s what I would have done if I was just being Kara’s good ol’ friend Nate.

  But her description certainly fit my experience of the place I had been taken to. It had obviously been a grand home. It certainly could have been one of the historic plantations set up on a bluff above the James River.

  “I think they have people for that,” I said. “But was there, you know, a lot of art hanging on the walls, or . . .”

  Kara scrunched her face. “I don’t remember any more or less than normal for a house like that. I didn’t know you were into that sort of thing.”

  “Oh, you know, grow up in New York City and it kind of happens by osmosis.”

  “Right,” she said.

  “Anyway, thanks for taking the girls. This appointment shouldn’t last too long. It’s just that it’s an hour away. I’ll see you after nap time?”

  “You bet,” she said.

  And, after one more exchange of friendly smiles, I was off for Dominion State Hospital.

  I felt like an old pro, pulling into the hospital’s main entrance, driving past the signs telling me I was under video surveillance.

  As I walked up to the admissions desk, I already had my license out. It was the same woman who had helped me the day before.

  “Hi,” I said, extending my ID. “Attorney Nate Lovejoy here to see my client Buck McBride.”

  She looked mildly horrified by this.

  “Well, you know he’s not here anymore, right?”

  “What do you mean he’s not here?”

  “The medical examiner’s office has him. They came and got him a few hours ago.”

  “The . . . medical examiner’s office,” I said.

  And I must have looked as puzzled as I felt, because she asked, “Didn’t anyone contact you?”

  “Contact me about what?”

  She sat up a little straighter.

  “I’m sorry, I thought you would have known already. Mr. McBride hung himself early this morning.”

  CHAPTER 11

  JENNY

  The door to Jenny’s office was about seven-eighths closed, a position intended to say: Bother me if you have to.

  But don’t bother me.

  The professor had left Jenny a two-inch-thick binder stuffed with figures, maps, and regression analyses, all of which undergirded his expert conclusion that the section of Richmond downwind of the Shockoe Generation Plant was a cancer cluster.

  As tedious as it was, Jenny knew the numbers might end up forming the backbone of her case, and so she had dedicated herself to plowing through it on the off chance that a judge actually read the whole thing and wanted to ask questions or—as was much more likely—the defense decided to get picayune with it.

  She was just beginning to recall some sliver of the college statistics class she had once vowed to forget when there came a tiny knock at her door—with a large man soon entering behind it.

  “Sorry, is this a bad time?” Barry Khadem asked.

  “No, come on in,” Jenny said.

  He closed the door behind himself, then crossed her office and sat on the other side of her desk.

  “So as I believe you’re aware, one of the things my guys do is keep an eye on the outside of the building—the parking garage, the plaza. We’ve got cameras all around. We don’t want anything to happen to one of our people out there.”

  “Sure,” Jenny said.

  In his presentations to the partners, Barry was always referring to what “my guys” were up to. He was often deliberately vague about who the “guys” were and what methodologies they used.

  “That woman you told us about? We’ve started referring to her as ‘Code Orange.’ I don’t know if it’s you she’s after or not. But she’s definitely up to something. She’s been out there all morning.”

  Barry held up an iPad so Jenny could see it and began swiping through pictures showing the woman in various poses and various places in and around the plaza. He was going quickly until he stopped on an image that was much sharper than the rest, a close-up of the woman as she smoked a cigarette.
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  “One of my guys snuck out and took this with a zoom lens,” Barry said. “Does she look familiar?”

  Barry slid the iPad across the desk. Jenny tilted it upward and studied the photo. Up close the woman’s hair showed the ravages of the cheap orange dye she had been using for too long. Her cheeks evinced the fine creep of age. Her eyes were smaller than Jenny remembered, surrounded by skin that had long ago gone loose.

  Just looking at the photo, Jenny had that awful sense of foreboding she had felt this morning all over again.

  But recognize Code Orange?

  “No,” Jenny said. “I’ve never seen her before this morning.”

  “Well, she seems to be hanging around for some reason. She stays on the move for the most part, but she almost always keeps a line of sight on the front entrance. That T-shirt she’s wearing is so loose, she could have anything under there. And we don’t like that bag she’s carrying either.”

  “Because it could have a weapon?” Jenny asked.

  “A weapon or a detonator or, well, who knows,” Barry said. “You know I did a couple tours in Iraq, right? If I was in Baghdad or Mosul right now, I’d be thinking suicide bomber, all the way.”

  “But you’re in Richmond, so—”

  “So it’s pretty unlikely, but we still want to keep a careful eye on her. Earlier, when you said you thought you were being watched, was there anything specific that made you think this woman is targeting you?”

  “No, just a hunch, I guess,” Jenny said.

  “Okay. Well, I don’t want to take any chances. Were you planning to leave the building for any reason today? Other than when you go home?”

  “No.”

  “Good. When you decide you want to get out of here for the day, give a call down. If Code Orange is still out there, I’ll have one of my guys escort you to the parking garage. Sound like a plan?”

  “You bet.”

  “And in the meantime, if you change your mind and decide you need to go out—even if it’s just for a smoke break, or to run to the store, or whatever—just give a holler and I’ll send someone with you.”