“It smells amazing, Nana,” I said.
“I should hope so,” she said, then she moaned sadly and gestured at the screen, shaking her head.
CHAPTER 12
BREE AND I LOOKED AT the TV to see Anderson Cooper doing a standup in front of the yellow tape blocking access to Kay Willingham’s Georgetown mansion. On the screen, over Cooper’s left shoulder, there was a picture of Kay from several years before, beaming and waving.
“Kay Willingham died today at fifty-two, shot to death in her powder-blue Bentley convertible in the middle of a tryst with her latest political protégé and apparent lover, Randall Christopher,” Cooper said.
A montage of video clips and images of Kay with many of the most powerful people in the country began to play. Cooper went on in voice-over. “She inherited her family’s millions and moved from Alabama to the nation’s capital, where for years Kay was Washington’s socialite queen. She was more than just beautiful and rich. She spoke five languages and had several degrees from schools all over the world, but she also possessed that rare ability to relate to almost everyone she met with warmth and genuine interest. She was known as a political mentor and an advocate for social justice — until she became better known as the angry ex-wife of the sitting vice president of the United States.”
The screen cut to Kay in a video clip from when she was in her late thirties. “I genuinely like people,” she said in her soft, familiar drawl. “Every soul who appears in front of me deserves my love and attention. But I know that to have real impact while I’m alive and kicking, I have to curate the souls I spend time with. Hence the parties. They’re good for me.”
The screen cut to a female columnist from the Washington Post. “Kay Willingham honestly never met a stranger,” she said. “She was giving and glamorous and passionate, and she was not afraid to show it — especially, unfortunately, when she had a few drinks in her.”
The footage cut again to Kay, older now, dressed for a ball and not quite three sheets to the wind as she smirked into the cameras, winked, and said, “This is what three political fund-raisers a night will do to a ’Bama gal, boys. Please be gentle with me. The headache I’m facing in the morning will be punishment enough.”
The screen cut back to Cooper in standup in front of the Georgetown mansion. “Long before she married J. Walter Willingham, a rising political star in her home state, Kay lived here in the nation’s capital and entertained her way to power. Her Georgetown parties were private, the conversations completely off the record. The gatherings were legendary, partly because they were safe places where people from all walks of life with radically opposing views could come together and talk frankly about the pressing issues of the day — if they could get an invitation.”
The screen jumped back to the Washington Post columnist, who was smiling. “Kay understood exclusivity and kept those parties small, forty guests tops. So people who wanted power as well as people who didn’t want to lose their power asked to come, but she’d turn them down if the space was full or if it wasn’t the right mix.”
With more video and commentary, the piece then dug into Kay’s marriage to Willingham. They were married a few months before he ran for the governorship of Alabama. Unconventional as always, Kay had refused to leave DC and move back home, and she split her time between Alabama and Washington while her husband led the state and then ran successfully for U.S. Senate.
The feed cut to Willingham with Kay six or seven years ago, sitting for a formal interview. He was smiling as he said, “Our marriage is a little unconventional, at times rocky. But it’s always worked for us.”
Kay, I noticed with twenty-twenty hindsight, seemed cool as she agreed with her husband. Not surprisingly, the story then veered ahead a few years to the ugly end of her marriage, when her drinking surged and she made wild, unsubstantiated accusations about her husband, now a vice-presidential candidate, publicly filing for divorce four and a half days before the general election.
“Willingham survived, and he and the president won the election,” Cooper said, returning to the screen. “Voters seemed to feel sympathy for him. In exit polls many of them said that they’d personally seen what drugs and alcohol had done to their own families and dismissed the things Kay had said to reporters in a drunken state.”
Cooper went on to note that shortly after the election, Kay’s mother had become terminally ill. Kay went back to Alabama and disappeared from the Washington, DC, scene. When she returned, stone-cold sober, she quietly began trying to pick up her life as a single woman.
But within a year, she was testing the social waters, appearing at a few events and parties, though still solo and sober. At one gala, she met Randall Christopher, a telegenic married African-American educator who ran an innovative school in DC and was interested in a political career.
“They evidently became lovers at some point,” Cooper said, again in standup. “They died together earlier today, shot at close range.
“So far Vice President Willingham has not spoken publicly about his ex-wife’s murder. His office did release a statement to us saying he was, quote, ‘shocked and beyond saddened by Kay’s death. My ex-wife had fought long and hard to conquer her demons and we’d made our peace with each other. She deserved a much longer life. The world would have been better for it.’ ”
CHAPTER 13
THE SEGMENT ENDED. NANA MAMA shut the TV off, but I kept staring at the screen, seeing images of Kay Willingham barefoot, laughing, and twirling away from me.
In addition to being a shrewd and skilled detective in her own right, Bree has always had an uncanny ability to read me, to sense things I might not even be consciously thinking about.
My wife tugged on my arm. “What’s going on? You couldn’t take your eyes off that story about Kay Willingham.”
“Well, I am working the case and there were things I’d never heard before.”
Bree wasn’t having it. “There’s more to it, Alex.”
I sighed, glanced at my grandmother. “There is. Clive Sparkman.”
Bree rolled her eyes. “What crackpot conspiracy theory is he pushing now?”
“He’s threatening to publish a story saying that Kay Willingham and I had an affair a long time ago.”
Bree stared at me, then burst out in nervous laughter. “You’re kidding.”
“Wish I was.”
“There’s nothing to it,” she said.
“I know.”
Nana Mama put her hands on her hips and sputtered, “This is what’s wrong these days. No one knows what’s true or not. Anything that gets thrown up there on the internet, people take as fact and gospel truth. No wonder the country’s in the state it’s in. Everyone’s hating on everyone, and nothing gets done because no one can agree on basic reality, even if you put the evidence right in front of their noses.”
Bree got angry then. “What can we do about it?”
“Until Sparkman publishes, nothing,” I said. “But I told him I had Craig Halligan on retainer if he chooses to post a libelous story.”
“Do you?”
“I met him last year and gave him a dollar in case I ever needed his services.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh.”
She gave me a hug. “You never cease to amaze me, Alex Cross.”
“Get a room, you two,” Nana Mama said. “But before you do, I need someone to set the table.”
As we did, I told Bree what Barbara Taylor had said about Randall Christopher’s wife suspecting he was having an affair.
“She mention evidence?”
“Just that they hadn’t made love in months.”
My grandmother had the oven open and was peering inside at the roast chicken. “That’s the first real sign of relationship disintegration,” she said. “If a man isn’t looking to his wife in the bedroom, he’s looking in some other bedroom.”
Both Bree and I stopped setting the table to gape at Nana Mama. We were still staring when she set the ch
icken on the stove and turned to us.
“What are you two looking at?” she asked.
I smiled. “Nothing, Nana. It’s just not often I hear someone in her nineties talking about that kind of thing.”
She shot me a withering look. “Shows how much you know. It’s all most eighty- and ninety-year-olds talk about because they spend so much time watching daytime television and that’s all that’s talked about on daytime TV.”
“C’mon,” Bree said.
“It’s true,” she said. “Don’t believe it? Look up the rise in the rate of sexually transmitted diseases among octogenarians.”
“I’d rather not,” I said.
“Sky-high,” Nana Mama said. “Especially in those assisted-living facilities.”
My son Ali came into the room. “What’s sky-high?”
My grandmother frowned. “A subject not for young men.”
“I’m ten,” he said indignantly.
“Nana Mama was talking about the number of people who make it to ninety these days,” Bree said.
“Oh,” he said, then looked at me. “Were the murders of Mr. Christopher and the vice president’s ex-wife professional hits, Dad?”
Ali, in addition to rock climbing, had long been interested in detection. At times, in our opinion, that interest had been borderline unhealthy. I said, “You know we can’t talk about active cases.” That irked Ali, but he said, “There are all sorts of theories already on the web.”
“You want to try to ignore the internet,” Nana Mama said. “It’s for idiots.”
“Well, the idiots all think that Mrs. Willingham is to blame because Mr. Christopher was such a good guy.”
My daughter, Jannie, came into the kitchen, upset. “He was a great guy. I can’t believe it. Everyone’s talking about it. Tina and Rachel are destroyed.”
My stomach sank. “They heard up at camp? Did their mother break the news to them?”
She shook her head, on the verge of tears. “They found out on Facebook hours ago, Dad, and they can’t find their mom. They said she’s not answering her cell.”
“She’ll call in soon, I’m sure,” Bree said.
The doorbell rang and Sampson called out, “Hello?”
I called back, “We’re in the kitchen, John.”
Sampson, his wife, Billie, and their seven-year-old daughter, Willow, appeared in the doorway. “Smells good in here,” John said.
Billie, ordinarily one of the most vivacious women on the face of the earth, nodded and smiled weakly. “It always smells good in here.”
“Just like I like it,” Nana Mama said, turning from her stove. “How are you, Willow?”
“Good,” Willow said, looking at my grandmother’s cookie jar.
Nana Mama winked at her, then turned to Sampson’s wife. “And you, Billie?”
“Getting better every day, Nana,” Sampson said, wrapping an arm around her shoulder. “She walked two miles this morning.”
“Two miles,” Bree said. “That’s huge!”
Billie smiled broadly. “I just wish I could do it without feeling so tired afterward.”
Sampson said, “The cardiologist said that will pass. He said in two weeks he’ll be taking the gizmo out of her chest.”
Billie had been stricken with Lyme disease that went un-diagnosed long enough to precipitate a crisis in the emergency room when her heart rate dropped to twenty beats per minute. Luckily, a sharp ER doc had questioned Sampson about her exposure in the woods. It turned out that Billie had gone hiking in Pennsylvania a month earlier. Even before the blood test came back positive for Lyme, the doctor was pumping her full of the antibiotics that saved her life.
“Have you all eaten?” Nana Mama asked.
“We don’t want to impose,” Billie said. “Just stopped in to say hi, though I think John wants to talk with Alex.”
Sampson nodded.
“Nonsense, you’re family,” Nana Mama said. “Ali, can you set three more places? We need to fatten Billie up a little.”
“Can you make mine and Alex’s to go?” Sampson asked, and he looked at Bree. “I want to tell Alex what’s going on with my end of the Willingham case, and I might have something on the Maya Parker case that should be checked out sooner rather than later.”
I smiled at Bree and said, “See? We’re already on it.”
CHAPTER 14
AS SOON AS SAMPSON AND I walked out the front door, he told me he’d spent much of the day canvassing the neighborhood around Harrison Charter High and looking for security-camera footage.
“Any luck?”
“A little,” Sampson said, getting into his car. “And that’s the problem.”
I got in on the other side. As he pulled away, he explained, “Due to lightning, we have no operating cameras on the apartment building opposite the front of the school. I got solid footage from the security cameras on the bodega on the northeast corner across from the school, but — ”
“Did you get it from Ronald Peters?”
“Yes, you know him?”
“Enough to say hello,” I said. “I used to use his laundromat. Have you looked at it?”
“Yes, and I found nothing, but that’s not the point,” Sampson said impatiently, waving his hand at me. “The point is there were nine other cameras around the perimeter of the school, including our two CTs on the west side of the campus.”
“The school faces east. So our traffic cams are behind the football field?”
“Correct. At the cross streets north and south.”
“Okay.”
“Both our cameras were shot out an hour before the crime,” Sampson said. “The other cameras facing the campus were all small, personal-surveillance types with strong lenses, and those lenses were smeared with Vaseline before our cameras were shot out.”
“This is not some junkie, then.”
“And this was not a rip-and-run deal gone bad, Alex. This was cold-blooded murder.”
I thought of my son Ali and wondered at his instincts. “By one or more professionals,” I said. “How did they miss the bodega cameras?”
“I almost missed them,” he said, smiling. “They’re painted white, like the building, everything but the lenses.” He slowed, pulled over, and parked on a street of row houses in DC a mile from my home.
“What are we doing?” I asked.
“Maya Parker went to Bragg High, but she had friends all over Southeast through her community-service work. One of them lives here. Her name is Dee Nathaniel. She evidently told someone that there was a creep after Maya in the weeks before she disappeared.” He took us to a brick building badly in need of repointing and knocked on the door. A tall, strikingly attractive African-American woman in her early forties answered the door on a chain. She was wearing a navy business suit and no shoes.
We identified ourselves and said we were hoping to talk to Dee Nathaniel.
“I’m her mother, Gina,” the woman said, concerned. “What’s this about? She hasn’t done a thing wrong, not that girl. She’s a straight arrow.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “But we heard she was a friend of Maya Parker.”
Gina Nathaniel’s face fell. “She was. That hit my baby and me very hard. We helped search for her for days.”
“Would you mind if we spoke to her?” Sampson said. “It might help us.”
Mrs. Nathaniel hesitated, then said, “We don’t need an attorney, right?”
“We just want to talk,” Sampson said, holding up his hands. “If Dee’s a straight arrow, I can’t imagine she has anything to say that requires a lawyer.”
After a beat, she nodded. “But I’m listening in. Come in. You’ll have to excuse the minor mess, but I only just got home from work.”
After shutting the front door behind us, she called for Dee up a flight of stairs and got no answer. She asked us to wait in the kitchen and went up the stairs to get her.
We walked down the hall and into the kitchen, where the morning’s breakfast bowls
were still in the sink. Two of them. Mother and daughter.
Dee came in a few moments later, a younger version of her mother, wearing shorts and a T-shirt. She walked with an awkward gait, her arms loose and swingy; her mother followed behind her. Dee looked at us uncertainly. “Mama said you want to talk about Maya?”
“That’s right,” I said and introduced myself and Sampson. “How did you two know each other? Through school? Bragg High?”
Dee shook her head. “I go to Stone Ridge.”
Her mother said, “It’s a Catholic school in Potomac.”
“We know it,” Sampson said. “So where’s the connection?”
“I knew Maya before, in middle school,” Dee said. “We stayed friends even though she went to Bragg and Mom made me go to Stone Ridge.”
“C’mon, Dee, do we have to go there?” her mother said.
Her daughter sighed. “No.” She looked at us. “It’s not that bad except for the zero social life. You know, the things normal kids do?”
Gina Nathaniel rolled her eyes. “It’s not like I keep her in a cage, Detectives. I let you go to the Bragg spring formal with Maya and her friends, didn’t I?”
Dee shrugged and nodded glumly. “That was the last time I saw Maya alive.”
“When was that?”
“March twenty-seventh? It was a Friday.”
“They had a limo that I helped pay for,” Mrs. Nathaniel said.
Dee described the evening as fun except for the limo driver, who she said was creepy. There was a roll-up window between him and the kids. They asked him to keep it up, but he kept cracking it to look at the girls and make comments.
“Especially to Maya,” Dee said.
Sampson did not react, but he wagged his pinkie finger, a signal we used during interviews when someone tells us something we did not know before.
“Do you know the name of that limo service?” I asked.
“No,” Dee said. “But the driver’s name was Charley. We joked about him, called him Creepy Chuck.”
“You didn’t tell me that,” her mother said. “But I think I have a card from the limo service somewhere.”
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