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High Crimes

Page 16

by Libby Fischer Hellmann


  “His district is into fracking in a big way. The state of Pennsylvania supplies almost twenty percent of the dry natural gas in the country.”

  Georgia was puzzled. She didn’t understand why a politician in a fracking state would want data about an anti-president Facebook group. Luckily, though, she didn’t have to. That was an issue for Paul Kelly to figure out. She was just the investigator. She asked her last question.

  “Do the words ‘beef jerky’ mean anything to you?”

  Remson looked confused. “Wha—what?”

  “Beef jerky.”

  “Not a thing. That shit is terrible. Full of nitrates. It’s really bad for you.”

  Talk about “really bad for you.” Georgia didn’t know much about fracking, except that it caused earthquakes and poisoned water with the chemicals used to pump out the gas. But she didn’t say anything and slid back her chair.

  “Wait. Where are you going? What’s going to happen next?”

  “Just live your life normally.” She got up. “Pay attention to your wife and kids.”

  “But you can’t just ruin my life like this and then walk out!”

  She knew she was going to say it. Knew she shouldn’t. It wasn’t polite. Or professional. But she couldn’t help it. “Watch me.” She turned and walked out of the coffee shop without looking back.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Georgia called Kelly with what she’d learned from Remson. Over the phone, she heard him call out to Joan.

  “Hey, Joanie, text me a link to the bio of Jackson Hyde, Republican from Pennsylvania.” The text alert dinged less than thirty seconds later.

  “She’s efficient,” Georgia said.

  “Don’t I know it.” Then he was quiet, apparently skimming the bio. “Well, it is interesting. But I don’t know what it means.”

  “I don’t either.”

  “Lemme think about it. So what was Remson like?”

  “The guy folded like a paper airplane.”

  “Must have been your superior interrogating skills.” He cackled. “But data mining isn’t something to ignore. I’m sure the FBI would be interested in what the company is up to.”

  “Maybe they already know.”

  “Could be. But I’m thinking a voluntary info dump from us might loosen their tongues about Jarvis. Maybe even ‘beef jerky.’” He cleared his throat. “You know the Bureau has more than they’re letting on.”

  Georgia squirmed and stared out the rental car’s windshield. “Yeah. But give me another day. I’m about to pay Carl Baldwin’s assistant a visit. You never know. Maybe we can hand the Bureau a nicely wrapped package tied up with a bow.”

  There was a pause. Then Kelly said, “Your job isn’t to solve the crime, you know. Just to investigate.”

  “I know.”

  “Sure you do. Okay. Call me tonight.”

  “I will. Oh. Tell Erica the hotel is lovely. But traffic is horrible in this city. It takes forever to get anywhere.”

  “Yeah, everyone’s looking for their fifteen minutes, but in DC the traffic makes them stretch it to an hour.”

  • • •

  Georgia followed her GPS to the Kalorama neighborhood. She was surprised at the affluence on some streets, the third world look of others. Obama lived nearby, she knew. She wondered if she might bump into him. She was admiring the buds on the trees and the tentative sprouts that would be daffodils and tulips in a few days, when she checked her side-view mirror. She’d picked up a tail. She tried to pin down the car and model, but she couldn’t. All she knew was that it was American-made, a sedan, and dark gray, maybe blue.

  She turned the corner and drove around the neighborhood. The tail stayed with her. She should exit the area, ditch the tail, and come back later. But that would mean driving through unbearable DC traffic. She gritted her teeth and drove to Connecticut Avenue, heading back in the direction she’d come. Damn the tail. It was still there. She checked her rearview. Two people in front, the passenger smaller than the driver. A woman?

  Were they from DataMaster? It was possible. Video cameras surveilled the entire parking lot. A decent corporate security force would have homed in on her license plate, discovered it was a rental, perhaps even that a woman named Georgia Davis had rented it. Then again, that was a lot of work to do just because a PI talked to an employee at lunch. She kept driving. She had no idea where she was, but a sign said she’d reached Woodley Road. She turned left, and eventually emerged into a lovely residential area with what looked like a mansion on one side. As she drove past, she saw it was a school. With a French name.

  Only in Washington.

  She checked for the tail again. Still there. Damn it. She reached Cleveland Avenue. It was the first avenue she’d seen that wasn’t named for a state. But it was a city. Or was it a president? History had never been one of her strengths.

  She drove down the avenue, which was on an incline. At the bottom of the hill it merged into Calvert Street, a corner of which was occupied by a school that actually looked like a school. It was time to ditch the tail. Luckily, providence intervened. Just ahead on the right was a hotel, the Omni Shoreham. She accelerated, turned sharply into the hotel driveway, and pulled up at the entrance. She climbed out as if she was in a hurry, tossed the valet her key, and told him she’d be staying for a couple of days.

  She raced inside, took out her cell, and arranged for a new rental car, told them where this one was, and waited forty-five minutes. When she was ready to take a cab to the new rental place, the tail was gone.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  A rosy late afternoon sun slanted through the windshield when Georgia pulled up for the second time to Carl Baldwin’s Kalorama home. She’d checked several times, but this time no one was following her. To be safe, though, she parked a block away and walked around the corner. She passed through a wrought-iron fence with one of those fancy curlicue gates. A tightly inlaid marble path led to a huge red door with an ornate brass knocker. The door was flanked by white columns.

  Despite the elegance, all the shades were drawn, and the house looked deserted. She rang the bell. It reverberated with a hollow, tinny sound. No one came to the door. She rang again. Nothing.

  She made her way around the side of the house, removing her jacket as she did. No wonder the cherry blossoms bloomed in March. It was positively balmy here. She reached a side door, not as elaborate as the front, but solid, with thick rectangular windowpane inserts on the upper half. They wouldn’t be as easy to shatter as an intruder might think. Even if they were, they were undoubtedly tied to an alarm.

  She knocked. Nothing. She’d started to work her way to the back of the property when a pale face appeared in the glass inserts. The inserts broke up his face into pieces, and he might have looked clownish, except for his expression, which was troubled. Georgia smiled and waved with what she hoped was a friendly greeting.

  He cautiously opened the door. “Who are you and what do you want?”

  She introduced herself. Erica Baldwin had already told him she was on the way, because her name registered. His worry lines smoothed out, and he opened the door wider. “Thank God you’re here.”

  This had to be the first time anyone involved with the case was glad to see her. “I hope I can help,” she said. “You’re Vic Summerfield, right?”

  “The one and only.” He led her through a spotless kitchen equipped with every appliance, gadget, and amenity known to humankind. A manufacturer’s sticker on the oven door told her no one had yet cooked in it. “Did Carl Baldwin just move in?”

  Summerfield spun around. “Hell no. Carl’s lived here three years.”

  “Oh.”

  He followed her gaze to the oven. “He’s not much of a cook.”

  “I see.” What a waste. But she wasn’t here to discuss the absence of culinary skills. “So you want to fill me in on what happened?”

  “Well, you already know I’m Carl’s assistant. I help him in his lobbying work.”

 
The way he emphasized “lobbying” made Georgia wonder if there was other work Vic didn’t help him with. They emerged from the kitchen into a huge hall with two offices, one on each side. To the left were columns that separated the offices from an opulent living room, dining room, and foyer.

  “Nice digs,” Georgia said.

  Vic didn’t reply. Georgia studied him. He had sandy hair, close-cropped military style, unless he shaved his head to hide a receding hairline. He looked too young for that, though; she pegged him in his thirties. Unremarkable brown eyes, same with his nose. But he was well put together. Strong, broad shoulders, slim waist. “You a swimmer?”

  “How did you know?”

  That’s my job, she thought. But aloud, she said, “Just a guess.”

  “Do you swim?” he asked. She heard eagerness in his voice.

  She shook her head. “I work out. And I box.”

  He shot her an approving look. “Let’s go into my office.”

  “Which is Carl’s?”

  He pointed across the hall.

  “May I take a peek?”

  “Of course.”

  She crossed the hall and looked in. A spacious room, decorated in Euro-Scandinavian style. An oriental rug on the floor; silver pen set on the desk, inbox and outbox. Beyond that the room was spartan. Three bookshelves were empty except for a photo. Two people on a sailboat, one a young woman in a bikini hoisting a sail, a man smiling benevolently behind her. It was the same photo Dena Baldwin had in her office at the foundation.

  “Okay,” Georgia said after they were settled in Vic’s office, a paler imitation of Baldwin’s. “What’s been going on the past seventy-two hours?”

  “Well,” he began, “like I said, I came to work two days ago like normal. Sometimes Carl’s at his desk. Sometimes he’s still upstairs.”

  “What time do you usually start?”

  “Generally about eight. Unless I swim. Then it’s nine.”

  “Go on.”

  “Occasionally he’s still asleep. If he had a late night.”

  “How often does that happen?”

  “He often meets with clients at night.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s the way DC works. If you want to keep your business private, you’re careful.” He hesitated. “No big, splashy lunches or dinners. Usually you meet in small, dark bars. Hotel bars are good.”

  “Go on.”

  “When he didn’t come down by ten, I called his cell, but it went to voice mail. Then I went upstairs to make sure he was”—he gulped—“okay. He wasn’t there.”

  Fear splashed over him. But something was slightly off about it. It seemed as if he’d slipped into character.

  She shook it off. “What did you do?”

  “I freaked out.”

  “You didn’t think he might be shacking up someplace? Or at his gym?”

  “Carl has never worked out a day in his life. And if he was seeing a woman, they would stay here. By noon, when there was no call or text, I called Erica.”

  “Why her? They’ve been divorced for years.”

  He thought about it. “You know, I’m not exactly sure. We were still finalizing a few financial things and, well, because of Dena’s death so recently, I guess I felt she should know.”

  “What financial things?”

  “Mostly how the estate was going to be handled now that Dena was gone.”

  “Got it.”

  Underneath his desk Vic crossed his legs, and his foot juddered.

  Georgia asked, “Is there a place he goes to get away from it all? Somewhere on the Chesapeake Bay? Annapolis or the Tidewater area? He likes to sail, right?”

  “He doesn’t sail anymore. At least not that I know of.”

  “What does he do to relax?”

  “He doesn’t. He’s here all the time.”

  Georgia scratched a phantom itch on her cheek. “How long have you worked for him?”

  “A year and a half, and in all that time, he never took more than a day off. And then only when he was hammered.”

  “Does he have a drinking problem?”

  Vic was quiet for a moment. “Not compared to some in this city.”

  “Maybe his disappearance has something to do with reallocating the estate.” She mused. “Maybe he disappeared so Erica couldn’t change it.”

  “That doesn’t—well, it doesn’t feel right. To be honest . . . actually . . .” He hesitated again. “Work wasn’t going well for us.”

  “Oh?”

  “We lost on some important legislation. It was getting so bad he was afraid he might have to close up shop.”

  Chapter Forty-Four

  “Tell me.” Georgia crossed and recrossed her legs.

  Vic explained what had happened with the Russians, the Uzbekistan situation, and the fracking bill. “Some of it was bad timing . . . or corrupt politics . . . or competing against dark money.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Succeeding in DC is a game, a race, actually. You need to pick winners—both the issues and the folks behind them—before anyone else. Then you get on the pay-to-play merry-go-round. See, the only important thing for a congressman is to get reelected. They need money to do that. Carl can help get them that money. In return for considering his interests, of course.”

  “Where does this money he gets them come from?”

  “Different places. Depending, again, on the issues.”

  “Are you talking bribes?”

  “We call them ‘quid pro quos.’”

  “An Illinois governor went to jail because of that.”

  “And the president almost pardoned him.”

  “It’s against the law.”

  “Sure it is.” He splayed his hands. “So what? It’s pretty much mandatory here.”

  Georgia thought about it. “And I thought Chicago was a swamp.”

  “Welcome to Washington,” Vic said. “I’ll tell you what my father told me when I told him I wanted to move here. He used to watch Huntley-Brinkley religiously.”

  “The news program.”

  “Right. He said David Brinkley nailed it.”

  “Nailed what?”

  “In the old days politicians left DC on Memorial Day and didn’t come back until after Labor Day. Summers here are almost unbearable. Temperature ninety-five degrees; humidity the same. So . . . a swamp.”

  “And?”

  “Then they air-conditioned the Capitol buildings. Congress could work year-round. So they started all sorts of overreaching government programs and spent like sailors on a spree. That’s how Big Government and deficits were born, Brinkley said. Sixty years later, we’re still at it.”

  “You sound like you don’t like how it turned out.”

  He shook his head. “You’re right. I’m leaving. Going back to South Dakota to practice law with my dad.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” She smiled. “But that doesn’t help figure out where your boss is now.”

  “I don’t know. Like I said, he was acting weird. Almost paranoid.”

  “I think this city does that to people.”

  “True, but this was more. After the fracking legislation fell apart, he kind of lost it.”

  “How?”

  “For starters, he thought he was being followed.”

  Georgia arched her eyebrows, thinking of the car that had tailed her. “By whom?”

  “He didn’t know.”

  Georgia leaned forward. “Hold on. Your boss got money to bribe some congressmen to pass fracking legislation. But it doesn’t work. Wouldn’t the people who gave him the money in the first place be ticked off?”

  “Of course they would.”

  “Would Baldwin give them their money back?”

  “It was gone by the time the legislation got to a vote.”

  “Well then?”

  “They gambled, they lost. That’s the way it works here.”

  “There wouldn’t be any repercussions?”

  “Oh, th
ey could smear Baldwin. You know, attack his reputation. In fact, that’s probably what’s happening. Why we’re on the ropes.”

  “But they wouldn’t actually hurt him . . .”

  Vic rubbed his temples. “You wouldn’t think so.” He looked up. “Except, you know, right before he bolted, he said something weird.”

  Georgia cocked her head.

  “He said he thought the fracking people might have been involved in his daughter’s murder.”

  Georgia went rigid. “How? Why?”

  “I don’t think he knew. At one point, he said it might have been a warning. But then he thought they were punishing him.”

  “That’s crazy. If they were upset about the vote, they’d take it out on him, not his family. He was the one they were pissed at. Right?”

  “Well, you see, the thing is, Carl has close connections to the current administration.”

  “So?”

  “They wouldn’t like it if something happened to him. So his enemies might have targeted his daughter instead.” Vic looked around as if those connections might appear out of thin air to bolster his theory. “Look. I don’t know. Carl could have been making stuff up. Like I said, he was acting crazy.” He hesitated. “But Dena was pretty vocal about fracking. She got her group to take a stand against it.”

  Georgia was surprised he knew anything about Dena’s activities. “How do you know that?”

  Vic reddened. He pushed back his chair and stood up. “Carl made me join the group. To keep tabs on her. It was part of my job.”

  “I thought they were estranged.”

  “They were.” He stood up. “Listen. You want something to drink?”

  Georgia was still processing what Vic had said. She replied absently. “You have Diet Coke?”

  “That’s what Carl drinks. There’s a case in the pantry. I’ll be back.” He headed toward the kitchen.

  Georgia tried to sum up. At least two people in DC were monitoring Dena’s Facebook page for different reasons. Her father made promises he couldn’t keep to people with clout. Lots of money changed hands. So who or what was Beef Jerky? Was Jimmy right that Beef Jerky was a person? Did he exist? Given Baldwin’s troubles in DC, did it matter? Maybe someone from DC had set up Jarvis. But then, where did the yurt fit in? And why did the Bureau close the case so fast? Had someone applied pressure on them? The current administration was known to do that. Maybe the Bureau just didn’t want the scrutiny. They had their killer, no matter if his body was blown to bits. With blowback from both the Left and the Right, it was a no-win situation for the FBI. And for Georgia?

 

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