Pursuit (42 page)

But whatever happened, whatever she did, it was probably going to be too late for Mark.

She could almost hear him saying it. The memory stabbed her like a knife to the heart.

Please, God, let there be a later.

The image of him dropping to the concrete replayed again in her mind, and even as she tried to block it out—to get anything done she needed a clear head, needed to be able to think—she found herself gasping for air. Her insides twisted into a knot. Her heart gave a great aching throb. The pain almost brought her to her knees.

Then she had a thought that galvanized her, that brought a blessed flood of adrenaline with it: They had to have known Mark was talking to someone, there at the statue. It probably wouldn’t take them long to find out about Dawn. To find Dawn. Who, voluntarily or not, would tell them what questions Mark had asked, and about the video on the First Lady’s phone.

Grieving, if grieving it had to be, would have to wait. Staggering through tent city, glad that there were now people around her even though they were paying her no attention, even though she knew they provided her with no protection at all, she realized that the thing she needed to do first was go get that phone.

She had an instant vision of the First Lady in the car, trying to make calls that wouldn’t go through. Of her throwing the thing in frustration. Of herself on her hands and knees trying to retrieve it from under the seat.

Then thrusting it deep in her pants pocket as the accident went down. Where she thought there was a good chance it still was.

When her mother had returned her purse and phone to her in the hospital, she would have mentioned a second phone if one had turned up. Therefore, it probably hadn’t. It was probably still in the pocket of her good black pants, which had been cut off her in the ambulance, wadded up with everything else she ’d been wearing, and given to her mother later.

To be stored in a bag in the laundry room until Jess told her what she wanted done with them. Her mother had told her that, too.

The first order of business was to retrieve that phone, see what if anything was on it, and then, if it provided anything like the proof she desperately needed, convey it personally and at warp speed to the
Post.
Or even if it didn’t. While calling a lawyer—George Kelly, Davenport ’s partner, sprang immediately to mind, but she hesitated even as she had the thought because of what had happened to Marty Solomon. But she needed an ally, lots of allies, as many as possible. Frowning, she thought of Davenport. Davenport had tried to kill her. Would Kelly be in the pocket of whoever was orchestrating this, too?

The bottom line was, now that Mark was gone, except for her immediate family, there was no longer anyone she felt certain she could trust. That left her with the old adage about there being safety in numbers.

She would pick up the phone and head straight for the
Post,
and ask them to summon every law-enforcement agency she or they had ever heard of after she told them her story.

As a plan, it was rough around the edges. And in the middle, and everywhere else. But it was the only plan she had. Even if she wanted to save only herself. Because just running wasn’t going to work. They would catch her, just like they had caught Mark tonight.

His words whispered through her mind. Suddenly they seemed terrifyingly prophetic. Oh, God, had he had some kind of premonition that he would die tonight?

Her heart bled.

Blocking him out of her thoughts wasn’t possible, although for the sake of her ability to do what she needed to do, she had to try. Gritting her teeth, she focused on putting one foot in front of the other and getting safely away. She was so stunned she was having trouble getting her brain to function beyond that.

People were leaving the park like cockroaches fleeing a fire, she saw as she pushed through a low hedge at the shadowy corner of East Executive Drive and K Street. Punks and hookers and thugs and druggies and the homeless and everybody else with something to fear from the suits who had invaded the park were hotfooting it along the sidewalks and disappearing down side streets, making tracks for somewhere else. Nobody wanted to be involved. If asked, nobody would have seen a thing.

Didn’t happen, wasn’t there, don’t know: It was the code of the streets.

Mark had been shot in front of at least a dozen witnesses, and it was almost a sure bet that not one of them would say a thing.

Jess pulled herself up sharply. She couldn’t think of Mark again. Every time she did, she could feel herself falling apart inside.

A cab—she needed a cab. Her mother lived on Laundry Street, down at the very end of 16th Street, the part of the city that spilled over into Maryland. How much would it cost to get there? Jess realized she still had her purse, which meant she had some money. How much? Her share of the kitty: twenty-four dollars. They had never gotten around to actually pooling it.

At the thought, Jess’s heart gave another of those horrible aching throbs. More tears leaked from her eyes. Wiping them away with determination, she sent one more heartfelt prayer winging skyward.

Then she saw a cab coming toward her, and hailed it.

The ride to her mother’s house was uneventful. Just to be on the safe side, she had the driver let her out on the next block over, and she cut through the alley. It was late now, well past one a.m. The chances that there would be anyone out and about in this slightly run-down residential neighborhood were slim. What worried her was that they—they, they, how she hated that terrifying, amorphous they—might have the place staked out, might be watching her even now.

Her steps slowed as she neared the two-story white house with its aging aluminum siding and black shingled roof. The family had moved here when Jess was a senior in high school, so her mother could be closer to her job. They’d all lived here until the last few years, when one by one they had started moving out. It was a working-class house, narrow and a little shabby, three bedrooms and a bath upstairs, living room, dining room, kitchen, and a half bath downstairs, and it had been crowded when they had all lived there together. Currently, depending on whether or not Sarah was still in residence with the kids, just her mother and Maddie lived there.

Jess stopped beside some garbage cans behind the house across the alley. Huddling against one of the rickety privacy fences that separated the tiny backyards from one another, she looked around—nothing out of the ordinary, nothing moving—and then back at her mother’s house. Not a light on in the place. No cars in the graveled parking area that, when they were home, usually held her mother’s Mazda and Maddie ’s Jeep.

Shivering, clenching her teeth to keep them from chattering, she hesitated, eyeing the house, almost ready to turn and walk away.

The very last thing she wanted to do was endanger her family. But it was the weekend, and Judy could often be found babysitting her grand-sons while Sarah and her husband went out and then, if they got home late, just spending the night at Sarah’s. (This was presuming Sarah’s marriage was back on.) And Maddie might well be with Grace, or at a girlfriend ’s, or, more likely, with her boyfriend.

There was a good chance, then, that the house was empty. And it would take her only five minutes, tops, to slip inside, go down to the laundry room in the basement, and recover that phone if it was there.

If there was any chance, any chance at all, that Mark was still alive, for her to find evidence that the First Lady’s death was murder and get it out to the public as fast as possible might be the only hope he had. After all, once the truth was out there, what was the point of killing anybody else? Of killing Mark?

She was probably kidding herself, and she knew it. There was no reason she could see that they would have kept Mark alive.

But she had to keep that slim hope. Otherwise, she was afraid she would just curl up in a little ball where she stood and cry and cry and cry.

Making up her mind, Jess took a deep breath and quickly crossed the alley. The familiar smell of home greeted her as she pulled her key from the lock and quietly closed and locked the back door. Something about just being inside the house was comforting. Her bedroom had been in the basement—as a teen, she’d made herself a whole lair down there—and knowing that her old bed and her old computer and everything else she’d left behind were still right where she had left them made her throat tighten with longing. But she couldn’t stay. She couldn’t even linger.

Holding her breath, listening hard as she crossed the well-worn linoleum floor, she heard nothing but the hum of appliances. The glowing numbers over the microwave announced the time: one twenty-three. She ’d been wrong, she discovered as she glanced into the hall. The light was on in the half bath at the bottom of the stairs. It had no windows, so she hadn’t been able to see the glow from outside. Now it showed her that there were no shoes kicked off in the hall—something that her whole family tended to do as soon as they entered the house—and so reinforced her belief that no one was home. And it was enough to light her way down the basement stairs.

Once away from the dim pool of light at the bottom of the stairs, the basement itself was dark as pitch. Fortunately, she knew her way like the back of her hand. The basement was separated by thin plasterboard walls into three rooms: the laundry room, which was in the far corner of the poured concrete rectangle; the utility-junk area, which the stairs led down into and which she was moving through at that moment; and her own former bedroom, which took up the entire area to the left of the stairs.

There were no windows, which had bothered Judy when Jess had insisted on moving down there. But Jess had liked the privacy and had compensated for the lack of daylight by plastering her walls with fluorescent posters.

The door to the laundry room opened with a creak. A faint mustiness and the scent of fabric softener hit her as soon as she stepped over the threshold. Once inside, with the door closed behind her, Jess turned on the light, blinking in the sudden brightness.

The washer and dryer were located against the far wall, a drying rack to the right. The ironing board and iron nestled in a corner. To the left were shelves that held everything from detergent to bug spray.

A brown paper grocery bag with the top folded over sat on one of the shelves. Jess was almost sure that it was the bag she was looking for as soon as she set eyes on it, and when she opened it she discovered that she was right. Thrusting her hand down into the jumble of clothes and finding her pants, she pulled them out. They had been slit up both legs, but that didn’t bother her. Checking the right pocket, she drew out a phone.

Her hand tightened around it. Then, frowning, she realized that it didn’t look like her memory of the phone the First Lady had had with her in the hotel bar. It had been too dark inside the Lincoln to see the phone Mrs. Cooper had tried to use without success just before the wreck, but Jess had assumed it had been the same one.

Now she saw that it wasn’t.

Opening it, she pressed the button to turn it on, praying it still had power. It did. The Sprint logo flickered to life with a melodious beep that made her flinch. Quickly, Jess went to the menu, pressed another button, looked at the screen, and felt her stomach tighten as she realized that what she was holding in her hand was the President of the United States’s personal cell phone.

His wife had obviously taken it. Why? Jess’s heart knocked against her rib cage as she went to videos. Clicking on it, she watched what filled the tiny screen with stunned disbelief.

David Cooper had filmed himself in full bondage regalia being serviced by a leather-clad woman who was not his wife.

There were six similar videos.

The quality was not good. The film was grainy. But what she was seeing was unmistakable, as was the identity of the person she was watching.

Jess realized that she held the proverbial smoking gun in her hand.

Clearly, Mrs. Cooper had discovered the videos. Just as clearly, someone else had found out she had them and had been determined to stop her from showing them to anybody. They must have been going crazy searching for the phone ever since the accident. Or maybe they assumed it had burned up in the wreckage.

Now that she thought about it, Jess realized that Mrs. Cooper might have been trying to e-mail those videos in the final few minutes before the crash. That would explain why nothing was going through. That would explain her frustration.

Phone in hand, Jess was just turning toward the door when it opened.

She jumped a foot in the air before she realized that it was Maddie who was standing in the doorway staring at her.

“Jess? What are you doing here?” Maddie ’s hair was in braids and she was wearing a blue tank top, ratty sweatpants, and fuzzy pink socks, her typical sleepwear. Her pregnancy was only just beginning to show.

“I stopped by to get something.” Jess brushed past her sister, already on the way to the stairs. Now that she knew somebody was home, she wanted to get out of there fast.

“Oh, my God, Mom’s been so worried about you! When she heard that your boss killed himself, she started calling everybody she could think of, trying to track you down.”

“I sent her an e-mail.”

Maddie snorted. “That didn’t even slow her down.”

“So tell her you saw me and I’m fine, okay? I’ll call her in a few days.” Jess sought to turn the subject. “How did you know I was down here?”

“I was asleep on the couch upstairs. I thought I heard somebody in the basement.” Maddie trailed her. “Are you leaving?”