Conspiracy (22 page)

Suddenly the water stopped. Terasawa watched the bathroom door open; then Boyd, naked, walked along the corridor in the direction of the stairs. Yanking the .38 caliber revolver from his jacket pocket, Terasawa gripped the gun hard. Terasawa pushed himself against the banister, holding his breath, hoping Boyd wouldn't see him. Terasawa didn't want to kill him when Boyd had so much freedom to move.

As he passed the top of the staircase, Boyd was muttering something that Terasawa couldn't hear. The senator never looked down the stairs. Not then. Not when he returned to his bathroom a few minutes later with a jar in his hand. He shut the door and began running the water again.

Terasawa put the gun back in his jacket pocket. He'd give Boyd five minutes to get comfortable in the tub, he decided, glancing at his watch. Softly he climbed the rest of the stairs with the gun in his hand. He turned into a recessed doorway where he couldn't be seen.

When the time was up, Terasawa extracted a pair of surgical gloves from his jacket pocket and put them on. He removed the revolver and wiped the handle clean with the cloth from his jacket. Then he screwed on the silencer.

Turning the doorknob carefully, he slipped into the room and closed the door behind him. As he crossed the room, the view through the open bathroom door became wider and wider. Senator Boyd was sitting in a huge Jacuzzi with the jets running and his eyes closed.
Perfect,
Terasawa thought. The motor in the tub made so much noise that no one outside would hear a thing. Noiselessly he glided into the bathroom.

Sensing the presence of an intruder, Boyd opened his eyes with a start. Seeing a strange Japanese man, he recoiled in fear. "Hey... what—"

Instinctively Boyd reached for the metal loop along the side of the tub in order to pull himself to his feet, but he never had time. Ramming the gun against Boyd's temple, Terasawa pulled the trigger. Skull fragments and tissue were blasted against the pale blue tile wall. It was precisely the single-shot kill Terasawa had wanted. Boyd was right-handed, so the assassin rubbed the gun against that hand, which was hanging over the edge of the tub, then let it fall to the floor.

Not disturbing anything, Terasawa retraced his steps downstairs. In the den with the gloves still on, he stood in front of the laptop and composed a message.

 

Please forgive me, Sally, but I can't live with the humiliation of what happened. Love, Charles.

 

Rather than printing it, Terasawa simply left the message on the screen. Then he departed as silently as he came.

 

 

 

Chapter 18

 

Don't count us out
, Taylor vowed as she fixed a glass of Finlandia on the rocks and took it out on the balcony of her Watergate apartment. She was feeling feisty.
There's plenty of time to expose the perpetrators of this big lie. When we do, the senator will gain sympathy from the public that will enhance his lead.

She watched boats moving up and down the Potomac as the sun began setting over Washington. The drink tasted good. Maybe she'd have one more before she fixed some pasta for dinner and called the senator to see how his statement was coming. Inside the apartment she checked her watch. Two minutes until the first network news. She turned on the television to hear how the story was being presented to the American people.

The first image she saw was Senator Boyd's house on Chesapeake Bay. She heard the words
St. Michaels
and
Maryland
and then "A Secret Service agent discovered the senator's body when he came into the house about an hour ago."

"What?" she cried out. "What the hell?"

As she turned up the volume, she listened in stunned disbelief. Once she heard the words
apparent suicide,
she couldn't listen any longer. She hit the power button. She took her glass and the bottle of Finlandia out on the balcony. Something was terribly wrong here. Charles would never commit suicide.

In a blank daze, she continued drinking until she finished the bottle of vodka. Finally, trembling from the cold, she decided to go inside. That was easier said than done. Unaccustomed to consuming so much alcohol, she couldn't control her movements. She staggered around the balcony. Objects jumped in and out of focus. She knocked the bottle onto the concrete floor, where it shattered into hundreds of pieces. Too drunk to make her way around the broken glass, she cut her feet in half a dozen places.

Coming inside, she stumbled into the kitchen, then bandaged her feet crudely with paper towels ripped from the roll and collapsed on the living room sofa. She was close to dropping off into a drunken sleep, but she still couldn't forget about what she had heard. Maybe it was all a mistake.

She grabbed the remote control, turning on the television again. She saw a sad reporter, a microphone in his hand. "Maryland officials have confirmed that the cause of Senator Charles Boyd's death was suicide. There is considerable speculation as to whether the senator was in fact guilty of some crime, which is the subject of the grand jury investigation. That may have caused him to take his own life."

"No!" Taylor screamed. "No! He didn't do it!"

She began pounding her fists against the sides of her head. Harder and harder she punched until she thought her head would explode. Somewhere she heard a bell, a doorbell ringing. A man's voice shouted, "Open up, Taylor. Open up right now."

It's Charles
, she thought.
He's alive. He's come back to Washington.

She hurried to the door, staining the Oriental carpet with bloody footprints on the way. After fumbling with the lock, she managed to open the door. "Oh, Charles," she yelled, and threw herself into his arms.

But it wasn't Charles. It was Coop.

Again the fists. This time she began pounding them against Coop's chest, wanting to punish him because he wasn't Charles.

She began to cry. For the longest time she cried and she cried. Suddenly she pulled away from him. On instinct she ran to the bathroom, where she threw up in the toilet, over and over again in an anguished retching, until there was nothing left but a dry gasp. Then Cooper took her back to the bed, and she passed out.

At one-thirty in the morning she woke up. Except for shadows on one wall from the moon outside, the room was dark. Cooper turned on a night-table lamp. He had been sitting in a chair watching her.

"He's dead, isn't he?" she asked.

Cooper nodded. "Wes Young found him."

She was silent.

"You cared for him a great deal, didn't you?"

She nodded her head. "He was a good man."

"It's over, Taylor," he said flatly.

"What happened?"

"He took a gun with him, went into the bathtub, filled it up with water, and fired a single shot into his head."

"That can't be right," she shouted, bolting into a sitting position. "He didn't kill himself. He never would have done that."

"He left a note for Sally on the computer screen."

The oddness of this fact stopped her for a moment. "Say that again."

"His wife, Sally. He left her a note on the computer screen asking her to forgive him. Saying 'Love, Charles.' She released it to the media."

Taylor waved her hands, shaking her head. "That proves it. He didn't kill himself. He couldn't stand her. He'd never leave her a note like that."

Cooper gave her a narrow look. "What are you telling me?"

"They killed him. The phony trumped-up charges didn't do the job.
They
realized from his statement that he would never quit. So
they
killed him."

"Who's
they
?" a skeptical Cooper asked.

"The same people who put together this bogus case."

He looked at her sympathetically. "We'd better both get some sleep. I'll go in the other room."

"You don't believe me, do you?"

"Truthfully, no."

"They killed him, Coop, " she mumbled into the pillow, crying herself back to sleep.

* * *

In the cold light of morning, nothing made sense.

She found Cooper in the kitchen, sitting at the small butcher-block table with his back to her, eating a bowl of cereal and reading the morning
Washington Post.
When he heard her approach, he stood up and turned around.

"Have you thought about what I said?" she asked him.

"To tell you the truth, you weren't making an awful lot of sense. There's nothing mysterious here. Senator Boyd violated the law. He lied to you, and he took his own life. End of story."

Taylor looked exasperated. "He's innocent. There's some type of conspiracy at work here. Don't you see that?"

She could tell he didn't believe her.

"And just who is this group of conspirators?" he asked.

"I don't know."

"And what's their reason for wanting Boyd out of the race and Webster back in the White House?"

"I don't know that either."

"Oh, great. Then what makes you so sure this conspiracy exists?"

"I know the senator. There's no other explanation."

Cooper frowned.

"They can't get away with this," Taylor continued emphatically. "Dammit, Coop, nobody has the right to destroy a man's life, to manipulate our election process, and then do God only knows what in the next four years."

"You don't even sound rational." Taking her hand in both of his, Cooper said, "To hell with Charles Boyd. I'm concerned about you. I think that you should worry about yourself for a change."

"He was winning," she insisted. "The senator would have made an excellent president. He was a leader in the Senate. Everybody respected him. He could get things done. He had so many good ideas for the country."

Cooper tossed the newspaper across the table. "The top medical people in the state of Maryland and at the FBI dropped everything yesterday and went out to his house in St. Michaels. They all agree that Boyd shot himself. They haven't found any other fingerprints in the house. No evidence at all to support your theory. They're convinced it's a suicide."

"C'mon, Coop. They're just saying that to alleviate public anxiety and because that bastard McDermott made it clear he wants the whole thing wrapped up in a hurry."

"You've got no basis for thinking that."

"I know what Charles told me Saturday at St. Michaels about the Mill Valley transaction. He's innocent."

He looked at her with empathy. "I wish I could agree with you. Really, I do. But I don't see a single shred of evidence to support your belief that he was killed as part of a conspiracy." Cooper was losing the little patience he possessed. "Give me hard information to go on. Not your supposition. Anything."

She thought about his request. In a flash something came to her. "The senator hated the idea of guns in a house. He led the legislative effort on the issue. He repeatedly told me he'd never have one. He criticized me for keeping one in my place in Aspen for protection in the woods. If he killed himself like you're saying, that gun had to be in his house, because the Secret Service limo took him directly to St. Michaels from the courthouse, but it couldn't be. He'd never have had a gun in the house." She rolled her hands into tight fists for emphasis. "Now I know I'm right. And you do, too, because you know what his position was on the issue of gun control."

Cooper shook his head in disbelief. "People often say one thing and do another. Politicians are the worst offenders. I don't have to tell you that."

* * *

Frustrated that Cooper didn't believe her, Taylor went for a run in Rock Creek Park. As she tore along the jogging path at a faster speed than normal, she kept replaying in her mind all of the facts Cooper had told her. By the time she got back to her Watergate apartment, soaked with perspiration and breathing hard, she was even more convinced that the senator had been murdered. She wasn't as sure, though, how she would go about proving it.

At home, she had nothing to do. With Charles dead, the campaign was over. She decided to go down to the office at the law firm and catch up on all of her work. It would be better to keep busy, not dwell on the awful death. A memorial service was scheduled for the senator tomorrow. Then maybe she'd be able to start coming to terms with it.

A few minutes after she arrived at her office, Harrison wandered in. "I came to see how you were doing," he said in a kind voice.

"Thanks, Philip. This isn't my best day of all time."

"Well, for what it's worth, I'm very sorry. I know how you feel."

No one ever knows how you feel,
she thought. "Thanks for all your help in connection with the investigation and through the long campaign. Particularly your advice in dealing with Cady." She gave a weary sigh. "The surgery was performed professionally, but we lost the patient."

He shrugged. "You can't possibly blame yourself for anything that happened. Boyd never told you the truth about the Napa winery sale. He was guilty on the election-law violation. There's no way you could have pulled a rabbit out of that hat. And as for his suicide—"

Eyes wide open, she stared at him. "It wasn't suicide!"

Harrison pulled back in surprise. "What are you telling me?"