He downed the rest of the Chivas in his glass.
“Doesn’t matter.” Then he slammed the glass back down on the desk hard enough so that Jess jumped. “None of it matters anymore. God, I hate that ‘dust to dust, ashes to ashes’ crap. Who the hell”—his voice cracked—“who the hell wants to be dirt?”
He’s losing it.
The thought was terrifying.
“I think whoever did it also tried to kill me in the hospital.” To hell with what Ryan had said about the tests on the IV equipment coming up negative. Either he was lying or the tests were wrong, because she knew she wasn’t. Desperation made Jess lean forward as she tried to hammer her point home; she gripped the wheelchair arms tightly. Her eyes fought to hold his, hoping to keep his attention focused on what she was telling him rather than whatever inner demons he was currently battling. “I think they’re trying to cover up what they did to Mrs. Cooper. They tried to kill me because they’re afraid I’ll remember something.”
“I told you to keep quiet, didn’t I?” He poured more whisky into his glass. Jess watched with dismay.
“I have kept quiet. All I’ve said to anybody is that I don’t remember. But that isn’t entirely true. I do remember some—”
He broke in on her before she could finish. “She wanted me. She said, ‘I need you, John.’ And this time she did. She really did. And I didn’t go. I was tired of dealing with her, to tell you the truth. So I sent you.”
He chugged from the glass. It was such an inelegant gesture, complete with gurgling sounds as he sucked the booze down, that Jess’s eyes widened as she watched. In all the time she had known Davenport, she had never seen him behave like anything other than a very cultured gentleman. He was either far more drunk than she had supposed or in far worse emotional straits.
She continued doggedly, “Somebody was chasing us. Another car. I remember that, and—”
“I tried to protect you. I tried. I did. You can’t say I didn’t.” He drank more whisky, drank it so fast that when he set the glass down again his mustache was wet and a little golden rivulet trickled from one corner of his mouth. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “I tried to help Annette, too. I always listened to her. I always advised her to the best of my ability. One time, one time only, she calls me and I don’t go running to her as fast as I can. And now she’s dead. Dead. Annette. My old friend Annette.”
His mouth shook. Jess realized that tears were seeping from his eyes. She sat bolt upright in the wheelchair now, watching him with dismay. This meeting in which she had put so much stock, in which she had planned to tell everything she knew and thus place the whole nightmare in his hands, letting this far more experienced, connected, respected lawyer deal with the mess he had gotten her into in the first place, was turning into a debacle.
Desperate, she tried one more time to get through to him.
“Mr. Davenport, please, I know you’re grieving, but this can’t wait. I came to you tonight because I don’t know who else to tell these things to. I can’t go to the Secret Service—I think the man who attacked me in the hospital might have been a Secret Service agent. And Mrs. Cooper was running from her own Secret Service detail when she died. And . . . and . . . I just don’t think it’s safe. Which means I can’t go to the FBI or the local police or any other kind of law-enforcement agency, either, because they all know each other. They all stick up for each other. They all talk. Somebody will tell somebody, and then whoever is behind this will find out that I’ve remembered something and they’ll kill me. And I can’t just keep quiet because it’s
murder,
the murder of the First Lady of the United States and two other people, and anyway, I don’t think just keeping quiet is going to help, because they’re afraid I might remember something that will incriminate them and they’re going to kill me anyway just on the off chance. You know those ‘dark forces’ you warned me about? I think it’s somebody in the government. I don’t see—”
“No, you don’t,” Davenport interrupted fiercely, his voice thick, his eyes wet. Tears trickled down his cheeks. “You don’t see anything. You haven’t had time to get married or have kids or build any kind of career that matters, any kind of legacy. You don’t know anything about power, about actions and consequences. You don’t know anything about how things work, or the kinds of things people sometimes have to do.”
He sobbed, then clamped his lips tightly together as if ashamed that the sound had escaped through them.
Jess stared at him, appalled.
“You’re right, I don’t.” She worked to keep her voice very, very steady. If he wouldn’t—or couldn’t—help her, what would she do? Her stomach twisted at the thought. If she was right about what she suspected—and she was almost sure she was—the perpetrators would hunt her down and kill her without compunction. They were big and bad and relentless, and in the end she would have nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. “But I know I’m in danger, and I’m pretty sure so do you. You obviously think something’s wrong about Mrs. Cooper’s death, too. So who do we contact? Who do we tell?
We’ve got to tell someone that she was murdered.
”
Panic curled through her insides as she searched his face. If there was anything there except sodden grief, she couldn’t see it.
“I always thought I was a brave man.” His eyes dropped away from hers as he poured the last of the Chivas into his glass. “Now I know I’m not. I’m a coward. A
damned
coward.”
He picked up the glass and drank thirstily, noisily. When he set the glass down, his mustache was wet, and he swiped his arm across his mouth again.
Jess watched despairingly.
“Maybe you could go directly to the President,” she suggested. “Tell him.”
He made a sound that might have been a scornful laugh. It was only then, as she tried to figure out what that laugh meant, that it occurred to her that if, indeed, the Secret Service was involved, then the President himself might very well be, too.
Because who else did the Secret Service take orders from?
“There has to be somebody we can tell,” she said. “Somebody who can launch an investigation and . . .”
Her voice trailed off as he swallowed the last of his whisky.
The press, she thought, as she frantically sought some other way to get what she knew and remembered and suspected out there and thus do her moral duty and also, she hoped, remove any motive for anyone to kill her at the same time. She would go to the media and tell them everything. It was obvious Davenport wasn’t going to be able to help her; even if he wanted to—maybe when he was sober and in a different frame of mind—it might be too late.
By that time, the dark forces might already have found her and shut her up permanently, with no possibility of mistake.
Maybe they’d just been waiting for her to get out of the hospital before they tried again.
Jess’s heartbeat quickened at the thought.
Maybe the Secret Service wasn’t involved in this after all. Maybe they had been all that was keeping her safe. And she’d just run away from them. . . .
A slithering sound caught her attention. Frowning as she tried to figure out what it was, she realized after a couple of seconds that Davenport had just opened one of his top desk drawers.
“This is the only thing I can do.” Davenport stood up, swaying a little on his feet. “This is the only thing left for me. I have to save what I can for my kids.”
Jess had only just registered that he was holding a gun in his hand when he whispered, “God forgive me.”
Jess’s eyes widened. Her stomach contracted. Her heart leaped.
“Mr. Davenport . . .”
Hand shaking visibly, he pointed the gun at her and fired.
15
T
hree things happened simultaneously.
There was a tremendous
bang,
and the bullet passed so close to her left cheek that she could feel it brush past.
She screamed, throwing herself from the chair.
And something hit her in the back with the force of a freight train. Still screaming, she landed facedown on the antique Oriental rug that covered the center of the floor as an enormous weight smashed violently to earth on top of her, stopping her forward momentum dead, crushing her, forcing the air from her lungs.
It hurt so much that she went dizzy with it.
“Davenport! Drop it!”
The shout sounded almost in her ear. She understood in that split second that what lay atop her was a man, a man who had dived on her hopefully with the intent of saving her life, and then another shot exploded, the sound muffled this time by the bulk of the man whose body covered hers. It was followed almost instantaneously by the sound of shattering glass, then a shower of almost musical notes as if it were suddenly raining tinkling wind chimes.
Cringing, wheezing as she fought to draw air into her flattened lungs, tucking her chin into her chest and wrapping her arms around her head, Jess tried to become one with the carpet, overwhelmingly grateful for the body atop hers. Terror turned her blood to ice as every nerve ending she possessed went wild in anticipation of the impact of a bullet—the next bullet—that would hit her protector’s body and even, possibly, tear through it into her own shrinking flesh.
“Jesus God,” the man on top of her said. His tone made it a prayer.
There was no other sound. No more bullets. No more wind chimes. No more voices. Nothing.
Just the pounding of her own heart in her ears.
“You okay?” the man asked as he rolled off her.
Jess barely even had to look at him to know who he was: Ryan. She realized that some part of her had recognized him as soon as he spoke. Much as she hated to admit it even to herself, she would now know his deep, drawling voice anywhere. For just a moment he lay on his side on the carpet facing her, looking her over carefully, his face hard, his normally light eyes dark with some emotion she couldn’t put a name to.
He was holding a gun, a big black pistol, in his right hand. It was, she was relieved beyond words to see, not pointed at her.
She realized that in that case she was profoundly thankful to see him.
Their gazes met. She sucked in air.
“Fine,” she wheezed.
A corner of his mouth twisted up in the smallest of involuntary smiles. “Good to know.”
Then, in a horrifying instant of clarity, she realized if he was facing her that meant his back was turned to the source of the danger.
Her eyes widened. “Mr. Davenport . . .”
Fear sharpened her voice. Her gaze flew past Ryan toward the desk, toward the place where Davenport had so unbelievably stood up and pointed a gun at her, shot at her, terrified of what she might see, what might be happening at that very second, only to find that she couldn’t see Davenport anywhere. Had Ryan fired that second shot, then, and had Davenport been hit by it and taken down?
“He’s gone.”
Ryan rolled to his feet with surprising grace for such a big man. He seemed slightly out of breath, which, as a matter of fact, she was herself. He was wearing a black suit and tie with a white shirt, as if he, too, was still dressed for Annette Cooper’s funeral, and he looked much better than any man who had just thrown himself into the line of fire to save another’s life had any right to. He kept the pistol at his side and pointed down.
“Gone?” Jess frowned in incomprehension.
“He shot out the window. Then he jumped.” Ryan spoke over his shoulder as he walked across the room and looked down.
Horror hit Jess like a blow to the chest. “Oh my God.”
Pushing herself up into a sitting position, she stared at the far wall where Ryan stood looking down, where, she realized with a combination of disbelief and shock, only a few shards of glass continued to cling to the metal frame. Otherwise, the window was gone. The office was open to the night. The roar she heard wasn’t in her ears at all but was some combination of wind, traffic, and shouts and screams from the people below. Fresh air blew in, sharp and clean-smelling, lifting the edges of the heavy curtains, sending some of the papers on Davenport’s desk swirling out and skyward on an upward spiral like dueling kites.
“Can you get up?” His voice surprisingly gentle, Ryan came back from the edge and held a hand out to her. “We need to get out of here. Right now. Security will be on the way. And the police. And there might be—hell, who knows. Somebody else.”
“Mr. Davenport tried to kill me.”
“Yeah, I caught that.”
Jess was still stunned, but fear made her move. She put her hand in his and let him pull her to her feet. As she straightened, a sharp pain in her back caused her to wince, and she realized she was shaking all over. His eyes slid over her again to check for a new injury. Except for a laddered stocking and a scraped knee, she was okay.
He dropped her hand. “Where’s that damned chair?”
It was on its side a few feet away.
“He killed himself.” Okay, that was obvious, which made it a stupid thing to say. But she was feeling stupid or, rather, stupefied, as she stared out at the star-studded night where all of D.C. continued to glow while Davenport had just died in its midst. She had to be in the early stages of shock. Her heart palpitated. She was finding it hard to breathe. She took a halting step forward, then another and another, drawn by an almost irresistible urge to look down into that black void. Impossible to believe that Davenport had just stepped out the window, fallen twenty stories, and was now lying broken and bloodied on the sidewalk below.
“Trust me, you don’t want to do that.” Ryan caught her by the arm before she reached the edge. “Sit down.”
Having fetched the chair, Ryan practically pushed Jess into it and thrust her purse into her lap. She shivered and swallowed hard.
“Don’t freak out on me. We don’t have that kind of time.”
“I’m not freaking out.” Her voice was surprisingly steady. “What are you doing here, anyway?”