“John!” Marian screamed. Her face twisted into a mask of hysterical grief, she ran frantically into the street toward Davenport’s body.
In the space of a heartbeat, Jess saw what was about to happen but was helpless to do anything about it.
A small tan car shot past the cop trying to stop traffic and hit Marian dead-on. She flew up in the air, slammed back down on the car’s roof, and then was thrown to the ground as the car streaked away.
16
M
arian!” Jess shrieked, pulling away from Ryan. Horror grabbed her heart like a fist and squeezed.
A couple of heads turned in her direction.
“Shut up,” Ryan growled, tightening his grip on her at the same time as he quickened his step. “Jesus, don’t draw attention to yourself.”
Jess didn’t fight him, but she couldn’t look away. Other people in the crowd were gasping, yelling, surging forward, crowding around the accident site. The cops abandoned what they were doing to run toward where Marian now lay crumpled in the street. One knelt beside her while the other held back traffic, which had now ground to a total halt because the street was completely, hideously blocked. Jess had eyes for nothing but Marian. The woman lay unmoving, her left leg bent at an unnatural angle. A pool of dark liquid was forming beneath her head.
Blood, black as oil as the streetlights hit it.
“I got the license plate number!” a man shouted, elbowing his way through the crowd toward the cops.
“Let the ambulance through!” someone else cried.
“Keep your head down.” Ryan pulled her up on the curb with him just as the ambulance rolled past. Behind it came two more police cars, strobe lights flashing, sirens screaming a warning into the night as cars nudged onto the sidewalk and wedged into a single lane to let them pass.
“Oh my God.” Jess could hardly talk. Her teeth chattered. Her breathing was suddenly way too fast and shallow. “I’ve got to go to her.”
“Like hell.” There was a brutal edge to Ryan’s voice that she had never heard in it before. With his arm clamped around her, he shouldered deep into the crowd, clearly intent on putting as much distance between them and the accident as he could. Suddenly, Jess could see nothing but a forest of people. “Anyway, there’s nothing you can do.”
His arm was like iron around her now, as though he feared she might struggle to escape. She didn’t. Too many terrible things had happened too quickly, and all she knew for sure was that she was afraid. They were on the edges of the crowd now, and he was moving faster, propelling her with him as he plunged past others rushing toward the scene, leaving it behind as quickly as he could. More police cars slowly forced their way through the stopped traffic. Cars moved aside to let them pass.
It started to rain, a slow sprinkle that hit her exposed skin like cold tears.
“The car just drove away.” Scarcely able to believe what she had just witnessed, Jess looked back, tried to see what was going on with Marian but could not. “It just hit her and drove away.”
“That’s what it did, all right.”
Jess’s heart clutched. Her head was up now, and he wasn’t saying anything about it, so she guessed it was safe enough. The rain was making her blink in an effort to keep it out of her eyes. “Do you think she’s—dead?”
“Hard to say. Believe me, everything that can be done for her is being done.”
They rounded a corner into near darkness. The wind caught her hair, whipping it back, driving a cold drizzle against her skin. The smell of booze and garbage mixed with the wet-earth scent of the rain. Jess realized that they had left the crowd behind. The thought scared her. Shivering, she looked carefully all around. Tall buildings rose up on either side; they were in an alley now. A starless and rainy alley lined with trash cans and Dumpsters and mounds of things she preferred not to think about. Rows of dark windows looked down on them like sight-less eyes.
Ducking her head against the rain, Jess instinctively leaned closer into Ryan, taking comfort from the solid warmth of his body. Watching what had happened to Marian had stripped the last of her illusions from her. This was big, it was real, and it was not going away. She felt exposed, like danger was closing in from all sides.
Like there was nowhere left that was safe.
Could someone be following us even now?
She looked fearfully back. A white plastic grocery bag tumbling toward them like a pale ghost in the wind made her jump. A sound—a rattle—rain on the trash-can lids, maybe—made her catch her breath. At the mouth of the alley, the flashing blue lights from the rescue vehicles pulsed, giving weird life to everything they touched.
Then the alley opened up, and they turned right into a parking lot filled with vehicles. There were lights, two tall halogen lamps at either end that emitted a foggy yellow glow, and row upon row of cars.
It would be easy for someone to hide.
Jess’s heartbeat quickened, but before she could look around more than once he stopped beside a small, dark-colored RAV4, said, “Hang on a minute,” and pressed the button to unlock the doors. Then he opened the passenger door and bundled her inside. A moment or so later he slid in behind the wheel.
As soon as he was inside, he locked the doors. The click as he did so was enough to make her jump. Even as she realized what the sound was, Jess wondered if he feared being followed as much as she did.
“Was that an accident?” Jess burst out, still looking warily all around as he started the car. She was wet, cold, and shaking like a leaf, and she folded her arms over her chest for warmth. The parking lot was filled with shapes and shadows, and she was on pins and needles in case someone should suddenly spring at them out of the darkness. “That wasn’t an accident, was it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
He backed the car out in a fast swoop, then shifted into drive. A moment later they pulled out onto M Street. Jess felt a little safer because they were now moving targets.
“Put your seat belt on.”
He was wearing his, she saw. Hands trembling, Jess did as she was told.
“Where are we going?”
He glanced at her. “My house. It’s just outside of Dale City. You can stay there until we get this thing figured out.”
Jess wasn’t in any state of mind to argue. Without a better suggestion, she didn’t even bother to reply.
As a result of what was happening on Connecticut Avenue, traffic was already clogging up throughout downtown. He headed away from the congestion, driving fast but not too fast, making good time through the interconnected grid of streets, glancing just a little too often in his rearview mirror for her to think they were now safe. Rain fell steadily, and the constant rhythm of the windshield wipers provided a numbing counterpoint to the swish of the tires on wet pavement. She was shivering, which, she suspected, had very little to do with the fact that she was cold and wet and had a whole lot to do with the fact that she had just witnessed two violent deaths and nearly suffered one herself. He must have noticed because he cranked the heat. A moment later, the smell of damp clothes circulated throughout the car.
“Why would Mr. Davenport try to kill me? Why would he kill himself ?” The questions that had been tumbling through her mind spilled over as he braked for a red light. “If there was anybody I thought I could trust, it was him.”
“Babe, outside of your family, I’d say there’s nobody you ought to be trusting right about now.” He gave her a quick, grim smile. “Except me, of course.”
Jess looked at him and frowned. Some of the shock was receding, and her brain was slowly regaining its ability to function.
Okay, time to focus here.
Before she fell hook, line, and sinker for the whole “trust me” thing, he had some explaining to do.
Her eyes narrowed at him. “About that. What were you doing in Mr. Davenport’s office again?”
“Let’s just say I was monitoring the situation.”
“Situation?”
“Yeah.”
“You know, I don’t mean to be ungrateful or anything, but I think I’m going to need a little bit more of an explanation than that.”
The light turned green, he accelerated and turned left, and they joined a long line of cars heading up onto the Beltway.
“Just out of curiosity, what happens if you don’t like what you hear?”
Good question. Jess was already asking herself that. She was in his car traveling at around seventy miles an hour on an expressway filled with other cars going equally fast. They were alone. He was a highly trained federal agent; she was a highly trained lawyer. He was big, she was small. Plus, he had a gun. If it came down to a fight for her life, she didn’t like her chances.
She made a face. “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it, I guess.”
He laughed, a small, amused sound that went a long way toward making her feel safer, and shot a look at her.
“I was following you, okay? To make sure you were safe. Which obviously you weren’t.”
Jess frowned. “How did you even know where I was? I deliberately left the hospital when you weren’t around. No one outside Mr. Davenport and Marian was even supposed to know where I was going.”
“Piece of cake.”
Now that Jess thought about it—Davenport’s secretary, Davenport’s helicopter, probably easy enough to find out where the helicopter had landed—she guessed it was, and felt stupid for feeling as safe as she had in the condo. Ryan—and no telling who else—had known where she was all along. What was the word she wanted to apply to herself?
Oh, yeah: thick.
“So how did you get into the building?”
“I’m good at things like that.”
“Up to the twentieth floor?”
“Those damned stairs. I watched you roll into Davenport’s office, and I followed you.”
“You heard everything I said to him.” Jess had only just realized that. Quickly she reviewed the conversation in her mind and stiffened with alarm.
“Pretty much, yeah.”
He knew—and he hadn’t killed her. Or let Davenport kill her, which would have been way too easy. That had to weigh heavily on the
trust him
side.
“I don’t think Mrs. Cooper’s death was an accident.” She threw it out there like a challenge.
“So I heard you tell Davenport. You want to tell me why?”
Jess wrapped her arms tighter around herself. Despite the blasting heat, she was bone cold. It was all she could do to keep her teeth from chattering.
“She was running away from something. She was nervous, afraid, even.” If Jess hesitated, it was because she suddenly remembered once again that he was a Secret Service agent. And a lot of the evidence that she’d pieced together in her mind pointed to Secret Service involvement in Mrs. Cooper’s death and in the subsequent attack on Jess in the hospital, which Ryan had almost certainly lied about. And in Davenport’s suicide? She didn’t see how the Secret Service could have orchestrated that, but she was starting to feel that anything was possible. And what about Marian? An accident, or something far more sinister? At this point, she just didn’t know, but she was prepared to assume the worst. “She tried to get away from the agent—Prescott—who was chasing her, but he caught up with us at the corner and managed to jump into the car.”
She paused, watching him for a reaction. There was none. His face was impassive. His eyes stayed on the road. A semi rolled past on the right, rattling the SUV. He eased into the lane behind it.
“Go on,” he said.
She took a deep breath. “That put him in the front passenger seat, with me behind him and Mrs. Cooper behind the driver. Mrs. Cooper was screaming at him, telling him to get out, to not call anybody, that what she did was none of his business. He told her that if she wanted to go somewhere, she was going to have to take him, too, or he would call backup to come and collect her and take her back to the White House whether she wanted to go or not. He said he was just staying with her to keep her safe, and they kind of agreed that as long as he didn’t call anybody or interfere with her, he could do that. And so she calmed down. Then we got off 95 onto this two-lane road, and she was making phone calls until she lost the signal. So she got mad and threw the phone, which ended under the front passenger seat down by my feet. She wanted me to get it, and I had to unbuckle my seat belt and slide down into the footwell and stick my hand way up under the seat to try to find it. So I was doing that when headlights from behind us flashed through the car. I don’t know what happened next—I was down on the floor—but Mrs. Cooper screamed, ‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ and then she yelled something at Prescott—something like, ‘You called them, you bastard,’ something like that. He was swearing that he didn’t while she was screaming at the driver to go faster, and the driver did. He booked it, started speeding up, and then we were just flying. I managed to get back in my seat and was grabbing for my seat belt when something slammed into the back of the car. It felt like something hit us; it was this tremendous jolt, but I could still see the other car’s headlights, and they were close but not close enough, you know? So I don’t know what it could have been. But like I said, we were going really fast, and there was this jolt, and the back end of the car slewed around like we were on ice, and I think the driver hit the brakes—and the car just shot off the road. I remember . . . I remember . . .”
Jess broke off, shuddering, as a slide show of terrible images flashed one after the other through her mind. Trying to make sense of them, trying to sort them out, she stared silently out through the windshield at the now pouring rain. They were on the bridge, she could see the lights reflected in the black waters of the Potomac beneath them, and the sound of the tires changed subtly to reflect the fact that the surface they gripped had changed. It only occurred to her that they were probably going to be following the exact same route the car Davenport had sent had taken that night when she saw the big green sign for I-95 flash past overhead. She was still absorbing the implications of that when the RAV4 trailed the semi down the ramp onto 95. The sudden sense of déjà vu was so strong she felt light-headed.