Shadow Image (31 page)

“My
family name,” Ford said, the life suddenly back in his voice.

The woman looked as if she'd been slapped. She pointed the gun at the television, where the camera panned across an undulating sea of red, white, and blue Underhill campaign placards. With her other hand, she stabbed the volume button on the remote control on the bar. A rhythmic chant filled the room: “We want Ford! We want Ford!”

“You're going to be the state's next governor, and that's just the start,” she said. “But you never understood the idea of destiny. Never. But I do. Vincent does. Your name?
Your
name? You think you'd be anything but a shiftless trust-fund baby without me?”

Time stopped, the players frozen as if in tableau. At the center of it all stood a man stripped of all dignity, pathetic and exposed, betrayed by the people he trusted most, his father, his wife. Christensen stifled his instinct to reach out to him, to somehow ease the trauma of revelation. Finally, Ford Underhill turned toward the conference table. He searched once more for his father's eyes, but was denied even that honor. Vincent wouldn't look at him.

Almost casually, Ford lifted his suit jacket from the back of his chair and slid it on. “I'm going downstairs,” he said.

Leigh Underhill's shoulders relaxed. She lowered the gun a little, but pointed it again at Christensen and Haygood. A smile, warmer now. “Don't deny our destiny. Seize it, Ford. Let us take care of everything else.”

Ford Underhill straightened his tie and started across the room. He swept past Christensen and Haygood in a wave of subtle cologne and hair spray, unlocked the penthouse door, and stepped into the hall. Christensen turned in time to see a covey of aides and security people behind Underhill scramble into action near the elevator doors, about thirty feet away. The one named Samala raised a walkie-talkie. “Penthouse elevator coming down,” he said. “Cue the band. Repeat: He's coming down.”

Leigh Underhill waved the gun, backing Christensen and Haygood away from the door, then walked across the room and stood sideways in the door's frame. Samala's bronzed jaw dropped. “If they wonder where I am,” she said to her husband's back, “just tell them I'm home taking care of your mother. That'll play.”

The elevator doors yawned open. Ford Underhill stepped inside, turned around, and pressed a button on the control panel. His face was calm. “I'm going downstairs, Leigh, to decline the nomination.”

The first bullet sent Underhill staggering to the back of the elevator, a tiny red bloom on his crisp white shirt just above his belt. As his hands moved toward the pain, the second shot apparently crashed into his groin, crumpling him. Underhill grabbed the elevator handrail, trying to keep his balance, his still-calm eyes fixed on the woman with the gun.

“No!” Vincent Underhill screamed. He started toward the door, frantic, knocking two chairs over as he scrabbled to help his son. Ford Underhill was doubled over, clutching the handrail, but with his head up.

The third bullet found its mark before anyone else could react. Underhill's thick neck snapped back, his head crashing into the elevator's back-panel mirror in a delicate spray of blood. The legs went limp, but his eyes were still open as he dropped to the floor in a shapeless dark-wool pile. Leigh Underhill pivoted with the gun just in time to stop her father-in-law's advance.

“Do you people think this is a
game
?”

She stepped into the room, closed the door behind her, twisted the deadbolt. In the stunned silence, Christensen heard the ancient elevator door rumble shut.

“Turn it off,” Leigh Underhill ordered.

No one moved until Christensen stepped forward. Anything could happen now. The unimaginable already had. Seeing the result of her violence could only complicate the situation. The woman was unstable. She had a gun, locked in a room with the people who had made her face her past, who knew everything. This wasn't over.

He pushed the television's power button, obliterating the scene downstairs, leaving the room in eerie silence. Leigh Underhill was chewing her lower lip, the gun wavering in her right hand, focused on the city-lights view through the sliding doors. Vincent Underhill sat with his face in his hands, elbows on the conference table. The heave of his powerful shoulders gave away his tears.

“They'll be here soon,” Christensen said, nodding toward the locked door.

Leigh Underhill nodded. “I know.”

He held out his hand, but stayed where he was, nonthreatening, maybe fifteen feet away. “Please give me the gun.”

“I'm not done with it.”

She lowered it and moved across the carpet toward the glass doors. Carrying the weapon almost casually, the manila envelope clutched to her chest and her back to him and the others, she slid open the center door and stepped outside. Christensen followed, his feet moving on pure instinct.

“I wouldn't,” Haygood said.

He stopped at the glass door and looked back. “As long as she's got the gun—”

“Somebody'll be here directly. I wouldn't.”

The first knock was gentle, not the battering-ram approach Christensen expected, but Leigh Underhill flinched at the sound. “Police,” a voice said. “Open the door.” He heard shuffling feet in the hallway outside, imagined a skittish herd of men with their own guns drawn, looking for a killer, unaware of the details. On the deck, Leigh Underhill leaned stiffly against the wall rimming the patio, her gun hand resting like a bird on the waist-high railing, eyes unnervingly even and locked on Christensen.

“We're in here,” Haygood called toward the door.

“Okay. How many people?”

“Four.”

Christensen couldn't tell if Leigh Underhill could hear. If she did, she wasn't reacting.

“How many guns?” the cop said.

“One.”

“Where is it?”

“Outside. There's a porch.”

Christensen turned, mouthing a single word to Haygood: “Stall.”

She nodded.

“Please open the door,” the voice said again.

“We can't do that right now.”

“We need you to open the door.”

“We need
you
to stay put,” Haygood said.

Christensen stepped outside. Leigh Underhill hadn't moved, but the wind at this height had loosened a strand of hair from the French twist at the back of her head. It danced around her face in the evening breeze, the only thing moving as she stared him down. He did not hate easily; it wasn't his nature. It felt odd.

“My children,” he said. “Where are they?”

Her answer was a sad smile.

“Please.”

“You must know about three-year-olds,” she said, clutching the envelope tighter. He nodded, trying not to look at the gun. “They don't care how busy you are, who you're talking to on the phone, how important the work is, the need to get things done. The planets revolve around them. They're at the center of the universe and can't be budged.”

“Is that so bad?”

Another smile, but coy, almost seductive. “Sometimes.”

“Like the day it happened?”

She didn't flinch. “You're a parent. You've been there, too, I bet, seen the edge and thought you might go over. Too many things to think about. Too much going on. And a three-year-old who won't be denied.”

“We've all been there.”

She waved the gun toward the penthouse, toward Vincent Underhill. “The rich really aren't so different. We have the same problems as everyone else. We just get less sympathy,” she said. “Not that I'm looking for it. Believe me, there was damned little of that after it happened. No excuses. Nothing like that. It happened, is all. It happened.”

“Your son pushed you too far. You reacted.”

Leigh Underhill took a deep breath, seemed to savor the breeze. She looked up at the bright moon, ignoring the wail of emergency vehicles seventeen floors below and the dull roar of panic from the crowd spilling into Underhill Square. Somewhere in the distance, a faint but familiar thrum.

“My son had this thing, this purple dinosaur thing. When you pressed its belly, it made this awful sound, this, I don't know, screeching.
SCREEEE!
The kind of sound … it drives you nuts. Makes it impossible to think of anything else. Just utterly…” She looked up again. “I still hear it sometimes.”

“He was making the noise, what, while you were trying to do something, something important?” he prodded.

She shook her head. “That makes it sound so benign. This phone call I was on … very important. Critical. A coalition Phil and I had been trying to pull together for months, laying the groundwork for all this.”

“The governor's race?”

She nodded. “Ford's parents had gone missing. Lottie was nowhere around. It was just me and Chip with my files spread out over their dining-room table and the biggest soft-money guy in the state on the phone and the goddamned dinosaur screeching over and over even though I'd interrupted the call twice already to ask Chip to stop or take it in another room or just leave me alone for just a few goddamned minutes.”

Christensen imagined what happened next, understood the rage that can explode from nowhere at moments of maximum stress. Yes, he'd seen the edge, too, been terrified by the possibilities.

“I reacted, that's all,” she said. “I swear, that's all it was, a reaction. As soon as I hung up, I knocked the, the dinosaur thing out of his hands and grabbed his arm to get his attention, to tell him I needed a few minutes. That was all, I swear. But I shook him hard, and just like that he was … just—”

Leigh Underhill choked off the words, but with a sigh, not a sob. Christensen felt sick.

“One moment, one mistake, and my son was dying on the dining-room floor and nothing was ever the same again.”

Christensen wanted to say something, but what? “I—” he managed.

“Don't think me a monster,” she said.

“But everything else? The cover-up wasn't a mistake.”

She shook her head. “We made a choice, made it that very day. The horse story seemed right to Ford. He
was
part of that; it was his idea, typically brilliant. But the story was so full of holes, somebody had to button it up. Once it was out, though, we had to see it through.”

“We?”

A sharp laugh. “Vincent. Me. The only people who understood the stakes. We knew something like that could derail all the good that might have come from our return to public life.”

“All the damage control, Bostwick, Maura Pearson, the Chembergos, Floss. You're saying Ford never knew about it?”

Leigh Underhill's eyes narrowed. “This was his moment. He knew that, knew without it he'd end up forever as a footnote to his father. So let's just say he didn't ask a lot of questions when things started to unravel. He's used to letting other people handle the details. And we did, Vincent and me. We'd come too far for me to end up as some charity chairwoman pushing the disease-of-the-week to the Chanel-for-lunch crowd. That's not me, not where I was headed.”

“So you just let your husband take the blame and made sure nobody looked too close at the mess you made.”

“He took the blame for an
accident,”
she said, looking away. She said something else, but her words faded in the wind.

“Sorry?”

“ ‘Tolerant, true, tested and ready,' ” she said, quoting her husband's campaign slogan. “A man of destiny, yes, but tested? Depth? Texture? Character? No. Not like some one-legged Kennedy kid, or Al Gore with the dead sister. Vincent knows what'll play, and what could be more character-building than suffering through the accidental death of a child? We all agreed it was the best way. But Ford wasn't even at the house when it happened.”

“Vincent was?”

“Out in the stables with Floss. He found us twenty minutes later, me half out of my mind, Chip all blue and not breathing.”

“They were with the horse. Doti, too. So Floss knew—”

“—the horse wasn't out. But she was starting to slip then.”

“She knew something was wrong,” Christensen said.

The woman's eyes narrowed. She was still thinking, shading the story, protecting herself. “How much else she put together after that, I don't know. You never know with her. But she was still outside when Vincent found us. By then I was so frantic … not thinking at all. And Vincent's saying, ‘The future is what matters, Leigh. There's nothing we can do for Chip now.' ”

“Wait,” Christensen said, a reaction. “Before, you said your son was ‘dying.' ”

She looked away, ignored the comment, and he knew she was lying less to him than to herself. All his questions were answered except one, and he knew she wasn't going to help him find the kids. Now they stood outside a door into the darkest chamber of her soul, a door he doubted even she had opened. Should he force it and make her confront the truth, hoping to break her down and get the gun? Or should he back off, knowing the confrontation could destroy her? Did he care?

Christensen stepped forward; she stepped back. “Who called for help?”

Leigh Underhill pressed herself against the railing. She nodded through the glass doors, toward Vincent Underhill.

“I begged him.”

“You were alone in the house with a telephone. Why didn't you?”

“I did. There's a tape of the call.”

“How long after it happened?”

“It was too late.”

Christensen zeroed in, wondering how far he could push her. “Chip was still alive, wasn't he? You waited until you and Vincent got the story straight.”

“No.”

“Maybe he wasn't breathing, maybe he
was
beyond help, but your son was still alive on that dining-room floor. You knew it. How long did you wait?”

The woman lifted the gun, aimed it at his chest. She was trembling now, her hand unsteady, her eyes those of a trapped animal. The thrum was louder now, more distinct, the unmistakable chop of a helicopter. “I said it was too late!” she cried. “He wasn't breathing.”

“But he wasn't dead.”

“We needed time to think!”

“You needed time to come up with a story.”

“You're wrong!”

“If paramedics had saved him, he might have told somebody what happened. How long did you wait?”

His words hit their mark. She turned her back, her defenses ruined, dropping the manila envelope at her feet. The gun clanged on the metal railing as she gripped it with desperate force.

“What was done was done!” Screaming now over the noise of the police helicopter hovering several hundred feet above them, Leigh Underhill stretched her arms wide, as if embracing the city and the night, then turned back toward him. The downdraft was as powerful as falling water, a baptism, and she strained to make herself heard.

“There's no changing the past! But the future, the future we can change! It does matter!”

The helicopter's spotlight blinked on, washing her in its harsh, obscene light just as she raised the gun to her temple. She smiled a smile he knew would haunt him.

“Did
matter,” she shouted.

Christensen saw her tense, but turned his head. The pop was immediate, sharp, definite. He steeled himself for another unthinkable scene, but when he looked back, Leigh Underhill was gone.