Treadmill (13 page)

“And the others?”

“You don’t recognize the man beside Kent?”

“I’m not sure. Someone from Bethesda, I presume?”

“The Doctor. Gang’s all here,” Laura said. “And the people in the back seat?”

“Don’t tell me….”

“Riggs Haley and his lovely wife Betty. The two secret service ladies are in the first SUV. Then there’s one more person.”

“And the SUV behind that one?”

“Some other guys from the Vice President’s secret service detail.”

Cooper was baffled.

Laura pressed the “play” button and the video resumed. The Limo rolled into the garage and the door came down. Then someone in the back seat looked her way, and at that point the tape stopped.

“I got the hell out of there right as the agents jumped out of the car and began to fan out. I got lucky, and made it back to Foxhall Road where I had stashed my car.”

“Is this it?” Cooper asked. “Did you get anything else?”

“I did a little reconnaissance but I could tell that the house was too well protected, and if I went down that road too often, they’d get suspicious. I assume I haven’t been identified. Otherwise I’d be missing too.”

“Do you have any idea about what’s going on?”

“Nothing for certain. But considering what happened to my husband….” She sucked in a deep breath. “I still have work to do. But I know one thing, whatever is going on in that house, my husband knew something about it. Something that got him killed, murdered. The official explanation of his death is pure baloney. My husband was murdered.”

Cooper felt his stomach tighten and left his sandwich unfinished, taking a few deep gulps of his Diet Coke.

“I shot this two days after Parrish disappeared from the club. That was about two weeks ago.”

“And you think….”

“Parrish was on that stretcher.”

“Impossible. Parrish is in California.”

She reacted like a deer caught in the headlights. “How do you know that?”

He had no desire to draw Susan into it. “A friend of his,” he lied. “Spoke to him yesterday. Parrish is in California.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“Is this friend trustworthy?”

“Yes,” he said, feeling a tiny trill of hesitancy.
Is she?

Suddenly, Laura’s cell rang. She answered it and walked to the other side of the studio, talking softly.

He felt himself being totally trapped in a web of conspiracy, tangled in its intricacies, searching for any clear path of escape. Parrish was now back in his life. At least Susan was in his life too, a bright and shining sunbeam—the bitter with the sweet. It amazed him how much she was filling the vacuum of his life. He could still smell her scent, taste her mouth. Despite the distractions of Laura and her dire warnings of danger, Susan was restoring something that had been missing in his life for a long time. Was it simple pleasure? Or real happiness? Or both?

Finally, Laura hung up. She was agitated, and the color from her lightly rouge cheeks had drained. “That was a Sergeant Gail Prentiss.” She tightened her lips and blinked her eyes as if in pain. “I’m meeting her in half an hour.”

“Something about a woman with a yellow Honda,” she added.

“Anni Corazon.”

“Yes,” Laura mused.

“Wheels within wheels,” Cooper said. “What did she say?”

“She didn’t say much. Not on the phone.” She bit her lip. “It could be a set-up. Maybe I’ve been found out.” She looked at him pleadingly. “Will you come with me, Jack?”

He hesitated. The prospect of danger was all too clear. “I don’t know. I mean, she might want to talk to you alone,” Cooper said, telegraphing his reluctance, and certain that if he consented to go, he would be drawn deeper and deeper into this crazy and now risky venture.

“Please,” she implored. “I insisted we meet at a public place. A bar…the Shamrock Bar, and she agreed.”

“You’re one hard sell,” he said.

“And you’re one tough buyer.”

The interior of the Shamrock, all polished wood and decorated with prints of Irish pastoral scenes, smelled of pretzels and beer. Most of the regulars who filled the booths and lined the bar were Caucasian, many of obvious Irish descent. Bursts of laughter crashed through the din of a Jew’s harp on the jukebox. Cooper and Laura quickly identified the only black person sitting in a booth near the back.

“Call me black Irish,” said the woman. She was tall, with close-cropped hair. Her yellow-flecked, dark brown eyes sharply peered at them. She appeared authoritative, and formidable. Cooper could discern no soft edges to her.

“This is Jack Cooper,” Laura said. He felt Prentiss’ quick evaluation.

“Join the circus,” Prentiss said with a sardonic chuckle. Cooper figured her for a woman used to making her own rules. She pointed to the seats across the table. The gesture, more an order than a request.

“Sergeant Gail Prentiss. Name your poison. Against all the rules of police protocol,” Prentiss said, chuckling again. Her gaze inspected Laura as if roaming searchlights in a prison yard. She sipped on a vodka tonic. Despite their size, her hands were graceful, her touch on the glass delicate. A waitress came over, Cooper and Laura ordered beers. Prentiss ordered another Vodka tonic, and the waitress nodded.

“In my business, two plus two rarely equals four,” Prentiss said. She looked at them fiercely, as if challenging them. There was a sense that she was preparing them for something of dramatic importance.

“Did you know the Filipino woman?” Prentiss asked Laura, barreling right in. Laura darted a look towards Cooper. Prentiss caught the exchange, her eyes narrowing, a thin smile forming on her lips.

The waitress brought their drinks. Before answering Prentiss, Laura lifted her beer and drank. She was about to speak, then looked again at Cooper.

“What does she look like?” Laura asked. Cooper could see she had opted to be evasive. He remembered Laura’s homily about bureaucrats. At the same time, he could tell that Prentiss saw right through Laura’s pose.

“About forty. Small. Slender. Brunette,” Prentiss said. “She moved here from Manila a couple of months ago, was hired by the White House. Probably had a husband at one point in time, but she’s living with a guy named Melnechuck. We spoke to him. He says that he met her at a local gym called the Bethesda Health Club.” It was an accurate description of Anni.

Laura pretended to mull it over. Cooper wondered why she was not acknowledging it.

“Doesn’t ring a bell?” Prentiss asked.

“Not so far,” Laura warily replied. Cooper watched her in profile.

“She was in top shape, like she worked out a lot,” Prentiss said.

Cooper caught her use of the past tense.

“Still nothing?” Prentiss asked, obviously skeptical. “Did your husband know her?”

Laura shrugged. “I couldn’t possibly know everyone he knew.”

“A car, yellow Honda, was fished out of the river today,” Prentiss said, her eyes riveted on Laura. “Anni was inside. Raped. Strangled.”

Laura froze. It was impossible to hide her stunned reaction. Cooper, too, reacted with frozen astonishment. He couldn’t believe it. He had seen Anni’s yellow Honda in front of Susan’s building only the night before. He swallowed hard and clasped his hands to keep them from shaking. Anni had spent months only feet from him, charging away on the treadmill, doing her sets, maintaining her ripcord body. All for nothing. It struck Cooper that he had never been so close to a murder victim.

“She was a nurse,” Prentiss said. “Mean anything?”

Cooper glanced over at Laura who seemed to be struggling over how to proceed.

Tell her
, he urged silently. Laura stayed silent.

Laura nervously picked at a fingernail, a detail Prentiss noted.

“It’s not like in the movies,” she said. She tapped her temple with a long dark finger. “That’s what homicide is supposed to be. Not here in Washington. If you’re going to do somebody in, dump the body in D.C. It’s a great place to get away with murder. We don’t have the manpower, nor time.” An expression of loathing registered on her face. She put her glass up to her lips and finished off her drink. Then she slurped up a piece of ice and began to suck on it.

“Not a good record. Lots of open cases,” she continued, “For a woman of color such as Anni, being raped and strangled in D.C. is not out of the ordinary.”

She added, with a touch of cynicism, “Bodies are piling up. We give it our best shot. If the murder isn’t out of the ordinary, we hit the computers, look for patterns. This woman was in her forties, older than most rape victims. I’ve been having trouble making any connections to other cases, especially because Anni lived and worked outside of my jurisdiction. So the chances of closing this case are, on a scale of one to ten…maybe a three.” She stopped abruptly, then fixed her gaze again on Laura. “This is definitely homicide, Mrs. Chase. It’s the connection that escapes me.”

“Connection?” Laura asked. “With what?”

“The death of your husband.”

Laura turned ashen. It had come to her with the force of a physical blow. Cooper heard Laura emit a strange rasping sound. At the same time, Cooper was pondering his own connection with Anni’s murder.

Prentiss signaled for a waitress, then pointed to the empty mugs in front of them. They both shook their heads in tandem.

“I’m not much of a drinker,” Cooper felt compelled to say.

“Yeah. Well, I wasn’t one either.” Prentiss said, looking at the surroundings. “This place gets jammed up around now. Years ago, the Irish dominated the police.”

Laura nodded vaguely, her thoughts elsewhere. Prentiss was shrewdly paying out the facts in her own good time and observing them closely after each revelation.

“You know what we found preserved in Anni’s car?” Prentiss asked. “Your electric bill, Mrs. Chase, soggy but readable. For your home, the month before your husband…died.” She pulled a photocopy of the bill out of her purse and put it on the table.

“Oh my God!” Laura exclaimed. “I put it in the pocket of his jacket just before he left for work that day. Dale normally took care of the bills at the office.”

“It had slipped into a space under the back seat of the Honda,” Prentiss said. “Of course, the forensics team found no prints on account of the water.”

Cooper’s mind was already buzzing along another track. He didn’t know whether or not to tell Prentiss about the Honda being in the Georgia Mews parking lot. He decided to hold off and take all his cues from Laura.

“What do you make of that?” Prentiss pressed.

“I don’t know,” Laura whispered.

“For starters, he had to be in the car. Wouldn’t you say?”

Laura was silent. Prentiss was scrutinizing her with her trained detective’s eye. Cooper knew that Laura was continuing to debate within herself.
To reveal, or not to reveal
. He sensed that she would come out on the side of admittance. Prentiss left her to her thoughts, saying nothing. Then suddenly, Laura nodded. “Yes, I would say so. He had to have been in that car.”

“Was she your husband’s mistress?” Prentiss shot back with neither compunction nor compassion.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Laura, managing a sardonic smile.

“Well then, Mrs. Chase. How do you figure it?”

“I can only speculate,” Laura responded, with stubborn determination to resist confirming the dead woman’s identity.

“I have no doubt that it was the same woman. And that she was his mistress,” Prentiss said.

“My husband was murdered,” Laura said. “It was no DUI.”

“I checked. He was blasted drunk.”

“He rarely drank.”

The fascination of what was unfolding was compelling. Cooper could see the logic of the homicide forming in his own mind: intoxicated, murdered, moved from the yellow Honda to his own car, then set downhill on a collision course.

“And if he was murdered?” Prentiss asked.

“Then it would be more than an ordinary murder,” Laura said.

“I’m listening,” Prentiss said.

“It’s bigger than you can imagine.”

“I’ve heard that before.” Prentiss took a sip of her drink.

Laura proceeded to launch into describing the events surrounding her husband’s death, connecting the dots to the Bethesda Health Club, Blake, Anni, the Doctor, and about Cooper’s phone tap, but left out the specifics about Parrish, suggested nothing that Parrish could be part of it. As she spoke, Prentiss listened with deep concentration.

Cooper saw that Laura was also not willing to completely expose herself to Prentiss, or perhaps the reason for Laura’s holding back was her fear that any mention of Parrish’s disappearance could lead to another cover-up, preventing the truth from coming out.

Prentiss silently turned over this information on the spit of her mind. “This still leaves two questions unanswered: what was your husband doing in the yellow Honda? And how did Anni land up in the White House all the way from Manila?”

“The Vice President. It has to be Riggs. My husband never mentioned it, but a rumor of ill health can kill an upwardly mobile career.”

“And the Vice President is quite upwardly mobile,” Prentiss mused aloud. “You’ve got to be pretty sick to require an on-site nurse.” She sipped her drink.

“Riggs must be desperate. Ambition is his aphrodisiac,” Laura said.

“Whatever he’s suffering from is serious enough to be a state secret,” Cooper suggested.

“So Anni knew about it. Kent Henderson, Riggs’ political director, knew about it. And Dale,” Laura added.

And Blake
, Cooper thought.

“And two of the three are gone.”

“Leaving Kent or the Vice President as the only people who can offer an explanation,” Laura said.

“We know that he told the news that he was on a diet.”

“But you don’t need an on-site nurse for a diet. She was at the Vice President’s personal home two weeks ago.”

Prentiss thought for a long moment. “How can I be sure the woman is Anni? I need proof.”

“I’ll come identify the body.”

“We’ve released the body to the next of kin. Her family has taken her back to the Philippines for burial.”

“That fast,” Cooper commented.

“The results of the autopsy were in.”

“You sound defensive, Prentiss.”

“I am.”

“You’re between a rock and a hard place,” Laura said, pressing on aggressively. “Too political, am I right? Don’t want to get too close to something like this?”

“You got that right,” Prentiss muttered. “Too many minefields.” Prentiss finished her drink. “The Vice President is an important man with a spotless reputation. It would be hard to prove anything but.”

“Image is everything,” Laura said.

“You saying Vice President Haley raped and strangled this lady?”

“I’m saying that there’s enough smoke blowing here to find the source of the flame.” Laura said.

“Are you implying that we covered up something about your husband’s death?”

“No. I’m not.”

“There was no evidence.”

“There was no investigation,” Laura snapped.

“And if they were related?” Prentiss responded with surprising gentleness, “…where does that leave us?”

“It leaves us in charge of doing something about it,” Laura said bitterly.

“Okay. Fine.” She lowered her voice. “I have pictures taken at the scene. They’re not pretty. You come back tomorrow, identify Anni, place her at the Vice President’s house, and we go from there.”

“Noon?” Laura said.

“Noon.”

Cooper knew what she was thinking. That was after their workout. She was inviting him to go with her.