Authors: Gregg Hurwitz
"That worked out well, didn't it?" Caruthers matched Hannity's chuckle, and then his tone took on a note of subdued outrage. "When President Bilton talks about family values, what does that mean? Are we interested in phrases or reality? For instance, there are those of us who are pro-life and those of us who are pro-choice. But none of us are proabortion. And there have been more abortions during President Bilton's three and a half years in the White House than under any administration since Reagan's. Look at what actually impacts
those figures. The economy. This president has consistently chosen image and hypocrisy over substance and effectiveness. There's a clear choice at hand. We can beat our chests and lecture sanctimoniously about values, or we can talk about the root causes and find solutions that actually make a difference."
"I like chest-beating."
"I've heard that about you."
"Where to today?"
"Ohio."
"Why?"
"Because it's a swing state. Where have you been?"
Hannity laughed. "Another straight answer from the man with the transparent campaign. I was worried you were gonna kowtow to midwesterners, praise the Buckeyes and Cincinnati's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, pull a Hillary with a chocolate
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chip cookie recipe."
"The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is in Cleveland. And June does the cooking in our house."
"What's her favorite thing to make?"
"Reservations."
It was an old joke, sure, but the delivery made me smile anyway. The senator always hit the marks, giving great press without sounding coached. Probably because he wasn't. He famously didn't rehearse. You got the sense that he
didn't watch polls, though of course he did, and that he didn't choose sound bites the night before with a bunch of world-weary spitballers slurping bad coffee and chewing Rolaids. What voters would be betting on--or against--was his personality, which he was unafraid to present in relatively unfiltered fashion.
I veered off onto an unpayed apron, watched the dirt billow up from the tires and drift away like a dusty ghost, like Homer. I looked at the view, marveling at how I was embroiled in something that could affect matters discussed on radio shows and TV broadcasts and front pages around the world. I thought about how I'd sat beside Caruthers in his conference room, so close I could have rested a hand on his shoulder. How he was turned away so the midday light from the window had caught his silhouette. I pictured his shaving nick, that tiny mole on his forearm. He was just a man, like Frank. But, like Frank, he seemed as if he were more.
In the distance a twinkle dipped through the haze, heading for the Burbank Airport. I watched until it merged with the pinprick lights of the Valley.
The crappy cell showed a surprising three bars. I called Induma on the phone I'd left there. When she picked up, I said, "I'm okay."
She was silent for a long time, and I wondered about the expression on her face. Her voice was slightly uneven when she spoke. "Come over?"
The customary fears stirred in me. "Bilton knows I know now. It's in the open. This is a whole new level of exposure. I shouldn't be near you."
"That's not just your decision to make."
"This is life and death, Induma."
"Everything is life and death."
"Not like this. Look at what happened to Homer."
"Exactly; " she said. "Look at what happened to Homer."
And she hung up.
Holding the phone in my lap, I tried to spot the plane down below, but I'd lost the points of reference to pick it up. There were no cars in earshot, and I could hear crickets sawing away down the hill. I pulled out onto the lonely road, and then I dialed again.
Steve answered on the first ring and recognized my hello.
"Nick? " I could hear the relief in how he said my name.
"I'm alive," I said.
"Then you'd better get over here."
"Why?"
"I tracked down Jane Everett. She was murdered eleven days after Frank was killed. They found her body in a lot."
The static over the line matched the thrum of ragged road meeting tire, a dazed, inadvertent composition. For an instant I felt suspended, separate from the car, hurtling around dark turns three feet off the ground.
From a great distance, I heard myself say, "Baby Everett?"
Steve cleared his throat once, hard, like it was bothering him. "Two weeks old. I'm afraid they found her, too."
Chapter
40
We sat around the kitchen table, Steve, Callie, and I, with new photos of Jane Everett laid before us. A college-graduation shot that had run big in the press and a candid taken eight years later, her pulling a Snoopy maternity shirt tight across her pregnant belly and grinning at the camera. She had large, expressive eyes and full lips that made her look younger than she was. There were fat dimples on her thighs, visible beneath the hem of the shirt, and her back was arched in an exaggeration of the weight pulling her forward. She looked happy.
A sentence kept running through my head like one of those crawls at the bottom of Fox News: The president had this woman and her baby murdered.
The kitchen light was half dimmed, and we'd spoken only in whispers. Not just because Emily was asleep upstairs but because, I think, we were awed by what we were up against. Right now it was just us, bound by this muted circle of light. If
we spoke too loudly, maybe we'd rouse the sleeping giant.
I lifted the Los Angeles Times printout from the table and read the article again.
Oxnard, CA--The bodies of a 32-year-old woman and her 13-day-old daughter were discovered yesterday at 11:00 p.m. in a dirt lot in Oxnard. Jane Everett had been shot in the head, and her baby, Gracie, suffocated.
Neighbor Tris Landreth saw two men throw the bodies from the back of a truck into the deserted construction area. She immediately alerted the police.
Jane Everett lived and worked in Sherman Oaks, but Landreth claimed that the new mother had been in the neighborhood before. "I saw her around the trailers out by the 101 a few times a month or so ago. I remember her because of that great big belly. This is a horrendous, horrendous tragedy."
The suspects were described as Hispanic in appearance. No arrests have been made. The Oxnard Police Department has requested that any additional information or previous sightings of Jane Everett be reported to the department.
Everett is survived by an older sister, Lydia, 43, and her mother, Bernice, 66. She is remembered by friends as a loving person who was interested in local politics and symphony music.
Given the exhaustion and stress, Callie was showing her age--her eyelids textured, the corners
of her lips drooping, her skin faintly loose along the line of her jaw. She'd held me in the entryway as Steve closed and locked the door, relieved that I was out of danger for the time being. While she was clutching me, we both grew awkward about the physical display. We were two adults now, who didn't know each other well as such.
"At first I couldn't find any information on Everett," Steve said. "Credit header, utility bills, phone company, DMV, the usual. So I checked the death registry."
"We finally have a name for the baby," I said.
I noticed Steve's and Callie's heads pivot slightly to exchange a look, bewildered, no doubt, by my reaction to Grace Everett. She'd come into the world the same month I'd been forced into my new life. We'd been born of the same circumstances, products of similar fallout. Since I'd seen that ultrasound, we'd been in it together, me and her, at least in my head, and yet she hadn't been there after all. I'd made her my responsibility, and, foolish as it was, I couldn't help feeling that somehow I'd failed her.
"It sounds stupid, but I guess I thought maybe if I could save her, I could, you know . . ." But I couldn't bring myself to finish the cliche. My face grew hot, so I focused again on the papers before us.
Because of the baby, the murders had made quite a splash, but since they'd occurred two weeks after Frank's death, neither Callie nor I had noticed them.
Who had helped neutralize Bilton's problem? Who'd shot Jane in the head, cupped his hand over Grade's tiny mouth and nose? How many others through the years had safeguarded what they knew? A secret like that rots outward until someone gives a damn.
The Voice echoed in my head: Charlie did this for me, but it turned into more. Why? He wanted to do what was right. Charlie certainly had plenty of guilt to expiate. If he hadn't threatened to blackmail Bilton, would Bilton's men have needed to remove mother and daughter from the equation? Were their murders on Frank's head, too?
I wanted Frank's death to make sense the way it used to. I stared at the printout and the photos as if they could make it so.
Steve flipped the article up, eyed the line of text at the bottom. '"Interested in local politics,'" he read.
"That fucking bastard," Callie said. "His own child."
"What's with the quotation about seeing Jane Everett out by the freeway?" I asked. "Isn't that a bit specific for a short news blurb?"
"It's all an inference game," Steve said. "Oxnard's always had a meth problem at the outskirts. Trailers are a favorite for cooking labs."
"So the witness is lying? Putting Everett at the trailers?"
"Not necessarily. Bilton's people are smart.
Maybe they figured out a way to get Everett over on that side of town where she'd be seen. Or maybe she really did have some drug involvement, and they used that as a cover story."
"The two men of Hispanic appearance play nicely into that."
"Right. Wisely chosen as the dumping crew by Bilton's men because they match the meth-pushing pop in the region. Playing to racist fear is always good and distracting."
"If the police suspected that this was a drug
-
related killing, why didn't they just come out and say so?" Callie asked.
"Because the detectives can't go on record claiming they think a nice white girl from Sherman Oaks was meth-whoring on the wrong side of Oxnard," Steve said. "They want leads, sure, but they have to be careful. So they made sure the article was phrased to get the information out on the street without saying anything disrespectful."
"Maybe Bilton's people oversaw the article. Or the investigation."
"They wouldn't want their fingerprints on it. Plus, they didn't need to. They did something better." He tapped the printout. "Everyone thinks they know what happened here. Half the people followed the wrong trail, and the other half didn't want to ask uncomfortable questions. This is the perfect way to bury a body in unspoken implications."
"Two bodies," I said.
"You watch your ass, Nick. This isn't just a spin game with poll numbers at stake. This is about accusing the president of the United States of murder."
But I didn't feel afraid. Nor did I feel the usual swirl of paranoia. I wasn't jittery. I wasn't stressed out. I felt only a cold, calm rage.
I asked, "Any of the family local?"
Steve scratched his curly hair. "Everett's mom passed away in '01. Lung cancer. But I got an address for the sister at the office. I'll call you with it first thing tomorrow."
I stood and zipped up my jacket.
Callie looked at me disbelievingly. "We're talking about the commander in chief, Nicky."
I pointed at the witness's name on the article. Tris Landreth. "Will you get me her address, too?"
I thanked them both and showed myself out the back door.
Sitting in the dark Jag four blocks from Callie's house, I dialed Alan Lambrose. He answered perkily, saying his name like it was something to be proud of.
I said, "It's me. Nick Horrigan. I need to talk to the Man. Only him."
"You got a reach number?"
I read him the digits off the back of the disposable phone, hung up, and waited, chewing my thumbnail. I didn't wait long.
The same voice I'd heard an hour before coming across the airwaves. "Nick? Are you all right?"
Having access to a presidential candidate was the kind of thing I could probably never get used to. "Yeah, I'm fine. Where are you?"
"Franklin County. I'm told that's in Ohio."
The phone brushed against the Band-Aid, sending a jolt of pain through my face. "I need to see you. Privately. This has just jumped into a whole new league."
"What is it?" Wariness in his voice.
"Not over an open line. But the threat of it leaking was enough to get me out of Secret Service custody earlier tonight."
"You were in custody? Why didn't you contact me? We could have helped. Bullied the bullies."
"I didn't want to drag you into it. Besides, I wasn't being offered a free call."
His hand rustled over the phone, then he said to someone else, "I'm ready. A minute." Back to me: "Can you convey whatever it is to Alan?"
"No, Senator."
"I trust Alan implicitly. And he's in Los Angeles right now."
Trust no one. I didn't respond. I just stared through the windshield, unsure of how to refuse respectfully, until Caruthers rescued me.