Worst Case Scenario (6 page)

“Neither do I,” Michaelson said. “Marjorie and I spent a good hour Monday morning playing with the identical locks on my hotel room door. There's not the slightest doubt in my mind that Ms. Bedford secured those inside locks herself.”

“So,” Pilkington said. “That leaves someone getting in, somehow or other, during Bedford's breakfast.”

“Only the standard lock would be engaged while she was in the café, presumably,” Michaelson said. “Gallagher was sure he could have picked it. Perhaps that's what the murderer did.”

“The police found no sign of that. More important, the corridor outside Bedford's room was like a Beltway rush hour Sunday morning. People who'd come to the conference were bustling around, trying to get to the airport for one of the morning flights back to Washington. Goings and comings around Bedford's room were noted. Extensively. Picking even a simple lock is a fairly conspicuous activity. It's hard to believe that that wouldn't have been spotted along with everything else, if it had happened.”

“Is that the case for suicide, then?” Michaelson asked. “That she must've killed herself because we can't figure out how anyone else would have killed her?”

“I think it was a suicide with a purpose,” Pilkington said. “I think she killed herself because she realized in the cold gray light of dawn that her thoughts of getting a significant government job back were pipe dreams. And I think she decided that as long as she was going to go, she might as well make trouble for the kind of people she blamed for her own bitter disappointments.”

“You, for example?” Michaelson asked.

“No, as a matter of fact. I think her target was Jeffrey Quentin.”

“What makes you say that?”

Pilkington drew a quarter-folded page from his shirt pocket and handed it to Michaelson. Unfolding the paper, Michaelson saw the cover and inside page of a birthday card photocopied on a single sheet. The card's cover showed a charming female tot, gamboling amidst flowers and balloons. Spaced over the inside page, in the kind of perfect script that used to be seen above the blackboards in elementary school rooms, was a single sentence.

“‘Your Little Girl Is One Year Old Today and She's Praying for You in Heaven,'” Michaelson read aloud. “
Disputandum de gustibus non
and all that, but it seems a bit grotesque.”

“It was sent to women in the Wilmot, Ohio, area several years ago, approximately a year after they'd had abortions.”

“In that case, not only grotesque but theologically unsound, at least if Augustine had things straight.”

“The cards were sent to twelve women from late September through the third week in October,” Pilkington explained. “In a year divisible by two.”

“I see,” Michaelson said.

“Two of the recipients suffered nervous breakdowns. One attempted suicide. Local media picked the story up and ran with it big time. Huge controversy erupted. The differences between the area's congressional candidates on abortion were microscopic, but this story injected abortion into the race and magnified those differences dramatically. They had a record turnout for an off-year election.”

“Punchline?” Michaelson demanded with a trace of impatience.

“The campaign of the winning candidate was managed by Jeffrey Quentin.”

“You, of course, are not implying, but I will infer, that Quentin was responsible for engineering this mailing, presumably through some cover group.”

“If you could prove that,” Pilkington said, “I think Mr. Quentin would have to find office space farther away from the White House than his current quarters.”

“What does this have to do with Sharon Bedford?”

“One of the cards was found in her room. This is a photocopy of it.”

“Was she one of the women victimized by this atrocity?”

“We can be quite certain she was not,” Pilkington said. “The autopsy showed that Sharon Bedford had never been pregnant.”

“Perhaps a sister, a close relative, or an old friend, then,” Michaelson speculated.

“No reason to think so. Neither her life nor her circle of acquaintances seems to have intersected that part of the country. I think the explanation lies elsewhere.”

“Namely?”

“She got her hands on that card and knew its history,” Pilkington said. “She made the same inference you did. Then she tried to pry a job out of Quentin by claiming that she could conclusively tie him to it.”

“And got nowhere.”

“And got nowhere. He probably laughed in her face. He undoubtedly treated her with complete contempt. When she realized that her rather pathetic ploy wasn't going to work, she decided in despair to jump off a cliff—and to grab his collar on the way down.”

“What do you mean by grabbing his collar?” Michaelson asked. “The card by itself proves nothing about Quentin.”

“Quentin, the card, and a tragedy all show up in Wilmot, Ohio,” Pilkington explained. “Quentin, the card, and a tragedy all show up a few years later in West Virginia. Maybe it stimulates some journalistic curiosity somewhere and makes things inconvenient for Mr. Quentin. It's not much, but maybe it was all she had.”

“Your theory is suspiciously convenient for those who'd like a nonculpable explanation for Ms. Bedford's death,” Michaelson said.

“I can't help that. The facts are what they are.”

“And one of the things they are is provocatively implausible in key respects.”

“Example?” Pilkington demanded.

“No note.”

“It happens.”

“You're right,” Michaelson said. “Something subconscious is making me look for excuses to resist your theory.”

“Well, I hope you can overcome it. I suspect that Mr. Gallagher's resistance will be formidable enough by itself.”

“It will. His work brings him to the Washington area one week a month as it is, and I think he's planning on dropping by even more frequently until Ms. Bedford's death is cleared up to his satisfaction.”

“I have a role in mind for you in dealing with the Gallagher problem, actually,” Pilkington said.

“What do you want me to do? And why do you expect me to do it?”

“I want you to help Gallagher accept the truth—no matter how unpalatable he may find it. I expect you to do it because it's the right thing to do from the standpoint of everyone involved.”

“The truth? Or your theory about the truth?”

“Let the chips fall where they may,” Pilkington said, waving his left hand expansively and then dropping it back to the table. “If you uncover something that shows I'm wrong, I'd like to be the first to hear about it, but I certainly don't want you to suppress it. That should go without saying.”

“I'm nevertheless glad to hear you say it.”

“You'll do it, then?”

“I'm going to do my best to help Gallagher understand what happened to a woman he loved very much. To do it right, I'll need your help. For one thing, I'll need information—access to yours, and your help in getting access to others'.”

“Can do,” Pilkington said.

“Second, I'll need cover.”

“For whom?”

“Deborah Moodie, to begin with.”

“That's harder.”

“If it were easy,” Michaelson said, “I could get it from Jeffrey Quentin.”

“I'll see what I can do.”

“In exchange for what I need, I'll give you the cooperation you're asking for. Sn. Once you're confident that you can deliver, give me a call. I take it you have my number?”

“The tape of your voice-mail message has been preserved,” Pilkington said dryly.

Chapter Eight

“What this guy Pilkington told you about Quentin bothers me a lot,” Gallagher said, taking his eyes briefly off the road to glance at Michaelson.

“It bothers me as well,” Michaelson said.

He pushed himself deeper into the corner of the El Dorado's rear right seat in an effort to avoid the arctic breeze from its array of air-conditioning vents. He had just finished summarizing his talk the day before with Pilkington.

“It sounds to me like Quentin had a pretty good reason to kill Sharon,” Gallagher said.

“I'm not ready to buy the Quentin blackmail theory yet,” Michaelson said.

“Why not?”

“For one thing,” Marjorie said from the front passenger seat, “the idea that exposing Quentin's role in that abortion atrocity would ruin him strikes some informed people as unmitigated nonsense.”

“Thus spake Wendy?” Michaelson asked.

“Approximately. She used a colorful synonym for nonsense.”

“Who's Wendy?” Gallagher asked.

“Wendy Gardner,” Michaelson said. “A friend.”

“A friend who's actually won an election or two,” Marjorie added, “and who's been indirectly involved in electoral politics since she was about six.”

“Did she explain or are you just taking her word for it?” Gallagher demanded.

“Wendy pointed out that, however reprehensible morally, the abortion ploy was tactically brilliant. After all, as she observed, it worked. Assuming that Sharon could plausibly have threatened to tag Jeffrey Quentin with it, that wouldn't have hurt him in his chosen profession, it would have helped him. It probably wouldn't have gotten him bounced from the White House staff, and even if it did, he'd still be more in demand as a campaign consultant than ever.”

“That's kind of depressing,” Gallagher said.

“Not the first time the truth has been depressing,” Michaelson said. “Besides, the card Ms. Bedford had come across was left in the room. If Quentin had killed her to cover up that part of his past, he'd presumably at least have taken the thing with him.”

“I don't know,” Gallagher said. “Maybe she had something else in the room a lot more conclusive than the card, and maybe he did take that. Besides, he was there and he's a slimebag. I can't see clearing him.”

“I'm not clearing him,” Michaelson said. “I'm just saying there's no evidence so far that he's the murderer. We don't have any real basis yet for focusing on anyone as a suspect.”

Gallagher's body language suggested no acquiescence in this assessment, but he didn't continue to challenge it. Instead he pulled the Cadillac to a smooth stop across the street from a collection of what an elegant sign called town houses, crowded onto two almost treeless acres. The sign explained that each town house contained four “Completely Private Living Units.”

“Here we are,” he said. “This is where Sharon lived. Number two-fourteen.”

The police hadn't sealed 214, and apparently no one had changed the locks, because keys Gallagher had got them in and turned off the alarm. They stepped directly into a musty living room. The room was orderly, but there was a hasty, improvised quality to its neatness, as if it were the result of half an hour's scurrying just before Bedford left for the bus station.

A computer desk with a Compudyne computer, monitor, keyboard, and printer dominated the far wall. A small radio in a turquoise Bakelite housing rested on the desk's far corner. Marjorie crossed over and flipped it on. “Yesterday” came out in instrumental cover, arranged for elevator with strings heavy and sweet.

A handful of framed pictures and certificates hanging above the desk drew Michaelson's attention. Fifteen years before, Sharon Bedford had graduated with honors from Stuyvesant Public High School in Deming, New York. Five years after that SUNY at Stonybrook had given her a bachelor's degree in political science. In one color picture Bedford in cap and gown stood between a Jell-O-checked man with steel-framed glasses and a wiry, bland-faced woman who wore her dark hair like Jackie Kennedy's.

Two four-shelf, screw-together metal bookshelves stood against the wall to the right. Michaelson spotted computer manuals and a collection of White House memoirs—the bulky kind that he had assumed were bought mostly to be given away rather than read: Reagan's, McFarlane's, Kissinger's (both volumes), and Quayle's, with Peggy Noonan thrown in. Bedford was also a big Tom Clancy fan, mixing copies of his books in with the memoirs. And she'd had what looked like a complete set of Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason stories in paperback. Beyond that, her tastes seemed to run to the kind of fiction that Michaelson had heard Marjorie classify as Contemporary Sentimental Education: Jackie Collins, Danielle Steel, and several names boasting similar arrays of sibilants and labiants.

Michaelson had expected to feel pity and he'd armed himself against it. Pity was useless. Welling up in him now, though, was a different and more dangerous emotion. He felt an angry frustration, not at her death so much as at what seemed the almost capricious casualness of that death.

Sharon Bedford had been an ordinary person from an ordinary family in an ordinary town. She'd taken her nothing-special education and her dime-a-dozen degree and her middlebrow tastes to Washington seeking neither wealth nor power nor fame. She'd asked for nothing more than the chance to be a tiny part of something that mattered, to toil in anonymous drudgery so that people like Jeffrey Quentin and Scott Pilkington—and Richard Michaelson—could carry saddle leather briefcases into walnut-wainscoted conference rooms and make a little history now and then.

For that, it seemed, she'd died. Her ordinary life had ended, and what was left of the ordinary lives of the ordinary people who'd brought her into the world and nurtured her and sent her to school would now be filled with grief. She'd overreached, of course, and there was nothing particularly noble about it. To impress a man—no, Michaelson corrected himself, to impress herself for a man's sake—she'd taken what she implied was hot information and basically offered it for bids. She'd put her own modest ambition above both public interest and private loyalty, at least dimly glimpsing the risks that entailed.

So all right, she wasn't Edith Cavell or Joan of Arc. She hadn't died for cause or country, she'd gone bungee jumping and the cord had snapped. But reminding himself of that didn't make Michaelson's frustration go away. Lonely death seemed too high a price to pay for misjudgment and overreaching. Sharon Bedford had died because of unreasoning self-doubt, and that was something that engaged Michaelson's gut as well as his mind.

He struggled methodically to control the unanticipated emotion. That wasn't why he was in this thing. Anger like that, he thought, was meretricious. It not only kept you from doing your job right, it made you think you were doing it better than you'd ever done it before. You thought you were looking reality right in the eyes, but instead you were gazing at it through a filter that radically distorted everything you saw. By the time Michaelson had finished these reflections, he heard Marjorie marching back into the room from the bedroom.

“Her television's in there,” Marjorie announced. “Also an alarm-clock radio, an old-fashioned turntable-style record player, and some albums.”

“Barry Manilow, Julio Iglesias, and John Denver,” Gallagher said quietly.

“Yes. No ashtray, by the way. I haven't been able to find one in here, either.”

Michaelson looked around, mildly surprised at the comment.

“Do you think that's important?” he asked.

“It confirms a comment Wendy made when I spoke to her last night,” Marjorie said. “She said that when she saw Bedford at the conference having a cigarette with Quentin, she looked like she wasn't a habitual smoker—that she was just using the cigarette as a way to have Quentin to herself for a few minutes.”

“I never saw her smoke the year and a half I knew her,” Gallagher said, nodding. “She asked for nonsmoking sections in restaurants, and she didn't carry cigarettes with her.”

“So that fits,” Marjorie said.

“Well,” Michaelson said, approximating a down-to-business tone, “our working theory is that if Sharon was murdered, it had something to do with the supposedly sensitive information she was shopping around the conference. Quentin probably wanted it, Pilkington certainly wanted it, others may have wanted it. So we'd like to know what that information is.”

“Sounds right to me,” Gallagher said.

“Before she left for the conference, she mailed off a list with several items that we can account for and an intriguing phrase, ‘Highways to Indians,' that we can't. It follows that we're here to look for something that may or may not be related to that phrase. We don't know what it is or where to look for it. We can't be sure it was ever in this apartment or, if it was, that it's still here. If we happen to stumble across it, we may well not know it when we find it. Let's get to work, shall we?”

“Any hints?” Marjorie asked. “Aside from ‘Highways to Indians'?”

Michaelson considered mentioning his speculation that the information had something to do with a general's relative moving to the head of the line for a rare-match liver transplant—the potential scandal that Deborah Moodie had gotten into trouble for pursuing. He decided against it. The possible connection was too conjectural to be helpful in the search they were about to start.

“Not many,” he answered instead. “Ms. Bedford told Wendy and me—among others, presumably—that the information she had could be immediately useful to someone hustling for a national office or already holding one. Whatever it is, this item is presumably connected to the period from 'eighty-five to 'eighty-nine, when she was working on the staff of the national security adviser.”

“Headline-worthy information, then,” Marjorie said. “That's something, I suppose.”

“Not just information, I don't think,” Michaelson said. “When Ms. Bedford was talking to me, she mentioned
showing
something to me when we both got back to Washington. I think she was talking about tangible documentation: a letter, a memo, a picture. Something that would speak for itself, whose significance I'd instantly recognize.”

“All right,” Gallagher said. “Let's do it.”

They did it. For the next two hours they leafed patiently through the books and manuals on Bedford's shelves, examined the space between the frame backings and the pictures and certificates on her wall, checked the ice-cube trays in her freezer and the coffee and seasoning canisters on her kitchen counter, unscrewed the numeral plate on the outside of her door on the off chance that she'd read
Casino Royale
, inspected the drains in her sinks and bathtub, probed the holding tank and drain-plug on her toilet, patted her wallpaper and the back of her vanity mirror in search of suspicious padding, looked under her mattress and sofa cushions, lifted her carpets, and rummaged through her drawers, closets, and cabinets.

They didn't find anything that looked very promising.

“Well,” Michaelson said when they'd finally run out of places to search, “we had to try.”

“I'll tell you one thing,” Gallagher said. “We weren't the first ones to have this idea. Someone's been through this place before us.”

“They must have been pretty careful about it,” Michaelson said. “Why do you say that?”

“When you get to know someone pretty well, you get a feeling about the way she keeps her things arranged. I just thought to myself as I was going through this stuff, This isn't exactly the way Sharon would have left this.”

“If someone else has searched the place before,” Michaelson said, “he or she apparently knew how to avoid tripping the alarm, and was then cautious enough to reset it before leaving. That's not without interest.”

“All that's left is the computer and the disks,” Marjorie said. “I guess we might as well take a look at them.”

“You're right, of course,” Michaelson said. “But what we're looking for shouldn't be on either one.”

“Why not?” Gallagher asked.

“Because you can't
document
a political scandal by pulling words off your own computer's hard drive or your own disks. You or I could sit down with nothing but a keyboard and our fertile imaginations and confect a paper trail implicating the president in everything from real-estate fraud to transvestite orgies, but the
Washington Post
wouldn't give us the time of day for it. It wouldn't prove anything except that we could type.”

“Let's take a stab at it anyway,” Marjorie said.

She flipped on the computer and the monitor. A bit too quickly for comfort, the screen flashed initial 64k memory error. Then the screen went blank.

“Turn it off,” Gallagher snapped decisively as he dug a knife from his trousers and stepped toward the unit.

With a quizzical shrug, Marjorie obeyed. Gallagher immediately began to loosen the screws on the back of the processing unit's casing.

“Are you sure that's a good idea?” Michaelson asked.

“Nope,” Gallagher said, laying the first screw beside the unit and going to work on the second. “I wasn't sure it was a good idea to enlist in the army, either, and look how that turned out.”

A minute and a half later, Gallagher lifted the top of the casing up.

“It looks a bit sparse,” Michaelson said.

“It's missing at least two boards, even allowing for expansion slots,” Gallagher said.

“So we have a computer here that's had the cybernetic equivalent of a prefrontal lobotomy?” Marjorie asked.

“That's about the size of it,” Gallagher said.

“I guess someone did get here before us,” Marjorie said as she gathered the handful of disks left beside the computer. After a moment's hesitation, she scooped up a manila folder holding Bedford's copies of invoices she'd sent for deposition summaries she'd prepared. Most of them were addressed to a local law firm identified as Hayes & Barthelt.