Justice

by Karen Robards

  “When I walked in this morning, Allison Howard was standing there behind my desk—her desk—kind of looking out the window. I said something like, oh, sorry, thinking I had disturbed her, and she looked at me over her shoulder. Then she vanished. As in, disappeared. You know, no longer there. Gone. Just like that.”

  “What?”

  “See, this is why I don’t tell you things. You’re too damned slow on the uptake.”

  “I’m slow on the uptake?” Mark shot her a disgusted look. “You just told me you saw a woman vanish. That takes a little processing.”

  “So process.”

  “You ever think that maybe Allison Howard was actually in your office this morning? Maybe she stopped by to pick up some things, or to visit somebody, or, well, who knows? That’s entirely possible. What isn’t possible is that she vanished. Just like that. Think about it.”

  “I have been thinking about it. Believe me, I’ve been thinking about it all day. I even tried to convince myself that what I thought was a vanishing woman was a plant that didn’t vanish.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.” Jess stared unseeingly at the blazing orange sun that was just beginning to sink below the horizon. “If that really was Allison Howard in my office this morning, then how did she disappear? I was standing in the doorway. The only other way out is to fall out the window, which she didn’t, because I checked.”

  “You checked.”

  “Yes, I checked. Of course, I didn’t know who the woman was until I saw that picture just now in Shelter House. Now I know it was Allison Howard. She looked just like her picture, except she was wearing black pants and a black-and-white kind of animal-print striped top. She was standing there in my—her—our office, she looked at me, and then she vanished.”

  “You realize that if she wasn’t really in your office and you didn’t just somehow miss her exit, what you saw was probably a trick of the light. Or a reflection, or a shadow, or something like that.”

  Jess shifted sideways in her seat and leaned earnestly forward so that the seat-belt strap pulled tight against her shoulder.

  “That’s what I thought at first. I mean, what other explanation could there be? I thought I imagined that a woman was standing in front of the window in my office. I thought by some kind of trick of the light or something the big plant that’s in the corner had somehow fooled my eye. But what are the chances that a woman I just conjured up out of nothing would look like Allison Howard, whom at that point I had never even seen?”

  Mark didn’t reply for a moment. Then, very calmly (for her benefit, she knew, because getting very calm was what he did when she started to get agitated) he said, “There’s got to be a reasonable explanation.”

  “Like what?”

  “Maybe there’s a picture of Allison Howard somewhere around Ellis Hayes. Maybe you saw it. If so, it’s not such a stretch to think you’d imagine her in the office you’re taking over from her.”

  “I saw it and don’t remember.” She was skeptical.

  “Maybe it registered on you subliminally.”

  Now it was Jess’s turn to be quiet as she thought about it.

  “I guess that’s possible.” She felt a niggle of relief.

  “She’s not dead, is she? Didn’t I just hear you say she got married unexpectedly and quit?”

  “She’s on her honeymoon.” Jess took the first deep breath she’d been able to manage since seeing Allison Howard’s picture.

  “So we’re not talking a ghost here.”

  “No, I guess not.” Jess shifted positions again and let her head drop back against the cushioned seat. She was bone tired and her head still hurt, although at least the pain in her side had subsided to a manageable degree. Mark’s observation made sense, but still she felt uneasy. As an explanation, it wasn’t entirely satisfying. Still, it was the only explanation she had.

  She turned her head to look at him. “You’re obnoxious and bossy and way too full of yourself, among your many other faults—but sometimes you do make me feel better.”

  He smiled a little wryly. “I aim to please.”

  “When do you think we’ll hear something about Leonard Cowan’s death?”

  They stopped at an intersection and he looked over at her. “In a hurry to get rid of me, are you?”

  “Yes.” Even as she said it, she realized it was true—and also not true. She liked having Mark in her life. But it was dangerous to get too used to his presence. Where he was concerned, if she wasn’t careful, she could soon find herself as needy and vulnerable as ever she had been.

  “A few more days. Maybe a week. The investigation’s on the down-low, but we’ve got the top forensic pathologists in the country working on it.”

  “Wouldn’t Hasbrough know if somebody had ordered Cowan killed? Or me attacked?”

  “Hasbrough has no such knowledge. I’d stake my life on it. If the Secret Service wasn’t serious about keeping you safe, they wouldn’t have assigned me to watch over you, nor would they be putting the resources that they are into Cowan’s death.” His face tightened, and he glanced at her. “If this is about what happened to Annette Cooper, it’s coming from somebody deep undercover. Somebody—some faction—completely off the grid.”

  “Which we both know is perfectly possible.”

  “Yeah, it is.” His expression lightened. Through the deepening gloom, she saw his eyes twinkle at her. “Look at it this way: as long as I’m alive, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  “Great.” They were on Connecticut now, and the lights from the shops and restaurants lining the street dappled the interior of the car.

  “Okay, enough about us possibly dying young. You’ve got the same choice tonight you did last night: your mother’s house, your apartment, my house: which one’s it going to be?”

  Jess groaned. “None of the above?”

  “You wish.”

  If she went to her mother’s two nights in a row, questions would be asked. If too many questions were asked, Grace would, under pressure, spill the mugger story beans, and her mother would deploy all her considerable resources in an effort to keep her oldest daughter safe. So that forced her mother’s house out. Mark’s house, which was located in Dale City, was simply too far away when she had to be at work so early in the morning. Besides, it was in Mark’s house that they had lived for the few weeks they’d been a couple. The memories would, she feared, be overwhelming, especially since they were, even in a strictly nonromantic way, together again.

  “If I pick my apartment, I take it you’re planning to spend the night?”

  “Yep.”

  “How can you spend the night at my apartment? You don’t have any clothes or anything for tomorrow.”

  “Now, there’s where you’re wrong. Anticipating this very problem, I packed a bag when I went home last night.”

  “So you could stay in my apartment.”

  “So I could stay wherever you chose to stay. Except your mother’s. If you want to go there, and if the house is as full as it was last night, I’ll sleep in the car out front.”

  Jess looked at him with sudden suspicion. “You didn’t do that last night.”

  “Yes, I did. I went home, packed a bag, and came back. This car’s perfect to sleep in—plenty of room. I got up early, took a shower, and got dressed at the Y around the corner. Then I got back in time to watch you go marching down the street by dawn’s early light.”

  Touched in spite of herself at the thought of the discomfort and trouble he’d gone to on her behalf, Jess frowned at him in pure self-defense.

  “I pick my apartment.”

  “Your apartment it is. Good thing Grace won’t be there. Unless you’re better at making up lies than I think you are, you and I would have had to share a bed.”

  “Not happening.”

  “I was just sayin’. If Grace was there.”

  “You could have slept on the couch. We could have said your air conditioner was broken.”

>   “That only works once. And I probably will sleep on the couch. The key is for me to be the closest to the door.”

  Jess felt a cold little prickle of fear between her shoulder blades. “Do you really think someone might break in?”

  “I doubt it. If they’d wanted to do that, they would have done it the first time. Think about it: Cowan commits suicide, you’re the victim of a happens-every-day-in-D.C. street mugging. If this is a Black Ops cleanup operation, they’re trying to make the deaths look random.”

  Jess tried to push the gruesome thought out of her head. “So you really don’t need to spend the night.”

  He grinned. “But, see, there’s always the possibility that I’m wrong. And I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not take that chance.”

  Thinking about it, Jess discovered that he was right. The idea of sleeping all by herself in her apartment after the events of last night and today gave her the willies. Visions of murderous attacks and vanishing women did not a good night’s sleep make. And, face it, a butcher knife under the pillow was no substitute for a big, buff, and trained-in-all-the-deadly-arts Secret Service agent sleeping on the couch.

  “I should get a gun,” she said.

  He laughed. “For a gun to be effective, you have to be willing to shoot it. You have to know how to shoot it. You have to be reasonably accurate at shooting it. None of which applies to you.”

  “It could. I could get a gun, and learn.” The idea was so appealing that it was already taking root and sending up shoots. Really, she didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of it before. She was getting damned tired of having to be protected whenever things in her life went south. It was time she learned to protect herself.

  “Jesus, I know that look. Baby, you don’t want a gun. You’ll wind up shooting yourself. Or Grace. Or one of her boyfriends. Or me. Or—”

  “There you go, being all patronizing again. I’m an intelligent, competent person. I can learn to operate a gun.”

  “You don’t operate a gun. You fire it.”

  “Whatever.”

  “You need a permit.”

  “I can get a permit.”

  Jess got the impression that Mark swallowed a groan that he was too crafty to let her hear.

  “Definitely something to think about,” he said diplomatically.

  Jess’s lips twisted. She knew when she was being fobbed off. Luckily, she didn’t require Mark’s permission for anything she wanted to do, including this. With that in mind, she made no attempt to keep him from changing the subject, which he did a moment later by asking, “So where do you want to eat?”

  Jess saw that they had reached Foggy Bottom. The streetlights were on, the sidewalks were packed, and flowers and greenery and good smells and happy sounds were abundant. The contrast with the Southwest quadrant they had just left couldn’t have been more marked.

  “You can’t be hungry.”

  “Sure I can. It’s after nine o’clock. Way past my suppertime.” He shot her a look. “We could go to Pearl’s. I have this hankering for their pulled pork sandwich. I haven’t had one in a while.”

  Since they’d broken up, Jess imagined. Just like she hadn’t had her favorite wonton chicken soup since they’d broken up, either. Because she hadn’t been to Pearl’s since they’d broken up. Because it was their place, the place the two of them had gravitated to as the default hangout for meals. The thought of eating there tonight, with him, made her chest feel tight.

  That was their together place, and the very worst thing she could do was let herself forget that they were no longer, in that sense, together. Which she was beginning to see would be alarmingly easy to do.

  “You’re going to have to make do with pizza. I’m tired, I have a headache, and I want to take a bath and go to bed.”

  At the shortness of her tone, he shot her a quick, unfathomable look.

  But “Pizza it is,” was all he said, and he made the call for a delivery. A few minutes later he was easing the Suburban into a parking spot near her apartment.

  With Mark behind her, Jess was able to get inside without more than an instinctive shiver as she passed the magnolia. Once in her apartment, Mark did the now standard walk through while she shed her jacket and shoes and checked the answering machine for messages. Her mother, Maddie, Sarah, some guy for Grace, some other guy for Grace: in other words, messages as usual. Nothing from Tiffany. Nothing on her cell phone, either. Either Tiffany didn’t care what she had dropped, or she was simply not calling back. Jess then got out the cell phones Paloma had given her, only to discover that neither of them was charged. Fortunately, the power cords were in the envelopes as well. Jess connected them to a wall outlet in the kitchen as Mark stopped in the doorway to see what she was doing.

  A knock heralded the arrival of pizza.

  They ended up on either end of the couch with the pizza on the coffee table in front of them, watching TV as they ate. His shoulder holster, complete with gun, rested on the end table at his elbow. With his coat and tie off and his shirtsleeves rolled up, Mark looked totally relaxed, totally at home—and so handsome that Jess did her best not to look at him. Instead she watched the TV—she couldn’t have recalled what program it was if her life depended on it—and finished off her piece of pizza without tasting it at all. The word companionable came to mind again when she sought for one to describe how sharing a pizza with Mark like this felt, but she dismissed it instantly. She didn’t want to feel companionable, or comfortable, or at home in his presence, because inevitably, when he was gone, she would lose all those things. And that scared her.

  In this one facet of her life, she feared she was too much like her mother, who had a weakness for gorgeous, sexy guys who were the human equivalent of catnip to other women and who, when they inevitably strayed, left her mother heartbroken in their wake.

  Judy had never learned. But Jess had.

  Loving a man like Mark was simply too great a risk. What had once been between them, what could blaze between them again if she wasn’t careful, was a big love, a grand love, the kind of love that could cause her soul to sing and her body to burn. When it crashed, as most love inevitably did, would the resultant pain be worth it?

  She didn’t even have to ponder to know the answer: no.

  One thing she’d learned about herself over the years was that her heart was tender. She wanted to be very, very careful about the man to whom she gave the power to break it. Her mother might cheerfully survive the constant romantic train wrecks. Jess could not.

  When she and Mark had broken up, she had wanted to die. She had wanted to crawl into bed and curl up under the covers and sleep for days. She had wanted to cry until she’d had no more tears left.

  What she had done instead was get up and get on with it. Leaned on her family. Thrown herself heart and soul into work.

  She’d put the pieces back together. But she was determined never to put herself in a position to feel pain like that again.

  Which meant that no matter how good it might feel to have Mark back in her life, she wasn’t about to let him back in her heart.

  Mark, who seemed intent on devouring the rest of the contents of the pizza box, barely grunted when she finished her single piece and left the room, only to return a few minutes later with a pillow and some sheets and a quilt, which she dropped unceremoniously in a pile on the end of the couch she had just vacated. He could make up his bed himself.

  “I’m going to bed,” she announced.

  Absorbed in the TV, he gave her an abstracted wave.

  Jess retreated. Half an hour later, after luxuriating in the hottest bath she could stand, she popped two more Advil and went to bed. As exhausted as she was, she expected to fall asleep the instant her head hit the pillow. But she didn’t. She wanted to toss and turn, but tossing and turning was difficult because her side was sore. Instead she shifted positions gingerly, kicking off covers, pulling them back on, listening to the muffled thrum of the shower as Mark apparently decided to
take one in Grace’s bathroom before going to sleep. After listening to him pad back down the hall, and straining her ears to catch the subtle creaks that meant he was settling into the couch for the night, she dozed off, only to wake up again with a start. A glance at the bedside clock revealed that it was 3: 09 a.m. She had, she realized as she lay there blinking into the dark, been dreaming about Allison Howard.

  Vanishing.

  Oh, God. Jess pulled a pillow over her head and tried to think of something else. After a while, when it became obvious that sleep wasn’t going to happen, she gave up. What she needed was something to drink. Like a glass of wine. Or a shot of vodka. Something strong. Something sleep inducing.

  Since unfortunately the only thing in the apartment with alcohol in it was strong mouthwash, she was going to settle for milk.

  Fumbling for the glasses she kept in the drawer of her bedside table, Jess put them on and headed for the kitchen. The apartment was dark, but not so dark that she couldn’t see where she was going. Moonlight filtered in through the curtains, the night-light in the hall emitted a soft blue glow, and light from the landing outside glimmered golden under the door. Anyway, the kitchen was close, and she knew where she was going.

  Practically tiptoeing, listening to the even rasp of Mark’s breathing that fell just short of snoring, she made it into the kitchen. Retrieving a clean glass from the dishwasher, she set it down on the counter and quietly pulled open the refrigerator. The sound was minimal. The white glow of the interior light seemed as bright as the sun.

  Jess got the carton out, filled her glass, and put the carton back. Closing the refrigerator door, she was relieved by the restoration of near darkness. Taking a sip of the cold milk, with only the smallest regret that it was only milk, she turned to head back to her bedroom when the glow of the recharging phones caught her eye.

  They were resting on the counter at the far end of the kitchen, next to the microwave.

  I’m up. I might as well check them out.

  Changing course, she set her glass down on the counter and picked up the nearest phone. It was hot pink, some brand she couldn’t make out in the darkness. Flipping it open, she saw immediately that it was recharged and ready to go. A push of a button told her that it held seven new messages.