The Nomination

by William G. Tapply

  She had plenty of cash. All she had to do was pick a city, an absolutely random city where she had no friends or connections of any kind. A city where Howie Cohen would never think to look for her. A city where she could get a fresh start.

  Or maybe it was time to put that passport to use. Just get the hell out of the country once and for all. Portugal, maybe. Or Thailand. Those were two places Jessie had always wanted to see.

  JESSIE WOKE UP early, but she waited in her room until she heard Katie leave for school. She wanted to keep this as simple and uncomplicated as possible.

  She pulled on jeans, T-shirt, sneakers. She took her little Colt Mustang automatic out of her duffel bag and made sure it was loaded. She dropped the gun, along with a baseball cap, a pair of sunglasses, and her cell phone, into her shoulder bag, which already held a roll of twenties and fifties, a can of Mace, a whistle, a pair of handcuffs, a Swiss Army knife, and a roll of duct tape—the standard precautionary items that she’d been carrying with her since the beginning of her days with the cops.

  She found Mac downstairs in his office peering at his computer monitor. She stood in the doorway and cleared her throat.

  He turned, looked her up and down, and smiled. “Hey. Good morning. Going somewhere?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’ve got some things to do. I’ll be back later to pick up my stuff, and then I’ll be on my way.”

  He nodded. “You going to need money or anything?”

  “I’m all set with money,” she said, “but when I get back, I need you to do me a favor. You’ll be around?”

  He shrugged. “Sure. No problem.”

  “Okay, good, thanks.” Jessie smiled. “Well, okay. Gotta go.” She gave him a quick wave, turned, and got the hell out of there.

  She realized, with a little shock, that she was sorry she wouldn’t have the chance to get to know Mac Cassidy better.

  JESSIE DROVE HER Cherokee toward Boston. She’d been to the old city several times, and she liked it. It had personality, not to mention great restaurants. Boston had the same neighborhood feel to it as San Francisco. What she mainly remembered about it, though, was the confusion of the streets, how they were laid out so haphazardly, how most of them were narrow and one-way—almost always the wrong way, no matter where you were trying to go—and how the people who’d been driving her around always seemed to get lost, even though they were supposedly Boston natives.

  Well, this time Jessie didn’t care where in the city she ended up. Her mission was simple.

  She took Route 2 eastbound from Concord, and pretty soon she found herself on Storrow Drive heading into the city, with the Prudential and John Hancock buildings towering off to her right and the Charles River on her left. It was a sunny June day. Sailboats and skulls skimmed over the water, and joggers and inline skaters and cyclists were cruising the pathways along the riverbank, and young people were sunbathing on the grass. It gave Jessie a pang to see how carefree they all seemed to be.

  She couldn’t remember a time when she’d been carefree. She had no idea what it felt like not to have worries and problems and pressures.

  She turned onto Charles Street so that she wouldn’t have to negotiate the bridges and ramps and exit options that she saw looming ahead of her. Charles was narrow and one-way, of course, with cars parked densely along both sides. It curved around the bottom of Beacon Hill.

  She took the first left off Charles, a one-way street that climbed steeply up the hill. It was narrow and quiet and leafy and lined with brownstones and townhouses. Very few cars were parked at the curb. Jessie read one of the signs: TOW ZONE. RESIDENT PARKING. PERMIT ONLY.

  Perfect.

  She pulled the Cherokee against the curb right under one of those signs. She emptied the contents of the glove compartment—Mary Ferrone’s registration, a few road maps, a couple of gas receipts—into her bag. She looked under the seats, front and back, and assured herself that it was clean.

  She left the key in the ignition.

  Then she got out, took her cap and sunglasses from her bag, put them on, and walked down the hill, heading for the subway station she’d noticed at the end of Charles Street.

  She figured if the Cherokee didn’t get stolen first, it would accumulate parking tickets for a couple of days before some resident complained. Then the traffic police would have it towed to a lot somewhere in the city, where it would wait for its owner to come and bail it out.

  She didn’t know what would happen when nobody claimed it. Maybe they’d try to get in touch with Mary Ferrone, in whose name the car was registered in Illinois. Maybe it would just sit there and rust.

  Jessie didn’t care. She was rid of it, and Howie Cohen couldn’t use it to track her down.

  She had more things to do before she could get her new life underway. But dumping the car was an important first step.

  As she walked down Charles Street, she came upon a hair salon between an antique shop and a French restaurant. She peered in the window and saw that two hairdressers were standing by the front counter talking. All the chairs seemed empty.

  So Jessie went in, and they took her right away. Turned her into a redhead. Gave her curls.

  When Jessie looked at herself in the mirror, she grinned. She liked it. She’d never been a redhead before.

  The Boston subway system seemed to be about as haphazard as the layout of its streets, but eventually Jessie made it to the North Station, which was the terminus of the metropolitan commuter train system.

  The next train wouldn’t get to Concord until 3:25 in the afternoon. By the time she walked from the station to Mac’s house, it would be close to four.

  She had hoped not to have to say good-bye to Katie, but she figured the girl would be home from school and it couldn’t be avoided.

  She liked being with them. She felt sort of motherly with Katie. And with Mac . . . ?

  She wished her life were different. She wished she could be ordinary, just be Jessie and not Carol Ann Chang or Karen Marie Donato. She wished she could just relax and allow herself to love a man. Maybe to love this sweet, sad man, this Mac.

  But she couldn’t.

  MAC SPENT THE morning on the Internet, collecting and storing in his computer everything he could find about Judge Thomas Larrigan.

  He learned that the man was a paragon of righteousness, a doting father, a loyal husband, a respected, even-handed judge, a community leader, a war hero.

  He began to wonder if the Thomas Larrigan that Simone Bonet described in her tapes could possibly be the same man.

  Had to be. The old photos showed a younger version of this Supreme Court nominee. The man’s service time in Vietnam matched Simone’s recollection. The story of the eye patch. Everything matched.

  Mac Cassidy was sitting on a gigantic story—not just the scandalous truth about the president’s choice for the Supreme Court, but also the truth about two murders—Simone and Jill Rossiter—and most likely a third—Bunny Brubaker—that had been committed in an effort to keep the story from being told.

  And now Mac knew those truths. And there was no reason to doubt that anybody who was willing to murder Simone and Jill, and who was clever enough to make it look convincingly like a double suicide, and who’d kill Bunny Brubaker and make it look like a botched drug deal . . . they would certainly be equally willing to murder Mac Cassidy, and anybody else who happened to be in the way.

  Jessie was leaving. That was good.

  He hadn’t figured out what to do about Katie.

  HE SKIPPED LUNCH. He had this other story in his head, and he needed to get it written down. Not the true story detailed in Simone’s tapes. Now he was interested in the imagined story. It was about the consequences of Simone’s story. It was how he connected the events of the past few months, the way he thought they might have unfolded.

  First Thomas Larrigan is tapped to succeed Justice Lawrence Crenshaw on the Supreme Court. Larrigan’s name, along with several others, is mentioned in newspaper articles
speculating about Justice Crenshaw’s retirement.

  Then Bunny Brubaker sends an envelope full of old Vietnam photographs—most of them pictures of Thomas Larrigan as a young soldier—to Simone Bonet.

  A day or two later, Bunny is murdered in a crummy motel room in Davis, Georgia.

  Then comes the president’s formal Rose Garden announcement of Larrigan’s nomination.

  At about the same time, Simone Bonet calls Ted Austin about having her autobiography written.

  So Ted calls Mac Cassidy, and Mac goes to Beaverkill, New York, to meet Simone.

  Simone gives Mac some photos and documents. She begins telling her story onto tapes.

  A couple of weeks later, Mac collects the tapes.

  Then Simone and Jill Rossiter are murdered. It’s set up to look like a double suicide.

  Coincidentally—or maybe not—about that time Jessie Church, Simone and Thomas Larrigan’s daughter, shows up.

  That was the story so far.

  There was a lot Mac didn’t know. He didn’t have much evidence of anything. Just Simone’s tapes plus his own logic. He was speculating, noticing how the dots appeared to be connecting.

  He was reading through what he had written, thinking it was a great story, although at this point devoid of evidence and utterly libelous and unpublishable, nothing more than fiction hung on a few disconnected facts plus a dead woman’s memories, when he heard the back screen door into the kitchen open and then click shut. He glanced at his watch. Katie was home from school.

  A minute later she appeared in the doorway to Mac’s office.

  He smiled at her. “Hi, honey,” he said, as he did every afternoon. “How was your day?”

  This was when she always came over and gave him a hug and sat in the chair in the corner with her legs tucked under her and told him all about her day at school.

  But this time she remained standing in the doorway. She blinked a couple of times. Then tears began spilling out of her eyes.

  “Oh, sweetie,” said Mac. “What’s the matter?”

  He started to stand up to go to her when she lurched into the room. Directly behind her stood a man. He was gripping Katie’s left arm just above the elbow. In his other hand he held a square black automatic handgun. He was pressing it against the side of her neck.

  “Please, Mr. Cassidy,” said the man. “Sit down and relax.”

  “Get your hands off her,” Mac growled.

  “There’s no need to raise your voice,” said the man. He had an earpiece hooked around his left ear.

  “Who the hell are you?” said Mac. “What do you want?”

  “You can call me Mr. Black.”

  “Whoever you are,” said Mac, “you better let go of my daughter.”

  Katie tried to twist away from the man, but he was gripping her arm tightly. He kept the nose of the gun pressed against her neck.

  The man who called himself Mr. Black smiled. “You don’t appear to be in any position to issue threats, Mr. Cassidy.”

  CHAPTER 23

  It was a hair under two miles from the Concord train station to Mac Cassidy’s house on the tree-lined suburban street across the river on the north side of town. Jessie had checked it out on her way into the city. She shouldered her pack and took off at an even lope. About halfway to Mac’s house, she picked up the pace. She wanted to be there now.

  She turned onto Mac’s street and jammed to a halt. A large, gray SUV was parked in front of a heavily wooded area four lots down from Mac’s place. This struck her as an anomaly. In the couple of days she’d been there, Jessie had never seen any vehicle parked on the street. All the residents left their cars in their garages. Visitors and UPS delivery trucks and other business vehicles all pulled into the driveways.

  That didn’t mean nobody ever parked on the street. But still. It was an anomaly, and cops were trained to spot anomalies and to take them seriously.

  She strolled past the van, trying to appear casual. From behind her sunglasses she tried to see into it, but she couldn’t. It had tinted windows.

  Massachusetts plates. Nothing remarkable about it.

  Except . . . who had left it there? Where were they now? And why hadn’t they parked in a driveway like everybody else?

  She supposed she was being paranoid. Okay, good. A long time ago she’d learned to trust her paranoia. Paranoia kept you alive.

  Jessie slipped into the empty lot. All of the houses on Mac’s side of the street had backyards that merged into thick oak and pine woods. She stayed inside the woods and sneaked past three backyards. She realized she was probably being silly, but so what? No one had seen her, and aside from a few mosquito bites, no harm done.

  A screen of hemlocks separated Mac’s yard from his neighbors. Jessie skulked behind them as she approached the back of his house. She felt alert and fine-tuned. She didn’t understand how it worked, but she’d had this feeling before, and it had never been wrong.

  The man was crouching in the shadows behind some rhododendrons near the front corner of Mac’s house. He was watching the driveway and the street. An earpiece was hooked over his left ear. He wore a dark windbreaker and dark pants. At his hip there was the small bulge of what Jessie assumed was a gun under the windbreaker. Why else wear a windbreaker on a warm, sun-drenched June afternoon except to hide a gun?

  This didn’t surprise Jessie. It was about what she’d expected when she first saw that SUV.

  This guy was the lookout. His partner had to be inside.

  Mac was in there, and Katie was probably home from school by now.

  Jessie slipped her Colt Mustang out of her shoulder bag, then adjusted the bag so that it rested out of the way against the small of her back.

  She’d try to get close enough to disarm him and disable his microphone before he said anything. At least his gun was holstered, so that if he spotted her, she’d be able to shoot him before he could bring his weapon into play.

  He seemed intent on watching the front of the house. Jessie slipped quickly across the driveway, and by crouching low she was able to keep the foundation plantings between herself and the man in the windbreaker.

  She’d snuck to within about ten feet of him when he lowered his chin and mumbled something. A message to his cohorts, who Jessie assumed were inside.

  She was just a few feet behind the guy now. He’d finished talking—relaying the news that all was clear, she hoped.

  Now!

  One quick step and she had her a forearm under his chin. She braced her hip against him and levered him back, using all her strength, holding back nothing, the way she had done with the Lesneski man back in the redwood forest about a hundred years ago. Her forearm against his throat was cutting his wind, preventing him from yelling, from even gagging. With her other hand she jammed the muzzle of her gun into the soft place under his ear. She had her mouth close to his face. “Don’t say a fucking word,” she hissed. “Don’t even clear your throat, or I’ll blow your head off, I promise. Okay?”

  He nodded. No panic from this guy. He was a pro.

  Jessie pulled him backward, dragging him behind the screen of bushes that grew along the side of the house, then turned him around and forced him onto his stomach. She sat on the backs of his thighs and jammed the muzzle of her gun against his rectum.

  She bent over and put her face close to his ear. “Not a peep,” she whispered. “Pulling the trigger right now would be my pleasure. Understand?”

  The left side of his face was pressed against the ground. His right eye looked back at her. He nodded.

  She plucked the earpiece out of the guy’s ear, held it to her own ear, heard nothing but static, and threw it into the bushes on the other side of the driveway. Then she took his handgun from the holster at his hip. It was a nasty square 9mm automatic. She popped the clip and dropped the gun and the clip into her shoulder bag.

  “Okay,” she said. “Put both hands behind your back.”

  He did. Jessie fished the handcuffs from her bag wit
h her free hand and snapped them on the guy’s wrists at the small of his back.

  Then she got out her roll of duct tape and, using her teeth and one hand while she held the Colt with the other hand, she wrapped the man’s ankles all the way up to his knees. Only then did she feel safe putting her gun on the ground beside her. She used both hands to wrap the man’s face and head with duct tape. She covered his eyes, mouth, nose and ears, leaving just his nostrils exposed. Then she taped his hands, wrists, and forearms together, right over the handcuffs and all the way up to his elbows.

  Jessie sat back on her heels and looked critically at what she’d done. The man might be able to squirm and worm his way along the ground. But he wouldn’t get very far very fast, and she guessed that he wouldn’t be able to tolerate much exertion since the tape prevented him from breathing through his mouth.

  She patted him down. Car keys, pocket knife, some change.

  No wallet. No identification of any kind.

  That, all by itself, identified him.

  Jessie knelt beside the guy on the ground. She jabbed her gun into his crotch, put her mouth close to his taped-over ear, and whispered, “Can you hear me?”

  He nodded.

  “Did Cohen send you?”

  He shook his head.

  She gave the muzzle of Colt a hard shove. A gurgle came from the guy’s throat.

  “If you’re lying,” she said, “you can say good-bye to your testicles. Was it Howie Cohen?”

  Again he shook his head.

  She sat back on her heels. If these guys hadn’t been sent by Cohen to kill her, it meant they’d come for Mac and the Larrigan tapes. How did she fit into that?

  The smart thing to do would be to walk away right now. Head for the bus station. Continue what she started back in Muir Woods a couple weeks ago.

  Disappear.

  Not likely.

  “Okay,” she said to the man in the duct tape. “You better be telling the truth. I will not hesitate to blow your balls off. I’ve done it before, and I enjoyed it. Nod if you believe me.”