Edge of Black

by J. T. Ellison

  “How’d he make it into the service?”

  “Oh, this was something he picked up in the first Gulf War. Bunch of them came home with lung damage. His manifested as asthma. Pretty severe, too, and stress didn’t help things.”

  “So you entered the office, saw he was down, and then what?”

  “I searched his jacket pocket, thinking I’d get his inhaler, but it wasn’t there. Then I saw it on the floor next to him. I picked it up and handed it to him. He could barely hold on to it. We got it in his mouth and I pressed the trigger, but it didn’t seem to help. His eyes were rolling into the back of his head, and he was turning blue. He kept an EpiPen in his briefcase, but his briefcase wasn’t in the office. I looked everywhere. He’d stopped breathing by that point, so I started CPR and yelled for someone to call nine-one-one.”

  “Where’s the inhaler?”

  “I have no idea. The EMTs probably took it.” He looked to the ceiling and shut his eyes. “I should have called earlier. If I had...”

  “If it makes you feel better, I don’t think that would have made a difference. The autopsy has been completed, and the attack was quite severe.”

  Temple didn’t say anything, just maintained his position with his face aimed at the ceiling, like he was trying to hold back tears from spilling down his cheeks.

  “Did the congressman take the Metro this morning?”

  Temple sniffed once, hard, then faced Fletcher again. “He takes it every morning. Part of his job, he says, to be with the people, be a part of the populace. Of course, he has security on him, and he only rides it one stop, from Eastern Market to Capitol South. You know. Kisses his wife goodbye, hops on the subway. It makes him feel normal, like a regular guy. Joe six-pack, he liked to say. So yes, he was on the subway today.”

  “Where’s his wife now?”

  “Gretchen? Flying in from Terre Haute. She’d gone home to get one of their...charities settled. She is devastated.”

  “I’ll need to speak to her as soon as she arrives. And I need to speak to his detail. I’ll also need the names of all the supporters who were here this morning.”

  “I will have the detail get in touch immediately, and the list of people sent to you.”

  “The detail weren’t here, in the office?”

  “Not at his time of death. In the building, yes. More than likely. They were scheduled to go out with him at two. The congressman had a meeting this afternoon at the University Club. He was scheduled to speak to the Daughters of the American Revolution, of all things.”

  Fletcher appreciated the irony—speaking to a group whose membership could trace their lineage to the first attempts of the country to gain their freedom on the day the most important city in the world was attacked by terrorists was rich.

  Temple tapped a pencil on the clean desktop. “Do they know what the attack was comprised of? What the agent was?”

  “We don’t know yet,” Fletcher replied. “What about the rest of it?”

  Temple glanced at him.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I think you do.”

  He gave Fletcher a pointed look. “Trust me. I don’t know.”

  “Mr. Temple. We’re both grown-ups here. I have no intention of using the information to demean or embarrass the congressman’s legacy. You saw the text. The language seemed...purposefully inflammatory. Has the congressman been harassed lately?”

  He shook his head, finally showing some interest in the situation. No, that wasn’t fair. He hadn’t been disinterested before. He was under control. Very much under control.

  “Peter Leighton is an American patriot. He served his country honorably in the service, came home and decided to continue his selflessness in this thankless job. He is the greatest man I know.”

  Fletcher sat back in his chair and took a sip of his Scotch. “You know, I’ve been a cop in D.C. for eighteen years. I’ve seen a lot of shit. It is not my job to be judge or jury. Your boss had a reputation in the very quiet corners of this town, and you can’t expect me to believe that, as his number-one guy, you aren’t aware of that.”

  There it is. Right over the plate.

  “No idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Come on. You want to tell me what this is all about? Who might have sent something like this? Who did the congressman piss off?”

  Temple swiveled the computer screen around to face Fletcher.

  “Who hasn’t he pissed off? My God, we get five thousand emails a day, and I’d say a solid ninety percent are upset about something. Take, take, take, blame, blame, blame. That’s all these people know.”

  “Mr. Temple. Please. I’m talking about something a little more private than constituents with a burning desire for a new road.”

  Temple shook his head but wouldn’t meet Fletcher’s eye.

  “Truly, don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “There are rumors...”

  Temple laughed. “This is D.C., Detective. If there isn’t a rumor about you, you’re doing something wrong.”

  * * *

  It was a good story, as far as stories went. Temple looked like a hero, he’d done everything he could think of to save his boss. The interviews with the three other staffers corroborated his story. Either they were all telling the truth, or they had decided on the story before Fletcher got there.

  Not a single one was willing to breathe a bad word against their boss.

  This was going nowhere, fast.

  Fletcher got a crime scene tech to come to the office and take exclusionary fingerprint samples. That took fifteen minutes, and while it was going on, Temple arranged for the service detail who’d been with the congressman this morning to meet them in the office. Fletcher dismissed Temple and talked to them—a man and a woman, Mac and Sally—grizzled old hats who’d been assigned to the congressman for several months. Nothing in the routine this morning was different from any other day. They didn’t know where his briefcase was. Neither were feeling ill. Both were going for stoic, but Fletcher could see they were genuinely distressed over the news.

  He pushed them on the rumors, too, but they clammed up. He took their statements, assured them he’d let them know what was happening, and let them leave, feeling vaguely uneasy.

  They gave him a list of the people who’d been in the office over the past few days, and this morning. The official congressional photographer would send over the photos from the morning’s meet and greet. Otherwise, it seemed there was nothing here.

  Someone was lying to him. He just didn’t know who. Or why.

  Chapter 9

  Washington, D.C.

  Dr. Samantha Owens

  Sam waited for Fletcher in Nocek’s office, watching the late-breaking news story that had finally leaked its way into the media. The anchors looked shaken; even though they’d known for at least an hour, the media had kindly waited for the wife to land in D.C. and get to her husband’s side before they broke the news.

  Congressman Peter Leighton, Democrat from Indiana, was dead, a suspected victim of the morning’s attack.

  Sam was always amazed at how thorough the media could be when they wanted. Granted, Leighton was a public figure, and as such, packages were built in the event of an untimely death. But considering he was just one of four hundred and thirty-five serving members, there was quite a bit of material that had been collected on him.

  The minute the news was out, the attack itself became secondary. Every station was giving their own eulogies of the congressman.

  Leighton had been a classic dove for most of his career, using his own service record as an example of why the United States should stay out of foreign domains. He’d flip-flopped about a year prior, started fighting for the troops, for them to get more money, better equip
ment and better services when they mustered out, damaged and broken. A seismic shift, brought about by the death of his son, Peter Leighton, Junior, a battalion commander in the Army who’d gone to Afghanistan and been decimated by a roadside IED.

  Grief changes you. Sam understood that. It mutates your soul, your emotions, your thoughts. Green becomes yellow, the sun disappears from the sky, and your lifelong convictions no longer seem to matter. As she watched the multitude of clips of the congressman defending his change of heart, she understood completely. He hadn’t done enough to keep his own child secure and protected, so he’d launched a campaign to keep the remainder of the soldiers on the ground and in the air safe. Too bad he hadn’t been fighting for them earlier. It might have meant a different outcome for his own son, not to mention countless others.

  At least the media didn’t have the text message yet. Once that slipped out, the wolves would circle and all bets would be off. The congressman would stop being lauded and start being blamed.

  And maybe he should. If the text was real, authored by the perpetrator behind the attacks, there was something to be discovered in the congressman’s very publicly private world.

  Sam muted the television. The message was unmistakably clear. What she was trying to ascertain was why, if the attack was directed at him, had so many others been included.

  Two hundred sick, some clinging to life. Two other deaths, random, people wholly unrelated to the congressman. She felt bad that their deaths were being overshadowed by the demise of someone more famous.

  Even one death is too much.

  Planes were flying overhead, the high-pitched roaring whine of the F/A-18s unmistakable. Helicopters chattered. There was talk of shutting down the bridges. There was a curfew in place, yet there were still news stories about chaos and absolute fear reigning in some neighborhoods. There’d even been a couple of reports of looting, down near Anacostia. But the congressman’s face was taking up ninety percent of the airtime.

  And they still didn’t know what had caused the turmoil.

  There were hundreds of people working on figuring out what the substance was. She knew that. But it was disturbing that nearly twelve hours after the event, they still had nothing more than speculations to go on.

  That told her something unique was happening.

  Sam shut the television off and went over her notes again. Fletcher had called to tell her that, yes, the congressman had been on the Metro this morning. But in looking at the maps, he was on the Blue Line, and it had been confirmed that the other two casualties had taken the Orange Line right through Foggy Bottom early this morning.

  It made sense that people who were immunosuppressed would have a more severe reaction. The congressman was an asthmatic, so any irritant could trigger an attack. Without the proper medication to arrest the attack, he could very easily die, as he had.

  The other two deaths weren’t as cut-and-dried. She had notes on them from the initial investigation Fletcher and his team had done when they’d come into the morgue. The only thing they had in common was the fact that they were smokers.

  Different parts of the city, different ages, different worlds, all affected by a single event. D.C. was a giant ecosystem, with thousands of moving parts, and each world was unique unto itself. Like species that couldn’t intermingle and breed, the people of D.C. found their comfort zones and rarely, if ever, deviated from course. Debutantes hung out with debutantes, jocks with jocks, politicos with politicos, lawyers with lawyers, lobbyists with lobbyists, teachers with teachers. There might be a Sadie Hawkins Day every once in a while, and a debutante would get it on with a politico, but that generally ended up in The Washingtonian, disguised as a society wedding, and the aftermath was full of fireworks and lawyers and mistresses and front-page news.

  Sam pulled the charts of the two other victims and flipped through the pages. She had nothing better to do.

  The first was a forty-year-old woman named Loa Ledbetter. She owned a market research firm on L Street, lived in the Watergate. She rarely used the Metro to go to work—she made off-site calls to clients, so she normally drove—but her car was in the shop.

  The second was a nineteen-year-old junior from American University, Marc Conlon. He lived in Falls Church, and took the Metro into town for school daily. He’d switch from the Orange Line to the Red at Metro Center and scoot out to the Tenleytown/AU stop, then take the shuttle bus onto the AU campus. On Tuesdays, he had an 8:00 a.m. history class, so he made sure to get into town extra early, to have a coffee and beat the crowds.

  Sam said a little prayer for her own student, Brooke Wasserstrom, who at last check was holding steady in the intensive care unit. Sam hoped that her quick actions meant Brooke had a decent chance of survival, but without knowledge of what they were dealing with, all they could do was treat, and pray.

  A congressman, a student and a market researcher.

  Three strangers, brought together at the hand of a madman. What had they done to deserve death as a punishment?

  Now, Sam, you know that this isn’t a healthy line of thinking. Random things happened. There aren’t always answers as to why people have to die. Why their number has suddenly come up. They were obviously in the wrong place at the wrong time. She could fully comprehend that. She knew that they weren’t connected in any way law enforcement could use their deaths to track their killer. A terrorist attack is a random event.

  Random. Chosen without method or conscious decision.

  She hadn’t chosen for her family to die. That had been random, too.

  She shook them away, the voices of her dead, and refocused.

  A random act.

  Then why did someone send a text to Congressman Leighton blaming the morning’s events on him?

  The only real evidence they had was the text. It could be the key. Leighton could be the key.

  Not Dr. Loa Ledbetter, a small brilliant redheaded beauty with a gaping slit in her chest, nor Marc Conlon, too young to even have grown fully into his bones, his sagittal suture not entirely fused.

  Quit personalizing, Sam.

  What Sam was interested in was why those three, out of all the people exposed and the two hundred exhibiting symptoms, were the only ones who died.

  Ledbetter was dead on arrival at GW, after being found collapsed on the floor of the ladies’ room at her office by one of her staffers.

  Conlon died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. He’d gone into cardiac arrest at the top of the stairs of the Tenleytown Metro.

  Neither had a history of lung disease; that was reserved for the congressman. Neither exhibited signs of illness, their initial blood work had been normal, and neither had a history of ill health.

  Their families could give more information. Sam was itching to talk to them.

  But this wasn’t her investigation. She’d been brought in to do a task, used for her discretion and talent, not to run off trying to explain the unexplainable.

  Except she knew every puzzle had a solution.

  Someone wanted Leighton to feel responsible, yes, but dead? Perhaps that was just chance. Perhaps that was a fluke. And there was absolutely nothing that said the text-sender was the same person who’d indiscriminately put a foreign substance into the air ducts at the Foggy Bottom Metro and made so many people ill. It could just be a pissed-off constituent who wrongly blamed the congressman for a completely random event.

  There she was, back to the arbitrary again.

  Fletcher had brought her into this investigation when he asked her to post Leighton. He wasn’t dumb; he knew she’d press for more information, for a chance to help. She wasn’t constricted by the rule of law here. She was a private citizen. She’d sworn a different kind of oath, one that she believed in, one that bound her to care for the sick, to have special obligations to the public she served. She could do whate
ver she chose, so long as she worked within the bounds of her ethics and didn’t break the law.

  She was starting to feel a bit tingly.

  She debated for exactly ten seconds before writing down the addresses of the other victims, folding the paper into halves, then quarters, and stashing it in the pocket of her trousers.

  It was damn good timing, too, because she’d barely raised her palm from the linen when Dr. Nocek came into the room, followed by Fletcher.

  “You ready, Doc?” Fletcher asked. He looked worried and rumpled and tired. His beard was just starting to make its appearance, and lent him a vaguely menacing air. Next to the taller, more collected Nocek, he looked a bit like a brawl just waiting to happen.

  Sam gathered her bag and sweater. “I’m ready. How are things on the Hill?”

  “Fucked.”

  That’s all she got. Nocek raised an eyebrow in her direction, and she responded by giving him a warm hug. “I’ll see you soon. We’ll have dinner.”

  “I would like that very much,” he said, and she sensed the sadness in him. Nocek was a widower, not fully used to going home alone in the evenings. On a day like today, after all the hoopla, the fear and adrenaline, having only ghosts to talk to could be hard.

  She squeezed his arm and said, “Call me if you need anything,” then followed a glowering Fletcher from the room.

  The longest day she’d had since she left Nashville was finally drawing to a close.

  Chapter 10

  The streets were still eerily deserted, the dark skies interrupted by the scream of jets. Fletcher was silent until they hit M Street. Sam knew better than to try and drag information out of him; he’d share when he was ready. They got stuck at the light at Wisconsin, and he finally started talking.