Now she would just have to settle in, be patient, and wait for something to happen.
With the late afternoon sluggishly giving way to dusk, she parked down the street, replaced her Trident with two fresh sticks, and settled in. Three hours, she decided, sliding in a best of Sting CD and seeking out "Fields of Gold." If nothing happened after three more hours, she would head back to the city and resume her one-woman stakeout another day.
Not surprisingly, as the time passed she found herself thinking more and more about Gabe Singleton. There was a sweetness and vulnerability beneath his rugged cowboy exterior that had drawn her in immediately. The men in her past had been, well, slick, she acknowledged—smart, self-assured, ambitious, and, almost to a man, not totally forthcoming. Gabe had lost his faith in her honesty the first night they had met when he caught her in the lie she was forced to tell by being undercover. Still, there was no way she could have let him be killed to preserve her status as an undercover agent and no way she could explain her actions that early morning other than with the truth.
He was even wondering if the whole assassin thing was a setup to gain his confidence and lead him to share some presidential medical secrets. Those suspicions were totally off base, but confronting him and denying his concerns would only strengthen them.
She also had chosen not to share the rumors she had heard that the president was not mentally well. They were grossly unsubstantiated—questions from medical unit personnel, whispered in dim, late night taverns—hardly the sort of thing she would expect Gabe to share with her. Where her attraction to the man might lead, if anyplace, was a total mystery at this point. What she did know was that there was something special she felt when she was around him—an almost little-girl musing of what it might be like to curl up with him on a chilly winter night. But she also wondered why a man as bright, handsome, and caring wasn't married . . . or a father.
What secret are you hiding, Gabe Singleton? she asked herself now. Why do you seem so vulnerable?
An hour passed.
Inside the house, lights appeared behind a few of the windows that weren't covered by drapes. The two functioning streetlights remaining on Beechtree Road, neither of them near where she was parked, winked on. Then, just as Alison was considering limiting her time there from three hours to two, the front porch light came on, the front door opened, and two people emerged. Alison brought her field glasses up and focused on their faces. One was a statuesque woman with a face about the color of her own. Latino, Alison guessed.
The other was younger—much younger. Possibly ten or eleven at the oldest. Like the older woman, she was mocha skinned and dark eyed, and also like her, she was pretty. No, not pretty, Alison suddenly realized, stunning, with perfect, gentle features, an incredibly sensual mouth, a lithe body—still more girl-like than woman, but with breasts that were already well beyond nubs. Such things were almost always a matter of personal taste, she acknowledged, but the girl was as beautiful as any young woman Alison had ever seen.
What was Treat Griswold doing with such an attractive woman and a spectacularly beautiful girl? It seemed as if the only ones who could supply the answer to that question were the woman and girl themselves. The pair, arm-in-arm, descended the stairs and began to walk leisurely in the direction away from where Alison was parked.
Alison waited, sorting out her options. Then she set the binoculars down, turned off the CD, and followed.
CHAPTER 28
Another liar?
An hour had passed following Gabe's conversation with Lily Sexton—a conversation in which she denied knowing a man who possessed a beautifully and accurately rendered charcoal drawing of her in the drawer of his desk. The questions came far faster than their answers. Was it possible the drawing wasn't of her? If it was, could it have been done from a photograph—perhaps one in a magazine? Given her style, poise, unusual beauty, and acknowledged intellect, it seemed that if Jim Ferendelli was obsessed with her from afar, he wouldn't have been the first.
Could she simply have been frightened about being connected to any scandal when she was so close to being the subject of a major confirmation hearing in Congress? That possibility made more than a little sense.
Was it worth confronting her with the drawing and asking for some sort of explanation?
And finally, would it be possible to trust anything that she said?
Questions without answers.
Gabe massaged the sudden throbbing in his temples, pulled out the vial of painkillers in his desk drawer, then just as quickly put them back again. His headache was real enough, but the solution lay in getting at the causes—diagnosing the president, finding Jim Ferendelli, and getting the hell back to Wyoming, where, most of the time at least, hidden agendas weren't a way of life. Maybe the headache would help Gabe stay sharp. It was a reasonable guess the codeine wouldn't.
A floor above, in the presidential residence, his friend Kyle Blackthorn was administering the neuropsychological tests that would go far in determining whether or not the man entrusted with the safety of every being on the planet was fit to continue in that role. Blackthorn was a person of great character, passion, and intellect. He had never, as far as Gabe knew, come to a forensic decision regarding a patient or defendant that had proven to be inaccurate.
Vice President Cooper, Magnus Lattimore, Admiral Wright, LeMar Stoddard, Lily Sexton, and of course Alison—were any of them someone Gabe could truly rely upon? Probably not. Certainly not in the way he could rely upon The Chief.
Gabe sat at his desk, biding time by shuffling papers, wondering if it was worth contacting Alison to arrange a repeat trip to Ferendelli's brown-stone. No, he decided, not with her, anyway. She was far too eager to learn about the president's health—at least that was the way it appeared to him. It would be terrific, absolutely wonderful, if he was wrong about her. She had never been far from his thoughts since the drive back to her place from Ferendelli's.
During the president's asthma attack, she had functioned with quickness, medical knowledge, and, except for a brief moment when she seemed oddly distracted, composure. Cinnie had the same qualities. Alison seemed to be telling the truth about her role as an undercover agent for the Secret Service, but she might have been forced to improvise after her quick thinking saved his life—or at least seemed to have saved his life. If the shooting wasn't something she had orchestrated, she needed an immediate explanation for why she had been following him from the White House in the early morning hours. If it weren't true, the undercover assignment story was brilliant. But brilliant improvisation or not, it would still have been a lie.
Then there was the matter of the missing tubes of blood. How would Alison explain that? Could anyone but she possibly have been responsible?
Another hour passed. Gabe's brain felt as if it were being squeezed in a vise. His headache—tension, he felt certain—failed to respond to some Tylenol, but still the codeine remained in the drawer. I never took a drug that I didn't have a pain for, he had once heard a recovering addict say at an AA meeting.
I never took a drug that I didn't have a pain for.
It had been a long, long while since he last went to a recovery meeting, Gabe thought now. A couple of years at least. Maybe it was time he started going again. The AA program taught not only how to stay away from a drink or a drug for a day but also how to do the right thing when it came to making difficult decisions. Maybe it was time. Why in the hell had he stopped going in the first place?
Grateful that he had closed the medical office for the day and diverted all traffic except the president to the Eisenhower Building clinic, Gabe returned some routine phone calls, then leaned back in his chair and dozed off—one of the perks of having such a truncated practice. The ringing telephone intruded on a hazy scene in which he and Alison were riding across the desert together, bareback on what looked to be Condor. Her arms were locked around Gabe's waist and her cheek was pressed against his back. Blearily he checked his watch. Blackthorn had b
een with the president for four and a half hours.
"Dr. Singleton," he answered, the words reminding himself of that fact.
"Yes sir, Doctor. Agent Blaisdell here. I'm upstairs in the residence. Your man has finished with the president, sir. We're checking to see if the coast is clear; then we'll bring your man down."
"Everything all right?"
"As far as I know, sir. Agent Griswold signed out a few hours ago, and just asked us to contact you in the office when the president was done with his visitor."
"Well then, bring him down, but be very careful he isn't spotted by anyone."
Gabe hurried to the small bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. From the moment Magnus Lattimore had led him into the president's bedroom, from the moment he had seen his onetime roommate thrashing about, sweating profusely, and babbling incoherently, Gabe had felt isolated—alone with his sensibilities and his emotions; alone with what seemed right and what felt right; alone with the awesome pressure of the Twenty-fifth Amendment. Now he would at least have an ally he could rely on in the struggle to sort things out—a friend with no hidden agenda and nothing at stake except getting to the right diagnosis.
Gabe had just toweled off when, without a knock, the outer door to the medical office opened and closed. Hat in hand, looking none the worse for his lengthy ordeal, Kyle Blackthorn stood alone in the center of the waiting room. He set his valise of testing supplies on the floor by his feet. It looked to Gabe as if Blackthorn were quietly invoking the senses available to him, hypertrophied from overuse like the muscles of a weight lifter, to get the lay of his situation. After just a few seconds he turned directly toward the small bathroom.
"So, Doctor," he said, "you were napping in my absence."
Gabe stepped into the waiting room.
"Actually, I . . . what I was doing was . . . okay, yes, actually, yes, I was. But how did . . . ?"
"If you hadn't been napping you would have been out here to welcome me back, not in there toweling off your face."
"Well, at least you didn't begin your explanation with, 'Elementary, my dear Singleton.' "
"I thought about it. Ready to talk?"
"Almost five hours. That must have been quite a session."
"For an incredibly impatient, kinetic man, your friend Mr. Stoddard displayed remarkable restraint and a deep desire to get to the bottom of things."
"I'm not surprised."
"Your office the best place?"
Gabe flashed on Alison working undercover for the Secret Service. Was it possible she had somehow managed to bug the medical office? It seemed highly unlikely, but his trust in anything or anyone had been pulled perilously thin.
"You hungry?"
"I can always eat."
"And I could use some fresh air. Let's go have an early dinner at the Old Ebbitt Grill. Magnus Lattimore, the chief of staff here, took me there. The food's excellent, and at its quietest the place is noisy enough so that the only person anyone can hear is the one sitting directly across the table or right beside them."
"I am aware that you are in a hurry to come to an understanding on this matter," Blackthorn said, "but I assume you know that my final conclusions will have to wait until I have gone over all the test results and my notes and correlated them."
"Notes?"
"I have written nothing down, but I have used an electronic, Braille typewriter."
"Just hold on to it tightly."
"The moment someone tries to get into my notes without using the right password, the machine erases its contents."
"So, you want to review your notes and correlate them with the test results. Makes sense. But you have formed some preliminary opinion?"
"I have."
"And you'll share that with me?"
"I will."
The two men left the White House through the East Wing and headed up Fifteenth Street through fading afternoon sun.
"So," Gabe said, "thanks again for doing this. I know how busy you are and how much you don't like leaving home—especially for government work."
"I've never been one to hold a grudge," Blackthorn said. "Whenever I'm troubled about the genocide of my people, I just think about all those big, shiny casinos and how reassuring it is to have organized crime on hand to help take care of us."
Gabe sympathetically patted him on the back. He had heard the man eloquently decry the subject of Indian genocide in any number of speeches and forums over the years.
"So," Gabe said, "over and above the testing, what did you think of my patient?"
"What do you want me to say, Gabe?"
"I don't know. I guess I want you to tell me that as a psychiatrist and a psychologist you found him to be a man of magnificent character, who has the potential for true greatness as a leader."
This time it was Blackthorn who patted Gabe on the back.
"My dear friend," he said, "to make that pronouncement, I would have to be with the person in question for a good deal longer than the few hours I spent with your Mr. Stoddard this afternoon. Besides, if nothing else, this is a time for objectivity."
"Objectivity," Gabe echoed as they entered the Old Ebbitt Grill.
The restaurant, refurbished from a mid-nineteenth-century saloon, still featured dark-stained wood, marble-topped bars set in brass, and a Beaux Arts facade. According to framed pictures and documents on the walls, the place had been a favorite of Presidents Grant, Cleveland, Harding, and Teddy Roosevelt. Gabe wondered how many times issues affecting the future of a presidency and the country had been discussed at its tables. Certainly, few would guess that the tall blind man and his wind-worn companion were about to become part of that particular history.
The Old Ebbitt was neither as crowded nor as noisy as it would probably be in another hour, but the young and beautiful movers and shakers of the capital, along with the young and beautiful mover-and-shaker wannabes, were already two to three deep along the length of the bar.
"I don't think we have a place quite like this back in Tyler," Gabe said as they were waiting to be shown to a booth.
Blackthorn inhaled deeply through his nose.
"Smells like success," he said.
He folded his cane, took a seat opposite Gabe, and asked only for water. Later, after they had talked about almost everyone of interest in Tyler and ordered fish, Gabe could wait no longer.
"So?"
"Let us not use names at all," Blackthorn suggested.
"Agreed."
"First of all, on the surface at least, the man really seemed to be trying. He certainly had important things to do, but he never made me feel as if I were an intrusion on his busy day. He was never curt or condescending, and as I said before, he sincerely seems to want to get to the bottom of what is going on.
"In addition to the actual testing, I took an extensive history from him, stressing what he remembered from each of the episodes, and also an exhaustive history from his wife, stressing exactly what she had witnessed. Allowing for the fact that the husband remembers little of the details, their descriptions of each of the events were similar, but there were differences in what they described from one event to the next."
"Explain."
"I really can't, Gabe. At least not until I put all the test results together, but these episodes aren't behaving with the consistency of, like, a seizure with a specific focus in the brain, or a tumor."
Gabe glanced around to ensure there was no one he knew or who seemed to be paying undue attention to them. The place was filling up, but none of the faces were familiar.
"So, at this point, what's your guess?"
Blackthorn leaned forward.
"Toxicity," he said in a gravelly whisper.
"Drugs?"
"Some kind, yes."
"But—?"
"Don't ask, Gabe, because I don't have the answers. Right now, though, that's the only thing that makes any sense to me. The man is taking something that's causing this, or someone is finding a way to get something into
his body."
Gabe sighed and exhaled slowly. The implications of what the psychologist was suggesting were staggering.
"I don't even begin to know what to do with that."
"Those blood samples you drew would be a good place to start. I would find the best forensic chemist you can find and have the specimens tested for anything that's not normally found in the human body—anything and everything."
Gabe felt sick about having allowed the samples to vanish. He should have had the presence of mind to take them back to his apartment.
"Will do," he said, wondering if there was anything to be gained by drawing blood from Drew in between the attacks. Certainly, a negative report would prove nothing.
"There's more," Blackthorn said, smoothing a few errant wisps of long gray and black hairs from his forehead.
"Go on."
"I don't quite know how to say this, Gabe, so I'm going to start by telling you that you can accept what I'm going to share or reject it. And other than to say that I believe my lack of eyesight since birth has everything to do with what I'm going to tell you, I have no real explanation. But I have had enough experience with my unusual ability to believe with certainty that it exists."
"Unusual ability?"
The psychologist hesitated, perhaps to emphasize that what he was about to disclose was personal and private.
"Most but not all the time," he said finally, "I can tell with some consistency when someone is lying. Call it a sixth sense if you wish, although in my case it would be the fifth. But I get a strange, almost indescribable feeling deep in my thoughts when a person isn't telling the truth, or even when they are withholding information and telling a half-truth. There's a word that I believe is from Zen—shingan. It means 'mind's eye' and refers to the ability to sense a person's thoughts or feelings. I believe that I am in touch with my shingan."
The First Patient Page 16