Now another kick came, landing directly on her throat. She let out a sound that was part gasp, part vomit. An instant later, from another direction, a boot arrived on her thigh. Then, as if correcting its aim, the same boot made a direct hit on her groin, the shock of being kicked in that intimate place almost overriding the pain of the sensation.
There were three more blows, the last apparently targeted with expertise at her head. As always, her brain refused to switch off. She found herself thinking that the people around and above would assume that what was happening was a terrible accident, if they were aware of it at all. They had probably not seen the two or three men who, she suspected, had formed a ring around her, deliberately preventing anyone else gaining a glimpse, each taking turns to administer their punishment. They must have been standing close by and on either side of her, waiting for their cue. Nor would anyone else have noticed these men walking away once the job was done, each in separate directions, melting into the crowd – performing their disappearing act at the very moment Madison Webb passed out.
Chapter 37
Doran surveyed the room. He knew these people. He knew the churches they went to, the names of their daughters, the TV shows they watched, the cars in their driveways. He had met none of them before. But they were county chairs of the state Republican party, a breed he knew as intimately as his own family. In fact, given that his parents were both dead and his ex-wife and son lived in Maine, he knew them more intimately than his own family.
In the diary, this meeting at the campaign HQ in Sacramento was scheduled to be sticky. For the GOP, the February meet in a statewide California race always was. The oldest among them still remembered, or at least had heard of, the glory days when Ronald Reagan was comfortably winning consecutive terms in the state en route to national office. ‘Why can’t we have some of that now?’ they’d bleat, in their nylon trousers and oversized glasses, although not in so many words.
But this time was going to be different. Thanks to the LA Times and that ferret of a journalist, the garrison protests had Elena Sigurdsson neck and neck with Berger, a phenomenal achievement for a Republican so early in the cycle. The danger now was that it would go to the candidate’s head, that she would start believing she had something special, that it was down to her unique appeal and charisma that the numbers were shifting. Hard to break it to them that they were just a can of beans whose sales went up or down depending on the vicissitudes of the market. But he would do it if he had to.
No need to do that now. This was to be a happy, breezy occasion. Matt had even invited a camera crew in for the occasion, doubtless for a feelgood item on surging morale in the Sigurdsson camp. Not a bad idea, Doran was grudgingly ready to concede. He took up his position on the side wall.
After an introduction from state chairman Ted Norman – his face even redder than usual, the rims of his eyes apparently raw, he was all but glowing – the candidate launched straight in, giving her assessment of the race ahead, why there were no grounds for complacency, it all depended on your support in getting out the vote, but California was ready for change and, with your help, that’s what we’re going to do in November!
Then it was time for questions, the first a softball lovingly moulded from cotton wool and candy floss. ‘I’m so proud of you and this campaign. Do you really believe you can win this thing?’
That brought applause and the pleasingly predictable, ‘I wouldn’t have entered this race if I didn’t believe … as I’ve always said, I’m in it to win it!’
If anything, the questions got mushier. What is your opponent’s greatest weakness? What more can we do, out there in the field, to bring home victory? What will be your first act as governor? Funny, Bill Doran reflected, what one good poll number can do. Without it, these activists would be demanding more of this, objecting to the inclusion of that, and generally Monday-morning-quarterbacking the entire campaign strategy, convinced they knew better than these hired guns who didn’t understand California politics the way they did. Instead, they were putty.
Then Sigurdsson gestured at a persistent hand at the back; Doran had to twist his thick, linebacker’s neck to see him. He clocked the questioner’s morose expression, automatically setting this man apart from the true believers crammed into the room, all of them cheerily knocking back the Kool-Aid.
‘I want to thank you for your campaign too,’ he began. ‘Especially your courage. It’s about time someone had the cojones’ – he pronounced it with a hard ‘j’ – ‘to say what needs to be said in this country. What’s needed to be said for a long time. I wouldn’t have guessed it would be a woman who had the balls to do it – excuse me – but there we are. That’s just how things work out sometimes.’ A barely perceptible ripple of discomfort passed through the room.
He went on: ‘But someone had to start telling the truth about what’s happened here. About the menace we’ve allowed into our country.’
Doran stiffened.
‘Now I know we’re not allowed to talk like my daddy did – about the “yellow peril” and all that. That’s not politically correct. But sometimes you need to tell it like it is. And right now, peril is exactly what it is. They’re right here. With their boots on our ground. So excuse me if I’m not too polite.’
By now Doran was standing tall, his chin raised. He had made strenuous eye contact with Matt, issuing a glare that said: disaster. He reinforced the point by tilting his head towards the cameras. This will look bad. Worse still, Norman was nodding visibly and within the camera shot, adding to the impression that this wingnut represented the true, if repressed, views of the party faithful.
But Doran hardly needed to worry. Sigurdsson had enough instinct of her own to know she needed to step in. She talked over the questioner for the time it took Matt to locate the technical guy and get him to cut the microphone. The man was still speaking, crying out to be heard, but she was amplified while he wasn’t, so she had the floor.
‘I want to be very clear. There is no place for racism or xenophobia in this campaign, none whatsoever.’ When the inevitable applause came, she wisely carried on speaking through it. Even if she was not saying much – ‘No place at all, let me be clear about that …’ – it was an effective, if ancient rhetorical trick. It created the illusion that the speaker was all but drowning in applause, struggling to wade through the flood of approval that was enveloping her.
Doran nodded his assent. The candidate was both growing into the role, he reflected, and growing in his esteem. He was too hard-headed to be a gusher, to let emotion cloud his judgement. He would always rely on the stats; he would not get carried away. That said, even hired-gun political consultants needed to feel the moment sometimes, to feel what the folks felt. If you stopped getting turned on yourself, then you’d have no idea how to turn on others. And right now he was allowing himself to feel what, he was ready to swear, every county chair in this room was feeling: that this woman really could win in November. That she could be the next Governor of California and after that, who knew?
What she did next only confirmed that impression. She pulled off a subtle two-step, not easy for a relative novice. First, she strengthened her attack on racism, nicely appealing to moderate voters (especially suburban women, aged thirty-five to forty-five). ‘My message has always been one of good, old-fashioned patriotism, the kind my parents instilled in me: America belongs to Americans – all Americans, every one of us, no matter where we come from.’
And then a neat little nod to the base, lest they think she was going soft. ‘All of us who love America feel the same way about this. We want the American people to be strong again, to be proud again, to be the independent nation our Founders dreamed of. Friends, join with me in sending a message out from this campaign to California and beyond: It’s time to take back our country!’
Thursday 10.10pm
The first sensation, before the realization of pain or the intimation of the bright, overhead light, was surprise. The experience of a lo
ng, sustained sleep was so unfamiliar to Madison Webb that to emerge from it was striking. It brought a strange kind of pleasure, though that was fleeting. The instant she moved even slightly, any comfort was scattered and dispelled by pain.
Her head was throbbing at its base, sending out the image of a spreading stain, like a tattoo of a grey cloud, on her neck. She could picture it, contracting and expanding in time with the hurt. She tried to turn, but that only started up the discordant orchestra of the rest of her body: the agony of bruised ribs and pounded muscles. She let out a sound that was part cry and part gasp. She still had not opened her eyes.
She heard him before she saw him, his voice soothing and calm. He placed his hand on hers. ‘Take your time,’ he said. Jeff Howe. Patient, quiet, preparing her gently. Acting as if he were a family member, as if he were her lover.
That made her rush to open her eyes, to find out what the hell was going on. She saw the white walls of a hospital room; stretching directly in front of her, the rumpled sheets of a hospital bed. She was tilted at an angle, even though she was certain she had not lifted herself up. It took her at least thirty seconds to work out that the top half of the mattress had been raised to create this gradient, but it was nothing to do with her. She moved her left hand under the covers, to check that she could. Her right too. But this hand was resting close to her most private parts which, she remembered, had been made agonizingly tender.
Her dream came back to her now, the gobbling sense of being swallowed, as if she had been sinking into a soft marsh. Except this bog was made of people. She had been standing still and then the ground had opened up, devouring her before closing over her. Once below the surface, demons had prodded and poked her with hot irons and heavy clubs; she had fallen and they had kicked her, punching her crotch. She had seen two of them, or perhaps she had sensed them – her attackers, initially flanking her like discreet bodyguards, determined to protect her. But when the boots and fists rained on her exhausted body, seeking to soften and batter it like a cut of meat, she had never got so much as a glimpse of their faces.
‘I had a very bad dream,’ she said, even the words draining her. She was trying to focus, but the light was so bright.
‘Yes. It must have felt like a dream.’
‘You know about my dream? That’s funny.’ The act of offering a feeble smile seemed to tug on several muscles, all of them rent and shredded.
‘I wish that’s all it was, Madison.’
Now, in the haze, the word ‘painkillers’ presented itself to her, as if emerging from a smoggy cloud, still wreathed in fog. That’s what this was, that was why she had slept.
Then came the other realization, the same one that had greeted her each ‘morning’ – or, more accurately, after each short interlude of sleep during these last few days – the realization that it was not some night terror of the imagination that had killed Abigail. That it was real, a hard boulder of fact that would not be shoved out of the way. It would still be there tomorrow. And Abigail would be gone.
Only at this moment did she look directly at Jeff, leaning forward in a modest wooden seat at her bedside. A dark line was etched under each eye.
‘What’s happened?’ she said lamely, attempting another wan smile.
‘Lots, Madison. Lots has happened.’
She raised her eyebrows, a manoeuvre which hurt much more than it had any right to.
‘Starting with you. You were at Mario Padilla’s rally, do you remember that?’
Maddy made the slightest of nods.
‘Things turned pretty nasty. They kinda got out of hand. A scuffle broke out near you. Somehow you got caught up in it. I don’t know how. Knowing you, you were trying to interview both sides while they were fighting.’ He gave her a wide smile. She was struck by the whiteness of his teeth: even in her stupor, she could see he was trying to be charming, trying to charm her.
A thought was taking a long time to form, uncoiling slowly like a sleepy worm. She had no firm idea of the shape of it, except that it did not agree with what Jeff had just said, though she could not say exactly how. Still, long before she could think how to convert it into words, he was speaking again.
‘But there’s something else that’s happened, Madison. That’s why I’m here.’
She summoned the energy to say, ‘Go on.’ The sound the words made was a whisper.
‘We’ve got him, Madison. We found him and we’ve got him.’
Chapter 38
Maddy let her head fall back into the pillow as Jeff explained how the prolonged exercise in facial recognition had finally brought a match to the man spotted at the bar of the Great Hall on the night Abigail had been killed. Given the poor angle, it had required a team of highly specialized computer forensic analysts to generate anything that could count as a positive ID. Tellingly, bar records showed that the suspect had paid in cash that night, leaving no identity trail. He had also arrived alone, so there had been no obvious witnesses to interview. He had been unusually difficult to trace which, in Jeff’s unofficial view, counted as grounds for suspicion in itself.
‘He was careful,’ he said.
‘What about the others?’
‘All the men who’d been interviewed have been released now. He’s the one, we’re sure of it.’
‘No,’ she said, frustrated not to be able to talk faster. ‘The other women.’
‘I think the team are taking it one step at a time,’ he said, letting the words hang in the air for a while.
‘So who is he, this—’
‘Justin Brooks.’
She nodded, saving herself the effort of repeating the name. ‘Who is he?’
‘White Caucasian male, twenty-eight years of age; army veteran; resident of Long Beach, occasional visitor to LA; unmarried; record mostly clean, except for two cautions for domestic violence. Used to work in house removals; last known employment was driving a cab.’
‘Domestic violence?’ The words seemed to have more syllables than Maddy remembered; they took so long to say.
‘Yep. I think that kind of clinched it for Barbara.’
Maddy paused, letting her eyes close as she swallowed. Barbara Miller, the detective. An earlier, unanswered question tugged at her. With effort, she said it out loud. ‘Is there any connection between,’ she swallowed again, ‘between this man and the others? Between him and Rosie? Or Eveline? Anything at all?’
Jeff checked his watch. ‘Christ, Madison. The doctors told me I shouldn’t talk to you for more than thirty seconds.’ The bright white teeth were showing again.
‘Just answer my question.’ No longer a whisper, but slurred. As if she’d just come from the dentist.
‘Madison, I’m not on this case, remember?’
‘Barbara would have told you. She told you everything else.’
He stood up, as if to go. ‘You need to rest, Madison. Please. Forget what I’m asking you to do. Your body is pleading with you.’
He let his hand rest on hers, a gesture capable of more than one interpretation and chosen for that reason: it could be platonic if that’s what she wanted. He was almost at the door when she spoke again.
‘I thought they reassigned you. To traffic duties. Punishment for helping me.’
‘They did.’
‘But here you are. In the loop.’ The phrase was hard to form, her mouth full of cotton wool.
‘They switched me back.’
‘How come …’ She swallowed at the effort of it. ‘How come they switched you back?’
‘What can I say, the Chief of Police always liked me. Now get some rest.’
The room was quiet, save for some beeping coming from an unseen and, to her, mysterious machine. There was a red button attached to a cord resting on her lap. She wondered who would come if she pressed it. Which prompted the return of the worm that had not managed to uncoil while Jeff Howe had been facing her: her disagreement with his account of what had happened at the rally. There had been no scuffle. There had been no
fight. She had been pushed to the ground and attacked. Why had he pretended otherwise?
And Jeff was back in his old job, his punishment over before it had begun.
What can I say, the Chief of Police always liked me.
Jarrett himself had intervened to overturn the suspension. Why would he do that? Just because he liked Jeff? And, and …
Her brain was fogging up again, like the inside of a car on a wintry morning. Think, she told herself, but even that instruction moved through her slowly. Jeff had just invented some bullshit story designed to conceal the fact that she had been beaten up in broad daylight, as plainly as she had been followed and, she now remembered with nauseous horror, watched by a camera hidden in her bathroom. Her friend and closest colleague had been subject to a crude honey trap. Her car had been unaccountably clamped. And all of it had happened straight after Maddy had published a brief piece putting the garrison in the frame. Why would Jeff be covering for even part of that effort?
What can I say, the Chief of Police always liked me.
She moved fractionally, which brought signals of pain from her ribs and between her legs. She touched herself there again, to explore the soreness. She had been hit very hard and very deliberately, the manner of the beating designed to send a message: that once roused, the forces behind the garrison could follow her, watch her and hit her where it hurts. They would show no delicacy just because she was a woman.
She needed to stay focused. What did she really know of Jeff Howe? That he had long been keen on her, persistently so. What else? That he was ambitious. And that his ambition was justified: when she was on the crime beat, the LAPD gossip had regularly tipped Howe for promotion, eventually even as a future Chief of Police. Somewhere small to start with – San Luis Obispo, say, or out of state – but afterwards, who knows? He looked the part: forty, salt-and-pepper hair, good with the media. So if it came to a clash, her wellbeing or his career, what would he choose?
The 3rd Woman Page 29