by David Grace
“You did a terrific job, Danny,” Kane said.
“Those tips you gave me really helped. We’re gonna catch this guy, Agent Kane. We will.”
Kane shot a nervous glance across the street. They had to get the hell out of here.
“Let’s go over everything back at the office and figure out our next move.” Kane reached for the door handle, then turned back.
“I’m really proud of you, Danny,” Greg said. Rosewood gave him a smile that threatened to break his face.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Kane stalled on turning in his report, wanting to see if anything happened when the Secret Service reduced Kathryn’s protection detail to just one team. He had uneasily waited through the weekend but nothing happened. Back at the office Rosewood wanted him to organize a surveillance team on Farber’s mailbox but, fearing discovery, Greg had refused, instead ordering Danny to find another way. Now that Monday had passed without incident Greg realized that he had to let the Hopper thing go. Tomorrow he would turn in his report and get back to his real job. As if to mark the end of his detached duty tonight Kane had embarked on another date? assignation? hook-up? with Allison Varner.
“A penny for your thoughts,” Allison said.
Kane’s principal thought was that he wanted to strangle people who asked that question but he sensed that saying so would be a mistake. What does she want to hear? he asked himself and wiped his lips with his napkin to stall for time.
“I could tell you that I was thinking about how ravishing you look tonight, but you would dismiss that as an attempt to dodge your question with flattery. Or,” Kane leaned a little forward, “I could say how lucky I was to be here with you but that would make you worry that I was developing a dangerous emotional attachment.” Was that a wry smile or a sneer? “Or, I could turn it around and say that I was wondering what you were thinking. Which answer would you prefer?”
“How about the real one.”
“Oh, you want the real one. Most women don’t want the real answer to that question because they end up finding out that the guy’s wondering what kind of underwear she’s wearing or when his Viagra’s going to kick in or if he’s going to be able to get home in time to call the wife before she goes to sleep.” Well, there was no confusion about that look. “In my case I was thinking that this was the best steak I’ve had in a long time. It has just the right amount of red.”
“You’re not nearly as funny as you think,” Allison told him through clenched jaws.
“Gee, most people think I’m a laugh riot. Oh, you want to know what I really, really think. Fine. I was thinking that you’re wondering if I had an ulterior motive in insisting that we have dinner together instead of just jumping into bed.” The narrowing around her eyes told him that he was right and that she wasn’t amused. “And yes, I did. I thought it might be nice to actually have a normal conversation before we climbed all over each other like wild animals.”
“I don’t think that’s going to be a problem for you tonight,” Allison said, stabbing her sea bass as if it was still squirming on her plate.
“Well, how about this then: I was thinking that you didn’t tell me that you were Senator Denning’s niece.”
“I didn’t tell you a lot of things,” she said, briefly looking up from her dinner.
“Yes, and I wouldn’t have minded not knowing if you hadn’t talked your uncle into throwing me into a jackpot with the Secret Service. Pissing off people like that can really screw up a person’s career.”
“Since when do you worry about pissing people off?”
“I’m thinking about trying to avoid it. I’ve heard good things.”
Allison glared at Kane for almost a full second before she broke into a smile.
“And that concludes the psychotherapy portion of our evening,” Kane said and cut off another chunk of meat.
Allison concentrated on her dinner for half a minute then finally asked, “All right, what should we talk about?”
“That’s a good question. Our jobs? Religion? Politics? . . . . Sorry,” Kane said, reading the hurt look on Allison’s face. “I wasn’t making fun of you. Tell me something about yourself.”
“Like what?”
“Anything. What you studied in school. What you like to do for fun. What kind of movies you like. The sort of normal stuff people talk about.”
“On dates you mean, normal stuff people talk about on dates.”
“Heaven forbid. . . . Fine, pretend I’m a woman, a friend of a friend, and we’re having a pleasant lunch together.”
Allison gave him a suspicious glance then shrugged her shoulders in surrender.
“I like to cook,” she said.
“That’s good. I like to eat. What else?”
Communicating with her is like trying to coax a nervous cat into taking a treat from my hand, Kane thought but somehow he kept her talking all the way through dessert. Kane heard music drifting in from the lounge and for a moment he considered suggesting that they go in and have a drink and maybe even share a dance, then just as quickly he abandoned the idea. She was starting to regret letting down her barriers and he sensed that one wrong word and this nervous cat was going to flee.
“Next time I can book the room,” he said when the elevator started its climb.
“You don’t like this hotel?”
“It’s fine. I just meant that you don’t always have to pay.”
“I don’t mind,” she said in a voice that cooled five degrees.
You want to be in control, he thought. You want to be able to throw me out and lock the door and call hotel security to kick my ass to the curb if it starts to look as if I might actually feel something for you.
“OK.”
Once inside she turned so that Greg could unzip her dress, but he gently turned her around to face him.
“There’s no hurry,” Kane said and, starting at her shoulders, began running the flat of his hands down her body, pausing at her breasts and then at her groin. Finally when his palms had reached her calves he raised them slowly until he had pinned her skirt above her waist with one hand while gently massaging her thighs outward with the other. He heard a catch in her throat and her breathing turned into a pant. Kane had just begun to pull her panties down, inch by inch, when a sharp TRILL shattered the mood.
“Don’t answer it!” Allison ordered in a husky voice.
Kane fumbled out the phone and reached for the “Decline” icon then he saw that it was a text from Robert Dohenny: “KH kidnapped. Agent down” followed by a number.
“It’s Hopper!” Kane told her, struggling to his feet. “They’ve kidnapped his daughter.”
Allison froze then unconsciously pulled down her skirt.
“The ransom, they’re going to want him to vote against Lyla’s Law,” she said in a worried voice.
“No, I don’t think so.” Kane hurriedly rearranged his clothes. “The decision’s weeks away. They couldn’t keep her captive that long.”
“Then what?”
Kane looked at Allison in the dim light spilling through the windows, her skirt wrinkled and only halfway to her knees, her hair slightly askew, and he thought that he had never wanted a woman as much as he wanted her. In an instant she was in his arms. When he finally released her he could not have said how long the embrace had lasted. It seemed like both a second and a minute all at once.
“Remember where we left off,” Greg told her and then turned away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
It was the fourth bar of the night and if Kathryn Hopper followed her usual schedule Agent Warren Emerson figured that they had two more to go before he could turn her over to the babysitter back at her apartment. He had checked out the room when they arrived and nobody set off any alarms. From his table against the wall he had a good view of both of the entrances and he watched every patron for signs of weapons or any unusual interest in Hopper’s daughter. A trill of laughter marked Kathryn’s goodbyes to a pair of women who were
now admiring their new nail polish. A moment later she slipped into the empty chair opposite him.
“I need to visit the ladies’ room,” she told Emerson in a matter-of-fact voice.
He had laid down the ground rules on his first protection shift: She wasn’t to leave the area where he had eyes on her for any reason. If she had to use the restroom then he would have a waitress make sure that it was empty, then he would go in with her to double check that all the stalls are unoccupied and then he would stand guard outside until she emerged. If he had to use the restroom himself the procedure would be repeated with the proviso that she would lock herself inside the ladies room until he was done and he gave her the “I’m back” knock.
“OK,” Emerson said and walked her over to the bar. “Miss, would you mind making sure that the ladies’ room is unoccupied?” He had badged the staff the minute they walked in and explained the procedure. The girl didn’t mind. He tipped her a few bucks and she found the job no more trouble than delivering a round of drinks.
“Empty,” the waitress said a few moments later and Emerson slipped three singles into her hand. He and Hopper went inside and he double checked the room then he returned to the corridor and planted his back against the wall next to the door. Emerson skipped his eyes between the men’s room, the rear entrance down the hallway to his left and the bar’s main room down the hallway to his right. About half a minute after Kathryn went inside one of the male customers entered the corridor. Emerson scanned him automatically – Caucasian, five-eleven, one-eighty, brown and blue, long-sleeved dress shirt, gray slacks, black wingtips. The guy gave Emerson a quick glance then hugged the far wall and slid by. A minute later, a cell phone to his ear, the man emerged and turned sideways so that he could clear Emerson without getting too close.
Just as he passed the cell slipped from his hand. Both Emerson and the customer turned to watch it bounce off the carpet and as soon as the agent’s attention was distracted Donald slipped the stun gun from his sleeve and pressed it against Emerson’s stomach just below his rib cage. It was an over-powered model that was guaranteed to produce an average of more than eight million volts over three seconds of use. The manufacturer bragged that it could incapacitate a man through five layers of clothing.
Donald kept the trigger down for a full three seconds then grabbed Emerson in a bear hug and bundled him through the woman’s room door. Once inside he dropped the agent, bent over and shocked him in the throat for two more seconds. Donald was just straightening up when the latch on the cubicle rattled and Kathryn Hopper emerged. For an instant she was frozen by the image of Emerson on the floor then she took a breath to scream but Donald jammed the stun gun into her solar plexus and paralyzed her diaphragm. Now he had to move fast. He didn’t enjoy killing but it didn’t bother him either. Warren Emerson had seen his face and that meant he had to die. A gun was too noisy and a knife was too likely to get some of Emerson’s blood on him but Donald had come prepared.
He pulled a plastic bag from his pocket, slipped it over Emerson’s head and secured it tightly around the agent’s throat with a piece of cotton twine. Donald wasn’t worried about leaving prints. Earlier that evening he had coated his fingertips with cyanoacrylate, forming a barrier that sweat and skin oil could not penetrate. While Emerson thrashed in a vain attempt to draw a breath Donald gave Kathryn another jolt then slipped into the hallway to recover the dropped phone. A moment later he half-dragged, half-carried Kathryn out the back door. In a few seconds she was on his car’s rear floor and they were heading into the heart of D.C.
Ten minutes later one of the nail-polish ladies pushed into the restroom and discovered Warren Emmerson’s body. It was another fifteen minutes after that before the D.C. cops found Emerson’s Secret Service ID and finally rang the alarm. By then Donald already had Kathryn Hopper safely tucked away. Part One of his plan was now complete.
CHAPTER THIRTY
It took Kane three tries to get through to Dohenny and when he finally connected the agent just rattled off an address and hung up. The Taft House was the sort of neighborhood bar and grill that you could find in any city in America, solidly middle class, reasonably priced and with a kitchen just big enough to serve a good burger and decent fries. When Kane arrived it looked like a war zone. The local cops had been posted at the exits with orders that no one without a badge was to enter or leave.
Inside two teams of agents were working their way through the patrons and staff with each person being separately interviewed by each team to make sure that nothing was missed. One squad of crime scene techs processed the ladies’ room while the body still lay in the center of the floor awaiting clearance from the coroner’s assistant. A second team had finished processing the rear door and was now working on the tables that had been occupied by the three patrons who left shortly before the body was discovered. The first team to finish their assignment would move into the parking lot where they would photograph every license plate and collect every cigarette butt and gum wrapper.
Kane found Dohenny in the corner nervously talking into his phone. The agent saw Greg and held up one finger.
“Yes, I’ve got a team on that. . . . No, no cameras in the bar. . . . Right, look Kane’s here.” Dohenny gave Greg a quick glance. “OK.” Dohenny disconnected and slipped the phone into his pocket.
“What happened?” Kane asked, trying to tune out the frantic activity around them. Dohenny unconsciously wiped his sweating forehead and pulled out his notes. Kane recognized it as a defensive measure, a security blanket since Kane was sure that the details of tonight’s events were burned into Dohenny’s brain.
“The subject and Agent Emerson arrived at approximately eight-fourteen,” he began, reading from his pad in a clinical tone. When he got to his description of the murder scene Kane interrupted Dohenny’s report.
“Any prints on the plastic bag?”
“No.”
“If his prints weren’t found on the bag then we’re not going to find them anywhere else. Nobody heard anything?”
“They had a basketball game on the flat screen behind the bar.”
“Any obvious trauma to Agent Emerson?”
Dohenny shook his head. “Something like a blackjack might not have broken the skin. We won’t really know until the M.E. takes a close look at the body.”
“Any neighborhood cameras?” Kane asked.
“I’ve got guys walking both sides of the street. No ATMs or traffic cams in the area.”
Kane’s eyes glazed over for a moment then he muttered “Shit!” half under his breath.
“What?”
“This guy’s no nut job. He’s a pro and he’s not going to make any stupid mistakes.”
“Because he used a plastic bag and didn’t leave any prints?” Dohenny asked.
“Because he used a piece of string to secure the bag around Emerson’s neck.” Kane read the confusion on Dohenny’s face and continued. “Anybody but a pro would use tape to secure the bag. It’s automatic, but a pro knows that a small length of tape is hard to carry unless you roll it up and then it’s a pain to unroll, and tape will trap lint and threads and even skin cells. It’s a CSI’s dream, plus you can match the end you’ve got with the end still on the roll if the doer is stupid enough to keep it around. On top of that if this were some guy with standard military training he’d have slit your agent’s throat instead of planning things thoroughly enough to bring the bag with him. The fact that he used a bag and then secured it with twine instead of tape tells me that we’ve got the real deal here.”
“No one’s infallible and from here on it just gets harder for him.”
“How’s he going to contact you?” Kane asked, suddenly changing the subject.
“What?”
“The girl has no intrinsic value. She’s just a bargaining chip, so who does he negotiate with?”
“She’s got the judge’s numbers on her phone. We’re setting a trap on all of Hopper’s lines.”
“Her phon
e is dead?”
Dohenny nodded. “He must have removed the battery and the SIM card. I figure the judge will get a call from some burner phone which will give us a chance to at least track the number back to the store that sold it.”
“That’ll be a dead end,” Kane muttered, his mind already someplace else.
“We could get lucky.”
“If our killer’s phone was bought sooner than three months ago I’ll eat my hat. No, my guess is that our guy’s got a dozen of them stockpiled from mom and pop stores all over the East Coast.” Kane stared blindly toward the door, then frowned.
“What?”
“Exactly. What? – What’s he after? What does he expect to accomplish by taking the daughter?”
“You said it yourself. She’s his bargaining chip. Hopper recuses himself from the Hoffkemper case and he lets the girl go.” Kane shook his head. “Why not?”
“What if after he lets her go Hopper unrecuses himself?”
“Could he do that?”
Kane shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess it would be up to the Chief Justice. But if you were doing this would you take the chance? Think about it. You go to all this trouble. You kill a Secret Service agent and you kidnap the daughter of a Supreme Court Justice and then you say, ‘Promise me that you won’t vote’ and Hopper says, ‘OK, I promise’ and you just let her go and hope that Hopper is a man of his word? Does that sound like a good idea?” Kane nervously tapped his fingers against his thigh. “I don’t see it. He’s got something else planned, something that he thinks is absolutely going to take Hopper out of the case.”
“His resignation from the court?” Dohenny suggested.
“Assuming he would resign and even if he did, that’s still not 100%. The country would be outraged. Theoretically, the President could re-appoint Hopper to fill the vacancy once they had the daughter back. The Senate could confirm him in a day if they were pissed off enough.”