Blood Trust jm-3

by Eric Van Lustbader

  “What do you think I meant?”

  “We weren’t lovers in the classical sense—like Romeo and Juliet.”

  “If memory serves, Romeo dies.”

  She snorted in derision.

  “About the psychopharmacologist,” Jenkins went on. “One of the things he said about you in his report is that, in his opinion, you’re lacking in affect.”

  “I think he’s lacking in affect.”

  Jenkins gave her a tight smile. “What his diagnosis means is that, basically, you have difficulty locating your emotions. Sometimes you can’t find them at all. In other words, there are times when you just don’t care about anything … or anyone.”

  She looked away again.

  “His evaluation will hold a great deal of weight in the course of the investigation. Typically, people who can’t feel—”

  “I told you,” she flared. “No fucking drugs!”

  “You’re not listening to me,” he continued doggedly. “Your reaction to your boyfriend’s death—or rather your lack of one—was duly noted by everyone at the crime scene, including those sympathetic to you.”

  “You can’t possibly understand.”

  He spread his hands. “Now is your chance to enlighten me.”

  She stared at him, stone-faced.

  Jenkins sighed heavily. “In return for you being held in your uncle’s recognizance instead of in a federal holding cell, the judge ordered a psychiatric evaluation.” He took another breath and let it out slowly, as if anticipating the coming storm. “You must comply with the psychopharmacologist’s diagnosis, which, of course, includes your taking whatever psychotropic medications he prescribes.”

  Alli leapt up again and retreated behind the chair back, as if he were a lion from which she needed saving. “I can’t! I fucking won’t!”

  “I’m sorry.” Jenkins regarded her with what seemed to be genuine pity. “I’m afraid you have no choice.”

  * * *

  DAYLIGHT SEEPED into the grove of trees with the blue-white flicker of a television screen. Jack, exhausted and frightened for Alli, had been scrutinizing the crime scene for hours. The detectives had made their reluctant exit, but Naomi Wilde and Peter McKinsey remained, along with Fearington’s commander, Brice Fellows, who had had sandwiches and thermoses of strong black coffee brought out from the academy’s commissary. Fellows, to his credit, stood back, sipping coffee, silently observing him as he worked. Jack was unfamiliar with McKinsey, but he had gotten to know Naomi well enough when she was guarding the FLOTUS. Carson had plucked Naomi out of her daily assignments specifically to guard his wife. That was how Edward Carson did things—by instinct. In thinking of Lyn Carson, Jack realized that no one had informed Alli that her mother was dead. On reflection, Jack supposed such news was better left undelivered for the time being.

  Jack had spent his time wisely. As soon as there was sufficient natural light he switched off the spots and got to work. He had learned to distrust spotlights, which tended to distort perspective and played havoc with the impressions received by his brain. Circling the body in ever closing circles, his dyslexic brain literally took pictures of the corpse—not only the ashen color and unnatural granular quality of the skin, the grotesque disfigurement of body and face, but aspects other people could not see or perhaps accurately interpret. His brain, however, worked more than three hundred times faster than other people’s, and so it could recognize tiny anomalies and dislocations, and, in the time it took a human being to inhale and exhale, analyze them.

  This was how he discovered the fracture below the left eye. It was precise, like a break a surgeon would make in the process of resetting a bone. There was, also, a deliberateness about it that intrigued him. He said nothing of either his find or his musings to the people in the grove with him.

  He stood up and said to Fellows, “Commander, do you really believe Alli capable of this crime?”

  Fellows’s meaty shoulders lifted and fell. “To be honest, Mr. McClure, I found myself a failure at human psychology the moment my wife of twenty years walked out on me without a word of explanation.”

  He turned. “Naomi?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t imagine it.” Her brow furrowed. “On the other hand, she’s like a closed book to everyone except you, so I’d ask you the same question: Is she capable of this kind of protracted violence?”

  “Absolutely not,” Jack said.

  “But we have the vial with traces of roofies under her bed,” McKinsey pointed out, “and a bloody knife in the trash behind her dorm.”

  Jack nodded. “We’ve yet to determine whether it’s Billy’s blood on the blade, or if her prints are on the haft.”

  “And if they are her prints?” Naomi asked.

  He waved away her concern. “Someone has gone to a lot of trouble setting her up. This has been meticulously thought out.”

  “What about the bizarre nature of the murder?” McKinsey said. “The knife wounds, draining the victim of blood?”

  “Red herrings,” Jack said, “designed to get us going around in circles.”

  McKinsey made a noise in the back of his throat.

  “What,” Jack said, “you think there’s a vampire infesting Fearington?”

  “Of course not, but don’t you think it’s possible that when Alli found out about this other girl…” He snapped his fingers.

  “Arjeta Kraja,” Naomi cut in helpfully.

  “Right. Isn’t it possible that when Alli found out Billy was boffing Arjeta Kraja she flipped out?”

  “And the sky could be falling,” Jack said acidly. “Let’s deal with reality.”

  McKinsey shrugged, as if to say, I tried.

  “Something stinks in this setup.” Jack peered again at the corpse. “It’s weird, gothic, over the top. We need to find out where the stink is coming from.”

  “We need to talk to this Arjeta Kraja,” Naomi said. “ASAP.”

  Jack nodded, only partly engaged. There was another thing he was reluctant to share with Naomi and McKinsey. He had the nagging suspicion that Alli knew more about this girl than she had let on. Why she would keep that secret was anyone’s guess, but Jack knew Alli well enough to know that she must have a damn good reason. She better have.

  No one would tell him where she was taken. Jack had called Henry Carson’s townhome in Georgetown without luck.

  Jack, his mind made up, turned to Fellows. “I want to interview Alli’s roommate.”

  * * *

  VERA BARD lay on a bed in the academy infirmary. The pinkish light of dawn streamed in through windows and a small skylight high up in the ceiling. The walls were painted a cheerful yellow, but the floor was institutional gray linoleum, a veteran from another era.

  The nurse led Jack over to Vera’s bed. Alli’s roommate was a dark-haired girl with large, slightly upswept chocolate eyes, an assertive nose, and a wide, expressive mouth.

  “Please, just for a few minutes,” the nurse cautioned. “She is still very weak.”

  Fluids dripped into Vera’s arm and her eyes were hooded, as if she was having trouble staying awake, but this only made her seem sultry. She looked vaguely Eurasian. Her long hair had lost its sheen to sweat; it lay lankly on the pillow in thick, Medusan coils. Still and all, Jack observed, she was an exceptionally beautiful young woman.

  He sat on a painted metal chair and introduced himself. “Vera, would you tell me what happened last night?”

  “I … I don’t know.” Her voice was soft and husky. “I went to bed as usual, read for a bit, took my pill, as usual, and went to sleep.” She licked her dry lips. “The next thing I knew I woke up here.”

  “Alli was in the room when you went to sleep?”

  “Yes.”

  “And while you were reading?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you two talk at all?”

  “Before I went to the bathroom we were talking about…” Her brow crinkled. “I can’t remember about what. Boys, maybe.”
/>   “About Billy?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “And after you came back from the bathroom?”

  Vera shook her head and a lock of hair fell across her cheek.

  Jack sat for a moment more. He smiled at her. “I’m sorry for what happened.”

  Vera seemed not to have heard him. She licked her lips again. “I want to see Alli.”

  “I’ll speak to Commander Fellows.” Jack rose. “By the way, what medication are you taking?”

  “Crestor. I have high cholesterol.”

  Jack nodded and smiled. “Thank you, Vera.”

  * * *

  ON THE way out of the infirmary, Jack encountered Naomi.

  “DNA is going to take at least a week,” she said, “but the forensic team found Alli’s fingerprints on the water glass beside Vera’s bed.”

  “Anyone else’s?”

  “Just Alli’s.”

  Jack’s cell phone buzzed, and then Dennis Paull was speaking rapidly and tensely in his ear. He strode down the hall, away from Naomi and McKinsey, who had appeared.

  “A new position?” Jack said after a moment. “Is Crawford kicking you out?”

  “Not exactly.” Paull further explained the changes. “You’re coming with me, Jack. I’m pulling all the details together. At midnight you and I are going to fly to Macedonia, then trek west into the mountains to a shithole called Tetovo, where we will terminate this sonuvabitch Arian Xhafa.”

  Jack bit back a protest. Though Paull had made it clear that he was sympathetic to Alli’s plight, Jack suspected he’d simply argue that there were other people—Naomi Wilde chief among them—who were perfectly adequate to being Alli’s advocate. Besides, in Harrison Jenkins she had one of the most savvy criminal attorneys on the planet. Jack could hear him now: Forget it, Alli’s in good hands. The trouble was, that was only half true. No one knew Alli the way he did, and she wasn’t about to open up to anyone else, Naomi included. And keeping silent wouldn’t help her cause one iota.

  Instead, he said, “Just like that? From what you’ve told me he’s exceptionally well defended and well armed. He won’t be easy to kill.”

  Paull laughed. “I may have spent the last several years behind a desk, Jack, but believe me when I tell you that I still have a trick or two up my sleeve.”

  FIVE

  ALLI, WALKING slowly around her uncle’s study, spent the slowly ticking seconds dragging her fingertips across the tops of books, the contours of artifacts and souvenirs, the outlines of framed photos of her uncle with presidents past and present. She paused at a photo of the two brothers and stared at her father. He was smiling into the camera, his hand on his older brother’s shoulder. Judging by the hazy mountains in the background, they were out west somewhere, doubtless at one of her uncle’s ranches. He clutched a ten-gallon hat in one fist.

  She was certain she ought to feel something at the sight of her father’s face—a sense of remorse, of pain, of a space inside her into which he had once warmly nestled—but she felt nothing. It was as if her heart had been turned to wood, burned to ashes in a fire, and was now a heart in name only, a hollow vessel, useless as a desert in which nothing could live.

  She tried to think of incidents in the past—her time with Emma, Jack’s daughter, and more recently, her adventures with Jack himself in Moscow and the Ukraine. All of it felt like a dream, or a film she was watching without becoming fully engaged. Briefly she tried to fight her way out of the disassociation, but it was too difficult for her to defeat. There was a good reason for that, too. Without being aware of it, she had developed a mechanism for keeping her distance from the week of terror when she had been imprisoned in the small, lightless room and subjected to …

  She was still in a prison, one of her own making.

  A barrier came up, like a wall of lead stopping Superman’s X-ray vision. Her own X-ray vision—her habit of peering backward into that one section of her past, examining that week, picking at it as if it were a scab that wouldn’t heal—had to be thwarted at all costs, even to the loss of feeling in the present.

  She made a little inchoate sound in the back of her throat, as a fox will when caught in a spring-loaded trap, when it is about to gnaw off its paw to regain its freedom. The truth was she longed to talk with Annika, though this was the one thing she must always keep from Jack. It was Annika who had convinced Jack to let her go see the mistress Milla Tamirova, who had taken Alli into her BDSM dungeon and made her confront her terror at being tied into a chair. Why had Annika done this? Because she, too, had been held hostage. She knew the hell into which Alli had descended because she had inhabited that very same hell. Unlike Alli, however, she had managed to escape. If only she could meet with her again, but neither she nor Jack knew where she was.

  Despair took her up and shook her as a terrier will shake a rat it has caught. She wanted to cry, but her eyes remained dry. She took up a Frederic Remington bronze sculpture of a cowboy on a horse rearing up at the sight of a rattlesnake, and raised it over her head. She felt a burning desire to smash it into a glass vase, but lowered it back onto the shelf.

  She knew the noise would bring Rudy, who might decide to stay in order to ensure she didn’t commit more acts of vandalism. Being imprisoned again, even in her uncle’s study, was making her nuts. An icy ball of panic had sprung up in her gut, and with each rotation was increasing in size. She had to get out of here, and soon. She needed to find Jack, but she had no way of contacting him. There must be some kind of way out, said the joker to the priest. She laughed silently and grimly. Jack had told her there was always a way.

  She looked around the study, inhaled the familiar scents of leather, her uncle’s cologne, the remnants of cigar smoke floating like dust motes in the air. Closing her eyes, she tried to recall afternoons when she was a little girl, curled up in this very chair, inhaling the same scents. She had often been left alone while the grown-ups had conversed as only grown-ups can. She couldn’t remember how that had occupied her time. Despite the changes in seasons and times of day, all the afternoons blended one into the other.

  Abruptly, her eyes popped open. She had spent her alone hours exploring the nooks and crannies, drawers and shelves of Uncle Hank’s domain. Unfurling her legs, she rose from the chair and, taking small, silent steps, she approached the huge burl walnut desk. As a child, it had seemed as enormous as a battleship or a castle, and filled with as many secrets.

  But what had seemed like treasures to a little girl—a box of matches, a handsome humidor, a photo of a little girl—didn’t now. She no longer played with the brief and tiny flames, the odors of cigars repulsed her, and the little girl in the photo was Caroline, Uncle Hank’s daughter from his first marriage, who was now either dead or alive, but was, in any event, as lost to him as if she had fallen off the edge of the world. She had known Caroline, if only briefly. Playing with her, she had seen a darkness in her eyes. Only much later, long after Caro had vanished, after she herself had gone through a period of fear and suffering, had she recognized the nature of that darkness. Caro had been consumed with an inarticulate pain and rage. She had hit her breaking point and was gone. After the disappearance, Uncle Hank had questioned her, apparently believing she might know what happened to Caro. After that day, Alli had never heard him mention her again.

  With her fingertips caressing the desktop, she wondered what secrets lay within the depths of her uncle’s burlwood castle. She started from the bottom up, figuring that secrets were safest in the depths. The left lowest drawer held a strip of hanging files, all pertaining to InterPublic Bancorp—memos, letters, quarterly P&Ls, and the like. She pawed through them with little interest, the bottom of the file holders scraping against the bottom of the drawer. The drawer just above was not as deep. It contained the usual stacks of pads of various sizes, packs of yellow pencils, a red plastic child’s sharpener, gum erasers, and various sorts of tape. How very neo-Luddite of Uncle Hank, she thought. Save for some spent pencil sha
vings and a broken bit of pencil lead, the top drawer was entirely empty. The wide middle drawer directly above the kneehole was filled with the sort of accumulated odds and ends—paper clips, staples, rubber bands, and Hi-Liters in several colors—endemic to all offices. The three drawers on the right held, variously, stacks of political magazines like The Atlantic; a half-filled bottle of single-barrel bourbon, along with a pair of shot glasses in a holder; a paper packet of cough drops; a metal flask, dry as a bone inside; and a grease-stained take-out menu from First Won Ton, in Chinatown. She scanned it quickly. One item, a Chef’s Special, spicy fragrant duck with cherries, was circled in pencil. Beneath the menu was a photo of Caroline and her mother. Caro was young, ten or eleven maybe, but already you could see that she strongly resembled her mother, Heidi, who was tall, slim in an athletic way, blond—pale as a ghost, really—with a high, intelligent forehead and light eyes; it was impossible to tell what color from the photo and Alli didn’t remember her well enough to recall whether they were blue or green or hazel. Mother and daughter looked like two equestrians, models out of a Ralph Lauren ad. Sad now to think of Heidi somewhere on the West Coast and Caro in the particular level of limbo reserved for the disappeared. Alli put the photo and the take-out menu back, and closed the drawer.

  Perhaps there was nothing.

  She sat back on her heels, rocking back and forth thoughtfully, as she stared at the desk. On an impulse, she pulled open the drawer with the hanging files. She pushed them back and forth on their metal tracks, listening to the scraping, dry as an insect’s chirrup. All at once, a frown creased her face and, pushing the files as far as she could to the rear, she peered down at the bottom of the drawer. Looking again at the outside, it appeared as if there was a two- or three-inch differential. Rapping a knuckle against the bottom of the drawer, she heard a hollow echo, but feeling around there was no way in. Pulling the files toward her, she drew the drawer out to its fullest extent. A tiny half-moon indentation in the wood presented itself.

  Hooking her fingernail into it, she pulled and was rewarded with a meticulously milled rectangular piece of the drawer’s bottom detaching itself. Inside the hidden cubbyhole she found a cell phone, and that was all. She double-checked the space before fitting the cover back on, pushing the files back into place, and closing the drawer.