“Okay,” I conceded. “You’re right. Someone obviously wanted to kill me. But why take me home with you? Why not let the Alexandria police baby-sit me? Do you really want people to know that we’re… that we’re…” I stopped, at a loss for a word to describe whatever we were.
Lansing looked at me and smiled. Apparently, he enjoyed seeing me at a loss for words.
“That we’re seeing each other? That we’re dating? That we’re having a personal relationship?” He didn’t seem to be stumbling over the idea nearly as much as I was. “No, I’m not worried about that,” he said, “which isn’t to say I haven’t thought about it. But I’m entitled to a personal life outside work. And I also don’t intend to let my personal and professional lives get crossed up. When you’re a reporter, I’ll deal with you as a police detective. Whatever is between us the rest of the time is our business.”
I turned my head and looked out my window as Lansing turned the car to the right, down a short street that ended in a cul-de-sac. He made it all sound so simple, so clear-cut, so easy, I thought. I wished I were as sanguine as he apparently was about our being able to keep our personal and professional relationships separated. But I had been over this ground before; he hadn’t, as far as I knew. I was painfully aware of just how quickly it could turn into a minefield, blowing a relationship—and careers—sky high without warning.
You mean like someone did to your car?
Though I was sure my shadow thought it was being amusing, I didn’t much care for the simile it had chosen to describe where my relationship with Lansing might be headed. I pointedly ignored it.
“Here we are,” Lansing announced, maneuvering the Explorer into the driveway in front of a two-story house, one of the smaller ones in the neighborhood. The all-brick exterior had been painted white. Navy blue shutters framed each window. The healthy green lawn that began in the large front yard ran back along each side of the house to merge into the darker green of many large trees growing in the backyard. A very large magnolia of three or four decades’ standing was the showpiece of the front yard, it’s wide glossy green leaves shading the house’s sizable bay window from the afternoon sun. As Lansing turned off the ignition, the front door opened, and David Lansing came barreling out of it and down the front walk, followed by a plump, Hispanic-looking woman who stopped in the doorway.
“Dad’s home! Dad’s home!” David was shouting as he ran up to the driver’s side of the Explorer. Lansing opened the door.
“Hi, Chief,” Lansing said in greeting, and his son flung himself up into the cab and into his father’s arms. As they hugged, David looked over and saw me.
“Hi,” he said to me across his father’s chest. “Are you coming to have dinner?” Before I could answer, he looked back at his father. “Is she, Dad? Is Sutton staying for dinner?”
“She is,” Lansing said simply.
“Ya-a-a-y,” David shouted, showing an exuberance that was very different from anything I had seen a couple of days before at the marina. He clambered down out of his father’s arms to stand outside the Explorer again. “Hurry up and get out!” he said, looking over to me excitedly. “I’ll show you my room.” Then he disappeared around the door.
“There’s still time to escape,” Lansing told me as he disembarked. But by that time, David already had run around to my side of the Explorer, where he started rapping on the door.
“I think my escape just got cut off,” I replied, opening my own door. Except, I wasn’t so certain I was talking about the son.
* * * *
As soon as I set foot in the house, David pulled me upstairs for the promised tour of his room. It was a young boy’s room, with sturdy oak furniture and lots of cars and trucks and spaceships on shelves and in brightly colored plastic boxes. And even a couple of well-worn teddy bears stuck in one corner, apparently nostalgic reminders from his babyhood. In another corner was a child-sized desk with a low bookcase next to it. And on top of the bookcase was an eight-by-ten color photo of a sweet-faced blond woman, smiling up at the camera from where she sat on a blanket with a picnic basket in her lap.
Sarah, I thought, and my heart felt squeezed by emotions I didn’t want to examine too closely at the moment.
“That’s my mom,” a solemn little voice said at my side. I realized I must have been looking at the picture for more than just a few seconds. “She died when I was real little.”
“She was very pretty,” I said, smiling down at David, “and I’m sure she loved you very much.” He returned the smile and slipped a hand into mine.
“C’mon,” he said. “Let’s go eat. I’m hungry!”
* * * *
In the dining room, we were finishing up the last of the baked chicken that Gradella, the housekeeper and baby-sitter who had waited in the doorway as David had rushed out to greet us, had made before leaving for her own home.
“And on TV, I saw they have lots and lots of really big roller coasters,” David was explaining to me, his arms reaching out to their limits to show just how big. As he had throughout dinner, he still was giving us all the details of the delights and thrills to be found at King’s Dominion, a large amusement park some eighty or ninety miles south of us, just outside Richmond, to which he had been invited for the next day by a neighborhood friend’s family. Then his face fell. “But Dad says they won’t let me ride on the big ones. I’m not tall enough, and I’ll fall out and get hurt.”
“They do have some you can ride, though,” I told him. “They aren’t the biggest ones, but they still looked pretty big to me when I rode them.”
“Really?” David wanted to know, his eyes growing large again at the prospect. “And you rode on them? Were you scared?”
“A little,” I fibbed for his benefit. “They go pretty fast, too.”
“Did you hear that, Dad?” he asked, turning back to his father.
“I heard,” Lansing said. “You’re going to have more fun than you can handle. But now it’s time for you to go get your bath and get ready for bed so you can save up all your energy for tomorrow. When you get your pajamas on and brush your teeth, give me a yell, and I’ll come up and read to you for a few minutes.”
“Can I come back down and tell Sutton good night?”
“Sure.”
With that, David slipped out of his chair and left the dining room. Once he rounded the doorway to the front hall, we could hear him break into a run and pound up the stairs, his footsteps only partially muffled by the carpeting.
“He’s very bright, isn’t he?” I asked Lansing as he turned back to face me after watching his son leave the room.
“Much brighter than I was at his age,” he said, standing up and starting to clear the table. I got up from my chair and began helping him.
“Between television and what they hear from their friends, and now having access to computers, it’s frightening sometimes to realize how much they already know by the time they’re five or six,” Lansing continued, carrying the stack of plates and flatware through the door to the kitchen. I followed him with the glasses and the bread basket.
Lansing rinsed off each item before putting it into the dishwasher, then filled the soap reservoir in the door from a large yellow container that he kept under the sink. He closed the dishwasher door and pressed a few buttons. The dishwasher came on with a sucking, whooshing sound.
With a wet dishcloth, he proceeded to wipe down the counters and stove top. He poured water into the coffeemaker and turned it on. Then he got a dustpan and whisk broom and cleaned up the bread crumbs scattered underneath David’s dining room chair. By the time he was finished and we were having coffee at the kitchen table, David, now wearing pale blue summer pajamas, came running back down the stairs. Lansing stood up and tossed the remains of his coffee down the sink, turning on the faucet to rinse it all down.
“Okay, Chief,” he said, walking over to sweep his son up in his arms, “tell Sutton good night and let’s get you up to bed.”
David
leaned toward me from his father’s embrace, his thin, little-boy arms reaching out. I hesitated for a moment, awkward with surprise, and then, feeling foolish at my hesitation, I got up from my chair as well and walked over to meet him. His arms went around my neck in a tight hug. My right hand found its way to his back, where I held it for the couple of seconds that the hug lasted.
“Night, Sutton,” David said, squeezing hard.
“Good night, David. Sleep well.”
David released me from the hug, and Lansing started up the stairs, still carrying him.
“I’ll be back down in a little bit,” Lansing said, looking back down at me over his shoulder, where David was waving at me. “We just have to read a story.”
“That’s fine,” I answered, waving back at David. When they reached the landing at the top of the stairs, I turned and went into the living room to wait for Lansing to come back. Tiredly, I dropped onto a sofa upholstered in dark green and looked around.
What I saw, I suspected, were things chosen in Virginia Beach by a younger, happier Lansing and the woman whose picture sat on David’s bookcase, things now transplanted to a house in northern Virginia. A pair of overstuffed chairs, upholstered in tan with a dark green trim, faced each other from either side of the sofa. Across from me was the fireplace, its bricks painted white, its opening now closed off by glass doors and sitting cold and empty in August. Above it hung a large watercolor of dunes and sea oats, up close and from a low angle, with an impression of ocean in the background. In an outside corner of the room, behind me and to my left, a small but elegant secretary of cherrywood sat next to a large green plant that I couldn’t identify. In the other outside corner, a matching bookcase with glass-fronted doors held three or four dozen books and what looked like several large seashells of varying descriptions.
She was everywhere I looked. Sarah, whom Noah Lansing had loved very much. And for whose death, I knew, he still felt responsible. How, I wondered, could I ever compete with a dead woman, a woman who never would grow any older in her husband’s mind, a woman whose imperfections probably had long since dropped from memory? The woman who gave Lansing a son and then was murdered by the people her husband had been investigating.
You can’t. You don’t have what it takes to qualify for sainthood.
For once, I couldn’t have agreed with my voice more. Trying to measure up to Lansing’s dead wife was a goal far beyond my ability to achieve, I suspected. I changed the subject, making myself think of more practical things, such as the fact that I had to find a new place to live and a car.
It was the idea of a new car, though, that brought unexpected tears to my eyes.
Are you really crying over a hunk of metal?
No, I thought back angrily, wiping away the tears, which quickly were followed by more. And I knew I wasn’t crying over the car itself, as much as I had loved it and enjoyed it. Instead, I was crying because, for the first time all day, I had let myself think about what the car had represented. It had been one of the last remaining links with my family—my parents and my sister—all of whom now rested in their graves in a small cemetery in southern Georgia. I realized that, as long as I had the Beetle, somehow I still had some part of them. And now it was gone, torn and burned beyond any repairing. And I felt terribly, frighteningly alone.
But Noah Lansing would be coming back downstairs at any moment, I thought, and the last thing I wanted him to see was me crying, looking lonely and afraid—and vulnerable. I got up and walked over to a box of tissues that sat on the corner of the secretary, then wiped my eyes and blew my nose.
There was no time for indulging in useless regrets, I told myself, sitting down on the couch again. I had far more pressing things to worry about at the moment. Like who killed Dan Magruder? And who killed Robert Coleman? And who wanted to kill me? And I knew the answer to the last question would be Rob Perry if I let the ball drop on either of the first two, exploding car or not. I also knew I still had some legwork ahead of me to try to pin down details of Magruder’s role in the firing of the two police officers in McLean. And the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that, unless the police quickly nailed down a suspect among Robert Coleman’s fellow financial conspirators, someone also would need to go to Tallahassee and take a much closer look at his years there.
God, I thought, resting my head against the back of the sofa and closing my eyes, there weren’t going to be enough hours in the day to get it all done, especially if I had to keep fooling around with a police escort. I remember thinking that I definitely would have to call Detective Moore and firmly decline, once and for all, his offer of a bodyguard, and then I must have fallen asleep, there on Sarah Lansing’s sofa. I have a vague recollection of someone, presumably Lansing, putting a pillow under my head and a blanket over me at some point during the night. And kissing my forehead. Beyond that, there was just deep, dreamless, healing sleep.
Wednesday
Eleven
After seeing David off with his friend’s family to King’s Dominion at eight o’clock, Lansing drove me to my apartment building, where I repacked my bag and reminded myself that I also needed to start apartment hunting soon. Then he gave me a ride to the car rental agency in Arlington.
“Promise me,” he said, as I climbed out of the Explorer and lifted out my overnight bag, “that you’ll be careful, that you won’t take any unnecessary chances.”
“I’ll be fine,” I told him in a tone that I hoped sounded convincing. “I’ll be in rush-hour traffic, and then at the paper. There’ll be lots of other people around all the time. I’ll be okay.”
“If you see anything, anything at all suspicious, you’ll call Moore or 911 for help?” He didn’t sound as if he were very reassured by my attempts at sounding confident.
“Yes, I promise. Now, go to work!”
“Okay,” he agreed, “I just don’t want anything to happen to you.”
I softened a little at that, knowing that the attempt on my life probably brought back painful memories of what had happened to Sarah. If Lansing had any personal interest in me at all, the violent death of someone he cared about probably wasn’t an experience he wanted to repeat.
“Thanks for watching out for me last night,” I said. That earned me a smile, but it quickly was replaced by another concerned look.
“Will you call me and let me know for sure whether you’re going out of town?” he asked. On the drive over to the apartment, I had explained that I was hoping to convince Rob Perry that I should go to Florida for a couple of days. “Actually, I’d feel a whole lot better if you were several hundred miles away until they figure out who rigged your car.”
“I’ll call you. And I’ll be fine. Now, go.” I closed the door firmly and turned to walk up the steps of the 1930s-era bungalow that housed the car rental company. Behind me, I heard the Explorer back out of its parking space and then pull out into the street, taking the weight of Lansing’s concern for me with it. I went inside to pick up the keys to the rental car, which turned out to be a small white Pontiac.
* * * *
“Christ, McPhee! You’ll do anything to get a story, won’t you?” It was Sy Berkowitz, walking into the metro room with Mark Lester.
I was in the middle of reassuring Rob Perry that I was as safe at the paper as anywhere and that my mental state was sufficiently recovered to get back to work. Rob had come in only a few minutes earlier, just as I was hanging up from a call to my source at the northern Virginia medical examiner’s office, where Robert Coleman’s body had been autopsied. At Sy’s interruption, I stopped talking to Rob and turned to give what was intended to be a searing look at Sy.
“Ordinarily, I would respond to that with some witty comment of my own,” I told him, “except someone else got killed by a bomb intended for me, and I don’t think that’s particularly funny.”
“Cut it out, Sy,” Mark told him. “We’ve got work to do. We don’t have time for you and Sutton to get into one of your little due
ls.”
“When we’re finished here,” Rob went on, talking to me as if the exchange between Sy and me hadn’t occurred, “make sure you find James and let her know anything you know that she doesn’t about the police investigation on your car.”
“I will,” I assured him.
Rob stood up from where he had been sitting on top of the metro copy desk and started toward his office.
“Let’s all go in here,” he said to the three of us, “so we can talk without being interrupted.” We followed him in and found seats in the guest chairs around his desk.
“Now, where are we?” he wanted to know once we all were settled.
“The cause of death is official,” I said, looking from Rob to Mark to Sy. “Coleman was shot once in the chest with a .38-caliber handgun. The bullet severed the aorta, then went right on through his chest. He was dead pretty quickly, within seconds if not instantly. The police also recovered a spent slug at the scene, a short distance from the body, that they think is the one that killed him. Of course, at this point, they don’t have a murder weapon to try to match it to. And there’s still some question as to the time of death, given how far gone the body was. They’re waiting for the results of a couple more tests before they know.”
“What about suspects?” Mark asked, his head swiveling between Sy and me.
“Everybody and nobody,” I told him. “Detective Peterson told me this morning when I called him that they’ve managed to rule out most of the staff at the foundation. They’re still checking on a couple of people there, but neither of those looks like a real possibility. There’s an ex-wife who couldn’t take the teeny boppers after a while, but she lives in California now and apparently has witnesses that she hasn’t left town in weeks. They’ve also ruled out the three girlfriends who they’ve identified, although there could be more of them. Who knows?”
Sy snorted a laugh at that, his editorial comment on Coleman’s reputation for a weakness for very young, very blond women.
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