First Family

by David Baldacci

  “I was outside my house,” he said hastily.

  “Outside your house?”

  “Yeah. I was watching it. I thought if Pam believed I was still in Jacksonville, she and her ‘friend’ might get together. I wanted to catch them in the act. But nobody showed up, so I drove into the garage and went in the house.”

  “And if the guy did show, what exactly were you going to do?”

  “Do? Um, I’m not sure. Kick his butt probably.”

  “And then what, confess to Pam your own infidelity and let her kick your ass?”

  “Look, you asked and I told you. I don’t need a sermon, okay?”

  Something about this explanation was not adding up to Sean. “Your house is down a long driveway with woods on either side. Where were you watching from?”

  “The driveway curves and there’s a break in the treeline on the east side of the property. You have a clear line of vision to the front door as well as the garage side.”

  “It was night and it was dark.”

  “I had a pair of binoculars in my car.”

  “You just happened to?”

  “Okay, so I bought them with that thought in mind.”

  “When you were watching your own house, did you notice anyone around who shouldn’t have been there?”

  “No. There was nobody.”

  “There was obviously somebody, Tuck. They weren’t in the house while you were watching it or else you probably would have heard screaming. They had a surveillance zone set up before they made the hit, spotted you right away, and waited for you to go in before they slammed your house.”

  “But I would’ve seen them, Sean.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. They obviously knew what they were doing. And you obviously didn’t,” he added.

  “Shit,” grumbled Tuck.

  “What did you overhear on the phone calls? As detailed as you can.”

  “There were two calls. I just happened to pick up the same time as Pam did on one of them. I heard a guy’s voice. He said something like, ‘I want to meet. And soon.’ And Pam wanted to do it later. That’s all I heard before I got nervous and hung up.”

  “And the other time?”

  I was walking past the bedroom. She must’ve thought I had already left, but I forgot my briefcase and had come back from the garage. She was talking in a low voice but I heard her say that I was leaving town in two days and they could meet then.”

  “And what happened?”

  “I only pretended to leave town. I changed my flight and followed her. She went to a coffee shop about a half hour away.”

  “And you saw the guy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hair color, build, race, age?”

  “Big guy. About your height. I know that because he stood when she walked in. He was white with short dark hair that had some gray. Maybe about fifty. Real professional-looking.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I sat in my car for about half an hour. Then Pam came out and I took off.”

  “Why didn’t you wait around for the guy to come out and then confront him?”

  “I told you, he was a big guy.”

  “Is that the only reason?”

  Silence.

  “Tuck, talk to me!”

  “Okay, okay. He was dressed in a suit. I could see them looking at papers. They never did anything lovey-dovey. So, I suddenly started thinking…”

  “What, that maybe he wasn’t her lover boy? That maybe he was a lawyer and Pam was thinking about divorcing your ass?”

  “Or that he was a PI like you that she’d hired to check up on me.”

  That was probably what Pam had wanted to meet with me about.

  “Wait a minute, if you thought that, why did you come back from Florida early, the night Pam was killed? You said you wanted to catch them in the act, maybe kick the guy’s ass. But now you just admitted you took off before because he was a big guy. And you also admitted that you started thinking he wasn’t her lover but maybe a PI. Stop the bullshit. I want the truth.”

  “This is embarrassing, Sean.”

  “Tuck, do you want to get Willa back?”

  “Of course I do!”

  “Then forget your feelings of embarrassment and tell me the truth.”

  Tuck blurted out, “I thought if I caught the guy coming out of our house, I could intercept him and maybe buy him off.”

  “Why?”

  “The same reason why Dawson obviously did what he did. If Pam found out about the affair and went public the contract was down the crapper. I couldn’t let that happen, Sean. I’d worked my tail off. It meant everything.”

  A big part of Sean wanted to reach across the ephemeral mist of cellular signals and flatten Tuck Dutton.

  “Well, obviously it meant more to you than your marriage. And that story you and Jane fed me at the hospital? About your partner trying to force you to sell because you needed the money. That was all BS!”

  “It wasn’t exactly the truth, no.”

  “And Jane knew it wasn’t the truth?”

  “She was just trying to protect me, Sean. She always has. And I keep letting her down.”

  “Look, do you think Pam had anything written down that would lead us to this guy? Or maybe his business card if he was a lawyer or a PI?”

  “Why? He’s not connected to Willa and what happened to Pam. It must have to do with my fling with Cassandra.”

  “Tuck, will you pull your brains out of your crotch and stick them back in your head for just one damn second? This having to do with your fling with Cassandra is only one theory and a pretty implausible one at that. Think about it, okay? Why kill your wife and kidnap Willa over a government contract? Dawson was already set to screw you over with Cassandra, so why would he do it? Are there any other competitors out there willing to risk the death penalty for that contract?”

  “Well, no, not really. Government contracting is brutal, but not that brutal.”

  “Great, thanks for employing some logic. Now, another take is that this guy had something to do with Willa’s disappearance and Pam’s death and it’s totally unrelated to your mess.”

  “But how could that be? Why would he call Pam and then meet with her if he was going to do something like that?”

  “Ever heard of meeting under false pretenses to gain some inside intelligence? You folks in the government contracting arena seem to have made a science out of it.”

  Tuck said slowly, “Oh, yeah, I guess I see your point.”

  “Have you told the FBI any of this? About Cassandra and the guy you saw with Pam?”

  “Of course not. Wait a minute, do I have to?”

  “Don’t ask me, I’m not your legal advisor. And when I get back to town you and I are going to straighten some things out with your sister.”

  “Back in town? Where are you?”

  “In Tennessee.”

  “Why?”

  “A funeral.”

  “Jesus, I just remembered. We’re burying Pam on Friday. Jane is taking care of all the arrangements.”

  “I’m sure she is.”

  “Will you be back by then?”

  “Yes, I will. But guess what, Tuck.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll be there for Pam. Not you! Oh, and while we’re being so truthful here, tell me this, was Willa the adopted child?”

  “What!” Tuck sounded shocked.

  “The postmortem confirmed that Pam only had two C-sections and she couldn’t deliver the normal way. You’ve got three kids, so which one was it? Willa?”

  Tuck hung up the phone.

  “Thanks for the answer,” Sean said to himself.

  CHAPTER 36

  QUARRY SLID his fat key ring out, found the right one, and opened the four-inch-thick door that had been built almost two centuries ago. Atlee was a jumble of dynamics; part southern baronial, part white trash, and part American history. This last part was demonstrated by the room he was now stepping into. It was in t
he bowels of the main house, dug so far down into the earth that one could never escape the sickly sweet smell of damp, hardened red clay. It was in this room that Quarry’s ancestors had sent their most unruly slaves for lengthy stays so as not to incite the rest of the “unfree” population. Quarry had removed the leg and wrist irons from the walls, and also the wooden partitions of cells that had separated slaves from each other lest they gain any strength in numbers. That part of his family history he could live without.

  People had died down here. Quarry knew this to be true from the excellent records kept by his slaveholding family. Men, women, and even children. Sometimes when he was down here at night he felt them, thought he heard their moans, the tailings of their final snatches of breath, their barely audible farewells.

  He closed the door behind him and locked it. He noted, as he always did, the long and deep scratches on the thick hand-sawn oak; the fingernails of folks trying to gain their freedom. If one looked close enough, one could see the lingering dark traces of old blood on the wood. From the records he’d seen, Quarry also knew that not a single one of them had been successful in escaping from here.

  The walls were now covered with painted plywood. He’d studded and framed the walls and then used a sturdy hammer and his own strong arms to nail in the half-inch plywood that came in eight-foot-long sections. It was heavy work, but the sweat had been welcome to him. He’d always embraced projects that made him tired at the end of the day.

  And set forth on the painted plywood was work that represented entire years of Quarry’s life. There were chalkboards he’d salvaged from torn-down schools and magic-marker boards he’d gotten cheap from a company going out of business. These surfaces were covered with writing, Quarry’s precise, homeschool-learned cursive. There were lines connecting to other notes, and still more lines intersecting with other collections of facts. Pushpins colored red, blue, and green were all over the place, each of them connected by string. It was like a mathematician’s or a physicist’s work of art. Sometimes he felt he was the John Nash of his little corner of Alabama. Except, he hoped, for the paranoid-schizophrenic part. One clear difference between him and the Nobel Prize–winning physicist was that there were no intricate formulas or numbers other than calendar dates on the walls. The bulk was simply words that still managed to tell a complex story.

  It was here long night after long night that Quarry had pieced everything together. His mind had always worked in flows and movements, ever since he could remember. When he’d torn down his first engine, it was like he could see where the initial spark of energy ignited the fuel and then everything that followed as the internal combustion system worked its magic. The most complex schematics, or mechanical diagrams, while constituting unfathomable puzzles to most folks, had been as clear as water from the tap to him.

  It’d been the same way with everything else; planes, guns, farm equipment so complicated and with so many moving parts that qualified mechanics would sometimes drink themselves into a stupor because they just couldn’t figure something out from a million different possibilities. But Quarry had always been able to figure it out. He believed he’d inherited this gift from his tongue-talking mother, because his adulterous, racist father couldn’t even figure out how to jump-start a car. Quarry was one of a fast-disappearing breed of Americans. He could actually build or fix something.

  As he surveyed the greatest work of his life, it occurred to him that it represented a definite slice of time, place, and opportunity, a treasure map of sorts that had taken him to where he needed to go. Made him have to do what he had done. And would do in the future. The near future.

  In front of the walls were old battered wooden filing cabinets filled with the investigative work that had allowed him to complete the gaps on the walls. He had traveled to many places, talked to lots of people, and taken hundreds of pages of notes that now rested in those cabinets, but the fruits of that investigation were displayed on the walls.

  His gaze started at one end of this “mosaic,” where it had all started, and then drifted along to the other end, where it had all come together. One end to the other, the dots finally connected. Some people would call this room a shrine to an obsessive mind. Quarry would not have disagreed with that. But for him it also represented the only route to the most elusive goals in the world:

  Not just truth but also justice. They were not necessarily mutually exclusive, but Quarry had found them immensely difficult to corral together. He had never failed at anything he’d ever really set his mind to. Yet his mind had often wandered over the possibility that he would eventually fail at this.

  He moved around the far corner where there was a small space, and glanced behind a wooden partition at some heavy metal cylinders stacked there along with tubing, gauges, and other piping. There were also leftover rolls of lead sheathing on a wooden workbench. He patted one of the tanks, his wedding band clinking against its metal hide.

  His ace in the hole.

  He locked the door, walked up to the library, pulled on his gloves, slid the single piece of paper into his typewriter, and started hitting keys. As the inked words appeared in front of him on the page, there was no surprise or revelation in their substance. He had formed all that he was putting down a long time ago. Finished, he folded up the page, took a key out of his pocket, dropped it in a pre-addressed envelope along with the letter, sealed it, and drove off in his old truck. Two hundred miles later, now in the state of Kentucky, he deposited the letter in a mailbox.

  He arrived back at Atlee in the morning. After having driven all night, he was not tired at all. It seemed as though with each step of his plan completed, his energy was renewed. He ate breakfast with Gabriel and Daryl, then helped Ruth Ann wash up the dishes in the kitchen. Six hours of working the fields next to his son left Quarry sweating. He figured his letter would get to its destination in the next day or so. He wondered about their reaction; the panic that would start to set in.

  It made him smile.

  After dinner he rode one of his horses to Fred’s Airstream. Slipping down from his ride, he set himself down on the concrete-block furniture outside the trailer and handed out smokes, a bottle of Jim Beam, and cans of Red Bull that his Koasati friends liked. He listened to several stories Fred told about his youth spent in Oklahoma on a reservation there along with a man whom Fred had insisted was Geronimo’s son.

  “That was Cherokee up there, wasn’t it?” Quarry said idly as he watched Fred’s mutt lick its privates and then roll around in the dirt trying to shake off some fleas. “Thought Geronimo was Apache.”

  Fred looked at him, a mixture of mirth and seriousness on his flint-hard features. “You think people who look like you can tell the difference in people who look like me?”

  The other Indians laughed at that and Quarry did too, shaking his head and grinning. “So why’d you end up coming back here? I never did know really.”

  Fred spread his short arms. “This is Koasati land. I came home.”

  Quarry wasn’t about to tell him that this wasn’t Koasati land, that this was good old American Quarry land. Yet he liked the man. Liked visiting him and bringing the man smokes, and Jim Beam and listening to the stories.

  Quarry grinned and raised his beer. “To coming home.”

  “To coming home,” they all said together.

  A few minutes later they all went inside to get away from the mosquitoes and raise a few more toasts to nonsensical things. One of the Koasatis turned on the TV, adjusted the dials, and the picture cleared. The news was on. As Quarry sat and sipped his drink his gaze settled on the screen and he stopped listening to Fred’s jawing.

  The lead story was about the Willa Dutton kidnapping. Breaking news had just come in. A leak from somewhere had revealed evidence at the crime scene not previously disclosed to the public. Quarry stood as the news anchor said what this evidence was. Writings on the dead woman’s arms. Letters that made no sense, but that the police were following up on.

 
; Quarry jumped from the top step of the trailer to the dirt, scaring the old hound so badly it started whining and curled up in a protective ball. Fred arrived at the door in time to see Quarry astride his horse racing back to Atlee. Fred shook his head, mumbled something about crazy white people, and closed the trailer door.

  Quarry found Daryl alone in the barn. The younger man watched in disbelief as his old man came at him like a blitzing linebacker. Quarry slammed him up against the wall and drove his forearm against his son’s throat.

  “You wrote something on her arms!” he roared.

  “What?” gasped Daryl.

  “You wrote something on her arms! What in the hell was it?”

  “Give me some damn air and I’ll tell you.”

  Quarry stepped back, but not before giving his son a hard shove that