First Family

by David Baldacci

  “The markings on Pam Dutton’s arms are a Native American language known as Koasati.”

  Waters sat up straighter. “Do you know what it says?”

  “‘One white woman,’” answered Michelle. “Something we obviously already knew.”

  “That makes no sense,” said Waters.

  “It was probably a clumsy attempt at a red herring because they’d messed up.”

  “Messed up how?”

  Sean said, “Guy panicked, killed the lady when he didn’t want to, and painted her arms to throw us off. I don’t think anybody was supposed to die that night. Tuck would’ve been the most obvious threat and even then they just knocked him out when they could’ve easily just pumped a round into him.”

  “Okay, so tell me about this Koasati stuff.”

  Sean relayed what they’d learned from Phil Jenkins about the Indian tribe.

  “Well, maybe that narrows it down some,” Waters said doubtfully. “But some Indian tribe having a beef with the president to such an extent they grab his niece? Pretty far-fetched.”

  “Second point,” said Sean. “Pam Dutton only gave birth to two kids. We think Willa’s adopted.”

  “That one I know. ME gave us the heads-up after you two brought it to her attention.”

  “We’ve talked to Tuck and he won’t say a word about it. Just says we’re nuts. The First Lady claims ignorance. Says the Duttons were living in Italy when Willa was born. Or supposedly born.”

  “Maybe Willa’s not the adopted one,” said Waters.

  “The other two look a lot like their parents,” Michelle pointed out.

  “But the ME said only two, so, regardless of which kid it is, Tuck is lying,” said Sean. “You may have to lean on him to get to the truth.”

  “Leaning on the president’s brother-in-law isn’t that easy,” noted Waters nervously.

  “There must be some records somewhere that would definitively state that Willa is adopted. Either here or in Italy. The FBI can surely find that out.”

  “You think if she was adopted it had something to do with her kidnapping?”

  “How could it not?”

  “But back up a minute,” said Michelle. “So what if Willa is adopted? Why would Tuck not want to admit that? It’s not like adoption is illegal.”

  “It might make a difference if the mother’s identity is an issue somehow,” said Sean slowly.

  “Or maybe the father’s ,” pointed out Michelle.

  The three stewed on that for a few silent moments.

  Waters finally spoke up. “And the First Lady didn’t know anything about this? Her own brother?”

  “So she claims,” answered Sean.

  Waters gave him a sharp glance. “But you don’t believe her?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “So you do believe her?”

  “I didn’t say that either.” Sean sat back and stared at the FBI agent. “So anything on your end?”

  Water’s face went slack. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know this was a two-way conversation.”

  “If we work together the odds of getting Willa Dutton back alive might go up a little bit.”

  Waters still didn’t seem convinced.

  “Look, I told you, I don’t care who gets the credit or the glory. We just want the girl back.”

  “You can’t possibly have a problem with that deal,” said Michelle.

  Waters finished his beer and eyed her curiously. “Was your mother really murdered?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any leads?”

  “The chief suspect is my dad.”

  “Jesus!”

  “No, his name’s Frank.”

  “Shouldn’t you be focused on that?”

  “I’m a woman.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning, unlike men, I can handle more than one thing at a time.”

  Sean tapped his arm. “So what’s it gonna be, Chuck?”

  Waters motioned to the waiter for another round, then said, “We found a hair on Pam Dutton that didn’t belong to her or anyone else in her family.”

  “I thought the trace DNA didn’t produce a criminal database hit,” said Michelle.

  “It didn’t. So we ran a different test on the hair. An isotopic exam looking for geographic clues.”

  Sean and Michelle exchanged glances.

  “What’d you find?” asked Sean.

  “That the person whose hair it was has eaten a diet high in animal fats for years but also one with plenty of vegetables.”

  “What can you deduce from that?” asked Michelle.

  “Not a lot, although the typical American diet doesn’t include a lot of veggies anymore.”

  “Were the fats or vegetables processed?” asked Michelle.

  “Don’t think so, no. But the sodium levels were high too.”

  Sean looked at Waters. “Maybe a farm? They slaughter and eat their own meat? Cure it with salt, maybe. Harvest crops. Preserve and can them, again with salt.”

  “Maybe,” said Waters. “They also found something else in the exam.” He hesitated.

  “Don’t keep us in suspense,” joked Sean.

  “The water the person drank. That’s reflected in the hair isotope too. The lab narrowed it down to a three-state area.”

  “Which three?”

  “Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.”

  “That dovetails with the mail triangulation,” noted Michelle.

  “Three across,” said Sean softly, staring at his drink. “Three states right in a row.”

  “Apparently both the rain and drinking water down there has some pretty distinctive markers,” said Waters. “And it’s been mapped pretty comprehensively over the years. That’s why the lab feels very confident about the findings.”

  “Could they tell if it was well or city water?”

  “Well,” said Waters. “No commercial chlorine or other purifiers like that.”

  “So that means rural?”

  “Possibly, although there’re certainly some subdivisions on well water down there. I used to live in one of them before I got assigned here.”

  “And with diets high in unprocessed animal fat and veggies?” exclaimed Sean.

  “Okay, quite possibly rural. But with all that, it’s still a big area to focus on.”

  “But those states don’t square with the Koasati piece,” said Michelle. “Texas or Louisiana.”

  “But the Koasati are from Alabama originally,” pointed out Sean.

  “Originally, yeah, but not now.”

  “Can you still run down the Koasati angle?” he asked Waters.

  Waters nodded. “I’ll have agents down there get started immediately on it.” He studied them both. “So is that all you know?”

  Sean finished his drink and rose. “It’s all we know that’s worth sharing.”

  They left Waters to his second beer and walked back to the SUV. Along the way Michelle’s phone buzzed. She looked at the screen.

  “Who is it?” asked Sean.

  “My caller ID says a Tammy Fitzgerald.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “Somebody I don’t know.”

  She put the phone away and said, “You didn’t mention the letter the First Lady received to our little FBI chum.”

  “That’s right, I didn’t.”

  “But why not?”

  “Because I’m willing to let her come to her senses before I throw her to the Feds on an obstruction charge. That’ll probably screw the election for the president too. And he’s done a good job.”

  “Are you kidding me? Who the hell cares what it does politically to the First Couple? What if it costs Willa her life? Isn’t that what you care about, getting Willa back? Or was that a load of shit you were shoveling Waters back there?”

  Sean stopped walking and turned on her. “Michelle, I’m doing the best I can here, okay? It’s complicated. It’s damn complicated.”

  “It’s only complicated if you make
it so. I like to keep things simple. Find Willa, any way I can.”

  He was about to say something when he stopped and stared over her shoulder.

  Michelle finally turned to see what he was looking at.

  There were two men across the street dressed in Army cammies walking along.

  “Damn.”

  Michelle turned back to look at Sean. “Damn what?”

  “You said you thought the guy you saw with the MP5 was wearing military-level body armor?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” said Sean.

  CHAPTER 53

  GABRIEL WAS TRYING his best not to even breathe. He held the big set of keys steady in his hand and was trying to locate every sound throughout the many nooks and crannies of Atlee before taking each step. Part of the little boy wondered why he was doing what he was. The other part of him well knew why: curiosity. Sam Quarry had often told Gabriel that curiosity was a good thing, meant you were really alive, wondering what made the world tick. He didn’t think Mr. Sam would think it was so good right now, because Gabriel was just this minute slipping down to the basement in the middle of the night to see something Mr. Sam probably didn’t want him or anybody else to see.

  He passed by the old furnace that in the dark resembled nothing but an iron monster ready, willing, and more than able to swallow little boys. Then he saw the old safe with the spin dial that had the numbers and slashes nearly worn off, and the bronze handle that one had to crank down on to open the door. Gabriel had never tried to get into the safe, but he’d often thought about it. What adventure-seeking child wouldn’t?

  He skittered down the corridor, trying not to breathe in all the musty damp. You couldn’t spend much time at a place like Atlee and not experience some type of mold allergies; it just came with the territory. Yet he gamely hurried on.

  He reached the thick door and looked down at the fist of keys. He examined the lock and then tried to figure which key might fit it. He was able to eliminate about three-quarters of the potential ones using this method and then finished off the task by simply inserting one remaining key after another in the old lock. The third one he tried did the trick.

  It made a big click as the lock tumblers slid neatly into place. Gabriel froze, thinking he might have heard a heavy step on the stairs coming down here. But after a minute of holding his breath and praying that it wasn’t Mr. Sam woken out of a dead sleep by him sneaking around the house, he put the wad of keys in his pocket and tugged on the door.

  It opened on well-oiled hinges. Mr. Sam, he well knew, was good about keeping things in fine working order. One reason he had come down here, perhaps the overriding reason, was to see where the slaves had been kept for doing crazy things like try to escape to freedom, as if anyone finding themselves bound by chains, white or black, would not try to do that very thing.

  When he closed the door behind him and flicked on the small flashlight he carried with him, the first thing he saw was the row of battered file cabinets. Then his beam hit the wall above. That’s when his jaw slackened, when he took in the boards full of writing, pushpins, connective string, photos of people and places and index cards. He drew closer, his youthful brow crinkled in both confusion and wonderment. As he spun around and his light hit off the other walls revealing still more of this, something tugged deep in Gabriel’s chest.

  Fear.

  And yet curiosity eventually won out and he moved forward and focused on what appeared to be the first board in the sequence, at least judging from the dates written on each section of wall. Names, places, events, times, details of seeming insignificance were given life here. And as Gabriel followed the tale around a space where over a hundred and fifty years ago, people with the same color skin as him were left to die, the fear slowly began to return.

  Gabriel had a wonderful memory, which was one of the reasons he was such a stellar student. He absorbed as much as he could, but even his mind began to overfill with all the bytes of information on these walls. The little boy had to marvel at the brain that Sam Quarry must possess. He had always known that the man was smart, tough, and as self-reliant as anyone he’d ever met. There didn’t seem to be much that Quarry couldn’t figure out. But still, what he was seeing now took his respect, no, his awe, to a whole different level.

  But then there was still the fear. And it was metastasizing right now.

  So concentrated was Gabriel on the story revealed on the walls that he never heard the door open, never caught the sound of the footsteps coming up behind him.

  When the hand gripped his shoulder his legs buckled and it was all he could do not to scream out.

  “Gabriel!”

  He whipped around to see his mother standing there wrapped in her old bathrobe.

  “What you doing down here?”

  “Momma?”

  She shook him. “What you doing down here?” she said again, her voice both angry and frightened. “Been looking all over for you. Thought something happened to you. Scared me to death, boy.”

  “I’m sorry, Momma.”

  “What you doing here?” she said one more time. “You tell me, right now!”

  He pointed his light at the walls. “Look.”

  Ruth Ann’s gaze slowly drifted over the space, but unlike her son there was no curiosity behind it. She turned back to him. “You ain’t supposed to be down here. How’d you get in here?”

  He pulled the key ring out and she snatched it from his hand.

  “Momma, look. Please.” He pointed frantically at the covered walls.

  “I ain’t looking at nothing’cept getting your butt back to bed.”

  “Look at that picture of that girl. I saw her on the TV at school.”

  She slapped his face. The shock that registered on Gabriel’s face evidenced that this was something that had not occurred before.

  “Let me tell you something,” she said. “Mr. Sam done give us his home. All his land and this house when he die. All we got is’cause of him. So don’t you say nothing against that man or I’ll slap you again only harder.”

  “But Momma—”

  She raised her hand and he drew back from her.

  “Let me tell you something else. I know Sam Quarry a good long time, from when you weren’t much bigger than my fist. He took us in when he ain’t got no reason to. He a good man. If he doing something down here, that’s his business.” She pointed around the room. “Whatever this all is, then he got himself a damn good reason for doing it. Now let’s go, boy.”

  She grabbed his arm and hustled him out of the room, locking the door behind them. As they rushed up the stairs, Gabriel looked back once at the room below before nearly sprinting back to his bedroom, propelled by a smack on the backside by his still obviously upset mother.

  CHAPTER 54