Pursuit

by ROBARDS, KAREN

  She was suddenly, overwhelmingly, thankful to be alive. The idea of never seeing her mother and sisters again, of their grief if she had been killed along with everyone else in that car, made her throat tighten. They were a mess, every single one of them—herself included, she supposed. They could be, and frequently were, a giant pain in her ass. But in the end, she was just now discovering, none of that really mattered.

  What mattered was that they were a family.

  Annette Cooper had a family, too.

  Jess’s throat tightened again. Leaning over the basin, she splashed her face, the better to conceal incipient tears, and discovered that in some places her skin was so raw it stung.

  Ironically enough, the small discomfort banished the sudden urge to cry.

  Mrs. Cooper ran away from the Secret Service agent who came looking for her.

  “You’ve got to be exhausted,” Jess said to her mother in an effort to banish the torturous thoughts that just wouldn’t stay out of her head. Wiping the water from her eyes, she looked at Judy. Her mother really did look tired. “Have you gotten any sleep at all?”

  Judy nodded. “Maddie came in this morning, so I lay down on the other bed and slept while she was here. She and Grace went out about an hour ago to pick up some things from the house.” Maddie was Jess’s youngest sister, a just-turned-eighteen-year-old high school senior. The previous weekend, Maddie had precipitated a family crisis—and when weren’t they ever in some kind of crisis?—by telling Grace, who told Sarah (because Jess was working all weekend and Grace had to tell somebody, and Sarah possessed the closest ear), who told their mother, who then told Jess, that she was pregnant.

  At the time, having National Merit Scholarship-winning, valedictorian-candidate Maddie confess that she was pregnant had seemed like the family-size equivalent of an atom bomb.

  Now it seemed manageable. A small pothole in the road of life. One of those things that you end up making the best of, maybe even laughing about in twenty years. When the kid-to-be was a beloved member of the family.

  Nothing like almost dying to provide a little perspective, Jess reflected with an inner grimace as she worked the soap into bubbly lather, which she then carefully spread over the parts of her face that weren’t either stinging or stitched together.

  Mrs. Cooper said her Secret Service agents were more like wardens. She was upset, way more upset than she should have been from something as ordinary as a fight with her husband. She was running away.

  “I hate for you to stay with me again tonight—you’ve got to work tomorrow,” Jess said. “You’ll wear yourself out.”

  Her mother operated a small day-care center out of her home. Both Maddie and Grace, who was a junior at University of Maryland, worked there part-time. It was her mother’s latest moneymaking venture after she lost her job as a shift supervisor at the Red Cross shoe plant three years ago, when Jess had been in her first year of law school and working at Davenport, Kelly, and Bascomb as a research assistant at night. Since then, Judy had been a temp, a waitress, a veterinary assistant, a sales associate at Macy’s, and a pizza delivery person, and sometimes two or three at once. None of which, singly or in multiples, paid enough to support her family. Even with Grace and Maddie holding down part-time jobs, and Jess contributing every penny she could, there was never enough. Until Jess had graduated law school and gotten the fat-salaried job with Davenport. With what she was now able to contribute to the family kitty, everyone was comfortable for the first time that Jess could remember.

  Do I even still have a job? Probably the last thing I should be worried about now, but . . . I need the money. We need the money. She grimaced inwardly. Face it, doesn’t everybody always need the money?

  “We didn’t open today, and we’re not opening tomorrow. Probably not the rest of the week, either. I called all the parents—they understand. Lots of businesses around here are shut down out of respect for Mrs. Cooper anyway, and they all know that you’re my daughter and what happened to you.”

  It took Jess a second, but then she caught it.

  “Is this Monday?”

  “Sure is. What did you think?”

  “I thought it was Sunday.” Jess rinsed her face and reached for the brush, which she pulled carefully through her hair: Ouch. She’d been out of it for almost forty-eight hours: unbelievable. And oh my God, it was a work day and she’d missed it. The first one ever. Then she remembered, and realized that it was almost certainly not a work day. Not for a firm so closely associated with the First Lady. “Has Mr. Davenport called? Or anyone from work?”

  “There were so many calls the hospital switchboard’s only been putting family through.”

  So many calls—because everyone wanted her to talk about the accident.

  The panic that had been slowly building just below her precariously maintained calm started to bubble to the surface.

  They—she wasn’t quite sure who was to blame—had it wrong about where Mrs. Cooper was going when the car crashed. Jess’s memory of what had transpired during the accident might be spotty, but her recall of what had happened before was unimpaired. Mrs. Cooper had been running away from the White House, and Davenport had sent Jess and a car to pick her up and take her—somewhere. Those were facts. Admittedly, Jess didn’t remember where they were headed, but for sure it wasn’t to visit a dying friend in a Fredericksburg hospital. Maybe that was an honest mistake, maybe it was a deliberate lie, or spin, as Davenport would probably put it, but the discrepancy made her uneasy. Couple that with the images in her mind of dark figures rushing down the slope past where she lay and surrounding the burning car, add in Mrs. Cooper’s upset and her claim that she was a prisoner in the White House (more facts), as well as the near certainty that she herself had been attacked right here in this very room just hours after the First Lady’s death, and what did you get?

  Either something really bad—or a whole lot of vivid imagination mixed with a little bit of truth that added up to nothing much at all.

  Her imagination had never been that vivid. Therefore, she was going with something really bad.

  You gotta tell somebody. You can’t keep this to yourself. It’s too big—too important.

  “Mom, could you get rid of this stuff, please? I’m finished with it.”

  “You look better.” Giving her a critical once-over, her mother gathered up the bedpan and glass, etc., and headed for the bathroom with it. “Still a little the worse for wear, but better.”

  “Wonderful. Oh, and you might want to wash your face while you’re in there. You’ve got mascara smudges under your eyes.”

  “Oh, my.”

  That, Jess figured, had just bought her a good ten minutes. She barely managed to wait until Judy disappeared into the bathroom and closed the door before snatching up the phone by the bed and punching in Davenport’s number—not the office but the private cell phone number he had given her on Saturday night when he had sent her out to retrieve Mrs. Cooper. It was his direct line, the only number, home or office, that wasn’t routed through Marian Young, his longtime secretary.

  It was recorded in her cell phone’s memory, but her cell phone was nowhere in sight. But she remembered it.

  Perfectly, as it turned out. Because he answered on the second ring.

  10

  Who is this?” Davenport demanded, instead of giving his name or any identifying information. Jess realized that the hospital name and number must have come up on his caller ID, but nothing that would tell him specifically it was her. The thing was, only a few people had this number, which was normally reserved for very special clients like Annette Cooper, so there weren’t a whole lot of choices. Unless he’d thought the number had been discovered by the press.

  “Jessica Ford, Mr. Davenport.”

  She heard him catch his breath.

  “God in heaven, Jessica, you’re a living, breathing miracle. Do you realize that? Do you appreciate it?”

  “Yes.” Brushing over that impatiently, she
spoke in an urgent whisper with one eye on the bathroom door. “Mr. Davenport, listen, I think something may be wrong about this. For one thing, a man attacked me not long after I was admitted to the hospital. He tried to put something in my IV. I think he might have been trying to kill me. And . . .”

  “How did such a terrible accident happen? Annette, everybody else—” Davenport’s voice shook as he broke in on her hurried recital. Jess was pretty sure he hadn’t listened to a word she had said. Because it was obvious that just like he had been the last time she had talked to him, he’d been drinking pretty heavily. “Well, I’m just glad you’re alive. Just so glad. It just seems so impossible. . . .”

  He made a choking sound, and Jess realized it was a sob.

  “Mr. Davenport. They’re saying on TV that Mrs. Cooper was on her way to visit a dying friend and we both know that’s not—”

  “Wait! Stop!” Davenport’s normally deep and authoritative voice was high-pitched and wobbly. “Don’t say it. Not anything. Not on the phone. Anybody could be listening.”

  Jess’s heart skipped a beat. Her eyes widened, and she had an absurd impulse to glance around the room even though she absolutely knew it was empty.

  “Who? Who do you think is listening?”

  “Anybody. Everybody. Bad people.”

  “Bad people?” Her heart speeded up. It sounded like he harbored some of the same suspicions she did, when what she’d really wanted was for him to tell her that they couldn’t possibly, no way, uh-unh, be true.

  “The dark forces. They’re dangerous, you know.”

  She was pretty sure the gulping sound she heard was him knocking back another long swallow of whatever it was he was drinking. It certainly wasn’t her swallowing. She wasn’t that loud.

  “I don’t know who else to go to with this. You’re the only one I can trust and—”

  “No, no, no! Not on the phone!”

  Jess was feeling desperate. She got the impression that he might hang up on her at any second. “Could we talk in person, then?”

  “Maybe.” Another gulp. “Yes, that would probably be a good idea.”

  “Are you at the office? I could come there—” She thought of her physical condition. She was pretty sure she couldn’t even walk. “No, on second thought, I can’t. Can you come here?”

  “No. Not possible. It would cause too much of an uproar. The media’s knee-deep around that hospital. They’ve already traced the car back to me, you know, and they’re calling every number they can find for me practically nonstop. If I showed up there they’d jump on me like fleas on a dog, and I’m just not up to dealing with that yet. Anyway, I’m out of town.” She heard him take a deep breath. There was a pause before he continued in a voice that suddenly sounded almost normal. “I’ll be coming in for Annette’s funeral on Thursday. I could meet you Thursday night.”

  Annette’s funeral. Oh, God.

  “Where?” She kept her voice carefully steady.

  “The condo.”

  In addition to his elegant Georgetown mansion and sumptuous Virginia estate, Davenport quietly maintained a two-bedroom suite in the Watergate Apartments. He said it was for the overnight use of out-of-town clients, but Jess suspected that he did some personal entertaining of the extramarital sort there as well. Not that it was any of her business. She’d been there twice, both times to drop off paperwork for her boss, once in the evening and once in the early morning before heading to work. The first time, the dining table had been set for two, a bottle of wine or champagne or something had been chilling in an ice bucket beside the table, and fresh flowers perfumed the air.

  She had noticed all this accidentally, just from glancing past Davenport as he’d come to the door in his robe. Poker-faced, she’d handed him the documents she’d brought him, turned around, and left.

  Because that’s what junior lawyers who wanted to rise in the ranks did: exactly what they were told. Without asking any questions.

  “You remember where it is?”

  “Yes.” She noticed that he wasn’t mentioning the address, realized it was deliberate, and felt a cold chill. She could almost feel unseen ears listening in.

  If she was paranoid, then he was, too. The knowledge was the opposite of comforting.

  “I hear you’re going to be released from the hospital in the next couple of days. When you get out, that’s where you go. You just call the office when the time comes, and I’ll send Marian over to get you. You won’t be able to go home anyway. There’ll be media everywhere. The next few weeks are going to be a damned circus.”

  It was the first time Jess had really, truly comprehended how much her life had been altered. Reporters would be after her; she couldn’t go home. . . .

  She had to fight to keep her voice steady. “All right.”

  “And Jessica . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Anything you may have seen or heard while you were with Annette, just forget it, understand? Forget it.”

  “Okay.”

  Then Jess remembered the Secret Service agent talking to the hotel doorman before he spotted them and came running toward the Lincoln: Prescott, that was his name. And she realized that simply forgetting what little she knew wasn’t going to wipe the First Lady’s trail clean. Not by a long shot. There was that doorman, for instance, and . . .

  “They’re going to find out she was at the hotel,” she warned. “Mrs. Cooper—”

  “Don’t say another word,” he interrupted, his voice suddenly fierce. “Not over the phone. Not anywhere. Not to anybody about anything, do you understand? Not to investigators. Not to the press. Not to your family. Not to anybody. Nothing. Say nothing. You don’t know anything. You don’t remember anything.”

  “Yes, all right.” There was real fear in his voice, she realized. And that scared her worse than almost anything else so far. For Davenport, the rich and well-connected power player, to be afraid was huge.

  Over the phone, she heard the muffled sound of a doorbell.

  “Look, somebody’s here. I’ve got to go. I’ll be back in D.C. on Thursday. We’ll talk then. In the meantime, you just sit tight and keep your mouth shut. About everything, and I mean everything.”

  He disconnected, and not a moment too soon. Jess was in the act of restoring the receiver to its cradle when a quick knock sounded on the door to her room.

  In a guilty panic, she dropped the receiver, which fortunately landed on the phone but jangled. Her eyes widened, riveting on the door. Who would knock, instead of just walking in? Not her family, or the nurses . . .

  A reporter maybe, having snuck past security? Or somebody else? Somebody sinister . . .

  Jess’s pulse shot into overdrive.

  The knob turned . . .

  Her breathing suspended. Her fight-or-flight response kicked in, but unfortunately under the circumstances flight was not an option.

  The conclusion she came to as she watched the door start to open made her sick: Whoever this is, I’m a sitting duck.

  She was just opening her mouth to yell for her mother when Judy walked out of the bathroom.

  “Mom . . .” Jess said. Before she could continue, Judy, oblivious to the possibility of any kind of threat, simply caught hold of the edge of the door and pulled it the rest of the way open.

  For a moment Judy said nothing, just stood there looking at whoever was on the way in that Jess couldn’t quite see. Then she smiled, and Jess’s pounding heart began to slow. She took a deep, calming breath. She knew that expression. Whoever was standing there, it was someone Judy knew. Someone she liked. Someone who was welcome.

  That’s why the name that came out of her mouth shocked Jess so.

  “Why, hi there, Mark. Come on in.”

  Mark Ryan walked into the room. Beyond him, through the open door, Jess got a glimpse of the hospital corridor, a nurse hurrying past, a woman in street clothes walking in the opposite direction, and a huge, bald-headed, dark-suited Secret Service agent leaning against the oppo
site wall and watching with unsmiling intensity as Ryan entered the room.

  An icy little shiver ran over her at the sight.

  Were they there to keep people out—or her in?

  She didn’t want to think about it.

  “I’ve got some information for you.” Ryan bestowed an easy smile on her mother. Then his gaze went past Judy to seek out Jess. “You, too, Ms. Ford, since you’re awake.”

  She looked at him warily.

  Judy said, “Oh, you can call her Jess. We’re not fancy.”

  Her mother, bless her man-eating little heart, was sucking in her stomach and beaming and fluttering her hands so that her rings flashed and doing everything but batting her lashes at him, which wasn’t surprising. Judy had always been an absolute idiot when good-looking men were concerned. And Ryan was nothing if not good-looking. He was in his late thirties, with thick, light brown hair that had probably been white-blond when he was a kid, cut ruthlessly short. His face was lean and angular, with the kind of outdoorsy, baked-in tan that would send a woman racing for the Retin-A before the wrinkles could set in. His brows were sandy above eyes that were a clear ocean blue. His face wasn’t perfect: His nose was a little thick. His lips were a little too thin, a little too crooked. There were creases around his eyes, and deeper ones running from his mouth to his nose. But on the plus side, he was a hair north of six-foot-two, with wide shoulders and an athlete’s toned physique that the navy suit, white shirt, and navy-striped tie he was wearing served only to emphasize.

  Taken all together, it added up to sex on the hoof.

  Jess had noticed him the first time he’d walked into Davenport’s office at the First Lady’s heels. He hadn’t spared her so much as a glance.

  She had remembered him when he had accompanied Annette Cooper on a second visit. At his request, she had handed him a glass of water, which he had passed on to the First Lady. He had thanked her with a nod and a smile that had sent a disorienting little thrill shooting through her solar plexus clear down to her toes.