“The settlement we were offering came with a secrecy agreement.” He took another bite of sandwich.
“A secrecy agreement?”
“Would you eat?”
“Would you talk?”
Mark started in on the coleslaw. Before popping a forkful in his mouth, he said, “The President and his advisers thought you might have learned something detrimental to the First Lady during the course of your association with her. I was authorized to offer you enough money to make it worth your while to forget it.”
Jess stared at him. “What did they think I might have learned? That she and her husband fought? That they’d had a fight?”
Mark’s mouth twisted. “They fought, but that wasn’t it. Mrs. Cooper had a drug problem, all right? The original feeling was that you might have been somehow connected with it, maybe somebody she was buying from. Certainly that you had learned of it.”
“What?” Jess blinked at him. “She had a drug problem? Annette Cooper?”
“You know those pain pills you’ve been popping for the last week? It started out just like that for her, too. She broke her back in a horseback riding accident about eight years ago, had constant pain from then on, and started taking pills to deal with it. The whole thing just snowballed until she was a full-blown addict.”
Jess goggled at him. “How do you know this?”
He shrugged. “I was head of her security detail.”
“Wait. Hold on a minute. Are you saying that the whole time they’ve been in Washington, Annette Cooper has had a drug problem?” Jess thought back to when she had first become aware of the Coopers as the new vice president and his wife. That was almost five years ago. All she could remember of Annette Cooper from that period was stories featuring her working with children and charities. She ’d seemed very much the traditional political wife, and completely devoted to her husband.
Mark nodded.
“That’s why they killed her. Because of the potential embarrassment to her husband.” Jess couldn’t believe it. There it was, the motive. “If you knew she was addicted to drugs, you had to have suspected that was the reason she was killed. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You want me to talk, you’re going to have to eat.”
“Mark.”
“Eat.”
Jess realized he was right, realized she needed food, and took another bite out of her sandwich.
“At first I couldn’t believe her death was anything but an accident,” Mark said. “Even now that I know it wasn’t, that it was murder, I’m finding it tough to believe that her drug problem was the reason. We were dealing with that. Dealing with it successfully.”
“Dealing with it how?” Looking at him with fascination, Jess drank some juice.
“She was being weaned off them. We were keeping her away from her suppliers. In fact, we’d pretty much cut her off from the ones she’d always used, the ones she preferred. Occasionally, she would manage to meet with someone who wasn’t on our radar and get some more. That’s where Prescott and the others thought she might have been going when she slipped away from them the night of the accident. That ’s why no big alarm was raised and they just tried to round her up themselves. They were scared that the press might get wind of her buying drugs.”
“Instead, she was running away from the White House.” As Jess put them in context, the First Lady’s words took on a whole new meaning. “We both saw Prescott looking for her. She didn’t want me to wave to him and get his attention. She said, ‘Don’t you understand? I’m a fucking prisoner.’”
“Yeah, well.” Mark polished off his sandwich. “It was for her own good.”
Jess took another sip of juice. She couldn’t eat another thing. Remembering the night of the accident had completely killed her appetite.
“So how long has this been going on?”
“The drug problem? I told you, pretty much the last eight years. It got gradually worse until the people around the President faced up to what was going on and came up with a plan to deal with it.”
“What I meant was, how long had you been trying to keep the First Lady away from drugs?”
“They brought me on board last August. Up until then I’d been working on the outgoing President ’s detail, but I was asked to make the switch to Mrs. Cooper, and I did.”
Jess frowned. “Why you?”
“I knew them. I’m from Texas, too, you know. Abilene. Actually, Lowell, Davenport, quite a few others that make up the inner circle—I know them, too. Known them for years. We’re all from the same place. It was a tricky situation, and they felt they could trust me.”
“You mean you knew the Coopers before you came to Washington?” He nodded. “My mom worked as the elder Coopers’—Wayne and his late wife, Virginia’s—housekeeper after my dad was killed on an oil rig when I was four. I pretty much grew up on their ranch in Abilene. David and his sister were gone by then—grown, with David working as a lawyer in Houston before he got into politics—but he came back to visit a couple of times a month. I got to know them all pretty well.”
Jess looked at him with fascination mixed with more than a little bit of anxiety. This involvement with the Coopers—did it make him less trustworthy? If his ties to them were strong . . .
“Does your mother still work for them?”
He shook his head. “She remarried and moved to Florida. I go see her when I can. I’m her only child.”
“Are you . . . close to them? The President and his family?”
“Depends on what you mean by ‘close.’ I know them. They know me. They knew they could trust me to do what I could to help with the situation they had.” His gaze sharpened on her face. “If you’re asking me would I conspire to commit murder for them, no. Would I keep my mouth shut if I knew they had conspired to commit murder? No. They know it, too. You need proof, all you got to do is cast your mind back to the bomb in my car.”
Again with the bomb. But she had to admit, it was definitely reassuring.
“So how did you become a Secret Service agent? Was it because of the Coopers?”
“In a roundabout way, I guess. I played football in high school and college. Actually, that ’s all I ever wanted to do. I was good, too. Good enough to go pro. I got drafted by the Cowboys out of college and played for them for almost one full season. Second-to-last game, I got hit below the knee and something snapped: worst pain I ever felt in my life, and then I was on the injured list. At first I thought I was going to be able to come back. I had surgery, did physical therapy, the whole bit, but my knee was never the same. My speed was gone, and my agility was limited. It took me about a year to admit it, but then I knew I wasn’t ever going to be able to play pro ball anymore. No matter how hard I worked at it, I wasn’t going to be able to come back.”
His tone revealed nothing but wry acceptance, but there was a flicker of pain in his eyes that told her how difficult it had been for him.
“That must have been terrible.”
“Life happens.”
Jess thought of his daughter. “You were married then, weren’t you?”
He nodded. “Heather and I met in college. We got married our senior year, and Taylor came along soon after that. Heather was pretty, ambitious, loved the idea of being a pro football player’s wife. When my career ended, so did our marriage. Of course, it took me a while to see that, too. Once everybody figured out I wasn’t going to be playing pro ball anymore, Mr. Cooper—the old man, Wayne—helped me get on with the Secret Service. Knowing what I know now, it seems likely that he already had it in mind that David—he was in the Texas Senate at that time—would be going to Washington one day. So I moved up here with Heather and Taylor, worked round the clock trying to suck it up and get my new career on track, and in the process lost my marriage.”
Jess looked at him questioningly. She didn’t want to pry, didn’t want to ask it outright, but she very much wanted to know what had led to the breakup. He must have seen the question in her eyes, bec
ause he grimaced.
“You want to know how it ended? It was classic, and I guess I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t. I found out that Heather was sleeping around. With a guy I knew, Ted Parks, an FBI agent. A guy I thought was a friend. I couldn’t get past that. Not even for Taylor, although I swear I tried my best. To be fair—and it’s only in the last couple of years I’ve been able to be that fair—I was no piece of cake to live with after I figured out I was never going to be able to play football again. I had some down times. I drank too much. I spent a couple of years kind of cursing at fate, you know. Then I was working too much. The Secret Service is pretty much a twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week gig, and Heather was always the kind of woman who needed attention. Lots of attention. There were some rocky moments between us during and right after the divorce, but we ’re on good terms now. For Taylor’s sake. Of course, Taylor plays us off against each other, which causes the occasional dustup. I just took her to Florida to see my mother for spring break. You know what she did while we were there? She got a tattoo on her butt. A butterfly, so I hear. I take her to the mall, she does it while she’s supposed to be shopping, and then I don’t know a thing about it until Heather calls me to blast me for letting her do it. A tattoo. At fifteen. Can you believe it?”
Mark looked so aggrieved, Jess had to smile. She hadn’t even met his daughter, and she was liking her more and more. “It’s the style. A lot of teenage girls have them.”
Mark’s eyes showed an unmistakable flare of interest. “Do you? No.”
“No,” Jess replied firmly. “I don’t. And just for the record, I’m not a teenage girl. I’m twenty-eight years old, remember? But Maddie does.”
Mark’s eyes widened. “Jesus, that ’s just what I needed to hear. No worries there. First a tattoo, then she ’s pregnant. I’m going to have to lock her up till she ’s thirty.”
Jess narrowed her eyes at him. She might not be thrilled to pieces about Maddie ’s pregnancy, but Maddie was her sister, and criticism of her from anybody outside the family was not allowed.
“You know what? Life happens.” She threw his own words back at him with bite.
“I know, I know.” Mark held up his hands in apology. “It’s just—Taylor’s my daughter. I don’t want to even think about going there. She doesn’t even date yet”—he frowned suddenly, looking uncertain—“I don’t think.”
That blatant manifestation of male cluelessness was so adorable Jess had to smile again.
“Anyway,” Mark continued, with the air of someone getting back to the subject at hand, “I spent a good bit of time talking to Davenport about your settlement. Even though I never did think having you sign a secrecy agreement was a good idea. Almost as soon as you and I started talking, I realized you didn’t know a thing about the First Lady and drugs.”
“No, I didn’t,” Jess agreed.
“That’s why I couldn’t believe somebody was trying to kill you. There didn’t seem to be any motive until you told me you thought the First Lady’s death was murder. If you were right, and clearly you are, but hindsight ’s always twenty-twenty, the fact that you’re the only witness to something that big would do it.” He frowned. “But I’m willing to bet almost anything I own that Annette Cooper was not killed to keep her drug problem quiet. There ’s another reason. I guarantee it.”
Jess was thinking about that when she realized he was looking at her intently.
“Back there in the library, you looked at my phone records, didn’t you?”
Gulp. But there was nothing to do but fess up. “Yes.”
“You know, you have some real trust issues.”
That was so unfair, Jess could only blink at him in disbelief.
“I have trust issues? Well, gee, I wonder why. Let’s see: Someone kills the First Lady in a car crash, which was also meant to kill me; then when they realized I survived, I was attacked in my hospital room; I try to tell people, including you, what ’s going on; you don’t believe me, nobody believes me. I try to tell my boss, and he tries to kill me. I start trusting you, sort of, enough to let you take me to your house, where you promise I’ll be safe, and while I’m there I hear the voice of the person who tried to kill me in the hospital. The person you called in, mind you. Your friend and fellow Secret Service agent. Not being stupid, I run, and you chase me down. I trust you again, sort of, until you start talking to another of your friends about bringing me in, which, we both know, means to be killed. I jump out, and your car blows up. Then I start trusting you again, sort of, because I really don’t have a choice, and I find out, not because you told me but because I checked your phone records, that you have a prior relationship with my boss, the one who tried to kill me. You have an even stronger relationship with the President and his associates, one or several of whom are almost certainly behind the ongoing efforts to try to kill me.” She took a deep breath and glared at him. “So if I have trust issues, is it any wonder why?”
Their eyes met. Then he smiled at her.
“Okay, point taken.”
“Point taken? Is that all you can say?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Something else.”
“You’re beautiful?”
Her eyes narrowed at him. That was the second time he had called her beautiful, and it made her feel as vulnerable this time as it had the first.
“Wrong answer.” She stood up abruptly, gathering the remains of her meal and stalking away to dump them in the trash can.
“Jess. I’m teasing.” He shoved back from the table, picked up his garbage, deposited it in the trash, and followed her into the living room, where she was in the process of sinking down on the couch. “Although you are. Beautiful, I mean. Actually, I think I’m developing kind of a thing here for petite girls with big greenish eyes and glasses.”
He stopped walking, leaned a shoulder against the doorjamb, crossed his arms over his chest, and smiled at her. Smiled dazzlingly at her.
The look she sent him could have fried an egg in midair.
“If you’re trying to distract me from everything you didn’t tell me, you might as well give up,” she said. She was suddenly supremely conscious of her disheveled state, her unstyled hair, her bruised, stitched and makeup-less face, her ill-fitting, ill-matched, sexless clothes, her damned glasses. The problem was that she did not feel beautiful, never had, probably never would, and that, she discovered, was what was really ticking her off. “So you can just cut out the crap, pretty boy, because it isn’t working.”
His eyes widened. His smile widened. He straightened away from the doorjamb to grin at her.
“‘Pretty boy’?” Instead of being stung, as she had intended, he was, she was incensed to see, starting to chuckle. “‘Pretty boy’?”
“Oh, go away.” She barely managed to control the impulse to chuck something at him. With studied indifference, she turned her attention to the coffee table in front of the couch, where today’s paper lay folded and ready for reading.
“Fine,” he said. She could feel him studying her, but she didn’t look up. She picked up the paper and snapped it open, perusing the headlines, ostentatiously ignoring him. “I didn’t get any sleep last night, and I’m starting to feel a little groggy. I’m going to go take a shower and see if that doesn’t perk me up.”
“Fine.”
“Keep the TV on low if you want to watch it. And don’t answer the door. And stay off the damned computer. And the phone.”
With that, he left her alone. A moment later Jess heard the click of the bathroom door closing. She thumbed through the paper—the front section was almost entirely devoted to coverage of the First Lady, and the luminaries who came in for the funeral, the size of the crowds, and the reactions of ordinary citizens, none of which she could bring herself to read—and listened to the muffled rush of the shower. Her skin tingled in atavistic response. She really, really wanted a shower. A long, steaming hot shower . . .
With Mark in it.
>
Do not go there, she chastised herself fiercely.
Scowling, she was scanning the pages for some mention of what had happened to Davenport or Marian—nothing, and no obituaries yet, either, and it would be too soon to even look for anything about Marty Solomon—when she heard the shower shut off. A couple of minutes passed before the bathroom door opened. That sound was followed by the soft pat of bare feet on carpet. Mark was heading for the bedroom. Probably wearing nothing but a towel . . .
She gritted her teeth, staring doggedly at the newsprint in front of her. And never mind that she was no longer taking in a word.
“You want to take a shower, it ’s all yours,” he called.
She heard more footsteps followed by a rustle of plastic—the bag their clothes were in, she was guessing—followed a moment later by a long creak. Then nothing.
Finally, Jess couldn’t stand it anymore. Folding the paper, she got up and went to check on him.
He was in bed, sprawled on his stomach with a white down comforter covering him to the waist. Thanks to the heavy drapes, the room was gloomy-dark, but she could see enough of him to know that his broad, bare shoulders and wide, muscular back and brawny arms were—the only word that came to mind was fine.
She was already mentally backing out when a snore told her that he was sound asleep.
It was the only bed in the place. Right now, she was tired but not particularly sleepy, certainly not ready for bed. But later, sometime tonight, she had the option of crawling into that supremely comfortable-looking bed with him or grabbing a pillow, scrounging up some kind of cover, and sacking out on the couch.
Couch, Jess told herself firmly. The other choice was so dumb it bordered on self-destructive.
While Mark slept she took a shower, washed her hair and blew it dry, brushed her teeth, smoothed on ChapStick and a little face cream—thank God for the supplies in her purse—and popped a single pain pill. Mark’s recounting of the First Lady’s troubles made her wary of taking more than she absolutely had to. But the ones she had swallowed earlier were wearing off, and her legs and back were really starting to ache. So she compromised on one and hoped for the best.
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