“Let it go, Gigi.” She huffed out a long breath and then shoved her key into the ignition. “If they don’t want your help, they don’t want your help.”
She started the car and left the parking deck. Her cell phone pinged. She quickly whipped it out of her jacket to see a text message from Dennis, asking whether he would see her that evening.
There he was, getting all clinging again.
She sighed and tossed the phone into the passenger seat.
She was halfway back to her agency when thoughts of Madam Nevaeh being discovered in that catering van overtook her. Without a doubt, Abrianna and her friends had snatched the madam from that party. Whether the woman was a police casualty or Abrianna had exacted revenge on the woman was what Castillo couldn’t decide.
“Let it go. Let it go,” Castillo mumbled, her hands at ten and two. Another mile down the road, the nagging at the back of her head got the best of her. At the next light, she made an illegal U-turn, picked up the phone, and asked Siri for directions to La Plume.
Within minutes, she was turning into the lot when a speeding SUV charged toward her and clipped the corner of her vehicle and spun her back out into the street.
“The fuck!” In mid-spin, she was T-boned by another car. Castillo’s unbelted body thrashed around behind the wheel like a rag doll. The side of her head shattered the side window.
A surround sound of squealing tires was followed by more jarring hits: a multicar pile-up. Then the car stopped. The pain came a few seconds later. Everything hurt. When she opened her eyes, the world was a blur. She blinked several times, but nothing changed.
“Lady, are you all right?” The voice sounded like it was up a very steep hill.
Am I all right? She made a quick mental check. Besides the blurred vision, the aching chest, and ringing head, she answered, “Yes. I-I think so.” She tried to open the warped door, but couldn’t.
“Stay put,” the man urged. “My wife is calling for help.” Castillo ignored him and exited the car Dukes of Hazzard–style, broken glass and all. Halfway through, the guy decided to help.
“Careful,” he kept repeating while she swung her legs out.
Once on her feet, she wobbled for a moment. Soon, she had her bearings. “What the hell?” she asked after an instant replay in her mind.
“We saw the whole thing,” the guy said. “That jackass could have killed somebody,” the man raged on her behalf.
“Did you catch the license plate number?” she groaned, rubbing the side of her neck.
“Sorry. No.” The man cocked his head. “Hey, are you sure that you’re all right?”
Castillo nodded and backed away. “Yeah. Yeah.” She had a bad feeling.
“Whoa. Where are you going?”
Castillo turned from the man and jogged toward the restaurant. A vehicle speeding away like that was never a good thing; that sort of driving happens after a crime.
“Hey, lady!”
“I’m fine! I’ll be right back! Tell the police I went inside the restaurant,” she yelled over her shoulder.
“But, lady . . . !”
Ignoring the man, Castillo picked up the pace. Her jog became a full-out sprint. After finding the building’s side door locked, she rushed toward the back, where she pounded on the door. “Hello! Hello!” She banged on it again to no avail. Panic rising, she ran to the other side door and caught a break. It was unlocked. She bolted inside, reaching toward her back holster.
“Hello? Is anybody in here?” She removed her weapon. “Hello? I’m Gizella Castillo, private investigator. I’m checking to see if everything is all right in here.”
Silence.
“Hello?” She inched torward the back kitchen. A strange sound caught her ear. She followed it. When she rounded a corner, she spotted a teenager huddled over a large bloody body on the floor.
The teenager looked up, tears streaming. “I’m sorry. I-I should’ve never let them in. I think they killed him.”
9
Tomi entered Ray’s Bar. Through its low lighting she spotted Castillo, waving from a booth near the back. As she approached, her eyes grew wide. “Holy shit! What happened to your face?” Tomi asked, settling into the booth across from the private detective. It took a while for her to notice the cast on her arm.
“It’s okay, I’ll live.”
Their waitress arrived, smiling while placing a bowl of peanuts in the center of the table. “What can I get you? A Bud Light?”
Tomi blinked. “Wow. You have a good memory.”
“A good memory means bigger tips.” The waitress winked.
“A Bud Light will be fine.”
“You got it. Gigi?”
“I’m good,” Castillo said after evaluating how much she had left in her own bottle.
Once the waitress drifted off, Tomi addressed the ex-cop. “Okay. Talk. What happened?”
“Car accident.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. I was following a hunch on the case.”
“What case?”
“The Abrianna Parker case.”
Tomi shook her head. “I didn’t know . . . Why are you still working on that? I didn’t hire you to solve a murder case.”
“No. You hired me to investigate Speaker Reynolds. He’s dead. You used my work to do that little story identifying Abrianna before we got her side of what happened.”
Tomi frowned as she took Castillo’s words as a slap in the face. “I was doing my job.”
“Yeah. I get it.” Castillo shrugged. “You weren’t interested in getting the whole picture. I was. So I followed a hunch and went to the hospital the other day and paid a visit to Shawn White.”
Putting her ego aside, Tomi asked, “Who’s Shawn White?”
“A friend of Abrianna’s who helped me back in the day to nail Craig Avery.”
“Your Deep Throat,” Tomi said. “I remember from the Lifetime movie.”
“Yeah, well. Shawn was gunned down at Abrianna’s apartment hours after I saw her fleeing the Hay-Adams and around about the time she was recorded on that car shoot-out video that went viral.”
Tomi processed that information. “And? You went and saw him. What did he say?”
“Off the record?”
Tomi huffed and slumped back against the booth.
Castillo waited.
“Sure. All right. Off the record.”
“He told me about Abrianna and the circumstances that led her to work for a D.C. madam the weekend Reynolds was killed. So I then went to talk to the madam.”
“Really?” Tomi leaned forward, but then had to self-correct when the waitress returned with her beer.
“One Bud Light,” she sang, setting down the bottle.
“Thanks.” Tomi smiled and then returned her attention to Castillo. “So you went to see the madam?”
Castillo nodded. “Of course she denied everything. But Shawn had said that Abrianna was indebted to the Teflon Don, a drug dealer-slash-businessman who’s acquired quite a lot of political friends over the years. I’d never been able to get anything to stick on him. Anyway, I was privy to a drug raid coming to his estate, and I made sure that I was there to see it all go down—but then all hell broke loose.” Castillo quickly recapped the events at the party.
“Wait. You think Abrianna stole the van?”
“Right after she somehow managed to kidnap the madam from the party.”
“But why?”
“Shawn thinks that Abrianna was set up.”
Tomi’s entire frame deflated. “Set up?”
Castillo nodded. “When the cops found the van, the only body inside the was the madam. And she was dead.”
“Shit.”
“Right.”
“So I paid another visit to Shawn at the hospital. I had a feeling that he was holding out on me.”
“How?”
“I think he’s been in contact with Abrianna recently.”
“Did he confirm your suspicions?”
&nb
sp; “No. He shut me down.”
“So you don’t have any proof that it was Abrianna who stole the van?” Tomi checked.
“Just my gut.”
Tomi shrugged. “Maybe this madam stole the van when she saw the place being raided?”
Castillo smirked. “Anything is possible, but it’s more likely that she was snatched. I started thinking about one of the guys at the party. One I’d seen before. The caterer.”
“The caterer?”
“Turns out that he is another one of Abrianna’s friends. And it was his van that was stolen.”
“So you think he helped her crash this guy’s party?”
Castillo nodded while she took a swig from her beer bottle. “So I decided to go to his restaurant and see if I would have better luck getting any information out of him. However, when I got there this SUV was peeling out of the parking lot like a bat out of hell and clipped my car, which spun me back out into traffic. And voilà. I got the shit knocked out of me and I got this lovely new cast.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah. But I’m a hell of a lot better off than her friend Tyrone Hollis. I found him inside the restaurant barely breathing.”
“What?”
“Yeah. He almost died en route to the hospital.”
“But who?”
“If I was to place a bet, I’d put my money on Zeke Jeffreys aka the Teflon Don. I’m not the only one in this town who can put two and two together.”
“So where is Abrianna now?”
“Still on the run. And she better hope that the feds find her before Zeke does. He’s on the war path.”
* * *
The Bunker
Abrianna and her ragtag team replayed the video clips from the Hay-Adams over again. Each of them marveled at what they were seeing. Feeling vindicated, a smug Abrianna sat back with her arms crossed. She had proven that she hadn’t made the whole story up about the judge Sanders, even though there had been times when she’d questioned whether the drugs she took that night might have fucked up her memory. However, there was no need to tell any of them that.
Ghost was the first to spit out an apology.
“Apology accepted,” Abrianna said.
Draya asked, “What do we do with this information now?”
“We leak this shit to the news,” Julian answered, shrugging. “What else?”
“What, in an email with our names attached? How do we know if anyone will play it? The media is as bad as the government.”
Ghost perked up at Draya’s declaration. “A woman after my own heart.”
Julian butted in, “Something tells me that being a woman with two legs is all it takes to be ‘after your own heart.’ ”
Abrianna and Kadir smirked.
“That’s offensive,” Ghost countered. “I don’t discriminate against the disabled.”
“All right, you two,” Kadir cut in. “Don’t start.”
“Why don’t we upload it to the Internet and watch it go viral? Our site is as popular as Anonymous or WikiLeaks,” Ghost suggested. “This kind of shit is what we’ve been trying to expose about these dirty bastards running this fucking country.”
Abrianna thought it over. “I need more than a video. I need my story attached. Simply uploading this won’t clear my name. If anything, it still leaves the accomplice angle open.”
“You want to do an interview?” Ghost asked. “We can do that, too. We sit you in front of a camera and voilà.”
“We need to go through something more official. The government considers you and your friends here a criminal enterprise,” Abrianna said. “No offense.”
“Offense taken,” Ghost said, leaning back and crossing his arms.
“She’s right,” Kadir said. “She needs to go through a reliable source.”
Ghost expelled a long breath, doing a lousy job of hiding his hurt. “All right. Like who? You got somebody in mind?”
Abrianna hesitated. “Actually I do. But I haven’t spoken to her in a long time.”
“A friend?” Kadir asked.
“Not exactly.” She glanced over at Draya’s frowning face. “But I think that she can be an ally.”
Kadir remained intrigued. “And you think that she will run your story with these images?”
“There’s only one way to find out.”
“Who is it?” Kadir asked.
“She’s a reporter for the Washington Post. Her name is Tomi Lehane.”
10
The White House swearing-in ceremony for the new chief justice took place three hours after the senate voted 61 to 37 to confirm Judge Katherine Sanders to the Supreme Court. The conservative right wing was already throwing a fit over what they saw as a corrupt administration scoring another win on the margins. The president was riding on a spike in popularity due to his strong response to Washington’s Reagan airport bombing. The president and Homeland Security kept the press updated on the city’s manhunt for suspected domestic terrorist Kadir Kahlifa and his possible partner-in-crime Abrianna Parker.
Tomi and photojournalist Jayson Brigham arrived ten minutes early for the ceremony; it was a new phenomenon for the often absentminded and habitually late reporter. Tomi had wrestled with guilt ever since she’d identified Abrianna as the murder suspect in the paper. Her professional ambition had overridden any allegiance she had toward her fellow tortured survivor. She should have listened to Castillo about doing more digging on the story before outing Parker, especially after no one had been there for Shalisa Young before she’d hurled herself off a roof.
Tomi was jarred back to the pomp and circumstance of the moment when the crowd around her broke out into applause.
Chief Justice Sanders shook President Walker’s hand and then turned and beamed at the crowd of gathered friends, family, and reporters while cameras clicked away, Jayson’s included.
Tomi’s cell phone vibrated. Quickly, she scooped it out and frowned at the unknown caller identification. On the last ring before the call transferred to voice mail, she answered, “Hello.” Unable to hear anything, she threaded away from the crowd to the edge of the East Room. “Hello.”
Silence.
Tomi stuffed a finger into one ear. “Hello.”
“Hello. Is this Tomi Lehane?” a woman asked.
Tomi’s spine tingled at the familiar voice. “Who is this?”
“Are you Tomi Lehane, with the Washington Post?” the woman asked.
She hesitated, but her curiosity won out. “I am.”
“I have some information that I think that you may be interested in.”
Tomi’s patience eroded. “Look, lady. I’m in the middle of something. If you’re not going to tell me who you are or what this is about, I’m going to—”
“It’s about who really killed that congressman at the Hay-Adams.”
Tomi stiffened.
“Hello. Are you still there?” the caller asked.
“Who is this?” Tomi demanded.
“Look. I’m trying to clear my name, Ms. Lehane. And I think that you can help me do that.”
Shock hit Tomi hard. “Abrianna?”
Silence hummed over the line.
Tomi waited her out.
“Can we meet?” Abrianna asked. “Alone?”
Tomi’s reporter instincts kicked in, “Sure. We could do that. Where would you like to meet?”
There was a pause.
Tomi shrugged. “I know this little hole-in-the-wall bar over on—”
“No,” Abrianna cut her off. “No crowds.”
“Okay. Then where?”
“Stanton Park—midnight.”
Tomi frowned.
“Do you know where it is?”
“Yeah. Sure. No problem. Midnight. Got it.”
“No cops,” Abrianna stressed. “If I see a cop, I’m out, and I’ll give the story to someone else. Deal?”
“Deal.”
* * *
Abrianna signaled Kadir to end the call over the encrypted computer l
ine.
He punched a key and then swiveled toward her to ask, “Are you sure that you can trust her?” he asked.
“I don’t trust anybody.”
Kadir placed a hand over his heart. “Ouch.”
Abrianna grinned. “Except you guys, of course.”
Ghost shook his head. “Ice cold, man.” From behind his computer station, Ghost leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs at the ankle. “The real question is whether your reporter friend has enough juice to get your story printed. At least your version of it.”
“My version? We have proof now.” Abrianna gestured to the printed pictures from the Hay-Adams security video. There were clear images of Judge Sanders in her trench coat arriving at the hotel, riding up the elevator, walking down the hallway, knocking on the suite’s door, and even pictures of Kenneth Reynolds inviting her inside. However, there was no picture more damaging than the one of the judge leaving the suite, this time with blood visible on her face and coat.
“Too bad there aren’t any pictures of the judge with the murder weapon,” Draya said.
“No. She left the weapon in the room.”
“The police have it?” Kadir asked.
Abrianna shook her head. “I took it.”
“That’s . . . not good,” Ghost said. “Where’s the weapon now?”
She thought about it. “Shit. I left it in Kadir’s car after I ran out of bullets during that shoot-out.”
“Shit. So the cops have it.”
“Wait. You used the murder weapon during another crime?” Ghost asked.
“I didn’t have a choice.”
“Well. We have proof that she was there,” Kadir acquiesced, “but it could still put us in a she said/we said situation.”
“Only the good judge hasn’t come forward to place herself in that hotel room that night. A lot of people would wonder why,” Draya said, being helpful.
Julian nodded, looping an arm around her shoulders. “I’d like to hear the judge explain being in that hotel room the night that guy was killed.” He jabbed the date and time stamp on the photograph.
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