by Dan Kelly
Seeing me standing in front of her desk and Bob and Shirley running into the office has her face turning crimson from embarrassment and then anger. “Damn it, Chet. You scared the daylights out of me.”
“I’m sorry, Felicity, but I don’t know what else I could have done to get your attention. When I spoke to you, you didn’t hear me.”
“You spoke to me?”
“I did.”
“Oh boy. I’m sorry I snapped at you, boss, but you really scared me.”
“Forget it. Bob, Shirley, thanks for checking on her. Have a good night.”
As Bob and Shirley walk out the door, I ask Felicity again what’s in the material she’s reading that has her shaking her head.
“It’s the latest expense report I’m putting together for Don Ericson. I’ve been making daily entries to the report so I wouldn’t leave anything out that should be included, but there has to be a mistake somewhere. The amount I’m showing they owe us can’t be right. Either you gave me some wrong figures or I’ve transposed some numbers or added wrong. I’ve looked over this report so many times I have it memorized, but I can’t find anything out of whack.”
“Let me have a look.”
I go down the list of items and see nothing out of line and say so. “Why do you think the total is wrong?”
“That total will put us in the black for months. We’ve never had a billing so high.”
“At $300 bucks an hour plus expenses for the number of hours I’ve been putting in, the grand total climbs high in a hurry. There’s nothing wrong with this report. It explains every expense down to the smallest detail although I must admit it’s going to raise Piedmont’s eyebrows and the hackles on his neck when he has to forward it to his superiors. Submit it and move on.
“Now, is there anything that I need to attend to personally ASAP?”
“There’s nothing that can’t wait for a few days.”
“Good. I’ll give you a quick status summary of where we are on the Crusader project and then you can get the hell out of here at a decent hour for a change.”
When I finish giving her the latest on the Crusader and the trap we hope to spring she asks, “If this doesn’t work, do you folks have a plan B? I don’t want to rain on your parade, but this man has managed to elude the long arm of the law for months now and the media blitz hasn’t yet put him in a corner either. As you have said time and time again, this Aldrich guy is very smart. From what you’ve told me about him, he engineers his killings with a minimum of risk to himself, no witnesses when at all possible or from hiding when it is expedient for him to do so. This trap you’re setting doesn’t fit into either scenario. I don’t think Aldrich will take the bait and go for broke out in the open with so many people close by even if he doesn’t care if he loses his life in the process. I’m sorry for being a spoil sport, Chet, but I don’t think he’s going to fall for it no matter how much he hates the President.”
“Well, you sure know how to ruin a fella’s day. Get out of here.”
After Felicity clears her desk and leaves, I start giving what she just said some serious thought. The key to our plan working lies in the accumulative effect the media blitz is having on the Crusader’s emotions and the reaction he’ll have to the President’s comments about his son. We’re banking on these two things to be sufficiently strong to make him willing to throw caution to the wind for the sake of making the President pay for his role in his son’s death.
If we’re wrong, there’s no plan B except to hope the media blitz will eventually lead us to him and that will have diminishing returns the longer it’s in place because people will tire of the repetition with nothing being accomplished and lose interest.
Well, at least one good thing has come from the blitz to date, except for the Crusader’s attempts on Janet, yours truly, Don and Piedmont, no one else has been killed.
On that note, I check my emails and then call it a day.
Chapter 26
On the way home, I decide to follow Janet’s example and fix something to eat there and wash it down with a beer or two. I have the makings for spaghetti and sausage, but stop at a deli not far from my place to pick up some Italian bread and some parmesan cheese.
While I’m waiting in line to pay for these items, I see that the owner has a small TV on a shelf above the counter he slices the meats and cheeses on and it’s tuned to Channel 2 News. I can barely hear what the reporter is saying, but I catch the word Crusader so I ask the owner to turn it up.
What I hear makes me lose all interest in eating. Two men delivering some office furniture to a law firm recognized Aldrich as he was getting off a bus and tried to apprehend him and were shot in the process, one of them fatally. The other man suffered two gunshot wounds, one to his shoulder and one to his upper chest and is currently in surgery. A spokesman for the hospital said that although the injuries are serious the patient should survive. The man who was killed had a wife and three small kids, the oldest eight years old.
Witnesses said that they briefly saw the shooter, but he quickly ran into a nearby mall and disappeared. One of the policeman at the scene said that while they were waiting for the ambulance to arrive the injured man told him what had happened.
I pay the cashier and head home. I pass on supper, but not on the couple of beers while thinking about the kinds of things that can turn a loving family man and a law abiding citizen into a cold blooded killer. It’s a terrible way to spend an evening, so I elect to do some research on a missing person, the wife of a French diplomat who went shopping for a new outfit a couple of weeks ago and never came home. The President asked me to look into the case personally because the Frenchman has helped him in the past with some very touchy issues and he would like to return the favor, but in a quiet out of the spotlight kind of way.
Over the next couple of hours I make some headway, but my heart really isn’t in it, so I go to bed and toss and turn for another hour before I finally drift off to sleep. A memorable evening it was not.
I woke up on time the next morning, but I just couldn’t get my ass in gear as I was still thinking about the shooting yesterday and showed up at the FBI conference room fifteen minutes late. Nobody seemed to notice as everyone was talking about the shooting. After a cup of strong coffee and some pastries, I feel more alive and ask Janet if she was able to deliver the scripts to Don as she had promised.
“I had to rewrite them a couple of times before I was satisfied, but I met his deadline. When I left, he was calling the President. He hasn’t said anything yet about how the call went. We’ve all been talking about what the Crusader did yesterday.”
When she says this, I begin to sense something else is different about this morning, but at first I can’t figure out what it is. Then it dawns on me. There are no phones ringing.
I comment on this to Janet and she says, “In the public’s eye, spotting the Crusader and reporting it has just become a lot more dangerous with the killing of the two delivery men. Even though they’ve been warned about how dangerous Aldrich is, the killing of two people who aren’t primary targets of the Crusader makes getting involved a whole new ball game. It will be interesting to see if the phones stay silent or start ringing again, but in a smaller number. I don’t believe we’ll be receiving the volume of daily call-ins we have been receiving anymore.”
Don asks everyone to take a seat so he can bring everyone up to date on the progress made regarding the planned Crusader trap. After he summarizes what was discussed and agreed upon at the planning meeting he finishes up with, “Everything we need to pull this off has been arranged for and will be in place on the day of the news conference at Walter Reed. The President bought into everything we’re planning to do, including his impromptu appearance at his press secretary’s news briefing with the press later this morning which will begin promptly at eleven o’clock. All we can do now is keep our fingers crossed and wait to see what happens. I’ve had a TV brought in so we can all watch the news conference along
with the next shift if you want to hang around.”
The rest of our shift is uneventful as there are only five call-ins by the time ten o’clock rolls around, none of them helpful. It looks like Janet’s assessment of the future call-in volume is going to be the case. Janet and I elect not to stick around for the news briefing, but instead to catch it in her office where she can prepare a follow up story to what transpires during the briefing after the President drops his bombshell on the Crusader and have it in her editor’s hands before he can even think to ask her for one. Her editor has no idea she wrote what the President will be saying. We figure the fewer people who know that the safer we’ll be when it comes to leaks. Press room personnel have loose tongues too.
At eleven o’clock, Janet and I are glued to the TV in her office as the Whitehouse press room appears on the screen. The Press Secretary, Jim Worthington, walks into the room and the reporters settle down to listen to his remarks. About half way through the news briefing, reporters start firing questions about the Crusader’s latest killing. The President chooses this moment to put in his surprise appearance. He makes the appropriate apology for interrupting Worthington as he’s in the process of answering a reporter’s question and then steps up to the mike. Soon after he begins to speak he has me convinced he should have been an actor. He’s putting on an Oscar performance and the reporters are eating it up. Ten minutes later he turns the news briefing back over to Worthington and exits the press room. As of that moment the news briefing is over as everybody begins to scramble out of the room to call in their stories.
Somewhat in awe I look at Janet and say, “Lady, if you ever get fed up with journalism, you could make a whale of a living as a novelist. That script you wrote for the President had everyone in the room spellbound.”
“Thank you for the compliment, Chet, but the President is the one who should get the credit. He added the believability that was necessary for it to have the desired effect. This will be all over the news for the next 24 hours. Let’s hope Aldrich catches it.”
During the President’s performance, Janet was multi-tasking at her computer inputting segments of the story she plans to submit to her boss so she won’t have to worry about forgetting ideas and phrases she wants to use. She now turns her attention back to her computer and immediately becomes preoccupied with her story and I’m forgotten. I silently slip out of the room and head back to my office. Although I’m making a lot of money working with the FBI on the Crusader case, I’ve been neglecting the rest of my business which is going to come back to haunt me if I don’t get back on track.
I spend the rest of my day working on other cases and manage to make a fair amount of progress. I even found the wife of the French diplomat. Unfortunately, it was in a hospital. Apparently, she had a stroke in a women’s restroom at one of the stores she was shopping in and was found by another customer lying unconscious on the floor. Her purse was missing, so there was no immediate way to identify her and since she isn’t a resident of the United States they didn’t have her fingerprints or a picture of her on any American document that would help ID her. The stroke put her in a coma for 12 days and when she came out of it she couldn’t speak clearly and she’s lost all movement in her right arm and hand and only has partial movement in her left hand. Since she can’t communicate, the police and hospital personnel have been scratching their heads over what to do with her.
I found her because I had a picture of her that the President got from the husband and I emailed it to all of the local hospitals asking them if the woman was a patient in their facility. Two hours later I received a phone call from the Coronary Care Unit at Howard University Hospital telling me that the lady was a patient there.
When I call the President to let him know he could now score some points with the French diplomat, he doesn’t answer the phone and that has never happened before. It’s a dedicated line that only I have access to and when it rings it’s supposed to be answered without delay because the call is important. When he calls me, it’s on a separate cell phone that I always have on my person or close by and only he has the number for it. I don’t make calls on it to anyone else but him. We don’t call these numbers to socialize.
I leave a message about locating the Frenchman’s wife and asked him to call me before he contacts the diplomat. I want him to be aware of her condition so he can decide how to break the news to the man.
The fact that the President didn’t answer the phone has me more than a little concerned. I’m thinking something very urgent has occurred that’s taken precedence over my call to him.
It’s now about five-thirty and my stomach’s starting to put up a fuss about being empty, so I decide to head for Morey’s. I haven’t eaten since I wolfed down those pastries in the FBI conference room early this morning. On my way to my car, I call Janet to ask her if she’d like to join me, but my call goes to her voice mail, so I leave a message. When I get to the restaurant, there are a few vacant spaces in the parking lot which surprises me. The last time I was here the lot was crammed with cars. Maybe Reardon’s off tonight.
When I get inside, Sadie is at the hostess stand welcoming a party of four to Morey’s. She assigns a table to them and calls one of the hostesses over to show them to their table. I’m next in line and the first thing she says is not hello or good evening, Chet, but where’s Janet?
“Sadie, we’re not tied to the hip. We don’t go everywhere together. Despite what you might think or wish, we’re not an item. We’re just in the getting to know each other better stage of our relationship. I know you mean well, but please, back off on playing cupid, okay?”
“You two are perfect for each other. Trust me, match making runs in my family. I know these things.”
“Sadie, people like to move into relationships at their own pace. They don’t want to be pushed or maneuvered into them by someone else even if that someone is a match making guru and means well. So, will you back off?”
Looking at me like I’m a lost cause, she shrugs her shoulders and reluctantly agrees to try to mind her own business, but she also says she won’t make any promises because what I’m asking her to do is like asking her to stop scratching an itch.
I figure that’s the best I’m going to get from her, so I change the subject by asking her about Reardon. “Is the Maestro playing tonight?”
“He is, but there are no tables available in that room. However, you’ll be able to listen to him wherever you’re sitting because we had a speaker system installed throughout the entire restaurant today, even in the restrooms.”
“Okay, seat me somewhere. I’m famished.”
As soon as I sit down, my special cell rings. I get a sudden queasy feeling in my stomach and it’s not from hunger. I’m thinking I’m about to hear some very bad news. “Good evening, Mr. President.”
Without any preamble, the President laid it on me. “Chet, about four this afternoon the Vice President was shot leaving his home at the Naval Observatory. When you called, I was in the middle of finding out what the hell happened and wasn’t having any luck finding someone that could answer my questions. I still only have a cursory knowledge of what went down there.”
“What’s the Vice President’s condition?”
“He’ll be okay. His briefcase and laptop bought it though. He was holding it up in front of him to hand it to one of his security detail for some reason when the shot was fired. The briefcase absorbed most of the momentum of the bullet and that’s what saved him. The bullet penetrated his chest muscle, but did no major damage.”
“Do you know who shot him? Was it the Crusader?”
“We don’t know. It might have been him. A rifle was used but from where it was fired is still unknown. The Secret Service and FBI are crawling all over the place trying to figure that out and looking for clues to the identity of the shooter.”
“I’m betting this is more of the Crusader’s work. Yesterday the Vice President pulled no punches when talking to some TV reporters about
how he feels about the Crusader’s rampage. I caught his comments on the news last night. He said several times in several different ways that the Crusader is way off base in his reasoning for his vendetta, that he’s drawn erroneous conclusions from spurious information provided by unreliable sources and is no better than any other serial killer with a lust for blood. I’m betting this got Aldrich’s blood boiling to the point that it pushed him to try to spill some of the Vice President’s blood.”