“Let me guess,” Willingham said. “Her brother? Napoleon Howard?”
“Half brother, and a little bit of that,” Mahoney said. “But Althea was more focused on West Briar and how the staff would not listen to her when she brought Kay in this last time. She kept telling them that Kay had been through two traumatic incidents in the weeks before she brought her to the facility.”
“What traumatic incidents?” Barnes asked.
“Her mother dying,” the vice president said.
“And the death of Napoleon Howard,” Mahoney said. “Ms. Lincoln said it was the straw that broke the camel’s back and caused the nervous breakdown.”
I could see the news had gotten to Willingham.
“Your ex-wife believed Mr. Howard was innocent,” Mahoney said.
“Kay sure did not believe that when he was convicted,” he said, setting his coffee cup down hard. “It’s how we met, you know. She walked up at a party, told me she’d been a childhood friend of Jefferson Ward, and thanked me after I put Howard away.”
Mahoney said, “She came around to Howard’s position over the years.”
“Napoleon Howard wasn’t innocent,” Willingham insisted. “He killed Jeff Ward in a drug-fueled rage. Cut off the man’s head, for God’s sake. His prints and Ward’s blood were on the knife. He lost every appeal. End of story.”
Mahoney said, “There might be a different angle on all of that.”
Barnes sat forward. “What sort of angle?”
“Kay evidently believed her mind was being manipulated long before Dr. Tolliver and Dr. Hicks were ever involved in that facility.”
Barnes said, “This sounds like Althea Lincoln nonsense and a waste of the vice president’s time. Sir, you really do have to be at the White House at — ”
Willingham crossed his arms. “I want to hear this, if only to see how delusional Kay managed to make herself this time. Dr. Cross, she used to tie herself in knots with family conspiracy theories. It’s why her parents sent her to Switzerland for school when she was seventeen. She blamed Roy and Beth Sutter for everything wrong with the world and she needed some perspective on that.”
“When Kay was seventeen,” I said. “That would have been after her first stay at West Briar?”
He shrugged. “Sounds right.”
“Do you know why her parents committed her to West Briar that first time?”
“Bipolar disorder,” he said. “It’s a chemical imbalance, treatable with drugs.”
I said, “That was the diagnosis. But Althea says there was a traumatic incident that triggered the depression and Kay’s first commitment.”
CHAPTER 87
“WHAT DID ALTHEA SAY HAPPENED to Kay?” the vice president asked, the fingertips of his hands touching to form a steeple.
“She fell in love for the first time,” I replied.
“With Jefferson Ward,” Mahoney said.
“What?” Willingham said scornfully. “No, not a chance. She would have told me that.”
“And yet she didn’t,” I said. “But we’ve confirmed the romance with several sources, all teenage friends of Kay and Althea.”
“Whoever they are, they’re full of it. I know most of Kay’s teenage friends and never once did they mention Kay being in love with Ward. That’s preposterous.”
Mahoney said, “How many of those friends were black, sir, African-American?”
“Well … I don’t know.” I said, “Kay’s African-American friends, the ones we spoke with, were adamant that Kay had not only been in love with Ward but was in a sexual relationship with him. Kay’s parents found out and forbade her to see him. That’s what caused the depression. Not a chemical swing.”
“According to Althea Lincoln,” Barnes said, dismissively.
“And six other women, Ms. Barnes,” Mahoney said. “We have sworn affidavits.”
The vice president stared off as if seeing his late ex-wife in a different light. “Roy and Beth put her in West Briar for sleeping with Ward?”
“That’s our belief,” I said. “The problem was, Kay went right back to Ward after her release from West Briar, which was really what got her sent to school in Switzerland. Two years later, she came home to Montgomery at Christmas, polished, multilingual, and extremely well educated, on her way to being fully prepared for her future life. Jeff Ward had fallen on harder times. He’d lost his job. He sold drugs. Still, during that visit, Kay told Ward that when she’d finished her studies abroad and gotten her inheritance, she would return. They’d go away, make a life for themselves.”
Willingham stayed silent, watching us, while Barnes scribbled furiously. Then he shook his head. “We had investigators all over that case. We would have known this.”
“But you didn’t,” Mahoney said. “With all due respect, sir, we believe the Montgomery investigators were understandably lax about pursuing other explanations for Ward’s death. They had the weapon, the motive, and eyewitnesses who put Howard at the scene. Why would the detectives have looked at other theories?”
“Bill Miller, Howard’s public defender, was very good. He would have brought the relationship up at trial if it had been pertinent to Howard’s case.”
I said, “We asked Mr. Miller about that. He said he vaguely remembered that Kay had been in love with Ward when they were young but did not know about her visit home at nineteen and believed she’d been in Switzerland almost six years and was living with a Swiss man when Ward was murdered.”
“Henri,” Willingham said with a head bob to Barnes. “I met Henri once. A twit. But Dr. Cross, Special Agent Mahoney, I still haven’t heard anything that presents a new angle here. One night when Howard and his friend were high on booze, meth, and coke, tempers flared and Howard went berserk.”
“Or someone else did, Mr. Vice President,” Mahoney said.
He crossed his arms again, said, “You going to tell me Bobby Carson did it?”
Mahoney said, “No, sir. Bobby’s good for fraud and racketeering but not murder.”
I said, “We believe a hired assassin was watching Ward and Howard the night of the murder. The assassin saw them higher than kites and arguing. When they passed out, he took advantage of the situation, went in wearing gloves, cut Ward’s head off, and framed Howard for it with the knife.”
“C’mon,” Barnes moaned. “An assassin? Who’s going to believe that scenario?”
Arms crossed, frowning, the vice president sounded equally skeptical when he said, “Who do you think this assassin was?”
“I don’t think we’ll ever know exactly who, sir,” Mahoney said.
“That’s convenient,” Special Agent Breit said.
“Right?” Special Agent Price said and sat back, unimpressed.
Barnes’s phone buzzed. She looked at it, closed her eyes, said, “Great. That’s the White House counsel wondering where we are.”
“Tell him we are attending to a personal issue that’s just come up.”
“Sir, I — ”
“Do it, please,” Willingham said. He looked at us. “If you don’t know who the assassin was, how do you know he was hired? That’s what you said, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Mahoney said. “We know he was hired because we know who hired him.”
The vice president, his chief of staff, and his security detail all leaned forward.
“Who?” Willingham said.
“Roy Sutter,” I said. “Kay’s father.”
CHAPTER 88
AT THE SAME TIME OVER in Southeast DC, not far from Dempsey’s All-Night Diner, Bree and Sampson pounded on the apartment door of Angela Monroe, mother of Devon Monroe, a seventeen-year-old junior at the late Randall Christopher’s Harrison Charter School.
Devon Monroe had no prior history of criminal activity, a minor miracle for the neighborhood, but Mary Jo Nevis, aka Waffles, had told Bree and Sampson that Monroe and a friend of his named Lever Ashford came to her two days after the murders.
Several weeks before, the boys, w
ho washed dishes part-time at Dempsey’s, had asked her about being a fence. Waffles told them being a fence had landed her in a penitentiary and that’s all they needed to know.
She’d meant it as a warning, so when they showed up at the diner looking for her to fence some jewelry that had “come their way,” she refused. Which meant either they’d sold the stolen goods elsewhere or they still had them.
Sampson knocked again on Monroe’s door.
Devon’s mother, Angela Monroe, who worked nights as an EMT, answered the door in a robe looking exhausted and confused. “Devon?” she said when Sampson showed her the search and arrest warrants. “No, my boy has never been in trouble a day in his life.”
“I’m sorry to say that day has come,” Sampson said. “Where is he?”
“No, no, Devon’s a good boy, a good student,” she said, her anxiety rising. “He’s going to go to college someday. He — ”
“Stole jewelry off two dead people,” Bree said. “One of them his high-school principal.”
“Mr. Christopher?” she said, appalled. “No, that’s — ”
“Ma’am, please,” Sampson said. “Can we make this easy? For his sake?”
Mrs. Monroe nodded. With tears welling in her eyes, she pointed to a hallway. “Third door on the right.”
Sampson didn’t bother to knock, just went in and turned on the lights. Bree followed him and almost gagged at the smell of a seventeen-year-old boy’s bedroom, a mix of body odor, sneaker toe punk, and dirty-clothes stink. And the tiny space looked like a bomb had hit it.
Across the wreckage, on the lower of the bunk beds, something moved. Clothes fell to the floor, and then schoolbooks, then Devon Monroe’s head appeared, eyes shut, grimacing.
“Not again, Ma.” He moaned. “Shut the light off. I said I’d pick up in the morning.”
“Metro Police!” Bree said. “Get up. Now!”
The kid’s eyes flew open and his face registered shock at seeing Bree and Sampson standing there in their bulletproof vests. “What? Wait! What is this?”
“You’re under arrest, Devon,” Sampson said, going to him and throwing aside the small mountain of clothes and blankets he’d been burrowed under. He was naked.
“Dude!” he yelled, covering himself. “Not cool!”
Bree looked around, saw a pair of jeans, threw them at him, and listened as Sampson read him his rights.
“Do you understand, Devon?” Bree asked.
He nodded morosely.
“I sacrificed everything for you!” his mother yelled from the doorway. “Your father left, and I lived for you, boy!”
“Ma!” he said. “Please!”
“Please, nothing,” she said, weeping. “You’ve thrown it all away. Everything I worked for.”
“Maybe not,” Sampson said, looking at the kid. “We have a search warrant, but honestly, Devon, we’d rather not dig around in here. Show us what we want, now, and just maybe the judge will cut you some slack.”
His gaze shifted from Sampson to Bree to his mother, who shouted, “Show them! Tell them, Devon! Whatever they want, you do it!”
The teen’s shoulders drooped in surrender, and he sullenly pointed to a pile of debris in the corner. “I tried telling Lever it was too good to be true, but he just wouldn’t listen.”
Sampson put on latex gloves, went to the corner, and started digging.
Bree said, “Was that before or after you shot Mr. Christopher and Mrs. Willingham?”
“What?” his mother shouted. “No! Do not answer that, Devon.”
“Ma,” he said angrily. “We didn’t shoot anyone. We — ”
“I don’t care,” she said, sounding on the verge of hysteria. “I know where this is going now. Not another word until we’ve talked to a lawyer, you hear me, young man?”
CHAPTER 89
VICE PRESIDENT WILLINGHAM’S BROW FURROWED after we’d told him that Kay’s father had ordered the murder of Jefferson Ward and the framing of Napoleon Howard.
“Roy Sutter?” he said, shaking his head. “I’m sorry, my late ex-father-in-law might have been a racist but I can’t believe he’d — ”
“Why not?” Mahoney said. “He put his daughter in a psych ward and had her doped to the gills, and then he sent her to Switzerland for years to keep her and Ward apart.”
“Why have Ward killed, then? As you said, Kay had been in Switzerland for nearly six years by that time. She had a life over there.”
I said, “Kay was coming home, returning to Montgomery because her grandmother was terminally ill with cancer. And she was going to reunite with Ward. She told her father as much in a letter two months before Ward was killed.”
“Says who?” Barnes said. “Althea Lincoln?”
“No,” I said, flipping my file open. “Kay’s letter states it clearly.”
“You have the letter?” Willingham said, shocked.
“Mr. Vice President,” his chief of staff said. “I don’t like where this is — ”
“We have a copy of it, sir,” I said, pushing the document to Willingham.
He said, “And where did you find this letter Kay allegedly wrote?”
Mahoney said, “In a storage unit in Montgomery. With your old files from the Ward trial, sir. You must have left them behind when you ran for Congress.”
Willingham stared at Ned and me, blinking, then he put on reading glasses and scanned the letter and the envelope Mahoney slid across to him.
Barnes shifted in her chair, said, “Mr. Vice President — ”
“Give me a damn minute, Claudette,” Willingham said, his eyes on the letter as he read and reread it. After a moment, he lifted his head. “I can tell you, gentlemen, I have never seen this before in my life. And you say it was found in my trial files? That is impossible. If authenticated, this letter might have been exculpatory at trial.”
“Exactly, sir,” I said.
“Stop!” Barnes said. “This conversation is over, Mr. Vice President!”
Willingham glanced in bewilderment at the letter again and then at her. “Why?”
“Because I am also serving as your counsel here, sir,” Barnes replied, agitated. “Whatever that letter says, they found it in your files and they are, in effect, accusing you of withholding evidence in a capital crimes case, a violation of Napoleon Howard’s constitutional rights as well as a gross obstruction of justice.”
The vice president blinked again and shook his head. “But Claudette, I have a near-photographic memory, and I have honestly never seen this letter before. And I remember going through those trial boxes before I had them moved to storage. There was an index of everything. I would have seen this in the index or in the evidence log, and I didn’t.”
Mahoney cleared his throat. “I never said the letter was in your files, sir. We said the letter was with your boxes in the Carson and Knight storage unit. But the files that contained the letter and other documents were markedly different than yours. They were light blue and had a different labeling and coding system.”
“Whose files were they, then?” he demanded. “Who did they belong to?”
Mahoney and I turned our full attention on Barnes, who was staring at us like we’d morphed into a firing squad.
“They belonged to Claude Knight, sir,” I said. “Your chief of staff’s late father.”
CHAPTER 90
CLAUDETTE BARNES’S LIPS BARELY TREMBLED as she said softly, venomously, “How dare you impugn the reputation of my father. He was one of the finest — ”
“— liars, cheats, and legal con artists Montgomery has ever known,” Ned Mahoney said. “At least, that’s his reputation among people old enough to remember him in his early days. ‘A bag man’ was how some described him.”
“Corrupt,” I added. “A man without a conscience. A man willing to sell his soul.”
Barnes’s face flushed and she shouted, “Do not talk about my daddy like that! He was a good man and I’m not listening to any more of this.”
She got to her feet. Willingham put his hand on hers and said, “Sit down, Claudette. You’ve said yourself he was a lousy lawyer.”
“He was not a criminal,” she said, sitting down, not looking our way. “I went through his files before he died and he was not a criminal. I would have seen evidence of that and I did not.”
“Why did you go through his files?” I asked.
“It’s what you do when your father has died,” she said.
“Except you went through the files before he died,” I said. “We’ve seen the sign-out sheets. Why before?”
Barnes shook her head. “I don’t remember it that way.”
“Your sister remembers it that way,” Mahoney said. “She says a week after your father’s first stroke, she overheard him ordering you to go through his old files and destroy anything that linked him to any criminality.”
“My sister’s lying,” Barnes said. “But it’s moot. I didn’t find anything.”
“Because someone else got to the files first, someone who had suspicions about their contents — a paralegal at Carson and Knight named Belinda Jackson.”
“I remember her,” Willingham said.
I said, “In the hours after Claude Knight had his first stroke, and three days before you went to the storage unit, Ms. Barnes, Belinda Jackson went through your father’s files on Kay Willingham, Roy Sutter, Jefferson Ward, and Napoleon Howard. She put what she discovered in with your files, Mr. Vice President, figuring that they would be seen at some point soon in Howard’s appeals process.”
Mahoney said, “But those files were put in storage. Belinda tried to tell several investigators that there was information pertinent to the case somewhere in the trial boxes. But no one looked. And then Howard died in prison.”
I said, “When Belinda heard, she tried to call Kay to tell her about notes she’d seen, written in Knight’s own hand, that referred to meetings with Roy Sutter after the letter arrived from Switzerland along with specific times and dates where Kay’s father talked about having Ward ‘eliminated.’ But Kay couldn’t take Belinda’s calls because she was in West Briar and not allowed any outside contact at the suggestion of Ms. Barnes.”
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