The Next President (10 page)

“I’m Ivar McCray’s cousin. I’ve been asking a few questions about his death.”

“You can do that in Illinois?”

“Just a friendly exchange of information between police professionals.”

“Probably helps when one of those professionals is the chief of police and he’s married to a McCray,” Evan suggested.

Blair McCray didn’t so much as blink.

“That does have its advantages.”

“So you learn anything interesting?”

“Your name.”

“And did you tell your fellow cops anything they found important?”

“I let them know Ivar was too simple to spell bomb, much less build one.”

Evan took in the implication of that tidbit without comment.

“See, Ivar and me, we grew up together. We were more like brothers than cousins. Ivar lost his daddy early and I lost mine before I was born. But I was older, so I was supposed to look after him. Did a pretty good job for quite a while, too. But you go off to college, meet a girl, find a job, get married, and start a family—you do all that, you got your hands full night and day. Some things just slip. With me, Ivar was what slipped. He never was much at school, and he was easily led. He dropped out of high school and took to running with bikers.”

Blair put a chiseled arm on the window frame of the pickup and leaned toward Evan.

“What I’m saying, Ivar wasn’t a Boy Scout. He was in with the wrong crowd. He got drunk and loud. Started fistfights easier than he should have.

Spent any number of weekends in jail. But extortion and bomb building?”

Blair McCray shook his head.

“That wasn’t him. But somebody went to a lot of trouble to make it look that way.”

The look Blair gave Evan told him he had a strong suspicion who that somebody was.

“Or maybe, with all your new responsibilities, you just lost touch

with him,” Evan suggested in a neutral tone.

“He changed and you never saw it.”

That possibility pricked Blair’s conscience, made him frown.

Evan added, “You talked to the Carbondale chief, he had to tell you about the footprints found near your cousin’s body. Two of his uniforms wanted to look for shoes in my closet, but they didn’t have a warrant and didn’t get to come in. But maybe… maybe it’d be a good idea to let you take a look.”

Evan was sure defense counsel Richard Shuster would vehemently disagree, but he wanted to see how the idea would play with this guy.

Blair McCray laughed, a deep, somewhat threatening sound that bubbled up from his overdeveloped chest.

“I’d be surprised if those shoes aren’t long gone. No, I think we’ll just have to find another opportunity to talk, you and me. Sometime when your friends with their shotguns aren’t around.”

Evan looked up and saw Ben behind the truck with a shotgun; in front of the vehicle was his neighbor, similarly armed.

“Not friends, family,” Evan told Blair.

“I’ve got lots of family around here.”

Blair started his truck and turned on his lights.

“I know what you mean. I’ve got a lot of kin right close by myself. And as you pointed out, in-laws, too.”

He gave Evan a mock salute and drove off.

Jenny Crenshaw had a hard time falling asleep. Besides having to break up the fight between Vandy Ellison and Special Agent DeVito that day, she’d also heard from Baxter Brown about what had happened in Denver: The FBI had been led to a marksman’s notebook.

It had been discovered in a hotel room that looked out at the Four Seasons, where the campaign had been scheduled to stay. The head of housekeeping at the second hotel had been checking up on how well her staff had been cleaning rooms when she’d found the notebook, which had fallen behind a desk and been left there by both its owner and the maid who’d cleaned the room.

The head of housekeeping hadn’t known exactly what the notebook was, but the crudely scrawled figures in it seemed somehow angry-sinister—to her. She’d taken the risk of looking foolish and summoned the hotel’s chief of security’ to examine it. That gentleman, formerly with the Denver PD, had known exactly what he was looking at: notations for windage, elevation, and range.

The head of hotel security had also known who’d be arriving soon at the hostelry across the street, and so he called the FBI.

None of the data listed in the notebook specified a target. Some of the figures could have worked for a shot at the Rawley suite in the Four Seasons … or the target could have been something else entirely. But what greatly disturbed everyone was that the last occupant of the room where the notebook had been found had registered under a false identity. No man matching the name or possessing the home address of the hotel guest could be found.

With those disturbing thoughts in mind, Jenny had just drifted off, felt herself sinking helplessly into the teeth of a nightmare, when the phone rang. She awoke with a start, and when the phone rang again she felt a chill, as she feared the call could only be bad news. She grabbed the phone and croaked a dry-throated hello.

“Now I know I’ve woken you. I am sorry, my dear.”

If possible, Donald “Hunter” Ward’s voice was more brittle and ethereal than the last time she’d heard it. How, she wondered, could anyone sound that way and still be alive? She took a sip of water from the glass on the nightstand and asked, “Do you have any news, Don?”

“Yes, but not the news you’re asking for. I haven’t redeemed my promise to you yet, but I will. In all my poking about, though, I’m afraid I’ve uncovered another threat.”

“Another assassin?” Jenny asked. The mystery man in Denver? The very idea made her go cold.

“Of the more common variety, Jenny. A character assassin. I haven’t gleaned the details yet, but there’s a big smear heading your man’s way. Very big is the impression I got, and quite soon, too.”

“A smear? But Del is Mr. Clean. I checked him out myself before I signed on.”

“Check again, dear. I wasn’t led to believe that this was a whole-cloth attack.”

“I don’t care what it is. When I hear something like this I just want to go off like-” Jenny stopped herself before she said the name, but far too late for it not to be inferred.

“Like our esteemed former colleague, Thomas “Killer’ Laughlin?”

While it was said that Don Ward could dig up the dirt on Santa, Tom Laughlin’s claim to fame was he could shoot Rudolph out of the sky, red nose and all.

“Yes, Tom could run people through the shredder, couldn’t he?” Don Ward asked.

“Well, I’m sure in the wears the three of us were together you picked up some of his fighting spirit.”

“In this business, it’s a necessity.”

“I heard from him, you know. Quite recently.”

After a long pause Jenny asked, “He finally had the decency to come see you?”

Don Ward’s laugh was a sibilant wheeze that gave Jenny chills.

“No, no, my dear. He called. He wanted me to leave him all the secrets of my craft. Put down in black and white a primer on the investigation of human frailty. You know, which rocks are the most important to look under, which transoms are the most profitable to peek over, which friends are most likely to have betrayal in their hearts. I told him it was all intuitive, a gift, and it would die with me.”

Put that way, Jenny wasn’t surprised at the affliction Don suffered.

“I imagine he didn’t take that well,” she said.

“No. Shrugging off rejection was never Tom’s long suit. He seemed particularly disturbed, and more than a little surprised, when I told him I was otherwise engaged.”

“You told him you’re helping me?”

“I didn’t specify what was occupying my final days. I knew keeping him in the dark would drive him crazy. It’s a small pleasure, but one he owes me.”

Jenny had no trouble remembering that when she had first gone to work for Ward & Laughlin the two men were the best of friends, as close as brothers Seeing them come to this, she wondered how long she could continue in politics before she became indistinguishable from her mentors.

“Again, my dear, I apologize for the hour of my call. I’ll try to do better next time.”

“Call anytime you want, Don,” Jenny told him.

“And thanks.”

Wednesday, September 15, 2004

“You had to call my lawyer, huh?”

J. D. Cade answered his son’s question with one of his own.

“What kind of father would I be if I hadn’t?”

J. D. had taken the call from Evan in the kitchen at the Refuge. He’d given the phone number and the house’s address to his mother when he’d called her the day before. Outside by the pool, Pickpocket was negotiating a meeting via his laptop with Red, the hacker who claimed to have the PostMaster Plus password.

“Somebody else’s father, I guess. Not mine.”

“Can’t help myself,” J. D. replied.

“That’s just the way I feel.”

“I’ll yell for help if I need it, okay?”

“I’d rather not let it get to that point.”

“All right. How about I’ll call you if I even see trouble coming—and believe me, I’m keeping my eyes open.”

J. D. knew he had to cut his son some slack. By the time he was Evan’s age… well, that was how this whole mess got started. So stepping back even a little wasn’t easy.

Even so, he said, “All right.”

There was a moment of quiet and then, signaling he was taking his father at his word, Evan changed the subject. Dramatically.

“So how come you never told me about Alvy McCray?”

J. D. almost dropped the phone.

Before he could hope to find the words to answer that question, Evan had another one for him: “Is it true you actually dated a McCray—Lilah, Ben said her name was—or were you just good friends?”

The note of glee in his son’s voice was unmistakable. But this question J. D. could answer and it gave him the time to regain his balance.

“You’ve been talking to people,” he said.

“Yeah. Cousin Ben and Grandma. So what about you and Lilah? You have a Montague-and-CapnIet thing going on?”

“Lilah was in my senior class at Carbondale High. She was very…

earthy.”

“Stacked, fast, never took a bath?”

“Exactly,” J. D. chuckled.

“I was on the outs with my girlfriend of the time” “Mary Ellen McCarthy.”

“Yes. Anyway, while I was angry at Mary Pollen a teacher asked me to tutor Lilah. I knew it would tick off Mary Ellen to see me with her, so I agreed.

But all I did was tutor Lilah.”

“Because she was earthy or because she was a McCray?”

“A little of both.”

“So why did she cause a big uproar and say you knocked her up?”

“Her child’s father was black. Lilah thought that it would be easier for her family to accept that after they learned they wouldn’t have to share a bloodline with the Cades.”

“Wow,” Evan exclaimed softly. Then he added, “I met a McCray recently myself.”

J. D. listened intently as his son told him of his encounter with Blair McCray.

A chill crept up J. D.‘s spine. He suggested, carefully, “Maybe it would be a good idea to come home.”

“Leaving might make me look guilty, don’t you think?” Evan rebutted.

“If the situation there gets iffy, I don’t care how it looks.”

Which brought them right back to the nub of the only dispute they had as father and son: J. D.‘s need to make sure nothing ever hurt his son, and Evan’s need to assert his independence—a divide not easily bridged. Evan, in a quiet voice, chose to return to an earlier subject.

“You were gone before Alvy McCray had his accident, right?”

J. D. was taken by surprise again, but not nearly as much as the first time.

“For about a month,” he replied evenly.

“Well, that ought to take the edge off the pistol-whipping you gave him. I mean, if the cops ever ask me about Cade-McCray confrontations.”

“Evan, I know you’re a man now, but you’re a young man. You may not

believe it, but there are situations you’re really not prepared to handle. If you think you’re in trouble with the police or anyone else, you come home. We’ll work things out from here.”

There was a lengthy pause, then Evan agreed. Somewhat.

“If I need an escape hatch, that’s what I’ll do. But where’s home these days? Santa Barbara?

Or this new place in L.A.?”

J. D. gave him the cloned PCR number.

“Just call me. I’ll let you know where to go.”

After J. D. said goodbye and clicked off, he heard a tapping at the kitchen door. Pickpocket was there. He waved him in.

“Saw you were talking. Didn’t want to interrupt,” the little thief said. After a moment’s pause he added, “We’ve got a meeting for the PostMaster Plus password. Pan Pacific Park.”

“When?” J. D. asked.

“Tonight,” Pickpocket replied with a grin.

“That fast enough for you?”

J. D. nodded and said, “I’ll go get the twenty thousand from the bank right now.

Jenny’s plane landed in Denver that morning. It was the last day of Del’s campaign swing through the Rocky Mountain states before heading to California.

But she couldn’t afford to wait twenty-four hours for him to come to L.A. The smear that Don had alerted her to might be headline news by then.

The warning was a tremendous break for the campaign, and they had to do everything they could to hit back as hard and fast as possible. Damage had to be kept to a minimum and, if possible, redirected at their opponent.

When they got all that sorted through, Jenny wanted to hear if the FBI had anything new about the marksman’s notebook… and talk to Del about Special Agent DeVito running amok.

Except for dozing fitfully on the plane, she hadn’t slept since receiving Don’s call. She fell asleep in the cab she took from the airport, and the driver woke her up by rapping on his security-shield when they reached the campaign’s new hotel, the Brown Palace.

“We’re here, lady.”

She paid the cabbie, went into the hotel, and found a ladies’ room off the lobby. She splashed her face with cold water, shook herself to bring her circulation up to speed, and raked her hair into place with her fingers. She was still exhausted, but she knew she’d have to be mentally sharp until the campaign’s brain trust decided on a plan of action. Or Del decided it for them.