Worst Case Scenario (7 page)

“We've accomplished one thing, even if we haven't found what we were looking for,” Michaelson said. “We've established conclusively, at least to my satisfaction, that Ms. Bedford was murdered. Suicide or accident followed by a painstaking, professional search of her apartment is the kind of coincidence that just doesn't happen.”

“Fair enough,” Gallagher said. “But I don't see how we're much closer to knowing who killed her, and that's the next thing I plan on finding out.”

“Let me suggest,” Michaelson said, “that the next thing we should plan on finding out isn't who killed Ms. Bedford but why.”

“If you can guarantee me that why will lead us to who, I'm game,” Gallagher said.

“I can't, but I can guarantee that no other course will lead us to who, and this one might. I don't know if the murderer is at the end of this trail, but I'm certain he isn't at the end of any other one. Why is the only card that it makes any sense for us to play.”

Chapter Nine

Like most soldiers, they seemed impossibly young until you looked at their eyes. The four white and two black women in the five-by-seven photograph seemed scarcely more than girls, apprentice women who might have been planning a homecoming dance, their khaki uniforms jarringly incongruous. Then you caught their eyes, and that changed everything.

“Six nurses in that picture and four of us have cigarettes,” Deborah Moodie said in a can-you-believe-it tone, as if the demonization of tobacco were the biggest change in the country since 1968. “I got rid of mine just before they snapped the shot. I was afraid my mama might see the picture someday.”

“A more innocent time in a lot of ways, I suppose,” Michaelson said, leaning forward to look more closely at the photograph. It was Sunday night and he was basking in the relaxed comfort of the Moodies' Montgomery Park home. He'd called Alex Moodie immediately after Gallagher had dropped him off. Asking for a brief visit, he'd found himself invited over immediately for drinks.

“It wasn't innocence, it was 'Nam,” said the still slender black woman whose hair was now touched with gray. “If you'd told us we were going to die of cancer in forty years, we'd have said, ‘I'll take it.' Especially after Tet, we weren't any of us betting we had the next forty days guaranteed, much less forty years.”

Alex Moodie approached, carrying a tray with three glasses of scotch and a soda spritzer. Michaelson and Deborah Moodie each took a glass. It was a tiny act of generational complicity, a taste that Michaelson and the Moodies shared with one another but not with those around Wendy Gardner's and Sharon Bedford's ages.

“I've brought you only bad news so far,” Michaelson said.

“It was news I had to have, though,” Deborah Moodie said. “And I know it wasn't easy.”

“I have more. Scott Pilkington has asked me to do something for him. I agreed on several conditions, one of them being cover for you. His response was equivocal.”

“Why would I need cover?”

“Because I want the name of the general who got favored treatment in the incident you were pursuing,” Michaelson said.

“And you can't get that from anyone but me?” A challenging glint brightened Deborah Moodie's eyes as she asked the question. That query came from the Potomac, not the Mekong Delta.

“I don't know,” Michaelson answered. “But regardless of whom I get it from, Pilkington will assume I got it from you. That's why you need cover.”

“Thanks for asking, then. Why do you need that name?”

“It's a long story.”

“There's plenty of scotch,” Alex Moodie said.

“Very well,” Michaelson said. “On the Sunday of the Contemporary Policy Dynamics Conference in West Virginia, a woman named Sharon Bedford died. I'm convinced she was murdered. Before dying she'd hinted to me and probably to several others that she had sensitive information.”

“But she didn't say what it was,” Deborah Moodie guessed.

“Right. She was making these hints as part of a job search.”

“Pilkington was there and she probably shopped the information to him, too,” Alex Moodie said.

“Right again. Put that together with Pilkington jumping through hoops to set our meeting up at the CPD Conference instead of at a cocktail lounge in Washington, and what do you get?”

“Speculation,” Deborah Moodie said. “One possibility is that what Pilkington was really interested in even before the conference was Bedford's hints, and he met with you and Alex as a diversion.”

“Agreed,” Michaelson said. “A related possibility is that Pilkington thought Bedford's information might be connected somehow to the topic of his meeting with Alex and me.”

“Which is why you need the general's name,” Alex Moodie said.

“Walt Artemus,” Deborah Moodie said. “Retired major general.”

“That name doesn't ring much of a bell,” Michaelson said.

“No particular reason it should. He wasn't political and he didn't have a very high profile outside the Pentagon. He only got his second star as a retirement present. His last long-term posting was military aide on the White House staff.”

“Working with the national security adviser?” Michaelson asked, his interest sharply piqued.

“No,” Deborah said, shaking her head emphatically. “That's the first thing I thought, too, but according to Alex's sources, he reported directly to the president's chief of staff and not to the national security adviser.”

“That seems odd,” Michaelson muttered, but he decided to think through the implications later. He looked directly at Deborah. “As to your role in the underlying incident itself, what I have so far is Pilkington's version. I'd like to hear yours.”

Shrugging, Deborah Moodie walked away from the bookshelf and found a place on a sofa against the opposite wall. Michaelson read unmistakable pain in her eyes as she dredged up the memory.

“Pilkington's version isn't that far off, if you look at it his way,” she began. “It started in mid- to late 'ninety. I was supposed to sign off on an option paper about different ways to ration medical services, if we ever stop just selling them to the highest bidder. I'm translating it into plain English for you, you understand. The paper itself didn't actually come out and admit that rationing was what it was talking about.”

“I shouldn't think so.”

“Anyway, it was a pretty standard-issue Washington work product. The executive summary was one page long, the body of the paper was thirty-two pages, and then eighty pages of appendices were attached. An appendix is always the safest place to put the truth in a report like that, so that's where I looked for it.”

“And the truth turned out to be what?” Michaelson prompted.

“The truth turned out not to be there. I studied the appendix summarizing the sets of standards used to decide who gets organ transplants, because that's the one area where we haven't been able to kid ourselves about rationing. We've faced up to it because we haven't had any choice: it's triage, someone's gonna live and someone's gonna die, and we have to decide who.

“This appendix included a table, and the column for liver transplants had a footnote that said, ‘Data incomplete because of extra-criterial allocations.'”

“Meaning what?”

“That's what I intended to find out. Turns out it meant that some liver transplants went to people who got pushed to the top of the list without reference to the triage criteria. I asked for summaries of every case where that had happened. The name of Walt Artemus' daughter came up, and my antennae started quivering big time. That's what I meant when I said Pilkington wasn't that far off. I thought maybe I was really onto something. I'll admit it: I really did see myself testifying in front of a congressional committee and being interviewed on CNN and PBS.”

“So. What did you do?” Michaelson asked.

“Just what Pilkington said I should've done,” Deborah said. “I wrote my own report with my own executive summary and a snappy little action memo attached to it.”

“And nothing happened.”

“Right. Tickled it after one month, tickled it after three months, six months, nine months. Nothing.”

“So you pushed.”

“Not right away, to tell you the truth,” Deborah said. “I'd do a little follow-up memo every few months, just to sort of stake my claim to the issue. The kind of thing that goes from the in-basket to the out-basket with eight-point-two seconds' reading time in between. But I didn't start breaking furniture until early 'ninety-three. That's what got me taken to the woodshed.”

“What did you start doing then?”

“Went outside channels. I even went outside the service. Started adding bitchy little cc's to the memos. And then,” Deborah added, suddenly lowering her voice at the enormity of what she was about to confess, “I threatened to go to the Hill.”

Michaelson did his best to look shocked. The executive branch mentality knows no heresy more outrageous than the notion that the elected representatives of the people should be allowed to participate in governing the country.

“What provoked you to this, ah, extreme measure?” Michaelson asked carefully.

“It just started to get to me,” Deborah explained, her tone rising slightly in angry frustration. “I wasn't always a suit. I didn't learn about triage from thirty-page reports, I learned about it in an OR at Da Nang.”

She leaned forward, eyes widening with intensity as her face came alive.

“The triage rules at Da Nang were crystal clear, especially during Tet. The marines we treated first weren't the ones about to die or the ones in the most pain. They were the ones who could be patched up quickest and sent back to kill more Charlie.”

“Yes,” Michaelson said softly, “I do see.”

“So I'm sitting at my desk in 1993 and we're not under fire, we don't have a defense perimeter to worry about, and we don't have bodybags piling up like cordwood. Yet some lifer with a charity star and a Rolodex is making up his own little triage rules, and someone
dies
because of it. It just got to me.”

Settling back, Michaelson took a sip of scotch. The sip turned into a substantial swallow. Gazing steadily at the mildly abashed smile that split Deborah Moodie's lips, he thought for a moment about which of the two lies he should call her on. He chose the first.

“Your description of how you got caught up in this issue in the first place was very thorough,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“As you went through it, though, the mischievous notion occurred to me that, somewhere along the line at the beginning there, someone might have given you a hint.”

Deborah's face went flat. Michaelson imagined an armored knight flipping down the visor on his helmet: one instant you saw a human face, and the next you saw nothing but cold steel and angry eyes.

“Did you have any particular source for that hint in mind?” she asked in a taut voice.

“I was hoping you'd tell me.”

“I thought I just did tell you.”

Michaelson rested his forearms on his knees. He did his best to open his own features up, to disguise the threat implicit in his dark, piercing eyes.

“I've worked with cover stories for over forty years,” he said mildly. “I know one when I hear one.”

“That's out of line,” Alex Moodie snapped in a low tone that tried to match Michaelson's and didn't quite make it. He moved a couple of protective steps closer to his wife.

“We've been sparring for close to a minute now and Deborah hasn't told me I'm wrong,” Michaelson said. “If I'm out of line, I'd like to hear it from her.”

“Do you really think I made all that stuff up about the report and the table in the appendix?” she asked.

“No, I don't. I think you just started somewhere after the beginning. And I still haven't heard you tell me I'm wrong.”

Deborah lifted her glass and drank briefly. The sip was measured, practiced, calculated sedulously to suggest that the liquor was appreciated but not needed.

“You're not wrong,” she said. “Someone did leak some sketchy information about the incident to me, and I dug the report out to start following it up.”

“And to cover the leak,” Michaelson suggested, nodding.

“True,” Deborah said, a bit pointedly for someone who'd been on the defensive five seconds before. “When someone's done you a favor, you don't want to leave them hanging out to dry.”

“Absolutely right. Of course, you wouldn't be hanging Sharon Bedford out to dry at this point, would you?”

“You're right,” Deborah said as she finished her scotch and soda. “She doesn't have anything to fear now from any bureaucrat in the world.”

Chapter Ten

“I'm glad that one of us had a productive evening,” Marjorie said around eleven o'clock Monday morning, after Michaelson had summarized his Sunday-night talk with the Moodies. “If it was Bedford who gave Deborah Moodie the story about this general getting favorable treatment on a transplant, then that has to be related somehow to whatever Bedford was shopping around at the CPD conference.”

“Implying that Pilkington's chat with Alex and me and his interest in Bedford's death isn't exactly a coincidence, either,” Michaelson said.

“Right.”

They were in the backroom of Cavalier Books, Marjorie's store just beyond Dupont Circle on Connecticut Avenue. Marjorie was in the process of returning three dozen hardcover books to their respectable but soon to be poorer publisher.

“Nothing useful on the disks you took from her apartment?” Michaelson guessed.

“Nothing. They're bootleg copies of games. If a tantalizing clue is hidden somewhere within them, I didn't stumble across it.”

“We may have another shot on the computer disk front. I phoned Scott Pilkington first thing this morning.”

“You mean you left a message for him around nine and he returned your call before lunch?” Marjorie asked, her voice pitching upward in astonishment that was only partially feigned.

“He actually answered when I called. On the second ring.”

“You must feel drunk with power.”

“I very nearly called a press conference.”

“What did he tell you about computer disks?” Marjorie asked.

“That the police didn't find any in Ms. Bedford's hotel room, even though she had a laptop computer with her.”

“That doesn't sound very promising,” Marjorie said. After packing two last handfuls of books into a cardboard box, she closed the flaps and expertly taped them shut.

“The promising part is that the laptop itself wasn't stripped of its hard drive, as the computer in her apartment was. Pilkington has persuaded the police to let one of his functionaries pop down and copy everything on it. If Federal Express performs with its customary efficiency, he'll have the data by noon tomorrow.”

“That's curious,” Marjorie said. “Why would the murderer leave one computer alone and then gut the other one?”

“One intriguing possibility is that the murderer isn't the one who searched her apartment—that the murderer knew what he was looking for in the hotel room, and whoever searched her apartment didn't. Another plausible explanation is that the murderer wasn't trying to find something but to keep someone else from finding something.”

“Something that police in Charleston wouldn't have any reason to look for, but that someone in Washington would,” Marjorie said, her eyes brightening at the idea's plausibility.

“That was my thought,” Michaelson said.

“Promise you'll show me the disks when they come in tomorrow.”

“If I can extract them from Pilkington, I certainly shall.”

“Is there some doubt about that?” Marjorie asked. “I thought he was eager to keep you happy so that you'd keep on coopting Gallagher.”

“That's not exactly a pat hand. If he decides I'm overplaying it, he'll send me on my way with one of his little Princeton eating club
mots
, and I'll be about as much use as those bootleg game disks left in Ms. Bedford's apartment.”

“You never were exactly an optimist, were you?” Marjorie commented.

“Optimism is a luxury purchased with ignorance. I've never been able to afford it.”

“Speaking of eating club
mots
.”

“It's contagious, isn't it?” Michaelson said, half-apologetically. “I spend twenty minutes on the phone with him and he has me doing it.”

The phone on Marjorie's desk burred with polite insistence. She glanced at a tiny screen near the receiver, where she could read the number the call came from.

“That will be Susanna Herro calling back,” she said, reaching for the receiver.

“Who's she?” Michaelson asked.

“An attorney wise in the ways of law firm organization.”

“I'll check back with you this evening,” Michaelson said, standing and moving toward the door. “Something tells me I'll have a better shot at the disks if I've found out what General Walt Artemus' White House job was before I talk to Pilkington again.”

Nodding her farewell to Michaelson, Marjorie greeted Herro on the phone.

“I hope you're calling to tell me that an exciting new legal thriller will be coming out soon,” Herro said. “Several of the partners here read them when they feel like escaping from the tedium of real-world law practice.”

“I have my eyes open for one,” Marjorie said, “but I'm calling now to get information rather than dispense it.”

“What would you like to know?”

“I want to talk to someone at a local Bethesda law firm called Hayes and Barthelt about a woman who did freelance deposition summaries for them. Whom should I ask for?”

“If the firm has more than twenty lawyers, ask for the head paralegal,” Herro said.

“What if it has fewer than twenty lawyers?”

“Then it doesn't have any business using freelancers to summarize depositions.”

“Thank you again,” Marjorie said. “I'll let you know the instant I spot the next female Perry Mason.”