The Triangle Conspiracy

think of what it would be like when she finally did allow herself to feel.

“Not now,” she said. She stood up and went into the bathroom. She took a towel out of the linen cabinet and wiped down every surface she had touched.

She would do this investigation her way, and she couldn’t have the FBI or the Edmond Police Department or anyone else considering her a suspect while she was doing it. She felt a coldness begin to descend on her.

She pulled off the page of Scott’s legal pad that had his notes about Sean on it. She was only buying time-she suspected that others, particularly Rob Cain, had the same information. But she needed a head start. She already had a new identity and clean, untraceable money. That would help.

She took one long look back. “I’m sorry,” she said again, and left the condo.

She started the Suburban and let it idle for a moment. She pulled out the Kimberly Diamond cell phone and, in a burst of impulse, called the number on Rob Cain’s business card.

When Cain’s voice mail greeting came on, she said, “This is Faith. I’m going to fix this, once and for all. If you find out anything-about Daryn or about Scott-let me know. You’ll know what that means pretty soon. I-I don’t know what else to tell you, Rob. Scott trusted you, and I think I have to trust you. I hope you’ll return the favor. Call me at this number if you find out anything.”

She clicked the end button, put the phone away, and pulled out of the parking lot, back into afternoon traffic on Danforth Road. Everything seemed so normal, just an ordinary suburban street on an ordinary suburban afternoon.

Faith blinked again and again. The tears formed in her eyes, but not a single one fell.

32

EVEN BEFORE SENATOR EDWARD MCDERMOTT had finished speaking, the director of Department Thirty had been summoned to the attorney general’s office.

Yorkton ran Department Thirty from an unassuming gray stone building in Harrisonburg, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley, one hundred miles from Washington. It was close enough to D.C. for easy access, far enough away to be removed from the regular business of government.

The AG was Yorkton’s only boss. There were no deputies or associates or assistants in between the two. Each attorney general since the Nixon Administration had functioned in this role, some wanting weekly reports from Department Thirty, some wanting as little contact with it as possible.

The current occupant of the office fell somewhere between the two, and while Yorkton couldn’t really say he liked the man-he was a political appointee, after all-he admitted the AG was intelligent, capable, and seemed to be honest. He generally let Yorkton do his job and kept his hands off Department Thirty’s internal operations.

The two men sat in the AG’s sumptuous office at the Justice Department with no aides, no secretaries, no in-house lawyers.

“Tell me,” the attorney general said. “Is it true?”

“Substantially, yes,” Yorkton said.

“What do you mean, ‘substantially’? I have no patience with your vague answers. If we’re going to control this, I need to know what’s real and what’s not.”

Yorkton nodded. “My case officer-”

“The Kelly woman. She was Art Dorian’s, wasn’t she?”

“Yes. Very talented young woman. Has a tendency to be volatile at times, but she does the job.”

“Yes, I know. So?”

“What Senator McDermott said was true, as far as it goes. His daughter came to us and requested protection-”

“How did she even know about us?” the AG interrupted. “Did you wonder about that?”

Yorkton gritted his teeth, forcing himself to be calm. “Yes, of course I did. That still hasn’t been answered. But she came to Officer Kelly, who did the preliminary intake work. She investigated the different aspects of it, the girl’s claims that this Coalition for Social Justice was set to initiate further acts of terror at banks across the country, and that its leader, a Franklin Sanborn, had threatened to kill her. As I’ve already told you in my report, Kelly found nothing. No evidence of any kind to support any part of her story. I sent field officers to the places she specified that these terror cells were hiding. They were all old abandoned buildings. As far as we can tell, Franklin Sanborn doesn’t exist.”

“So why?” the AG said. “Why does Daryn McDermott want us to protect her if there’s no terrorist group and she’s not in danger?” He spread his hands apart. “Obviously, there was a danger to her. She thought so, to the point that she sent her father-a man with whom she does not get along-this impassioned e-mail message.”

“I can’t explain it,” Yorkton said. “Daryn McDermott has a history of unusual behavior that was designed to either get attention, embarrass her father, or both.”

“Oh, so being shot to death and strung up in a tree was an attention-getting ploy? It was to embarrass the senator? Come on, you can do better than that.”

Yorkton shrugged. “I don’t have an answer. But I trust my officer. If Kelly says there was no evidence, I believe there was no evidence. If we protected every small-time criminal who was afraid of their own associates-”

The attorney general crashed his fist down on the desk. “This was no small-time criminal! This was the daughter of the senior senator from Arizona. Ted McDermott is the point man on the president’s social agenda, and his daughter was brutally murdered after she’d asked for Department Thirty to protect her. Now McDermott’s on national TV throwing around Thirty’s name and your officer’s name. We have to put a stop to it. Right now. Do you understand me? Plug this before it gets any worse.”

Yorkton drummed his fingers on the arm of the deep leather chair. “Maybe we could convince Senator McDermott to just back down a bit, until we are able to figure out what’s really going on here.”

“And how do you aim to do that? The man’s daughter was just murdered!”

“What do you know about him, about the senator? He’s never been involved in oversight of law enforcement or intelligence, so I’ve had no dealings with him. Is there anything about him, any information”-Yorkton drew out the word-“that would be useful to us?”

The attorney general leaned back in his own chair, steepling his fingers and looking over them at Yorkton.

“Do you have a dossier?” Yorkton asked.

“I won’t answer that. But I do happen to know that the man is actually one of the biggest hypocrites in Washington. And that’s saying something, isn’t it?”

Yorkton didn’t want to debate hypocrisy in the political establishment. “What do you mean?”

“His daughter was renowned for a, shall we say, open sexuality.”

“Yes?”

“Let’s just say she came by it naturally.”

Yorkton waited a moment. “McDermott is firmly in the camp of social conservatism. Am I to assume that his daughter’s sexual escapades were not near as embarrassing as revealing his own would be?”

“That’s a fair assumption.”

The two men looked at each other for a long moment.

“You have the evidence?” Yorkton said.

“It’s with my other ‘special files’ on the legislative branch. I’ll make it available to you if you think there’s a chance it will work. Otherwise I won’t spend the administration’s political capital on it.”

“I’ll see that it works.”

“You think you can blackmail a U.S. senator into backing off talking about his own daughter’s murder? Even though the girl was out of control, she was still his only child, and what happened to her was horrible.”

“Agreed,” Yorkton said. “But Department Thirty is not culpable in her death, and Senator McDermott must be persuaded to stop acting as if we are.”

“Yes,” the Attorney General said. “What about your other cases?”

“All secure,” Yorkton said quickly. “Our budget is off the books, and there’s no way any of our other cases will be affected.”

The attorney general stood up. Yorkton took his cue and started for the door.

When he’d put his hand on the ornate doorknob of the huge wooden door, the attorney general stopped him and said, “You understand that any information you use with McDermott did not come from me.”

“Of course I understand. I do know how the game is played.” Far better than you do, he thought.

“Good. I’ll get the evidence to you later today.”

Yorkton nodded to him and left the office. In half an hour he was out of Washington and back in the rolling Virginia hills.

Of course, Yorkton hadn’t told the attorney general everything. He never did. He only revealed to his superior as much as he needed to know to help Yorkton accomplish what had to be done. Otherwise, there could be trouble. A superior who knew too much of day-to-day operations could be very dangerous, far more dangerous than Senator McDermott or his late daughter.

He hadn’t told the AG about Sean Kelly being the one who brought Daryn McDermott to the department. Faith had been forthright with him about her brother’s involvement, and in return Yorkton protected his officer.

And her brother as well, he thought as he rolled westward on Interstate 66.

But Yorkton thought he knew Faith Kelly well enough by now to understand how she would react to all of this. He already knew she had concerns about her brother-specifically, Sean Kelly’s alcohol addiction. The unspoken words had been there, in both the calls she’d placed to him about this case. Her brother’s involvement was a puzzle to her, something she couldn’t quite grasp yet.

He’d told her quite emphatically to go to ground, to assume her emergency identity. She would, but if Yorkton knew Faith Kelly like he thought he did, she wouldn’t be sitting around in a hotel room waiting for the storm to blow over. She would use the new identity to cover herself as she delved deeper into what had happened. And she wouldn’t stop until she had the truth, even if the truth was personally painful for her. Faith Kelly was funny that way.

An irritating quality for Department Thirty, Yorkton thought.

But even Yorkton had to admit that it was occasionally a useful quality to have.

Faith’s hands hadn’t stopped trembling since she’d left Hendler’s condo. She was amazed she’d been able to hold the big Suburban on the road. The way her hands shook reminded her eerily of Sean when he was either too drunk or “not drunk enough.”

But her mind was in fast-forward. If Sean had killed both Daryn and Hendler, he didn’t have much of a head start. The sickening realization came to her that she was now proceeding as if she knew her brother had killed two people, one of whom was her lover. She wasn’t viewing it through a prism of doubt any longer. She knew Sean’s frame of mind in the time leading up to Daryn’s murder. His behaviors were classic obsession, the “if I can’t have her, no one can” syndrome that so often arose in crimes of passion.

But she’d told Hendler that Daryn’s killing didn’t look like a crime of passion. It was more of a message, a point being made.

Then again, that had been when Hendler was still alive. Before he’d discovered new evidence implicating Sean. Before Faith’s entire world had shifted under her feet. Before she’d found Hendler’s