The Triangle Conspiracy

paper, probably prepared by Owens, as it was written in thick legalese-six words when two would suffice. He leafed through it, muddling through the dense prose.

Daryn Anisa McDermott was twenty-four years old and had been born in Washington to Senator Edward McDermott and his first wife, Regina Statham McDermott. The two divorced when Daryn was seven, and thus began the senator’s experiments in finding the perfect political trophy wife. He’d tried three more thus far.

Daryn only spent vacations, the occasional holiday, and most campaign seasons in Arizona, having been raised primarily in Washington. Owens was right-she’d received a sociology degree from Georgetown, and to Sean’s surprise, he saw that she’d graduated third in her class. Impressive. So Daryn McDermott was no bubbleheaded political princess.

She’d first begun moving in radical political directions during college, naturally. With the conservative ascendancy in American politics, Daryn practically ran in the other direction, especially on social, “moral” issues. Sean read a snippet of a paper she’d written her senior year, in which young Daryn called for the “over-throw” of traditional values and “dismantling” of old ways of thinking, to scrap the social order and begin again, to let the “ruling classes” know that the “real” people of America were “in revolt.”

Strong language, Sean thought. The birth of a radical. But then, how much of Daryn McDermott’s radicalism was true conviction, and how much was sticking it to her father, the father who dumped her mother and then had little to do with his daughter except as a campaign prop? The father who was firmly in the “family values” political camp, and who was a part of the ruling class his daughter railed against.

He put aside the bio and started looking through the newspaper and magazine clippings of Daryn’s various demonstrations. There was a copy of the famous picture from the Associated Press, of Daryn marching naked in front of the U.S. Capitol, a black strip superimposed across her breasts and pubic area. There were a couple of photos that seemed like more conventional protests: outside the gates to a coal mine in West Virginia, a factory in Ohio. But most were taken with Daryn standing shoulder to shoulder with groups of other women, sometimes street prostitutes, sometimes call girls or “escorts.”

Sean tried to follow Daryn’s arguments in an article clipped from Newsweek, which included photos from a march she’d led-the “hookers’ march,” a local paper had called it-in downtown St. Louis. Daryn never tried to talk women out of a life of prostitution. She campaigned for them to choose the life, and if they so chose, to do it safely and legally, without fear of either disease or the police.

Sean read her quote: “Some women are forced here because of circumstances. Some women are forced here to feed their children. Some women are forced here to feed their own habits. And some women, regardless of what polite society may think, aren’t forced here at all! They choose to be here! Women should be free to make that choice, right or wrong!”

He sifted through more photos. Another one from the Associated Press caught his eye. Daryn was a small woman, only five two or so, and she may have been all of 110 pounds. But she wore her hair long, often twisted into intricate braids, and her brown eyes blazed with intensity, intelligence, and fury. She wasn’t conventionally beautiful, but was an arresting physical presence.

I did fall under her spell myself once, Tobias Owens had said.

Sean was beginning to see how that would be the appropriate term. He could understand how a woman like Daryn McDermott would indeed cast a spell.

Sean scrutinized the photo, holding it up under the light. In it, Daryn was wearing a button-down shirt with several buttons undone, showing a great deal of cleavage. That was exactly the point, Sean quickly surmised. She wanted the photographer to see the tattoo at the top of her left breast. In swirling Old English lettering was tattooed the word justice.

“Jesus please us,” Sean muttered.

The photo, of course, mainly captured Daryn. Sean read the caption: Daryn McDermott, 23, daughter of U.S. Senator Edward McDermott of Arizona, at a rally to legalize prostituion, on the steps of the State Capitol, Oklahoma City.

Just off-center from the camera shot, though, was another woman, with dark straight hair and hollowed cheeks. She was wearing a denim miniskirt and white pullover. Large hoop earrings dangled from her ears. One of her eyebrows was pierced as well. She was young, barely into her twenties, Sean guessed. Her face was half-turned, gazing at Daryn with something like awe. The other woman’s arm was linked through Daryn’s.

They didn’t even bother to identify her, Sean thought. Just some anonymous hooker, lost in Daryn McDermott’s wake.

Sean took another pull of Dos Equis, then felt the apartment grow very still.

He saw the way the other woman was looking at Daryn, the way her arm was hooked through Daryn’s, her own fingers curling lightly over Daryn’s wrist.

On the steps of the state capitol, Oklahoma City.

Oklahoma City.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Sean said.

He traced a finger over the prostitute’s face. “I’ll bet you’ve talked to her,” Sean said to the photo. “I bet you know where she is. Because you love her, don’t you, honey?”

He put the photo down and opened his laptop. In his e-mail program, he found his sister’s address and entered it in the address box. Then he sat for a moment. He didn’t call Faith very often. He sent her an e-mail now and then, usually when he was toasted, and couldn’t remember later what he wrote. Her own e-mails to him consisted mainly of asking what the hell his last e-mail to her had meant.

Sean smiled at the thought of his baby sister, eighteen months younger than he. His best friend, his worst nightmare. She wasn’t in the Marshals Service anymore. She’d told their father that she was doing “special projects” for DOJ. She’d been interested in WITSEC-the Witness Security Program-when she was with the Marshals, so Sean thought he knew what Faith was doing now. He’d never spoken or written the words Department Thirty to her, but that had to be what she was doing. No one in the federal law enforcement community talked about Thirty if they could help it. Even talking casually about Thirty was asking for trouble.

But his sister still lived in Oklahoma City, and she liked it there. That much Sean knew. He believed in fate. The fact that he’d found a lead to Daryn McDermott in the same city where his sister lived meant he was on the right trail. He was doing the right thing. He knew it.

Sean drained the last of his beer and typed a message to his sister:

Here comes trouble, Sister. See you soon.

6

FAITH AND HENDLER GENERALLY SPENT THE NIGHT at each other’s homes once or twice a week. It was impromptu, rarely planned, and just depended on where they were and what they’d been doing when it began to get late. Sometimes there was sex, sometimes there wasn’t. They’d grown comfortable enough in the last year to just want to be together.

They’d stayed out until after ten at Different Roads, a small folk club on Classen Boulevard, where Faith’s friend Alex Bridge played fiddle and flute with a Celtic band. Though Faith wasn’t much into folk music, preferring contemporary jazz, she always tried to catch Alex when she played locally. They’d lived through a nightmare together a year ago, and the bond between them had grown strong.

When it had approached ten thirty last night, Faith and Hendler decided by an almost silent mutual assent to go to her house. Hendler lived in the northern suburb of Edmond, and Faith’s home in The Village area was a good ten miles or so closer in. So they slept together in her queen-size bed, and both were up shortly after five a.m. to run. Faith knew Hendler preferred to sleep later, and she also knew he preferred more “organized” exercise to running, but when he stayed with her, he rose with her and ran with her with no complaints.

They’d done three-plus miles on an overcast spring morning that promised rain later in the day, when they rounded the corner of Faith’s block. Her modest brick home, built in the fifties as most homes in The Village had been, was in the middle of the block, north side of the street. The garage was full of junk, so she always parked her Miata in the driveway. Hendler’s sensible Toyota was parked behind her. In front of the house, on the street, sat a dirty dark green Jeep Cherokee with a man sitting behind the wheel.

“Hmm,” Faith said, slowing.

Hendler pulled up beside her. “What?”

“In front of my house.”

Hendler frowned, stopping beside her, stretching out his legs. “I don’t have my gun. It’s in the house.”

“I have mine.” Faith had learned the hard way about keeping her weapon with her, even on the run, so she now always wore a large fanny pack in which she kept her gun. The Glock that she’d had for so long had been washed away into the waters of Galveston Bay a year ago, and she’d bought a SIG Sauer nine-millimeter, the “Cadillac of pistols,” not long thereafter.

She unzipped the fanny pack halfway.

“Maybe your paper boy, here to collect?” Hendler said.

“Maybe,” Faith said. But she’d gone to that unreachable place where everything clicked off except instinct.

Her long vision wasn’t that great, but the man in the Jeep had started moving. He was making no attempt to be furtive, movements smooth and natural. Of course, that meant nothing. In the world where Faith lived, people and places and things were often nothing like what they appeared to be.

The man’s head popped out of the Jeep. “Holy shit,” Faith said.

“Hey, that’s my line,” Hendler said.

“It’s my brother.”

“Your what?”

“My brother.”

They were two houses away from hers now, from the Jeep and Sean. In a movie, Faith supposed they would have run toward each other and embraced madly. Brother and sister hadn’t seen each other in nearly three years, not since the last time they were both at the famous Kelly Memorial Day picnic in Chicago. But this was no movie, and they weren’t hugging people.

The sight of Sean did elicit a smile, though. Aside from the red hair of the Kellys, she and her brother had inherited the height and slender build of their mother’s family, the O’Connells. Their father’s people were all short and round, but she and Sean were five ten and six three, respectively, big boned and well built. Faith realized with a pleasant rush how happy she was to see him.

She jogged the last few feet, Hendler trailing discreetly behind, and leaned over the hood of the Jeep. “I hadn’t seen your new wheels,” Faith said. “I was ready to shoot on sight. Can’t be too careful with all the riffraff about.”

Sean smiled through a day’s growth of beard. “Well, I’m the riffraff of the family, that’s for sure. Still obsessively running while normal people are in bed, I see. And now you’re dragging innocent bystanders along with you.”

Faith smiled. “This is my friend Scott Hendler.”

Hendler extended a hand and Sean shook it.

“Sean Kelly,” Sean said. “I think Faith mentioned you in an e-mail at one time or other. Aren’t you with the Bureau?”

“That’s the one,” Hendler said. “It’s good to finally meet you, Sean.” Hendler did a few stretches. “You two have a lot of catching up to do.” He squeezed Faith’s shoulder. “I’ll get my stuff. I’ll go shower at my place, then I’ve got to get to work.”

He jogged up the driveway and let himself in the house. Sean watched with interest, then looked back at Faith.

“Don’t start,” Faith warned. “He’s a good guy.”

Sean shrugged. “A little on the geeky side. Bald spot the size of Rhode Island up there. Kind of short. You never went for that type before.”