'Enough, McClure. I know you're desperately trying to justify your presence here, but this bullshit just won't cut it. What you're describing is Spider-Man, not a flesh-and-blood perp.' Garner, folding his arms across his chest, assumed a superior attitude. 'I graduated second in my class at Yale. Where did you go to school, McClure, West Armpit College?'
Jack said nothing. He was on his hands and knees, mini-flashlight on, looking under Alli's bed-
'I've been Homeland Security since the beginning, McClure. Since nine-fucking-eleven.'
– not at the carpet, which he saw had been vacuumed by the forensics personnel, but at the underside of the box spring, where there was a small indentation. No, on closer inspection, he saw that it was a hole, no larger than the diameter of a forefinger, in the black-and-white-striped ticking.
'What is it exactly you ATF people do again? Handcuff moonshiners? Prosecute cigarette smugglers?'
Jack kept his tone level. 'You ever dismantle a bomb made of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil set in the basement of a high school, or defuse a half pound of C-four in a drug smuggler's lab while the trapped coke-cutter is trying to set it off?'
Garner's cell phone buzzed and he put it to one ear.
'You ever run down a psycho whose lonely pleasure is trapping girls and beating the piss out of them?' Jack continued.
'At least I can read without contorting my brain into a pretzel.' Garner turned on his heel, walked out of the room, talking urgently to whoever was on the other end of the line.
Jack felt the heat flame up from his core, move to his cheeks, his extremities, until his hands began to tremble. So Garner knew. Somehow he'd burrowed back into Jack's past to discover the truth. He wanted to lash out, bury his fist in Garner's smug face. It was times like this when his disability made him feel small, helpless. He was a freak; he'd always be a freak. He was trapped inside this fucked-up brain of his with no chance of escape. Ever.
Something glimmered briefly as he shone the tiny beam of the mini-flash into the hole. Reaching in, he felt around, extracting a small metal vial with a screw top. Opening it, he saw that it was half-filled with a white powder. Tasting a tiny bit on his fingertip, he confirmed his suspicion. Cocaine.
SEVEN
NINA MILLER lit a clove cigarette, stared at the burning tip for a moment, and gave a small laugh. 'Reminds me of my college days. I never lost my taste.' She inhaled as slowly, as deeply as if she were drawing in weed, then let the smoke out of her lungs in a soft hiss. Behind her, the sun was going down over the low hills. A dog was barking, but the sound was high-pitched, from an adjoining property, not one of the K-9 sniffers.
She was standing outside of the west dorm, where Alli's room was, leaning against the whitewashed brick, her slim left hip slightly canted. Her right elbow was perched on the top of her left wrist, the left arm hugging her waist. The slow light placed her in the elongated shadow of the roofline.
'Find anything of interest?' she inquired.
'Possibly,' Jack said.
'I saw Garner storming out. You got to him, didn't you?'
Jack told her about his single-perp theory.
She frowned. 'It does sound hard to believe.'
'Thanks so very much.'
Her eyes slid toward his face. 'Like Garner, I was trained to follow the forensic evidence. The difference between us, however, is that I won't simply dismiss your theory. It's just that I never had an intuition of how to unravel a case. I don't think real life works like that.'
Jack felt sorry for her. It was a peculiarly familiar feeling, and then, with a start, he realized it was how he had felt toward Sharon most of the time they were married.
'One thing I will guarantee you,' Nina said, breaking in on his thoughts, 'that kind of argument won't fly with Garner.'
That was when Jack handed her the metal vial. 'I found it hidden in the bottom of Alli's box spring. There's cocaine inside.'
Nina laughed. 'So you found it.'
'What?'
'Hugh owes me twenty bucks.' She pocketed the vial. 'He said you wouldn't find it.'
Jack felt like an idiot. 'It was a test.'
Nina nodded. 'He's got it in for you.' Abruptly detaching herself from the wall, she threw down her cigarette butt. 'Forget that sonovabitch.' She moved off to the west, Jack keeping pace beside her.
'Back there,' he said slowly, 'when you read sections of that report…'
'I knew you were having trouble.'
'But how?'
'You'll see soon enough.'
They went along, paralleling the dorm. Just beyond it was a utility shed. At first it appeared that they were going to skirt the shed. Then, with a look over her shoulder, Nina opened the door.
'Inside,' she said. 'Quickly.'
The moment Jack stepped through the narrow doorway, Nina closed the door behind them. The interior contained a plain wood table, several utilitarian chairs, a brass floor lamp. It was as sparsely furnished as a police interrogation cubicle. The small square window afforded a view down over the end of the rolling lawn to a tree-line beyond which was the wall that bordered the property.
Two people occupied the room. A cone of light from the floorlamp illuminated the sides of their faces. Jack recognized them: Edward Carson and his wife, Lyn. The soon-to-be First Lady, dressed in a dark, rather severely cut tweed suit, a ruffled white silk blouse held closed at the neck with a cameo the color of ripe apricots, stood at the window, arms wrapped tightly around herself, staring blindly at clouds shredded by the wind. Fear and anxiety drew her features inward as if every atom of her being were psychically engaged in protecting her missing daughter.
Jack glanced at Nina. She had learned about his secret from Edward Carson.
Though the president-elect looked similarly haggard, the moment Jack and Nina entered, his sense of moment forced his political facade back on. Back straight, shoulders squared, he smiled his professional smile, the sides of his mouth crinkling along with the corners of his eyes. Those eyes, so much a part of his extraordinary telegenic image, possessed, in person, a glint of steel that did not come through on the TV screen. Or, mused Jack, maybe he was in war mode, all the knives at his disposal being out.
He was sitting at the table, a Bible open to the New Testament. His forefinger hooked at a section of the text, he began to recite from Matthew chapter seven. ' 'For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened. Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone?'»
Edward Carson stood up, came around the side of the table. 'Jack.' He pumped Jack's hand. 'Good of you to come. I have best wishes and Godspeed for you from Reverend Taske.' He kept a firm grip on Jack's hand. 'We've all come a long way, haven't we?'
'Yes, sir, we have, indeed.'
'Jack, I never got a chance to thank you properly for your help when we needed to evacuate my office during the anthrax attack in 2001.'
'I was just doing my job, sir.'
Carson's eyes rested on him warmly. 'You and I know that isn't true. Don't be modest, Jack. Those were dark days, indeed, marked by an unknown American terrorist who we never found. Frankly, I don't know how we would have gotten through it without the ATF's help.'
'Thank you, sir.'
Now the president-elect's other hand closed over Jack's and the familiar voice lowered a notch. 'You'll bring her back to us, Jack, won't you?'
The president-elect stared into Jack's eyes with the intensity of a convert. Despite his big-city upbringing, there was something of the rural preacher in him, a magnetic flux that made you want to reach out and touch him,