And what I should have done at that moment was drop her off at her hotel, wish her all the best, and disappear. But I wanted Lisa’s killer. And I enjoyed hearing Lisa’s voice, even though it belonged to a different body and personality. So I took her back to her hotel and we agreed we would stay in close touch and share everything we learned.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
He began tracking Julia Cuthburt as she pulled out of the parking garage underneath her Connecticut Avenue office building at 5:30. She drove a silver 2001 Toyota 4Runner with a six-cylinder engine and four-wheel drive that had probably never once, not since the day she’d bought it, ever been engaged. Her choice of automobile was in character with her general profile: practical, reliable, and best on the market for holding its value. The car conveyed an outdoorsy, rugged, and adventurous image, three qualities Julia Cuthburt roundly admired and sorely lacked. Poor Julia was a glorified clerk who wanted to be a princess in a Disney movie. Following her was too easy.
It was rush hour in Washington, and the traffic was dense and sluggish. She was a cautious, meticulous driver who rarely changed lanes and signaled far in advance of every maneuver. She drove like a snail.
At 6:15 she took a left off M Street in Georgetown, drove downhill half a block, and turned right into an underground garage. He waited fifteen seconds before he followed her in, just in time to see her taillights turning to the right. She went down three levels. He went down three levels. She pulled into an open space and he parked twelve spaces away.
He was quietly congratulating himself, when, suddenly, things went haywire. She locked her car and walked directly to the handicap elevator instead of the stairs. He was just stepping out of his car as the elevator doors closed and her guilty grin disappeared. The lazy bitch should’ve taken the stairs, instead of abusing the public trust.
He rushed for the stairwell, sprinted up three levels to the ground floor, and barged through a pair of heavy double doors just in time to knock a mother and her little children flat into a wall.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, looking frantically around, as the mother glared nastily and one of the children wailed, bouncing up and down on a hurt foot. He found himself on the ground floor of a two-level indoor mall, filled with expensive and exclusive shops. Julia Cuthburt wore a dark blue business suit. The crowds were light, and spotting her should be easy. If she was there. For five minutes he searched with increasing despair.
He gritted his teeth and cursed as he rushed toward the M Street exit from the mall. He stormed out onto a street thick with pedestrians, mostly young people and college kids wandering in noisy swarms and barhopping. He looked both ways and Julia Cuthburt in her blue business suit was nowhere in sight.
He had not considered this. Not from her. His computer had rated her a three. Tiny children with their naive trust of strangers and frivolous ways were twos. Julia Cuthburt was barely two steps above a drooling paraplegic in a wheelchair, he thought, as he shrugged with bewilderment and pondered his options. The simplest solution would be to go back into the parking garage, linger beside her car till she returned, and try something different. That option was canned nearly the moment it popped into his head. Bad enough that Lisa Morrow had required a script revision. One, okay, but Julia’s role was sacrosanct.
He racked his brain and tried to calculate what had brought her here.
Shopping, possibly, but as he looked up and down the street and studied the environment, it struck him as more and more unlikely. The array of expensive, upscale Georgetown shops was out of character for a tight-fisted bargain hunter who liked to brag to her friends about all the great deals she bagged at Wal-Mart and Kmart and Dollar stores. Her pretensions aside, Julia had an accountant’s soul. Life for her was a never-ending tug-of-war over who got to keep the highest percentage of the margin.
She would be hungry at this hour. But he doubted she had driven forty minutes through rush-hour traffic to find an overpriced restaurant in the most crowded district of the city. Possibly she was meeting a date, and that eventuality unsettled him greatly. It would mess up everything. This was Julia’s night to rise and shine.
He thought of all the other details and notations in her file and a hunch began to take shape. He looked both ways again, then swiftly crossed the street and walked into Clyde’s. The bar was packed with young men and women, mostly wearing suits and business attire, hefting drinks, chattering and chuckling, ogling one another, and posturing in ways they hoped would attract the opposite sex. He wandered through the bar pretending to search for someone he was supposed to meet. But no Julia in her blue serge suit. Possibly she was in the ladies’room, so he loitered nearby, gave that five minutes, and then departed in a huff.
A block down was Nathans and he made a beeline for the entrance. An almost identical scene, another upscale meat market filled with horny young people willing to pay seven dollars per beer on the off chance they might get lucky. He searched the tables first on the possibility that she was having dinner with a date. No Julia in a blue suit at the tables. He progressed to the bar, where women aspiring to be picked up mostly congregated. After two minutes of fruitless searching, he caught a flash of dark blue at the far end of the bar, right below a pair of ancient rowing oars hung on the wall to give the utterly false sense of a sporting clubhouse. He moved across the floor and improved his angle. Bingo-it was indeed Julia in her blue serge suit, perched on a tall barstool, a mixed drink of some sort held daintily between two fingers of her left hand. A man stood beside her, gripping a longneck, bouncing nervously on the balls of his feet and chortling at something.
The man was in his late thirties, balding, chubby, with a long, pointed nose, and his posture and gestures suggested he was trying hard. Her posture and flat expression suggested he was trying much too hard.
He maneuvered through the thick crowd until he was directly behind the man chatting with his Julia. Was this a date going sour or merely a stranger attempting a pickup? That distinction mattered. It mattered greatly.
The man was waving his longneck through the air and saying to her, “… and the senator was all over me to get it fixed. I have lots of friends in the White House, and you know what?… If he hadn’t pissed me off, I might’ve picked up the phone and handled everything.”
Julia nodded and said, “Uh… okay.”
“Know what I did?”
“No.”
“What I did was tell the senator I didn’t like the way he approached me. I told him I wouldn’t lift a finger. You should’ve seen him. Guy’s got hair transplants, you know. I swear to God, his face went red from here to here.”
He rocked back on his heels and chortled loudly. Julia took a long and serious sip from her drink.
“So, anyway,” the guy asked, “what did you say your name was?”
“Julia.”
“Uh-huh. Ever been up on the Hill, Julia? I could get you in, show you the corridors of power, introduce you to a few senators.”
“What a thrill,” Julia replied. Funny, she didn’t sound the least bit thrilled.
The important question was answered. He leaned across the bar and used his elbow to push back the man hitting on Julia as he yelled, “Julia? My God, it’s been what? Ten years?”
Her eyes shifted to him and she blinked a few times. He winked at her and said, “You don’t remember me? The prom? Senior year in high school?”
Julia’s expression became even more confused, so he widened his smile and added, “Gosh… Tom Melborne? Maybe you don’t recognize me without my tuxedo.”
Julia seemed to catch on. “Tom? Oh God. Please, I’m sorry.”
He edged closer to her, using his body to force the Senate staffer to back away a few more steps. He said to Julia, “What are you doing in Washington? Last I heard, you were going to… oh, gosh… I’m embarrassed-”
“University of Delaware,” she answered, smiling.
“Of course.” He looked at the staffer. “I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude. Are you Julia’s boyfriend? Husband? Date?”
“Uh, no. We just met.”
He put a hand on the staffer’s shoulder. “We went to high school together, until my mom and dad died in a car accident… right after the prom.” He glanced at Julia and said, “That’s why I dropped out. I’m sure you wondered, and… I guess I should’ve told you, but I… Hey, look, I didn’t want your sympathy. You had your life, your
