I, Alex Cross Read online

  “So what happened six months ago?” Sampson asked. The question was more rhetorical than anything, since we both knew the answer.

  That’s when the killing started.

  In which case—where were the rest of Nicholson’s disks?

  Chapter 67

  AFTER WORK, I picked up some Thai food on Seventh and brought it to Bree at the hospital. It wasn’t the kind of dinner date she deserved, but anything besides Swiss steak and Jell-O from the cafeteria had to be a big improvement.

  It looked like she had a whole mobile-office thing going on, with her laptop and a little printer and files spread out on the counter in the back. The laptop was open to Web MD, and she was busily taking notes when I came in.

  “Who ordered the panang curry and pad thai?” I called from the doorway.

  “That would be me,” Bree said.

  She picked her way past all the equipment and gave me a kiss hello.

  “How’s our girl been doing?” I asked.

  “Still fighting. She’s amazing; she really is.”

  Nana looked a little more peaceful, maybe, but otherwise seemed about the same. Dr. Englefield had already warned us not to get too invested in the minutiae. You could drive yourself crazy scrutinizing every little tic and twitch, when the important thing was to keep showing up and never lose hope.

  While I unpacked the food, Bree caught me up on the day. Englefield wanted to keep Nana on beta blockers for the time being. Her heart was still weak, but it was steady, for what that was worth.

  “There’s a new resident, Dr. Abingdon, you should talk to,” Bree said. “I’ve got her number right here.”

  I traded a plate of food and a bottle of water for it. “You’re doing too much,” I told Bree.

  “This is the closest thing I’ve ever had to a real family,” she said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  I did. Bree’s mother died when she was five, and her father never expressed much interest in his children after that. She’d been raised by a series of cousins more than anything, and when she left home at seventeen, she never looked back.

  “All the same,” I told her, “you can’t take off from work indefinitely.”

  “Sweetie, listen to me. I hate that this is happening. There’s nothing good about it. But as long as this is the deal, then I am right where I want to be. End of story, okay? I’m fine with it.”

  She twirled up a forkful of rice noodles and popped them into her mouth, with a grin I hadn’t seen in a while. “Besides, what are they going to do at work, replace me? I’m too good for that.”

  I couldn’t argue there.

  Honestly, I’m not sure I could have done everything Bree was doing. Maybe I’m not that generous. But I do know that she made me feel lucky, and incredibly grateful. There was never going to be enough I could do to thank her for this, but Bree didn’t seem to want any payback.

  We spent the rest of the evening with Nana, reading out loud from Another Country, an old favorite of hers. Then, around ten o’clock, we kissed her good night, and for the first time since this had happened, I went home to sleep in my own bed. Right next to Bree, where I belonged.

  Chapter 68

  WHEN NED MAHONEY called me the next day and said I should meet him at the Hirshhorn sculpture garden, I didn’t question it for a single moment. I left the office right away and marched over there.

  The beat goes on. In double time. Now what does Ned want? What has he found out?

  He was waiting on one of the low cement walls when I came down the ramp from the Mall side. Before I even reached him, he was up and walking—and when I did come alongside, he started briefing me without so much as a hello. I knew Ned well enough to understand when I should just shut up and listen.

  Apparently, the Bureau had already secured an administrative subpoena to get a look at Tony Nicholson’s overseas bank records. They’d gotten a whole list of deposits, originating accounts, and names attached to those accounts, through something called the Swift program.

  Swift stood for the Society of Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications. It’s a global cooperative based in Belgium that tracks something on the order of six trillion transactions every day. The database doesn’t include routine banking—they don’t necessarily know when I go to the ATM—but just about everything else is in there. The program was under all kinds of legal scrutiny, since it had come out that the US government was using it to track terror cells, post 9/11. Whatever the obstacles, though, someone at the Bureau had gotten around them.

  “If this were my case, which it isn’t, I’d follow the numbers,” Mahoney said, still peppering me with information. “I would start with the biggest depositors into Nicholson’s account and work my way down from there. I don’t know how much time you’ll have, though, Alex. This thing is unbelievably hot. Something is not right here, in a big way.”

  “Isn’t the Bureau already on it? They have to be, right?”

  It was the first question I’d asked in five minutes of nonstop talk. Ned was as manic as I’d ever seen him, which is saying a lot, since he’s usually a buzz saw on Red Bull.

  “Honestly, I don’t know,” he said with a shrug. He shoved his hands into his pockets, and we started another lap around the sunken garden.

  “Something’s sure up, Alex. Here’s an example. I don’t understand it, but the whole case has been moved out to the Charlottesville Resident Agency, which is a satellite. They’ll work with Richmond, I guess.”

  “Moved? That doesn’t make any sense. Why would they do that?”

  I knew from past experience that the Bureau didn’t swap cases around midstream on a whim. It almost never happened. They might cobble a task force between offices to cover a wider area, but nothing like this.

  “Word came down from the deputy director’s office yesterday—and they transferred the files overnight. I don’t know who the new SAC is, or if there even is one. Nobody’ll talk to me about this case. As far as they’re all concerned, I’m just a guy running a lot of field agents. I shouldn’t even be on this anymore. I definitely shouldn’t be here.”

  “Maybe they’re trying to tell you something,” I said, but he ignored the joke. It was pretty lame, anyway. I just wanted to calm Ned down a little if I could. I wanted him to speak slowly enough that I could follow.

  He stopped by the big Rodin in the garden, took my hand, and shook it in an oddly formal way. “I’ve got to go,” he said.

  “Mahoney, you’re freaking me out a little here—”

  “See what you can get done. I’ll find out what I can, but don’t depend on the Bureau in the meantime. For anything. Do you understand?”

  “No, Ned, I don’t. What about this bank list you were just talking about?”

  He was already walking away, up the stone stairs toward Jefferson Drive.

  “Don’t know what you mean,” he said over his shoulder, but he was patting his coat pocket when he said it.

  I waited for him to leave, then checked my pocket. There, along with my keys, was a black-and-silver thumb drive.

  Chapter 69

  NED COULD LOSE more than his job for handing over the kind of sensitive information he’d just given me. He could go to jail too. I owed it to him to do as much with the list as I could. So I took his advice and started right at the top—with Tony Nicholson’s biggest single “benefactor.”

  If someone had told me a month ago that Senator Marshall Yarrow of Virginia had a connection to a scandal like this, I would have been highly skeptical. The man had too much to lose, and I don’t mean just money—though he had plenty of that too.

  Yarrow was a billionaire before he was fifty, riding the dot-com wave in the nineties and then getting out. He’d turned part of his fortune into a Bill Gates–style foundation, run by his wife, focused on children’s health initiatives in the United States, Africa, and East Asia. Then he leveraged all that goodwill, and another big pile of money, into a Senate campaign that no one took too seriously—un
til he won. Now Yarrow was in his second term, and it was an open secret in Washington that he’d already formed an off-the-books exploratory committee, with his eye on the next presidential election.

  So yes, plenty to lose—but he wouldn’t be the first Washington politician to blow it all on hubris, would he?

  With a little calling around, I found out that Yarrow had a working lunch in his office that day, followed by a one thirty TVA caucus meeting, both in the Russell Senate Office Building. That would put him in the southwest lobby just before one thirty.

  And that’s when and where I went after him.

  At one twenty-five, he came off the elevator with a retinue of power-suited aides, all of them talking at once. Yarrow himself was on the phone.

  I stepped into his line of sight with my badge out. “Excuse me, Senator. I was hoping for a minute of your time.”

  The one woman in the group of aides, strikingly blond, attractive, late twenties, stepped between us. “Can I help you, Officer?”

  “It’s Detective,” I told her, but kept my eyes on Yarrow, who had at least put a hand over his Treo. “Just a few questions for Senator Yarrow. I’m investigating a large credit card fraud case in Virginia. Someone may have been using one of the senator’s cards—at a social club out in Culpeper?”

  Yarrow was very good. He didn’t even flinch when I referred to the club at Blacksmith Farms.

  “Well, as long as it’s quick,” he said, just reluctantly enough. “Grace, tell Senator Morehouse not to start without me. You all can go ahead. I’m fine with the detective. I’ll be right along. It’s okay, Grace.”

  A few seconds later, the senator and I were alone, as much as you could be in a place like this. For all I knew, the three-story coffered dome over our heads carried sound everywhere and anywhere.

  “So, which credit card are we talking about?” he asked, with a perfectly straight face.

  I kept my voice low. “Senator, I’d like to ask you about the half-million-dollar transfers you’ve made to a certain overseas account in the past six months. Would you rather talk about this somewhere else?”

  “You know what?” he said, as brightly as if he were being interviewed by Matt Lauer on the Today show. “I just remembered a file I need for this meeting, and I already sent my aides on. Would you mind walking with me?”

  Chapter 70

  THE FIRST THING I noticed about Marshall Yarrow’s private office was how many pictures of himself he had mounted on the walls. There seemed to be a visual clique of “important” people he wanted to be seen with. There was one with the president and one with the vice president. Tiger Woods. Bono. Arnold and Maria. Bob Woodward. Robert Barnett. He was obviously a well-connected man, and he wanted everyone who walked into this office to know it right away.

  Yarrow perched on the edge of a huge cherry inlaid desk and made a point of not asking me to sit down.

  I’d known I was going to have to be aggressive at first, but now I wanted to back off and see what I could accomplish with a little tact. If Yarrow chose to put up a firewall, it would be hard to get around without subpoenas.

  “Senator, let me start by taking any association you may have with that social club off the table. It’s not why I’m here,” I told him. That wasn’t entirely true, but it was good enough for the time being.

  “I never said I was associated with any club,” he said. It was a balls-of-steel moment on his part, especially considering the sex acts I’d seen him performing on more than one of Nicholson’s tapes.

  I didn’t push it. “Fair enough, but you should know that my focus here is extortion, not solicitation.”

  “Please don’t push your way in here doling out some puzzle pieces and holding on to others, Detective,” Yarrow said, suddenly more aggressive. “I’m too smart and too busy a man for that. What exactly are you hoping to walk away with here?”

  “Good question, and I have an answer. I want you to tell me that those bank transfers are exactly what I think they are.”

  There was a long standoff; I guess he was waiting for me to blink.

  Then he finally said, “Yeah, okay, let’s get this out on the table. I’ve been to Blacksmith Farms, but for entertainment purposes only. And I don’t mean myself. We’re talking about out-of-town guests, contributors, visitors from the Middle East, that sort of thing. It’s a part of the job, unfortunately.

  “I get them in, have a drink or two, and then leave them to it. That’s it. Believe me”—he held up his left hand and waggled a gold-banded finger—“I can no sooner afford to piss Barbara off than I can my whole constituency. There’s been no solicitation here. Nothing to be blackmailed for. Am I clear on that?”

  I was starting to get real sick of people pretending that none of this was happening.

  “I’m sorry, Senator, but I have evidence to the contrary. Digital video evidence. You sure this is the way you want to go?”

  Senator Yarrow never missed a beat, and he even remembered to pick up the file he’d supposedly forgotten in the office.

  “You know, Detective, my caucus meeting started five minutes ago, and if I don’t get this important water bill moving today, it’s not going anywhere. Assuming there aren’t any charges here, you’re going to have to excuse me.”

  “How long is your meeting?” I asked.

  He flipped a card from his pocket and held it out between two fingers for me. “Give Grace a call. We’ll get you on the schedule,” he said.

  I could feel the firewall starting to rise, higher and higher, faster and faster.

  Chapter 71

  I BROUGHT SOME music to Nana’s room that night, a mixed-artist CD, the Best of U Street, with a lot of the big names from when she went to the clubs there with my grandfather and friends—Basie, Sarah Vaughan, Lena Horne, and Sir Duke himself, the great Mr. Ellington.

  I let it play quietly on Bree’s laptop while we visited.

  The jazz singers’ weren’t the only familiar voices in the room. I’d also brought along Jannie and Ali. This was the first night the nurses had allowed Ali into the room. He was so quiet and respectful, sitting right next to Nana’s bed. Such a good little boy.

  “What’s this for, Daddah?” he asked in the younger-sounding voice he used when he was a little nervous and unsure of himself.

  “That’s the heart monitor. You see those lines? They show Nana’s heartbeat. You can see that it’s steady right now.”

  “What about that tube there?”

  “That’s how Nana gets food while she’s in the coma.”

  Then, suddenly, he said, “I wish Nana was coming home soon. I wish it more than anything. I say prayers for Nana all day long.”

  “You can tell her yourself, Ali. Nana’s right here. Go ahead, if you want to say something.”

  “She can hear me?”

  “She probably can. I think so.” I put his hand on Nana’s and my hand on top of his. “Go ahead.”

  “Hi, Nana!” he said as if Nana were hard of hearing, and it was difficult not to laugh.

  “Inside-the-house voice, buddy,” Bree said. “But good enthusiasm there. I’ll bet Nana heard you.”

  Chapter 72

  JANNIE WAS MORE reserved with her grandma. She moved kind of awkwardly around the room, like she just wasn’t sure how to be herself. Mostly, she hung back by the door until I motioned her over.

  “Come here, Janelle. I want to show you and Ali something interesting.”

  Ali hung on my arm, and Jannie came to look over my shoulder. It was tight in the little space next to the bed, but I liked us pressed in that way, a unit, hopefully ready for whatever came our way.

  I took a picture out of my wallet. It was the one I’d found in Caroline’s apartment, and I’d been carrying it with me.

  “Now, this is Nana Mama, your uncle Blake, and me. Way back in 1976, if you can believe it.”

  “Daddy! You look ridiculous,” Jannie said, pointing at the red, white, and blue hat jammed onto my seventies Afro. �
��What are you wearing?”

  “It’s called a boater. It was the Bicentennial, America’s two hundredth birthday, and about a million people were wearing them that day. Very few looked so jaunty, though.”

  “Oh, that’s really too bad.” Jannie sounded somewhere between embarrassed and filled with pity for her poor, clueless father.

  “Anyway,” I went on, “about five minutes after this picture was taken, a big Washington Redskins float came by in the parade. They were throwing out mini footballs, and Blake and I just about lost our minds trying to catch one. We ran after the float for blocks without even a second thought for poor Nana Mama. So you know what happened next, right?”

  This was mostly for the kids, but also for Nana—like we were sitting around the kitchen table and she was over at the stove, eavesdropping. I could just imagine her standing there, stirring something good and pretending not to listen in, getting a wisecrack ready for me.

  “It took her hours to find us, and let me tell you, when she did, you have never seen Nana that mad in all your life. Not even close.”

  Ali stared at Nana, trying to imagine it. “How mad was she? Tell me.”

  “Well, do you remember when she quit us and moved out for a while?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Madder than that, even. And remember when a certain someone”—I poked Ali in the ribs—“ ‘drove’ the vacuum cleaner down the stairs and put scratches all over the wood?”

  He played along and dropped his jaw wide open. “Madder than that?”

  “Ten times madder, little man.”

  “What happened, Daddy?” Jannie chimed in.

  The truth was, Nana had slapped both of us across the face—before she hugged us silly and then bought us a couple of red, white, and blue cotton candies, as big as our haircuts, on the way home. She’d always been a little old-school that way, at least back then. Not that I ever held the occasional whupping against her. That’s just the way it was back then. Tough love, but it seemed to work on me.