Mistress Read online

  Then she draws closer to me.

  We draw closer to each other.

  This isn’t going the way I’d planned.

  Chapter 66

  “It’s okay to say enough is enough, Ben.” Anne looks up at me. We are so close I feel her breath on my chin. “Whatever you feel like you owe Diana, you don’t owe her your life. I don’t want to see you get hurt, too.”

  She touches my cheek, and my resistance begins to melt away. No. This is a bad idea. You’re endangering her, Ben. Just being here puts her at risk.

  She leans into me. Her lips are soft and moist, delicate and cautious. It’s the sweetest kiss I’ve ever received.

  “God, you’re trembling,” she whispers.

  Personal foul—illegal contact. Replay first down.

  Okay, so we replay it. My mouth parts and our tongues find common ground. My hand slides inside her pajama top and Anne lets out a small gasp that turns into a low moan.

  Illegal use of the hands.

  Penalty declined; second base. I mean, second down.

  She lifts her arms and I pull off her shirt and she tugs at mine and the steam of our desperation and fear and longing ignites something primitive between us. We are not two people whose lives are in danger. We are two people who have nothing but right now, only this moment. She is aggressive and desperate and hungry as her tongue invades my mouth, as she digs her nails into my hair, as she takes my index finger and places it in her mouth, as she arches her back, as she raises her legs and wraps them around me, as she whispers harder, harder, into my ear, as she grits her teeth and squeezes her eyes shut and cries out harder, harder—

  This is wrong this is wrong but I can’t stop myself and I don’t want to stop, I want to remind myself that I still have a life and I can still feel something for somebody else and if I only have hours or days remaining in this world, I want to spend at least a small fraction of it with something, with someone, who is good, there is still such a thing as goodness in this world—

  “Wow.” I lie on my back and stare up at the ceiling. I don’t know how much time has passed, but I’m guessing more than an hour. We are panting and coming down from the high, and I’m thinking fugitive sex—back to Seinfeld, when George was dating that prisoner and he liked the arrangement so he sabotaged her parole hearing—how did that not make my top ten list?

  “Maybe our lives should be in danger more often,” says Anne, her head resting on my chest.

  “Did you used to be a gymnast or something?”

  She likes that. Her hair tickles my stomach. My limbs are rubbery, useless. My head is foggy. I’ve never felt better.

  We interrupt this program for a reality check. That thing about our lives being in danger.

  “This doesn’t change anything,” I whisper. “You have to get out of here. You’re not safe.”

  She adjusts herself so that her chin is on my chest, her eyes are on mine.

  “I’m not going anywhere. If you’re in, then so am I,” she says. “So, sweetie, maybe you should buckle up.”

  Chapter 67

  I spend the night at Anne’s to ensure her safety. Strictly for her protection. No other reason. I mean, there are bad people out there, right? In fact, I might need to come back again tonight to make sure she’s still safe.

  But this morning, I’m on the move. My calves and triceps and abdominal muscles and neck are sore beyond description. Apparently I’ve been lacking physical exercise. I also forgot, in the heat of things last night, how much my leg was killing me after I wiped out on the Triumph a few nights back. Luckily, I have this morning to remind me.

  In the gym bag that I’m carrying with me everywhere these days, in addition to a few items of clothing and toiletries and my laptop computer, I’ve been accumulating baseball caps that help shield me from detection by someone who might be, say, scanning the streets for me.

  But I know the truth: they’re going to find me eventually. Washington, DC, isn’t Manhattan. They could just position themselves at various posts and not move an inch, and sooner or later I’ll walk into them. So I try to keep my head down and baseball cap on and hope I can figure everything out before they find me.

  Now all I have to do is figure out what it is I’m supposed to figure out.

  As I’m walking down T Street, I call my trusted colleague Ashley Brook Clark, who is basically running the Capital Beat in my absence.

  “Any luck on Jonathan Liu’s computer?” I ask.

  “They’re getting there, Ben. I told them it was high priority, but that computer was beat to hell. What did you do, throw it on the ground?”

  Something like that.

  “One other thing, Ben. A guy came by looking for you. A guy with a real attitude.”

  “Was he wearing sunglasses and a trench coat, and did he move furtively?”

  “None of the above. His name was…here it is…Sean Patrick Riley.”

  “Sean Patrick Riley? What is that—Pakistani? Somalian?”

  “I think it’s Venezuelan.”

  “Okay, Sean Patrick Riley,” I say. “And what did this Irishman want?”

  “He says he’s a private investigator.”

  “And what is he privately investigating?”

  “He was very, um—”

  “Private?”

  “Yes, private with that information. Boy, you’re in a good mood, Ben. Did you get laid last night or something?”

  She’s right, there’s been a skip in my step this morning. Maybe things are looking up. Or maybe I just hadn’t had sex for a really long time before last night.

  “Did this guy give you a bad vibe?” I ask. “I mean, does he seem like a shady bloke?”

  “A private investigator? Shady?”

  “Okay, shadier than usual. Like, for example, rather than ask me questions, he’d like to put a bullet through my head?”

  “No, I didn’t get assassin from this guy. Chauvinist, maybe. Asshole, definitely. But not assassin. I think he’s looking for a missing person.”

  A missing person.

  I reach Vermont Avenue, where a big crowd is gathered at the intersection. I hang back rather than mix in too closely with a bunch of people I don’t know.

  “As long as he doesn’t want to kill me, I’ll talk to him,” I say. “Give me his number.”

  Chapter 68

  I see Sean Patrick Riley seated near the window of the café before he sees me. It’s not hard to spot a guy wearing a leprechaun suit and eating Lucky Charms.

  Okay, he’s more like a middle-aged guy with a full head of reddish-blond hair, a weathered complexion, and a drinker’s nose, wearing a button-down oxford-cloth shirt and blue jeans. And no Lucky Charms, as magically delicious as they may be; this afternoon it’s a cup of joe.

  Yeah, I’m still in a pretty good mood from the sex last night.

  We shake hands. “Nice bike,” he says.

  Okay, there goes my good mood. Normally, that would be a compliment, because normally he’d be talking about my Triumph, which is a nice bike. But the Triumph is in a parking garage in the Adams Morgan neighborhood. Now I’m riding a real bike—a bicycle—specifically, a used Rockhopper I picked up at City Bikes. It’s more suited to trails than city riding, but I may have to make some acrobatic moves with it one day, and I want something that can handle some quick turns and rough riding.

  Anyway, I’m not too happy about it. I already miss my motorcycle. But the Triumph made me visible. With the Rockhopper, plus a helmet and a fluorescent Windbreaker, I look like one of those bike couriers who risk life and limb weaving through traffic all around the capital.

  “You’re the Ben Casper who runs that newspaper?” he asks.

  “I am.” Checking out my appearance, he probably thinks I’m a guy who delivers newspapers. “And I’m short on time,” I say.

  He doesn’t respond to that. I’m guessing this guy used to be a cop, and judging from his speech patterns, I’m guessing Chicago cop. Last I checked, they have a
few Irish people out that way.

  They put one of yours in the hospital, you put one of theirs in the morgue! Sean Connery may be Scottish, but he killed as the Irish cop in The Untouchables. Killed.

  “I was hired by the Jacobs family,” he says. “They live in a suburb of Chicago. Their daughter Nina went missing here over a week ago.”

  Nina…Jacobs. I know that—

  “Diana’s friend,” I spit out. I met Nina once at a club. She was tall, like Diana, the same lithe, shapely frame, but not blond like Diana. Nina was a brun—

  Oh, shit. Nina was a brunette.

  And I’ll bet she didn’t have a butterfly tattoo above her left ankle.

  “Diana…Hotchkiss, you mean,” Riley says, flipping over a pad of paper.

  I take a breath and recall Nina. A beauty in her own right—not the perfect features of Diana’s face, but quite attractive. A bit younger than Diana. Up close, you wouldn’t confuse one for the other, but from a distance, they might be indistinguishable. Especially if Nina was wearing Diana’s clothes.

  And especially if Diana dyed her hair Nina’s color, which she did a month ago.

  I remember that night at the club, and thinking that Nina looked up to Diana, patterned herself after her. How ironic, in hindsight.

  Sean Patrick Riley is looking for a dead woman.

  “I’m down to remote acquaintances at this point,” says Riley. “I’ve talked to everyone she knows well, and I’m hitting a dead end. Anyway, she had your business card in her Rolodex. So I’m wondering if you can think of anything that might help me. Any chance you have an idea what might have happened to her?”

  Her parents must be in sheer agony right now. I’ll help them find justice for their daughter. I won’t let this go. I’ll tell them everything that happened to their daughter.

  But not yet.

  “Why don’t you tell me what you’ve put together so far?” I say. “And maybe something will trigger a thought.”

  Chapter 69

  “A week before she disappeared,” says Sean Patrick Riley, “Nina Jacobs had her mail held at the post office for a seven-day period, and she told the Washington Post not to deliver her newspaper for seven days. She also had the lights in her home set on timers. Why would she do all that?

  “She’d do that,” he continues, answering his own question, “if she were going on vacation for a week, and she didn’t want her mail to pile up or her newspapers to accumulate on her front porch. And she’d put her lights on timers so it would look like she was home, not on vacation, to ward off burglars.

  “The thing is, Nina didn’t go on vacation. She was at work every day. She worked at the Public Face, a PR firm over on Seventeenth Street. She didn’t miss a day that week.” Riley opens his hands. “So she was in town, but living somewhere else.”

  “Maybe she was watching a friend’s house,” I suggest.

  “Right. That’s the best I can figure. But I don’t know whose. She has a ring of three or four friends she spends a lot of time with. I’ve talked to all of them. They were all in town, and Nina wasn’t watching their homes. I’ve talked to all of them, I should say, except Diana Hotchkiss. Don’t know if you heard, but she’s dead.”

  “I heard,” I say. “Are you working with the local police on this?”

  He lets out a grunt. “The feds,” he said. “They’ve scooped it from the locals. Which means in terms of cooperation, I’m getting a whole lotta nothing.”

  I don’t know what to make of all this. Nina Jacobs was set up. Set up to play the role of Diana Hotchkiss—living at her apartment, wearing her clothes, and ultimately being thrown off a balcony. But set up by whom?

  Diana? Was Diana capable of something like that?

  “Who in Nina’s circle of friends have you spoken to?” I ask.

  “Oh, let’s see.” He flips to another page in his small notepad. “Lucy Arangold, Heather Bilandic, and Anne Brennan.”

  “What did Anne say?”

  He shrugs his shoulders. “Same thing they all said. They didn’t know about any house-sitting. I think they figure she just took off somewhere. They said Nina was…impulsive, I think was the word.”

  I’m still a little off balance by what I’m hearing. I can’t believe that Diana would have allowed her friend Nina to be pushed off a balcony in her place. Maybe the CIA, maybe some rogue government official—but not Diana.

  “I need your help,” says Riley. “I’m at the end of my string, and you run a newspaper. I’m hoping you’ll run a big story on this. Maybe someone will read it and help me out.”

  “A wee little Internet scribe like Capital Beat?”

  He plays it straight with me. “Couldn’t get interest from the Post or the Times,” he admits. “I think the feds pooh-poohed it to them, though I can’t prove that. Anyway, since you knew the lady, I thought you might be willing.”

  “I might be,” I say.

  He stares at me. “What does that mean?”

  “It means I’ll need your homework,” I say. “And it means from now on, Mr. Riley, you and I are a team.”

  Chapter 70

  The ride up Massachusetts Avenue is slower than usual, given that I’m on a bicycle, but it feels good to work the lactic acid out of my muscles, which are aching from the workout that Anne put me through last night. The midday sun is cooking me on this bike, but all in all, I’ve had worse days.

  “So…Nina Jacobs,” says Ashley Brook Clark into the earpiece I’ve connected to my prepaid cell phone, the fourth I’ve purchased in a week as a result of my well-founded paranoia. (Is that an oxymoron? Can paranoia really qualify as paranoia if it’s well founded?)

  Anyway, it’s a good thing I have money for all these cell phones and hotel rooms. Which reminds me, I’m low on cash. I need to find an ATM, which, for me, is no small task.

  I let out a long sigh. Withdrawing cash from an ATM means I’ll be on camera, which means that I can’t be wearing my biking outfit lest they’ll know it’s my disguise. I’m going to have to change back into normal clothes, withdraw the money, get the hell away from that ATM as quickly as possible before the black helicopters drop out of the sky, or whatever’s going to happen, and change back into biking clothes.

  This is getting old. They’re wearing me down. I don’t know how Harrison Ford managed to do it in The Fugitive. Of course, the technology was way different; it was probably a lot easier back then to hide and stay hidden. Plus it was just a movie, and this is really happening to me.

  Tommy Lee Jones was outstanding in that movie and deserved the Oscar he got, but really, that year they should have given out two best supporting actor awards, because John Malkovich was absolutely brilliant as the assassin in In the Line of Fire. (Yes, I agree that Ralph Fiennes was great in Schindler’s List, but Malkovich stole the screen every time he appeared.)

  (Why am I putting my thoughts in parentheses? What’s next—footnotes? Am I losing my mind?)

  “So you want this story on the front page,” Ashley Brook says. “And you want a nice big photo of Nina Jacobs, and you want me to mention Sean Patrick Riley’s name several times.”

  “A photo of him, too,” I say.

  “And why is that? I didn’t even like that guy when I met him.”

  “It makes him safer,” I tell her. “If they catch him sniffing around and want to get rid of him, he’ll be harder to kill now that he’s gotten publicity. He’ll be more visible.”

  “And you think people who are willing to fire machine guns at you in midday, at a busy downtown intersection, care about visibility?”

  “I’m doing the best I can here, kid.” I stop at the three-way intersection where Idaho Avenue and Massachusetts Avenue meet 39th Street and take a squirt from my water bottle. “If Nina’s disappearance becomes big news, then it makes it harder for them to cover it up by killing people or whatever.”

  “Then why don’t you apply that logic to yourself?” she asks me. “You wrote that article about Diana Hotchkiss.
Why aren’t we publishing that for the same reason? To keep you safe?”

  It’s a good question. I’ve already threatened Craig Carney with that very thing, splashing the entire story over the front page of my website—Diana’s connection to Carney, Jonathan Liu’s murder, Operation Delano, etc. There are two reasons I haven’t pulled the trigger yet. One of them Ashley Brook already knows.

  “You and your journalistic scruples,” she moans.

  Well, that’s close. I don’t have a wife or children and probably never will. Capital Beat is my only family. It’s the only thing I’ve ever created. If I print something I can’t prove, I deface something I love. And I risk a crippling lawsuit and the loss of the Beat’s reputation. We may not be the Washington Post, but we are hard-hitting, fair, and fearless, which is more than most news organizations can say these days. So if I go down in flames, I want to know that I’ve left behind at least one thing that is good in this world. And they can always print the story after my death.

  But there’s another reason as well.

  “I haven’t been indicted yet,” I say. “They haven’t issued a warrant for my arrest yet.”

  “Okay. So?”

  “So—Carney threatened to do that, right? The feds seem to be in control of this situation, and the deputy director basically promised that if I didn’t play ball with him, there would be cops serving an arrest warrant any minute. But they aren’t. They’re keeping their powder dry. So for the moment, I’ll do the same.”

  “I’m not really following the logic,” Ashley Brook says.

  “I think they’re as scared of me as I am of them,” I say. “Neither of us wants to pull the trigger, because once we do, the other side will respond in kind.”

  “It’s like the Cold War with us and the Russians,” she says. “They didn’t nuke us because they knew we’d nuke them. Mutually assured destruction.”