The 13-Minute Murder Read online

  “Susan, we’re not going to figure it out,” Beck told her, again. “Scott was in covert ops. It’s probably a string of random characters.”

  “You’re probably right,” Susan said, but she kept staring at the laptop, ignoring the traffic around them.

  Beck sagged in the front seat. He checked his own pulse. Neither Graham nor Susan noticed. It was thready. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath and tried to force himself to be calm.

  Just let me live long enough to do this, he thought. He wasn’t sure whom the thought was directed to, really. But he thought it again anyway. Just let me live long enough.

  The car slammed to a halt. Beck opened his eyes. They were outside the offices of Senator Pierce. The front of the building was covered with her campaign logo, and posters of her face smiled from every window.

  Graham hopped out. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go ride to the rescue.”

  Beck looked back at Susan, who nodded, and they both got out of the car.

  Let me live long enough to do this, Beck thought again, then followed the cop inside.

  Chapter 24

  Senator Pierce’s campaign headquarters was controlled chaos. Every manner of electronic device was beeping and pinging, demanding attention. Multiple screens showed every news channel, each one with a constantly scrolling stream of information. Volunteers ran from one cubicle to the next, as a dozen other people talked urgently into their phones. Dozens of pizza boxes layered a long table, and empty coffee cups overflowed the wastebaskets.

  They were united in a cause. Beck could almost see the excitement and purpose binding them all together, like a warm glow in the air despite the cheap fluorescent lighting.

  Then someone shouted, “QUIET!” as the latest poll numbers hit the screens. A blond, tanned anchorwoman on CNN announced, “And the latest polls show upstart challenger Senator Elizabeth Pierce within striking distance of President Sharon Martin, with just a few days to go before the crucial Super Tuesday primaries.…”

  The cheers drowned out the rest of her words. People were hugging and high-fiving, before returning to their work with renewed purpose.

  Beck overheard someone say, in a tone of disbelief, “Holy crap, man, we could actually win this thing!”

  Only if the candidate survives, Beck thought bitterly. He once believed that assassination plots and conspiracy theories were just for his patients and bad TV. That was this morning.

  Now he knew better.

  Graham pulled him through the packed room.

  “The senator and her detail are willing to meet with you,” he said, keeping his voice low. Beck had to strain to hear. They stopped in front of an office. Graham turned to Susan, looking slightly sheepish. “Sorry, can you wait in here? The agents are a little nervous about too many strangers getting close to the senator right now.”

  Beck began to protest, but Susan cut him off. “I don’t blame them,” she said. “It’s fine. I’ll wait.”

  “You sure?” Beck asked. He would not have made it this far without her. It seemed somehow ungrateful to put her in a waiting room right now.

  “Randall, I am ready to be done with this,” Susan said. “I promise. Do what you have to do. Go.”

  Graham nodded, grateful, and pointed her to a chair in the room. Susan sat down. She opened her bag and took out the laptop and offered it to Beck. “You’ll need this,” she said.

  Beck hesitated. Some instinct told him not to take it. After all, he thought, it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you.…

  “You hold on to it,” Beck said.

  “Hey, they need that,” Graham said.

  “Probably,” Beck agreed. “But I’ll feel better if Susan holds on to it.”

  Graham scowled but didn’t argue.

  “Fine. Whatever. Just don’t try to open it again,” he said. “The Secret Service has people that can crack it. They’ll take care of it.”

  If Susan resented being talked down to, she didn’t show it. “I understand,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

  She slid Scott’s laptop back into her bag.

  Graham turned and led Beck out of the office again, closing the door behind him.

  He went down the hall to a solid-steel door at the end of the corridor. Beck followed. A plainclothes Secret Service agent—dark suit, earpiece—stood on guard.

  Graham flipped his badge. “Todd Graham, MPD. They’re expecting us.”

  The agent nodded. Beck watched him carefully. He would never really trust people in dark suits again. Probably not for the rest of his life.

  Of course, that’s not going to be very long, he thought.

  The agent rapped on the door. A heavy bolt clunked and the door swung inward.

  Almost over now, Beck thought. He was glad. Susan was right. It was time for the professionals to handle this. It was time for this to become someone else’s problem.

  Chapter 25

  Susan watched Beck follow the cop out of the room, and immediately took out the laptop again.

  Randall was safe. They were both safe. She finally had a moment to think, without guns going off or someone trying to kill her. Now she could actually solve this.

  She cared about Randall Beck a great deal. If one of her friends took her out for drinks, off the record, she would admit that she probably cared about him more than was strictly professional. She thought he was one of the smartest people she’d ever met. She knew he cared about people, and had constructed his impatient manner to hide just how vulnerable that made him. And she knew he was like a pit bull clamped on to a steak when it came to figuring out a problem.

  But he had blind spots a mile wide.

  That was the thing about being a therapist. She could see his blind spots, even when the patient—even though he was also a psychiatrist—couldn’t.

  Randall, for instance, had almost nothing in his life except his work. The same applied to most of his patients. They believed in duty, in a higher calling.

  So of course he thought that Scott’s password would be the Ranger motto. It was the only possibility in Randall’s mind. He believed that Kevin Scott was like all his other patients, focused more on saving the world than anything else.

  It was a noble way to look at the world, but it left a few things out.

  Like family. Friends. Love.

  But Kevin Scott wasn’t like Randall’s other patients. Susan could see it from the pictures that were now scrolling across the laptop screen again. Sure, there was the one picture of him at work, and a couple of him in the field in Afghanistan and Iraq—but these were not pictures of him doing a job. They were pictures of him with his friends.

  Most of the rest of the pictures were with his wife, Jennifer. (Susan did not want to think about what must have happened to her. Poor woman.) In each picture, Kevin Scott looked at her like she was the center of the universe.

  Randall also thought the password would be some high-security code. Susan knew most people didn’t think like that. Even the ones who have been in top-secret jobs. Especially those people. At home, they just want to be normal.

  And normal people don’t put a lot of effort into the passwords on their laptops.

  Susan typed the name JENNIFER into the password space.

  The computer immediately opened to the desktop.

  Scott hadn’t gone to any trouble to hide what she was looking for.

  There was only one file folder on the screen, marked DAMOCLES.

  Susan opened it and began reading the first document she found.

  Within moments, she knew they’d made a terrible mistake.

  But she would have known that anyway when the door opened, and a man with a gun walked in on her.

  Chapter 26

  Graham went through the door into Senator Pierce’s inner office, and Beck followed.

  Two things happened, so fast that Beck would swear they were simultaneous.

  First, the door swung shut, the heavy bolt locking again.


  Then Agent Howard stepped forward, his face masked behind bandages and a splint for his nose. He was smiling like he’d just heard the funniest joke in the world.

  He hit Beck across the face with the barrel of his gun.

  Beck reeled from the blow.

  He looked up at Graham. He’d trusted the cop. He couldn’t believe he’d been so wrong.

  But Graham looked just as surprised. He was clearly taken off guard, just like Beck was.

  That moment of disbelief cost him his life.

  He was still reaching for his Glock in its holster when Agent Howard shot him in the face.

  Graham’s body dropped to the floor, landing right next to Beck.

  Beck had a moment of pure horror as he saw the wet, red wound in the middle of Graham’s forehead, the cop’s eyes already empty and staring.

  Then he felt nothing but rage.

  He prepared himself to leap at Howard, but the agent was ready. He hit Beck with the barrel of the pistol again—Beck realized it was longer than it should have been, a suppressor attached to the end—and spots danced before Beck’s eyes as his body failed underneath him.

  It took him a long moment just to keep from vomiting.

  When he was finally breathing normally, he looked up.

  Agent Morrison stood above him now, with his right hand on his gun and his left hand holding Susan by the arm. Agent Howard was still grinning at him.

  “I know you don’t care if you live or die,” Howard said. “But I bet you feel differently about her.”

  Beck wanted nothing more than to wipe that smirk from Howard’s face. “I swear to God—” he began.

  A woman’s voice cut him off before he could say anything more. It was the voice of the woman on the phone.

  “Oh, please, Dr. Beck, don’t say anything stupid.”

  Beck turned and saw Senator Elizabeth Pierce standing beside a heavy, slab-like desk. Sergeant Graham’s dead body lay on the floor less than five feet from her brand-new Ferragamo pumps.

  “I think we’ve had enough empty threats and promises, don’t you?” she said. “Now it’s time to get down to business.”

  Chapter 27

  Beck didn’t think that the bad guys really explained their plans to their victims. Not in real life. He thought he’d get a bullet in the head, just like Graham did.

  But as it turned out, Senator Pierce needed him to understand.

  Howard pulled Beck up from the floor, then sat him down in a chair next to Susan so the senator would have an audience. He bound their hands and feet with zip-ties, and then dragged Graham’s body into another room while the senator waited patiently.

  She looked at them for a moment.

  “Scott didn’t have a chance to tell you anything, did he?” she said.

  “He told me enough,” Beck said. He decided to try to bluff his way out of this. It had to be worth a shot. “And we told Graham. His superiors know he was coming here. The police will be here any moment—”

  “No, they won’t,” Pierce said. “Really, Dr. Beck. We know they’re still looking for you. Your friend was willing to hide you, to try to keep you safe. And look what you did to him in return. You got his brains blown out the back of his skull. Now. Can we please try again?”

  Beck shut up. Bluffing didn’t work. There didn’t seem to be any point in pretending he knew what was going on anymore. So he asked an honest question.

  “Why are you working with Damocles? Why are you doing any of this?”

  Pierce looked at him like he was an idiot. “Because I want to be the president, of course.”

  Susan couldn’t restrain herself, either, apparently. “But you’re winning,” she said.

  Pierce smiled. “No,” she said. “At the moment, I’m the distraction. I’m the challenger who’s interesting. Who brings up some issues, and makes the race competitive. I make the ratings go up, and I give the TV people something new to talk about. But none of the big donors have broken my way. The overall machinery is still firmly on Martin’s side. And when I’m not fresh or entertaining, I’ll be written out of the script. It happens almost every election. It’s just my turn.”

  Beck was starting to put it together now. “And Damocles came to you with a proposal.”

  Pierce snorted. “No. I had to go to them. Repeatedly. For a company that kills people on a daily basis, they were surprisingly squeamish about getting their hands dirty. But after I pressured them a bit with those hearings, they came around. You’d be surprised how many former Damocles employees there are in the Secret Service.”

  Beck couldn’t help looking up at Morrison when she said that. Morrison caught his eye and shrugged, as if to say, Hey, it’s a job.

  “Kevin Scott was supposed to be the distraction tonight. He was going to trigger an explosion. And while everyone panicked, a sniper would open fire on the debate stage, wounding both of us.” Pierce allowed herself a smile. “Tragically, only one of us would survive.”

  “And you’d ride that wave of sympathy right into the White House,” Beck said.

  Pierce nodded. “We’ll blame some Middle Eastern country, and Damocles will have a new war to fight. Everybody wins.”

  “But Scott wouldn’t go along with it,” Beck said.

  Morrison spoke up. “He had an attack of conscience,” the agent said. “He wanted his wife to be proud of him.” His tone was scornful.

  “And you were worried he’d told me about the whole thing.”

  “You know, if you’d just cooperated with my agents and told them that Scott didn’t say anything to you, none of this would have happened. You could be at home, waiting for that tumor to kill you. That’s right—I know you’re dying. I know everything about you. You might have helped a few more patients.”

  Beck had to admit, she had a point.

  “So you lost your bomber,” Beck said. “And you had me running around loose.”

  “It could have gotten really ugly,” Pierce said. “Fortunately, you showed up just in time. You really thought you were going to protect me, didn’t you?”

  Beck shrugged. He wasn’t usually this wrong about people. He wondered, if he’d had a chance to meet Pierce in person before this, would he have known she was a sociopath?

  “Well, you can still help me, Dr. Beck,” she said. “And you can help Dr. Carpenter as well. Even if it is the last thing you’ll ever do.”

  That was why she’d explained everything to him. And that was why Morrison and Howard strapped a vest with twenty small bricks of C-4 to his chest.

  Because he was a part of the plan now. Now he was one of the bad guys, too.

  Chapter 28

  Beck waited in line and wondered if he had the guts to sentence Susan to death.

  He was outside the auditorium on the Georgetown campus, along with a few hundred other people waiting to go through the metal detectors at the entrance. Like everything else in the contest between the president and Senator Pierce, the location of the debate had been argued back and forth for weeks. Pierce’s people wanted it in New York or Miami, one of the bigger media markets with more primary votes. President Martin’s people had argued that the president was too busy actually running the country to make the trip—and they didn’t want to raise Pierce’s profile any more than necessary. They both backed out of the debate several times before finally agreeing on Georgetown. It was a small space, which limited the candidates’ exposure to the public. Tickets were given to only select lucky citizens, including Beck.

  Beck had seen the bickering in the media. He never thought it would mean anything in his life.

  Now it looked like they were choosing the place he was going to die.

  The question was, how many people was he willing to take with him?

  A small radio inside Beck’s ear—almost invisible to anyone else—began speaking to him. “You’re doing fine, Doc,” Agent Howard said. “Remember, we can see everything you’re doing. Just stay calm, and it will be over before you know it.”


  Beck wondered where the cameras were, or if Morrison and Howard had agents following him. Probably both. He had no doubt they could see him.

  Back at campaign headquarters, they’d cleaned him up as best they could before they sent him out. They gave him a fresh shirt out of a box kept inside one of the staffer’s desks. They put his suit jacket back on him, over the suicide vest. To cover the bulk, they wrapped him in one of the special oversize raincoats that the Secret Service used while they were carrying shotguns and automatic weapons in public. It made him look normal, at least at first glance.

  Then they clipped an all-access pass to his coat. It had the senator’s campaign credentials stamped on it, along with a photo they’d snapped of him and printed onto the badge.

  He had a trigger for the vest inside the pocket of his suit, but Howard had disconnected it—it was just a piece of plastic now. The real trigger was a code that could be sent at any time from Morrison’s or Howard’s phone.

  And for leverage, they had Susan.

  “Remember, Doc,” Howard told him in the car as he was dropped off. “You deviate from our instructions in any way—talk to anyone, try to warn the president, go anywhere near a cop—and you will end your girlfriend’s life, as well as your own. It will be quick for you, but not for her. Understand?”

  Beck understood. He just had to decide if he could do it anyway.

  He saw uniformed security at the metal detectors. They were checking everyone. Campaign staffers had to surrender their phones. Big-name donors had to put their $20,000 Rolexes and Fendi purses into little buckets and send them through the X-ray machine. Beck even saw the secretary of state being patted down. As usual, they were taking no chances when it came to the safety of the candidates.

  Beck knew he could stop the plan right there. He could tell the nearest security man he had a bomb, and they would immediately take him down. With luck, it would start a panic and people would scramble to get away from him. Even if Howard detonated the vest remotely, fewer people would die out here than inside the auditorium.