Blood Trust jm-3 Page 2

  “Can you please tell me—?”

  “Hurry, Ms. Carson. The police are outside.”

  Fellows glanced around the dorm room, pointed to a chair on which she had casually tossed the clothes she had been wearing during dinner. Beyond was an empty bed with the covers pushed back.

  “Where—where is Vera?” Alli asked.

  “You don’t know what happened to her?”

  “No, I don’t.” Beneath her anger at this treatment, she felt a wave of fear rising inside her. “She fell asleep before I did. She was there when I turned off the light.”

  A catch in the commander’s voice. “Well, that, at least, is a relief.

  “Now, please, Ms. Carson, get dressed.”

  “Where is Vera?”

  “She’s in the infirmary.”

  A clutch in the pit of Alli’s stomach. “Is she okay?”

  “At the moment I can’t say.”

  “Commander, you’re scaring me.”

  “Please, Ms. Carson, just do as I ask.”

  Crossing to the chair, she drew on a pair of black jeans and a thick turtleneck sweater of the same color. She always dressed in black. Sitting on Vera’s bed, she placed her palms against the bottom sheet as if to make certain that Vera wasn’t there. Then, drawing her shoes over, she stepped into them.

  “Here, you’ll need this.”

  He passed her her leather jacket. She swung it around and zipped up.

  “Come with me.”

  She stood up, silently, with a fiercely beating heart.

  Beyond her door, the hallway was only dimly lit, so as not to awaken the other recruits on the floor, she assumed. She saw two police detectives, a three-man forensics team, and a pair of Secret Service agents, one of whom, Naomi Wilde, had been the head of her mother’s detail. Cops and the Secret Service? What in the world had happened?

  All at once, her heart skipped a beat. “Naomi, is Vera all right?”

  “Keep your voice down.”

  She turned to see three forensics techs snapping on latex gloves before they stepped into her room. Turning on the lights, they began to methodically go through it.

  “What are they looking for?” Then Alli turned back to Naomi. “Please,” she begged. “Just tell me if Vera is okay.” But Naomi’s face was as blank as a field of snow.

  “Ms. Bard is in the infirmary,” Naomi said.

  “I already know that,” Alli said. Something in her voice had spoken of a forced detachment, which caused Alli’s stomach to clench in anxiety. If Naomi wasn’t in control of the situation …

  “She’s been drugged. She was disoriented, sick to her stomach. She went out into the hallway without, apparently, knowing where she was, and collapsed. A security guard found her.”

  “What?” A chill ran through Alli. “My God, how … who would do such a thing? I want to see her—!”

  “Ms. Carson—”

  “Hey, Vera’s the only one here who gives a damn about me.”

  A member of the forensics team emerged from Alli’s room holding a plastic evidence bag with something in it. Approaching one of the Metro detectives, he handed over the bag and whispered in the detective’s ear, before disappearing back inside the room.

  The Metro detective cocked his head. “Interesting you should say that now.”

  Alli turned on him, her cheeks aflame. “What the hell does that mean?”

  He held up the bag. “This bottle contains traces of Rohypnol. Roofies in common street parlance, the date-rape drug. It was found under your bed.”

  “What?”

  “You deny it’s yours?”

  “Of course I deny it.”

  “So it’s your claim that you didn’t drug your roommate?”

  “What the what? Why on earth would I?”

  “Please keep your voices down,” Commander Fellows interrupted.

  “Ms. Carson,” the detective said in a steely voice, “I must insist you come with us now.”

  She looked around. “Just let me find my cell phone.”

  “The academy is in lockdown. You know the rules.” The commander gestured to the doorway. “This way, Ms. Carson.”

  She knew better than to argue further with Fellows. He ran Fearington like an Army boot camp, and talking back would only get her into deeper trouble. Fearington was one of only a couple of elite academies that fed the government secret services. Like its brethren in other regions of the country, Fearington was a closely guarded secret. Its cadets were the cream of the crop, exhaustively vetted and tested before being chosen to fill its ranks. The courses were rigorous, both physically and intellectually. It had taken all of Jack’s skills to get Alli accepted into the examination phase; following Jack’s intensive tutelage, she had done the rest. But from the very first day, she had been acutely aware of the fact that she didn’t fit the traditional Fearington mold.

  As she was marched down the hallway and out onto the grounds, she wondered dazedly why she was in trouble. Her legs were shaking and the core of her felt cold. Nevertheless, she had no choice but to take her first step into the nightmare.

  * * *

  “GENTLEMEN, WHAT a surprise finding you here.”

  This was how Henry Holt Carson, oldest brother of the late president, announced himself as he walked through the door into his sister-in-law’s room. Immensely wealthy and influential, he wore a silk-and-cashmere made-to-measure suit that Jack estimated must have cost at least five thousand dollars. On his feet were John Lobb shoes, mirror-shined, but not, Jack was certain, by Carson himself. His cold blue eyes, huge as an owl’s, studied them both, but failed, Jack noted, to even glance at Lyn’s corpse. But then, she was dead, Jack thought, and of no use to him.

  “Interlopers to the end, I see.” His lopsided smile failed to blunt the barb of his remark.

  He was in every way his brother’s polar opposite. A hard-nosed businessman, he distrusted and detested politicians, especially the ones he couldn’t buy off. He owned mining interests in the Midwest, for which he was forever buying pollution credits so he could continue pulling ore out of the ground and refining it. More recently, he had bought up a number of regional banks at bargain basement prices, merging them into one, InterPublic Bancorp. He had been married and divorced four times that Jack knew of. He had children, but, according to Edward, could neither remember their names nor what they looked like. He was an empire builder through and through. But, somehow, possibly because of his affection for all things familial, Edward had forgiven his brother his peccadillos and loved him as one ought to love a brother. It was anyone’s guess how the elder Carson felt about Edward. A rock might reveal more of its personal nature.

  He moved into the apex of the triangle with them; he was the kind of man who was continually conscious of his power vis-à-vis those around him, perhaps out of a deep-seated sense of inferiority. After being expelled from high school for defecating on the principal’s chair, retaliation for some slight, imagined or real, he had toiled fifteen-hour days in an iron smelter’s, working his way up to foreman, then day manager, from which position he had obtained a bank loan in order to buy the company. From that moment on, the path of his life was set.

  “We all had a deep and abiding fondness for Lyn,” Jack said.

  “My brother’s wife has passed to her final reward, McClure.” Henry Holt Carson’s head, as round as a medicine ball and almost as large, swiveled in his direction. “She doesn’t give a good goddamn whether you’re here or not. If she ever did.” This unnatural head, with its great eyes and turnip nose, sat atop sloping shoulders seemingly without the benefit of a neck. He had the overlarge, rough, slabbed hands of a hod carrier, and his face was deeply scored by wind, sun, and backbreaking work. Though he was now an owner, he made it an ironclad rule never to sit behind a desk. He was vocal in his contempt for those who, as he put it, were that disgusting modern mythological beast, half man, half chair. As a consequence, he never sat when he could stand, never walked when he could run. And
he never spoke when he could order or accuse.

  Now he looked around. “Why isn’t my niece here?” Dark clouds gathered along his brow. “Has she been informed?”

  “We tried.” Paull’s voice was mild and even. “It seems that Fearington is in lockdown.”

  The clouds were fulminating. “At this ungodly hour?”

  “Rehearsal lockdowns are designed to come at inconvenient times,” Jack said. “As in real life.”

  “Indeed.” Which was what Henry Holt Carson said when he didn’t know how to respond and didn’t want to lose momentum. He abhorred silence the way nature abhors a vacuum. “This is unacceptable. The girl needs to know the altered state of her mother.”

  “Is that what you call it?” Jack said.

  “Listen, you”—Carson’s stubby forefinger stabbed the air like a dagger—“you’ve already done enough to that girl. As far as this family is concerned, you’re a fucking menace.”

  “Oh, I see. This isn’t about Alli at all, is it?”

  Carson took a step toward him. “The fuck it isn’t.”

  Paull put his hands up. “Rancor isn’t appropriate, especially at this moment.”

  The two men ignored him, glaring fixedly at each other.

  “The. Fuck. It. Isn’t,” Carson repeated, emphasizing each word with a degree of menace. “And then you go and let my brother get killed.”

  “Now it comes out. No one could have—”

  “You should have.” Carson squared his shoulders like a linebacker ready to make an open field tackle. “I mean, that’s what Eddie was always saying about you—Jack can do this, Jack can do that. According to him you were a fucking wizard.”

  “He had a squad of Secret Service agents whose job it was—”

  “They weren’t you, McClure.” He was up on the balls of his feet now, his hands curled into fists. “They. Weren’t. You.”

  At that moment, Paull’s phone burred. Something about the moment, the phone ringing in the dead of night, or the portentousness of the sound, stopped the escalating argument in its tracks.

  The two men stared at Paull as he drew out the phone, checked the number on the readout, then took the call. For what seemed the longest time he said not a word. But his gray eyes slid across the room and met Jack’s. His expression was not encouraging.

  “All right,” he said at length. “Make certain nothing gets out of control.” He sighed. “Yes, I know it’s already out of control. I meant—for God’s sake use your head, man!—don’t let it go any further. I’ll be right there.”

  He closed the phone and stood staring into space for some time.

  “Well,” Jack prompted, “what is it?”

  Paull, seeking to pull himself together, turned to Jack. He rubbed a hand across his forehead and said, “That was Naomi Wilde.”

  Jack’s adrenaline started to flow. “The Secret Service agent?”

  Paull nodded. “She’s at Fearington. The lockdown isn’t a drill, Jack.”

  * * *

  FEARINGTON’S GROUNDS were as dark as an abandoned coal mine. Not a light shone, not a figure could be seen in the blackness where trees, training courses, and firing ranges loomed. It was as if she and her detail were the only ones on the academy campus as they crunched through a thin layer of frost. Her breath appeared before her like an apparition. Then, from behind her, lights popped on in the dorm rooms, first one, then others, like eyes opening. Heads in silhouette told her that some of her fellow classmates had been roused, despite the stealth of her detail.

  She was led across the campus. Not a word was spoken. She could hear the soft crunch of their shoes in the icy grass, the brief slither of material against material. Just last week there were patches of snow, like the last tufts on a balding man’s scalp. Still, the cops’ shoulders were hunched against the chill. Out past the obstacle course, they turned left into a dense copse of towering beech trees, and she felt even more surrounded, hemmed in, and helpless.

  All at once, the lead detective murmured into his wireless mike and three huge generator-driven floodlights snapped on, one after the other. They were trained on a space between the trunks of two trees. Alli gasped and, staggering, almost fell. Only the hand of Naomi Wilde, cupped around her elbow, kept her from pitching headlong onto the bed of fallen leaves.

  There, in the midst of the Fearington campus, was the naked body of a young male. He was upside down, his ankles and wrists bound and tied to the tree trunks. His skin was a sickening blue-white.

  Alli, staring at Billy’s body, felt the familiar steel wall spontaneously spring up, shielding her from trauma. Her unconscious had manufactured this mental wall during her weeklong captivity; it was a defense mechanism over which she had no control. She felt the disassociation, the sense of watching a movie instead of living life. This was happening to another girl, the protagonist of the film. She remained perfectly impassive, watching the film as, frame by frame, it unspooled toward its unknown climax and denouement.

  After some time, she became aware that the others had come to a halt and now stood in a semicircle with her roughly in its center. They were all staring at her with the stern demeanor of tribunal judges. Her mind was filled with the ominous rat-tat-tat of military drums, and with a determined effort she put this, too, beyond the barrier of her inner wall.

  One of the detectives, a beefy man with the splayed stance of a flatfoot, was directly behind her, and she heard his voice now.

  “Well?”

  Alli, spellbound in horror, felt her tongue cleaving to the roof of her mouth. She could not utter a word.

  “What, no shock, no hysteria, not a tear shed?” Flatfoot said with a voice like an ice floe. “Christ, you’re a cold bitch.” He pressed his fingertips against her shoulder blades, propelling her forward. “Here is William Warren.” He came after her, like a hunter with the fox in his sights. “You knew him, oh, yeah, you did.” His laugh was like the braying of a mule. “You and he did what together behind that big old tree?”

  TWO

  COMMANDER FELLOWS took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “It’s a beautiful night.” He cocked his head. “That’s a nightingale singing, very peaceful, very romantic.” He turned to her. “This is the spot, isn’t it?”

  “What spot?”

  The detective’s voice grew quills. “You know what spot, Ms. Carson. This is the trysting spot where you and the victim—”

  “William,” Alli said. “He has a name.”

  Commander Fellows appeared to have difficulty pulling himself together. He cleared his throat, but said nothing.

  Alli was studying the ground at her feet. “Won’t someone have the decency to at least cover him up?”

  “This is a crime scene,” one of the Metro detectives said in a weary voice. “Premeditated murder. A capital offense.”

  “The ME isn’t here yet,” said Flatfoot. “Nothing gets touched until he’s done his thing.”

  Alli could see the lie on his bulldog face as surely as if it were a new scar livid on his cheek. More likely the ME had been ordered to hold off until they could get her here to see the atrocity in all its grisly panoply. Why? Ordered by whom? She racked her brains for answers, but the buzzing inside her head, caused by the pulsing of adrenaline, kept her from thinking clearly.

  In the end, she turned to Naomi. “You know me, tell them I couldn’t have committed such a horrible crime.”

  Naomi’s partner, a square man with a mole on his chin, said, “We aren’t authorized to get involved.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I was assigned to the FLOTUS and to Alli,” Naomi said. “I have a personal stake in the matter.”

  Fellows cleared his throat. “Ms. Carson, I want you to know that I think highly of you—very highly, despite your … despite the traumatic experiences of your … your recent past.”

  Fellows was gripping his hands in a link-fingered ball, flexing the fingers back and forth in a rhythm that reminded Alli of crazy Captain Que
eq and his stainless steel balls.

  “We’ve had a hotly contested internal debate regarding your, er, psychological break. A number of prominent board members feel strongly that the pressures you have been subjected to are a cause for concern and, I must admit, review.”

  “What?” Alli said. “I’m acing all my courses. Ask any instructor.”

  “And then there’s the matter of your, uhm, diminutive size.”

  “And yet these Metro yardbirds seem to think this little slip of a thing could kill a big, strong, healthy man and string him up upside down between two trees.”

  The first detective, clearly of higher rank than Flatfoot, stepped into the circle. He had prematurely white hair, stooped shoulders, and a bad case of razor burn. His name was Willowicz and his partner was O’Banion. He beckoned her to follow him as he went around the body to the back. There, he switched on a flashlight, illuminating a kind of scaffold, roughly made of tree branches lashed together with twine, onto which Billy’s body had been strung. A rope, invisible from the front, was tied to the top of the scaffold. It rose straight up into the tree, where it had been looped around a thick branch. The other end hung down.

  Willowicz took hold of the free end of the rope with a hand encased in a latex glove, and tugged. “You see how this works, Ms. Carson. The victim was attacked, his body was affixed to the scaffold as it lay on the ground. Clearly, the killer had prepared ahead of time. Looping the rope over the branch created a fulcrum which made it possible to hoist the corpse into the vertical position it’s in now.” He paused, a small smile creeping into his face. “Anyone could do it, I assure you, even you.”

  “But then you already knew that,” O’Banion said.

  “You’re grotesque,” Alli said, “you know that?”

  His laugh was as grating as nails on a chalkboard.