First daughter, p.32
First Daughter, page 32
"Alli . . ."
She turned to him. There was desperation in her eyes. "I don't want to leave you!"
"You have a responsibility to your parents. Tomorrow you'll be the First Daughter. From now on, you have to act like the First Daughter. The whole country will be watching."
"Please don't make me."
"Honey, it's what has to happen."
"But I'm afraid."
Jack frowned. "Afraid of what?"
"To leave you, to be here, I don't know."
By this time, the Carsons, concerned, had come up to the car. Lyn Carson opened the passenger's-side door, leaned in.
"Alli? Baby?"
Alli, still turned toward Jack, silently mouthed, Please help me.
Jack felt torn into a thousand shreds. He had failed Emma, he didn't want to fail Alli as well. But what could he do? The president-elect had given him an order that he was powerless to ignore. Alli wasn't his child. So he did the only thing he could do. He leaned over, whispered in her ear, "I'll see you later, I promise. Okay?"
As he pulled back, he saw her nod. Then she turned, got out of the car and into her mother's arms.
"Jack."
Edward Carson was at his side as he got out of the car. The president-elect pumped his hand then impulsively embraced him.
"There are no words." His voice was clotted with emotion. "You've brought our girl back to us safe and sound, just as you promised."
Jack watched Alli. Her mother, arm around her waist, walked her up the brick steps to the open front door.
"That's right," Lyn Carson said. "Random House wants you to write a memoir about growing up to be the First Daughter."
"She's a special young woman," Jack said. "I want Nina Miller and Sam Scott assigned to her permanent detail. Nina and I were partners in finding Alli. I worked with Sam at ATF until he transferred to the Secret Service three years ago."
Carson nodded. "I'll make the necessary calls right away." He looked at his wife and daughter for a moment, before turning back. "Jack, Lyn and I would like you at the inauguration, up on the dais with us. You're like a member of our family now."
"It would be an honor, sir."
In the doorway, Alli turned, gave him a tentative smile, and with a sweep of her mother's arm, vanished into her world of privilege and power.
FORTY - FIVE
WHO WAS Ian Brady? In other, more normal circumstances, Jack would have been preoccupied with finding that out. However, this case was anything but normal. What concerned him now was not who Ian Brady was but why he had chosen that name. Clearly, his other aliases—Ronnie Kray and Charles Whitman—followed on in a straight line from the first.
It was Jack's experience—the experience of any knowledgeable lawman—that criminals, even the highly intelligent ones, chose their aliases for a reason. An FBI profiler who had been brought into the ATF office on a case some years ago had said that giving meaning to an alias was a subconscious urge criminals found irresistible. In other words, they couldn't help themselves. Of one thing Jack was certain: The name Ian Brady held special meaning for this man. The trick was to find out what that meaning was.
With his paranoia at full mast, Jack bypassed the computers hooked up to the federal network, which included his own at the ATF office in Falls Church. What was required, he thought now as he made his way out of Chevy Chase, was a public cybercafe. Twenty minutes of hunting from behind the wheel of his car unearthed one on Chase Avenue, in Bethesda. He sat down at a terminal, typed the name Ian Brady, but all he got was a bare-bones recap from Wikipedia and About.com. On the other hand, after some false leads, he found a distributor of logwood, the substance Brady had inadvertently left on Calla Myers's coat. Taking down the address and phone number, he walked outside, checked the environment for tags. In the shadow of a storefront, he got out his cell burner, punched in the number of the distributor. He got nothing, no automated message, no voice mail. He wasn't all that surprised. The distributor was so small and obscure, it had a rudimentary Web site. Customers could order its product online, but other than that, the site looked as if it hadn't been updated in months.
S&W DISTRIBUTION was on the outskirts of the curiously named Mexico, Pennsylvania, 160 miles north of Chevy Chase Village. It took Jack just under three hours bombing down I-83N and US-22W to get there. By the time he exited PA-75S, it was already late in the afternoon. The sun, low in the sky, was bedded on thick clouds into which it expanded and slowly sank. Shadows lengthened with the beginning of winter's long twilight.
S&W occupied a ramshackle building a stone's throw from the railroad tracks that brought Mexico all the business it was going to get. It was impossible to tell what color the structure had originally been painted or even what color it was now. Jack's heart sank because at first sight, the place looked abandoned, but then he saw a young woman come out the front door. She wore cowboy boots, jeans, a fleece-lined denim jacket over a ribbed turtleneck sweater. As he pulled up, she settled herself on the clapboard steps, shook out a cigarette, lit up. She watched him with gimlet eyes as he got out of his car, walked toward her. She had an interesting, angular face. Its slight asymmetry made her appear beautiful. She was slim and small. She appeared to be in her late twenties.
As he approached, he heard a train whistle. The tremor in the tracks built as the train thundered toward them. The unsettled air of its bow wave crashed over them like a hail of gunshots. The young woman, her long hair flying across her face, sat as calmly as if the only sound to be heard was the crunch of Jack's shoes on the pebbly blacktop. Smoke dribbled from the corner of her mouth, and now that he was closer, he could see the tattoos on the backs of her hands, either side of her neck: the four main phases of the moon. She must have dyed her hair black to match her eyes, but the tips were golden. She wore a silver skull ring on the third finger of her right hand. The skull seemed to be laughing.
In the aftermath of the cinder swirl, Jack flashed his ID, watched as her eyes tracked uninterestedly to the information. He began to wonder whether it was tobacco she was smoking.
"Do you work at S-and-W?" he asked.
"Used to."
"They fired you?"
"The world fired them. S-and-W is history." She jerked a thumb. "I'm just cleaning out the place."
Jack sat down beside her. "What's your name?"
"Hayley. Can you believe it? Ugh! Everyone calls me Leelee."
"How long did you work here?"
"Seven to life." She took a drag on her cigarette. "A fucking jail term."
Jack laughed. "You're a hard piece of work."
"It's self-preservation, so you can be sure I try my damnedest." She watched him out of the corners of her black eyes. "You don't look like a cop."
"Thank you."
It was her turn to laugh.
"How far along are you with the—" He jerked his thumb. "—you know?"
She sighed. "Not nearly far enough."
"I'm trying to track down a customer of S-and-W's," Jack said. "He's a tattoo artist who mixes his own pigments. I'm hoping he ordered logwood from you."
"Not too many of those," Leelee observed. "It's why S-and-W was overtaken by history. That and the fact that the owner never came around. The fucker stopped paying his bills altogether—including my salary. If I wasn't hired by the mail-order company taking over the building, I wouldn't even be here now." She shrugged. "But who cares? Odds are the new company'll go belly-up, too."
"Do you know something your new bosses don't?"
"That's the way the world works, isn't it?" She stared at the glowing tip of her cigarette. "I mean, we're all sheep, aren't we, persuading ourselves that we're different, that we're beautiful or smart or cool. But we all end up the same way—as a little pile of ashes."
"That's a pretty bleak outlook."
She shrugged. "Par for the course for a nihilist."
"You need a boyfriend," Jack said.
"Someone to tell me what to do and how to do it, someone to leave me at night to go out with the guys, someone to roll over in bed and snore his way to morning? You're right. I need that."
"How about someone to love you, protect you, take care of you?"
She tossed her head. "I do that myself."
"I see how that's working out for you."
Through her armor, she gave him a wry smile.
"Come on, Leelee, you need to believe in something," Jack said.
"Oh, I do. I believe in courage and discipline."
"Admirable." Jack nodded. "But I mean something outside of yourself. We're all connected to a universe more mysterious than what we see around us."
"Think so? Here's the truest thing I know: Don't for a moment let religion or art or patriotism persuade you that you mean more than you do." She took another deep drag, gave him a challenging, alpha-dog look. "That comes from a play called Secret Life. I bet you never heard of it."
"It was written by Harley Granville-Barker."
Leelee's eyes opened wide. "Shit, yeah. Now I'm impressed."
"Then give me a hand here."
"I could bust your hump, but you've taken all the fun out of that." She swept her hair behind one ear. "Does your tattoo artist have a name?"
"Ian Brady," Jack said. "Or Ronnie Kray. Or Charles Whitman."
Leelee took the butt from between her lips. "You're shitting me."
"He was a customer, right?"
"More than." She didn't look as if she was interested in smoking anymore. "Charles Whitman owns S-and-W."
THE EVENING was furry with sleet, but as Jack worked his way south toward the District, it became an icy rain his wipers cast off either side of his windshield. The roads were slick and treacherous, peppered with spin-outs and fender benders, which slowed him down considerably. He returned from Mexico with an address for Charles Whitman. He had no way of knowing whether this was Brady's current residence, but he wasn't going to take any chances. The approach had to be thought out in detail.
As soon as he entered the house, he turned on the stereo, along with the lights and his stove top. But the only meat he had—a steak—was frozen solid, so he turned off the burner, sat down at the kitchen table with a jar of peanut butter and one of orange marmalade. Using a teaspoon, he scooped out mouthfuls from one jar then the other.
Afterwards, he went through his LP collection without finding anything he wanted to listen to. That's when he came upon Emma's iPod. He'd stuck it on top of a Big Bill Broonzy album that contained two of his favorite songs, "Baby, Please Don't Go" and "C C Rider." Tonight, he didn't want to hear either of them.
He took up the iPod, plugged it in because the battery was low. Using the thumb wheel, he browsed through Emma's collection of MP3s. There were the usual suspects: Justin Timberlake, R.E.M., U2, and Kanye West, but he was startled to see tracks by artists he loved and had played for her: Carla Thomas, Jackie Taylor, the Bar-Kays.
Searching through the shelves that housed his records and video-cassettes, he found the box containing the iPod dock he'd bought but never used. He took it out, plugged it into the aux receptacle in the back of the stereo receiver. Then he put the iPod into the dock.
He decided to listen to something of Emma's at random. This turned out to be an album for some reason called Boxer, by a band called The National. He thought of Emma, imagined her listening to these muscular songs—he particularly liked "Fake Empire"—wondered what would have been going through her mind.
As the music played, he fired up his computer, went online. According to Leelee's records, the address where Brady had his logwood delivered was on Shepherd Street, in Mount Rainier, Maryland. He pulled up Google Maps, punched in the address, and clicked the HYBRID Button, which gave him both the map and the satellite photo of the area. The address was only five or six miles southeast of where he was born. The thought gave him the shivers.
Forty minutes later, he got up, rummaged around the house for several items he thought he might need, stuffed them into a lightweight gym bag. He checked his Glock, shoved extra ammunition in his pocket, grabbed his coat. On the way out the door, he called Sharon. There was no answer. He disconnected before her voice mail picked up. With a sharp stab of jealousy, he wondered where she was. What if she was out with another man? That was her right, wasn't it? Yes, but he didn't want to think about it. He climbed into his car, his heart hammering in his chest. Driving to Shepherd Street, he thought, this could be it, the end of a road twenty-five years long.
FORTY - SIX
WHAT WERE the odds that Ian Brady lived in a hotel just four miles from Jack's house? Yet this was what Jack saw as he cruised by the address Leelee had given him. RAINIER RESIDENCE HOTEL. SHORT-TERM AND LONG-TERM CORPORATE LEASES AVAILABLE the sign out front read. He didn't stop, didn't even slow down until he turned the corner onto Thirty-first Street, where he pulled into the curb and parked. The first thing he did was to check out the rear, which was flat, save for a zigzag of tiered black iron fire escapes. It gave out onto a concrete apron and, just beyond, a modestly sized blacktop parking lot, lit by sodium lights, from whose hard glare he kept his careful distance. But there was no rear entrance, most likely because of the same security concerns that had led to the installation of the parking lot lights.
Walking back to Shepherd Street, he found himself across the street from an ugly U-shaped structure hugging a courtyard with four withered trees, a Maginot Line of evergreen shrubs, fully a third of which were as brown and useless as sun-scorched newspapers. The hotel itself was three stories of pale yellow brick. Access to the apartments was via metal staircases at the center and either end of the U, along raw concrete catwalks that ran the length of the building. There was a coarseness about it, a glittery shabbiness, like a Christmas present wrapped in used paper. Had it been painted turquoise or flamingo, it could have passed as a down-at-the-heels Florida condo.
Jack kept away from the occasional dazzle as passing cars lit up sections of the sidewalk. He crossed the street, found his way to the manager's apartment. Even through the door he could hear the blare of the TV. Waiting for a seconds-long silence, he rapped hard on the door. The blare started up again, louder this time, which meant a commercial had come on. A moment later, the door was yanked open the length of a brass chain.
Dark eyes in a square, heavy-jawed face looked him up and down. "Not interested."
Jack put his foot across the doorjamb, flashed his ID even as the door began to swing shut. "I need some information," he said.
"What kind of information?" the manager said in a voice like a pit bull's growl.
"The kind you don't want to give me while I'm standing out here."
The dark eyes got small and piggy. "You're not from INS? All my workers are legit."
"Sure they are, but I don't care. I'm not from Immigration."
The manager nodded, Jack took his foot away, and the door closed enough for Pig-Eyes to unlatch the chain. Jack walked into a low-ceilinged apartment with small rooms made even smaller by enough sofas, chairs—upholstered and otherwise—and tables of all sizes and shapes to furnish the Carson's Chevy Chase mansion. The manager muted the TV. Images of Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble chased themselves across the screen.
"You have a tenant here by the name of Charles Whitman?"
"No."
"How about checking your records?"
"No need," Pig-Eyes said. "I know everyone who lives here."
"How about Ron Kray?"
"No Kray here."
"Ian Brady."
Pig-Eyes shook his head. "Uh-uh."
Jack considered Brady's propensity for misdirection. Alli had told him that the real Ian Brady had a female accomplice. "How about a Myra Hindley?"
"No," Pig-Eyes said, "but we got a Myron Hindley. You think he's the one you're looking for?"
"Do the apartment doors have peepholes?" Jack said.
Pig-Eyes seemed confused. "Yeah, why?"
"Are all the door locks the same as yours?"
"You bet. House rules. I gotta be able to have access to all the apartments."
"I need a broom, a wire hanger, and the key to Myron Hindley's apartment," Jack said. As the manager went to fetch the items, Jack added, "If you hear any loud noises, it's just a truck backfiring."
MYRON HINDLEY's apartment was on the third floor, at the far end of the building. Hardly a surprise, since that's precisely where Jack would have situated himself if he were in Brady's place. He had two choices: The first was to go in the front door. The second was to climb up the fire escape to the apartment's two rear windows. Since it would be far easier for Brady to flee out the front door than climb out the window, he decided to make a frontal assault. He wished Nina were here to take the back of the building, but she was with Alli. Besides, ever since the explicit warning he'd received from Secretary Paull, he'd decided to continue after Brady alone. This was his fight, not hers.
Every six feet, bare bulbs were screwed into porcelain fixtures in the ceiling of the catwalk. On the third floor, Jack took off his shoes, covered his right hand with both socks. Reaching up, he unscrewed each lightbulb as he progressed down the catwalk. The circles of illumination winked out one by one. After he'd disabled the last bulb, he put on his socks and shoes. His feet were freezing, and he had to wait several minutes for the warmth to come back so that he had full maneuverability.
With only the ambient wash from streetlights and the odd passing vehicle to illuminate the catwalk, Jack set the gym bag down on the concrete, opened the zip, took out a small can of WD-40 and a pair of bolt cutters. Then he took off his coat, hung it on the wire hanger, buttoned it, put the collar up. Then he twisted the top of the hanger so it wound around the butt of the broom handle. He stood this makeshift scarecrow against the railing of the catwalk directly opposite the door to Myron Hindley's apartment.
Standing to one side of the door, he sprayed the key Pig-Eyes had given him with WD-40. It slid right in as he inserted it into the lock. But he didn't turn it over. Instead, he picked up the bolt cutter. He rapped on the door, very loudly. Just as he pulled his fist away, three bullets exploded through the door, ripping holes in Jack's overcoat. The broom crashed over onto the catwalk.
