Джеймс Паттерсон - The 13-Minute Murder

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.