Дэвид Балдаччи - The Fix

“Is this room your doing?” said Jamison.

“It’s one of the ‘special features’ I mentioned.”

“You need a safe room?” asked Decker.

“Given what’s happened just now, apparently so. And, Decker, you’re bleeding.” She pointed to his face.

He rubbed at the spot. “Something must have hit me there. It wasn’t a bullet. Maybe some debris stripped off by the gunfire.”

“I wasn’t that lucky.”

They turned to see Mars holding his bloody forearm. “Think it’s just a graze, but boy does it burn like a bitch.”

Brown grabbed a first aid kit from a cubby on the wall and began, with Jamison’s assistance, to treat Mars’s arm.

As Decker watched on the screen, the men searched the room.

“Cops are on their way,” said Decker. He could hear the siren sound from the audio feed tied to the TV.

Frustrated at not finding them, the masked men sprayed the walls with gunfire. Yet none of it could penetrate the shelter they were in. Then the men turned and dashed from the room as the sirens drew ever closer.

Four minutes later they all emerged from the safe room in time to meet the cops peering cautiously into the room. Brown pulled her creds and did the explaining.

The cops looked slowly around at the devastation. One of them said, “Somebody really doesn’t like you, lady.”

“Well, that’s why you have homeowner’s insurance,” quipped Brown.

After the police finished their search and took down particulars, they left, leaving the four to stare anxiously at each other.

“That was close,” said Mars. “How did you even know they were coming, Harper?”

“When I looked outside I saw the red dots on their night-vision goggles lined up with the middle of their foreheads. That’s because they were wearing an older-generation device. Our agencies have phased them out for obvious reasons. Way too big of a target.”

“Well, thank God for safe rooms,” voiced Jamison.

“I wonder what the hell they wanted?” said Mars. “Other than to kill us.”

“They must have been following us,” said Brown. “And cut the power before making their attack.”

“I wonder,” said Decker thoughtfully.

“You wonder about what?” asked Brown.

But Decker never answered her.

It was raining once more.

It was actually bucketing down outside, accompanied by bold streaks of lightning followed by guttural punches of thunder.

Oblivious to the inclemency, Decker sat in a chair staring at his laptop in the kitchen of their apartment.

There were two FBI agents in a car outside the building as there were at Harper Brown’s home. Mars had stayed over at her place.

Bogart and Milligan had come to the scene of the attack. Forensics had found nothing but a mountain of shell casings tossed out by the MP5s and an open power box the attackers had broken into to cut off the lights to Brown’s home. Neighbors had heard the gunfire, and two had seen the men jump into a waiting SUV, but the license plate had been blacked out. With nothing more to do, Decker and Jamison had come back here, leaving Mars and Brown to pick through the pieces of the attack.

Decker had been sitting here for over an hour now. Jamison had long since gone to bed. He touched the spot on his face where a piece of debris had impacted. Brown had cleaned up the cut for him and bandaged it.

He refocused on the computer screen. He’d been staring at one page now in particular for about twenty minutes.

He closed his eyes and thought things through. When he reopened his eyes he checked his watch.

It was nearly seven in the morning. He’d not been to sleep yet but strangely felt quite energized. He made a phone call and the woman answered. A minute of conversation later, he snagged Jamison’s keys off the hook, waved to the FBI agents in their car, hustled across the parking lot — getting drenched in the process — and climbed into her car.

He drove to the Hoover Building and, by prearrangement, met the ME, Lynne Wainwright, in the autopsy room.

She was dressed in scrubs and her eyeglasses hung at the end of a chain across the front of her chest. She yawned and said, “It was a bitch getting in this morning. D.C. drivers and rain do not mix well.”

“Right.”

“So what’s up?”

“Had some questions. Wanted to do it face to face”

“That I figured.”

She led him over to a desk in the corner and they both sat down. “Fire away,” she said.

“Let me give you some medical symptoms and maybe you can give me a root cause.”

“Okay.”

“Birth defects in children. Toes missing off a foot and a deformed arm.”

“Okay. There could be lots of reasons for that.”

“I’m not finished. Add to that asthma in all the kids?”

“That narrows things down a little, but not enough, Decker. Where are you going with this?”

“Let me add to that some medications.”

He had written them down from memory and handed over the slip of paper.

Wainwright ran her eye down the list.

She pointed with her finger. “That one’s for a liver condition. This one for kidney disease. The Lipitor is for high cholesterol. Because of the TV commercials, most people know that. Zoloft is for depression, and that one is to increase bone density.”

Decker nodded. “Anything in Dabney’s postmortem results that struck you?”

“Not really. We got the blood work and tox screens back. As I told you before, he was on painkillers but he had no other drugs in his system, in case you were wondering whether he was high on something when he did what he did.”

“None of the prescription bottles were under his name. They were all under his wife’s.”

“He was actually in decent shape, except for the brain tumor, of course. Absent that, he was probably good for at least another twenty years.”

“Luck of the draw.”

“ Bad luck,” amended Wainwright.

“Yeah,” he said absently, staring off.

She said, “What are you thinking?”

“I’m just wondering why such a healthy-looking family has so many physical and medical issues.”

“Well, the asthma can be inherited.”

“One of the daughters said it was her mother that had it, not the father.”

“Right. Dabney’s lungs, nasal passages, and esophagus were clear. I didn’t detect any irritability of the lining in any of those places that would indicate any sort of asthma or other pulmonary issue.”

“So that leaves his wife and all her meds.”

“Look, this country is overly medicated, from kids to seniors. My mother took twenty-four pills a day for the last three years of her life, and she had friends who took even more. And it seems that every other kid today is on Ritalin or something like that. It’s ridiculous but it’s also true.”

“I get that,” said Decker. “But it’s still bugging me. And I don’t have an abundance of leads on this.”

“So you might be grasping at straws?”

“I might be. But I’d prefer to think that I’m closing in on finding the needle in the haystack.”

Decker’s knees were aching. Partly from the rain. Partly from old football injuries.

And partly from the fact that they were crammed up against the dashboard of Jamison’s clown car, with the steering wheel basically resting in his crotch.

I really have to get my own damn ride.

The windshield wipers slung the rain off and more immediately replaced it. With each rotation of the wipers, Decker’s mind seemed to swivel as well.

His thoughts had centered on something that might be valuable.

Cecilia Randall had spoken to them.

Shortly thereafter, Cecilia Randall was murdered.