Дэвид Балдаччи - Absolute Power

“Why would he come forward after he’d been paid off?”

“Who says he actually has to come forward? Remember like you said that night? He could do it from a distance. Laugh all the way to the bank and take down an administration. Hell, he can write it all down and fax it to the cops. They’ll have to investigate it and who’s to say they won’t find something? If they got any physical evidence from that bedroom, hair root, saliva, seminal fluid, all they need is a body to match it against. Before there was no reason for them to look our way, but now, who the hell knows? You get a DNA match against Richmond, we’re dead. Dead.

“And so what if the guy never comes forward voluntarily? The detective on the case is no bonehead. And my gut tells me that, given time, he’s gonna find the sonofabitch. And a guy looking at life in prison or maybe the ultimate penalty will talk his head off, believe me. I’ve seen it happen too many times.”

Russell felt a sudden chill. What Burton said made absolute sense. The President had sounded so convincing. Neither of them had even considered this line.

“Besides, I don’t know about you, but I don’t plan on spending the rest of my life looking over my shoulder waiting for that shoe to drop.”

“But how can we find him?”

It amused Burton that the Chief of Staff had fallen in with his plans without much argument. The value of life apparently did not mean much to this woman when her personal well-being was threatened. He hadn’t expected less.

“Before I knew about the letters, I thought we had no chance. But with blackmail, at some point you gotta have the payoff. And then he’s vulnerable.”

“But he’ll just ask for a wire transfer. If what you say is true, this guy’s too smart to be looking for a bag of money in a Dumpster. And we won’t know where the letter opener will be until long after he’s gone.”

“Maybe, maybe not. You let me worry about that. What is imperative is that you string the guy along just a bit. If he wants the deal done in two days, you make it four. Whatever you put in the personals make it sincere. I’ll leave that up to you, Professor. But you’ve got to buy me some time.” Burton got up. She grabbed his arm.

“What are you going to do?”

“The less you know about it the better. But you do understand that if the whole thing blows up, we all go down, including the President? There’s nothing at this point I could or would do to prevent that. As far as I’m concerned you both deserve it.”

“You don’t sugarcoat things, do you?”

“Never found it useful.” He put on his coat. “By the way, you realize that Richmond beat Christine Sullivan up bad, don’t you? From the autopsy report it looks like he tried to turn her neck into a spaghetti loop.”

“So I understand. Is that important to know?”

“You don’t have any children, do you?”

Russell shook her head.

“I’ve got four. Two daughters, not much younger than Christine Sullivan. As a parent you think about things like that. Loved ones getting messed up by some asshole like that. Just wanted you to know the kind of guy our boss is. That is, if he ever gets frisky, you might want to think twice.”

He left her sitting in the living room contemplating her wrecked life.

As he climbed into his car, he took a moment to light a cigarette. Burton had spent the last few days reviewing the preceding twenty years of his life. The price being paid to preserve those years was heading into the stratosphere. Was it worth it? Was he prepared to pay it? He could go to the cops. Tell them everything. His career would be over, of course. The police could get him on obstruction of justice, conspiracy to commit murder, maybe some bullshit manslaughter charge for popping Christine Sullivan and other assorted nickel-and-dime stuff. It would all add up, though. Even cutting a deal he was going to do some serious time. But he could do the time. He could also endure the scandal. All the shit the papers would write. He’d go down in history as a criminal. He’d be inextricably linked to the notoriously corrupt Richmond administration. And yet he could take that, if it came to it. What the hard-as-rock Bill Burton could not take was the look in his children’s eyes. He would never again see pride and love. And the absolute and complete trust that their daddy, this big hulk of a man, was, indisputably, one of the good guys. That was something that was too tough even for him.

Those were the thoughts that had been racing through Burton’s head ever since his talk with Collin. A part of him wished he hadn’t asked. That he had never found out about the blackmail attempt. Because that had given him an opportunity. And opportunities were always accompanied by choices. Burton had finally made his. He wasn’t proud of it. If things worked out according to plan, he would do his best to forget it had ever happened. If things didn’t work out? Well, that was just too bad. But if he went down, so would everyone else.

That thought triggered another idea. Burton reached across and popped open the car’s glove compartment. He pulled out a minicassette recorder and a handful of tapes. He looked back up at the house as he puffed on his cigarette.

He put the car in gear. As he passed Gloria Russell’s house, he figured the lights there would remain on for a long time.

Laura Simon had just about given up hope of finding it.

The exterior and interior of the van had been minutely dusted and then fumed for prints. A special laser from the state police headquarters in Richmond had even been brought up, but every time they found a match, it was someone else’s prints. Someone they could account for. She knew Pettis’s prints by heart now. He was unfortunate enough to have all arches, one of the rarest of fingerprint compositions, as well as a tiny scar on his thumb that had in fact led to his arrest years earlier for grand-theft auto. Perps with scars across their fingertips were an ident tech’s best friend.

Budizinski’s prints had shown up once because he’d stuck his finger in a solvent and then pressed it against a piece of plywood kept in the back of the van, a print as perfect as if she had fingerprinted him herself.

All told, she had found fifty-three prints, but none were of any use to her. She sat in the middle of the van and glumly looked around its interior. She had gone over every spot where a print could reasonably be expected to exist. She had hit every nook and cranny of the vehicle with the handheld laser and was running out of ideas where else to look.

For the twentieth time she went through the motions of men loading the truck, driving it — the rearview mirror was an ideal spot for prints — moving the equipment, lifting the bottles of cleaners, dragging the hoses, opening and closing the doors. The difficulty of her task was increased by the fact that prints tended to disappear over time, depending on the surface containing them and the surrounding climate. Wet and warm were the best preservatives, dry and cool, the worst.

She opened the glove compartment and went through the contents again. Every item had already been inventoried and dusted. She idly flipped through the van’s maintenance log. Purplish stains on the paper reminded her that the lab’s stock of ninhydrin was low. The pages were well-worn although the van had had very few breakdowns the three years it had been in commission. Apparently the company believed in a rigorous maintenance program. Each entry was carefully noted, initialed and dated. The company had its own in-house maintenance crew.

As she scanned the pages, one entry caught her eye. All the other entries had been initialed by either a G. Henry or an H. Thomas, both mechanics employed by Metro. This entry had J.P. initialed beside it. Jerome Pettis. The entry indicated that the van had run low on oil and a couple of quarts had been added. All that was terribly unexciting except that the date was the day the Sullivan place had been cleaned.