Eric Lustbader - Blood Trust

“Family?” Jack asked.

“Negative.” McKinsey shuffled from one foot to the other as if he were itching to go someplace.

“Friends?”

“Not anyone we could find when we canvassed the area.”

“So either she’s a ghost,” McKinsey said.

Jack nodded. “Or she’s an illegal immigrant.”

“Either way,” Naomi said, “she’s gonna be a bitch to find.”

“Which is going to take time,” McKinsey said.

They were talking like partners now, or an old married couple.

“Time is the one thing we don’t have,” Jack told them, and because he didn’t want to tell them about his leaving with Paull, he gave them a song and dance about Alli’s legal status, as if Jenkins had given him an update. “So we need to find the girl now.”

McKinsey was clearly unhappy with being given what was, in his estimation, an impossible task. “How do you propose we do that?”

TWILIGHT, THE bar both Billy Warren and the elusive Arjeta Kraja had supposedly frequented, was on a seedy section of M Street, about as far from the tony shops and town houses as you could get and still be in Georgetown. A sign on the door said that it was closed, but when Jack hit the brass plate the door opened. When they walked into the dimly lit interior, they were greeted by air that smelled burned.

Detective Willowicz, smoking idly, sat on a tipped-back chair, his ankles crossed on a table. Detective O’Banion was behind the bar, drinking what appeared to be whiskey from a shot glass. No one else appeared to be around.

Williowicz exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Well, what do we have here?”

“Place is closed,” O’Banion said. “Wassamatter, can’t read?”

“I could ask the same of you,” Jack said, then to Willowicz: “I thought I told you the case had been turned over to my department.”

Willowicz contemplated the glowing end of his cigarette. “I think I might have heard something of that nature. What’s your memory of it, O’Banion?”

O’Banion pulled at his earlobe and shrugged. “In this town, anything’s possible.” He poured himself another shot. His fingernails were filthy.

“So what are you doing here?” Naomi said.

“Satisfying an itch.” Willowicz watched them with a jaundiced eye.

“Checking the liquor license.” O’Banion swallowed his whiskey. “Shit like that.”

“The Metro police need detectives for that?” McKinsey was shuckling back and forth like an engine revving up. “You guys must really have screwed the pooch.”

O’Banion laughed nastily and slammed the shot glass down on the bartop. “Shut it, Nancy.”

“Where is everyone?” Naomi said. “The day manager, the bartender?”

“We just got here,” Willowicz said.

“How the fuck should we know?” O’Banion added.

“That’s enough,” Jack said. “You two can clear out.” He took out his cell. “Your captain is waiting.”

Willowicz dragged his feet off the table and stood up. “The thing of it is, my partner and I don’t like being treated like second-class citizens.”

“Then stick to your own turf.”

“We see this situation and it reeks,” Willowicz said. “Where you see a former president’s daughter, we see a perp.”

“No,” Jack said, “you see an easy way to wrap up this case. It doesn’t matter to you if she’s guilty or not.”

“Oh, she’s guilty.” O’Banion came around from behind the bar. “Guilty as fuck.”

“It’s just a matter of time before we prove it.” Willowicz brushed by them and out the door, O’Banion hard on his heels.

“Metro has a hard-on for Feds.” McKinsey relaxed visibly. “We’re always treading all over their cases, so all they can do is shit on us.”

“The hell with them.”

“Seriously.” Jack turned and walked toward the short corridor that led to the restrooms and the rear. “Where the hell is everyone?”

Then he paused. What had he sensed or smelled?

“Blood,” Jack said, sprinting down the corridor. He heard Naomi and McKinsey just behind him.

“McKinsey,” he called. “Restrooms.”

He heard McKinsey banging open the doors, then his raised voice: “Clear!”

Two men sat in side-by-side chairs facing the far wall of the small, cramped kitchen. Jack came around to face them. It was not a pretty sight. Both their faces looked like sides of raw meat. Blood had spilled down the front of their shirts, buttons ripped off, the flaps spread open. More blood oozed down their necks onto their chests. Based on their clothes, one seemed to be the bartender, the other the day manager.

Naomi knelt in front of the bartender. “Dead.”

Jack pressed two fingers against the manager’s carotid. “So’s this one.”

Both McKinsey and Naomi drew their firearms simultaneously.

“What the hell is going on?” Naomi said.

“It answers the question,” Jack said, already on the move, “why there were Metro detectives where there should have been no Metro detectives.”

SIX

“WELL?”

“Everything has gone according to plan.”

Henry Holt Carson nodded. His shoulders were hunched against the brittle wind. The sky looked like porcelain and it seemed to him as if the sun would never shine again. Like the residents of Seattle, he was getting used to the gloom.

“Paull is gone?” he asked.

President Crawford nodded. “And, as you predicted, he’s taken Jack McClure with him.”

“Good.”

Carson looked around him. This time of year the Rose Garden was a rectangle of mush and fertilizer, the sturdy rose stems prickly and dangerous as a porcupine’s back.

“I still don’t quite understand,” the president said.

Carson closed his eyes for a moment. A pulse beat in his forehead and he was certain a migraine was coming on. As was his wont, he fought against it. “They were too close to my brother.”

Crawford’s brow furrowed deeply and he snorted like a horse. “Do you think they suspect?”

“I don’t know.” Carson put a hand to his head. Yes, a migraine, definitely. “I hope to God they don’t.”

“But McClure—”

“My brother told me all about McClure’s monstrous brain.”

“Then you know it’s only a matter of time before he figures it out. That can only lead to more blood being spilled.”

“Yes,” Carson said through gritted teeth. He did not nod or move his head in any untoward way. “That’s why I want him gone. By the time he does figure it out, it’ll be too late. The only way to him that wouldn’t cause suspicion was through Dennis Paull.” He clamped down on the migraine but, as always, it was getting the better of him.

“Still, I worry.”

“The American people pay you to worry.”

Carson turned, fumbled in his trousers pocket, opened the silver-and-gold pill case, shook two pills into his mouth, and swallowed them with the little saliva he had left. The migraines seemed to suck him dry, until his tongue felt as if it were as big and unwieldy as a zeppelin.

The president eyed his Secret Service detail, circling the garden like a murder of crows. He took a hesitant step toward his friend. “Hank, I think you’d best sit down.”

Carson waved him off. “I’m fine.”

“Of course you are. But, you know, I find I’m a little peaked.” He sat on a stone bench. “Here, sit down beside me so we can continue our private talk uninterrupted. I haven’t much time before the budget meeting.”

Carson came and sat, holding his body as delicately as if it had turned to glass, which, in a way, it had.

Crawford looked away for a moment, out over the grounds to Washington itself. The White House was like a pearl sitting in the middle of an oyster, peacefully protected. However, today the president felt anything but peaceful.