Edge of Black
Edge of Black
J.T. Ellison
The killer is armed with a lethal weapon: an invisible pathogen that has been released into the Washington Metro.Two hundred people exhibit symptoms, but only three are pronounced dead. Dr Samantha Owen is the forensic pathologist called to consult on the case, but as she dissects the mysterious connections between the victims it becomes clear that this attack is not random.This pathogen is targeted. As Sam starts to close in on the killer’s identity, the further she propels herself into danger. Finding the truth might just lead Sam into risking her life…
The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides
Dr. Samantha Owens is starting over: new city, new job, new man, new life. She’s trying to put some distance between herself and the devastating loss of her husband and children—but old hurts leave scars.
Before she’s even unpacked her office at Georgetown University’s forensic pathology department, she’s called to consult on a case that’s rocked the capital and the country. An unknown pathogen released into the Washington Metro has caused nationwide panic. Three people died—just three.
A miracle and a puzzle...
Amid the media frenzy and Homeland Security alarm bells, Sam painstakingly dissects the lives of those three victims and makes an unsettling conclusion. This is no textbook terrorist causing mayhem with broad strokes, but an artist wielding a much finer, more pointed instrument of destruction. An assassin, whose motive is deeply personal and far from understandable.
Xander Whitfield, a former Army Ranger and Sam’s new boyfriend, knows about seeing the world in shades of gray. About feeling compelled to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. Only his disturbing kinship with a killer can lead Sam to the truth...and once more into the line of fire.
Praise for J.T. Ellison
‘Scintillating… Suspenseful… Startling…’
Publishers Weekly
‘Mystery fiction has a new name to watch.’
John Connolly, New York Times bestselling author
‘Tennessee has a new dark poet.’
—Julia Spencer-Fleming
‘J.T. Ellison’s debut novel rocks.’
Allison Brennann, New York Times bestselling author of Fear No Evil
‘Creepy thrills from start to finish’
James O. Born, author of Burn Zone
‘Fast-paced and creepily believable…gritty, grisly and a great read’
M.J. Rose, internationally bestselling author of The Reincarnationist
‘A turbo-charged thrill ride of a debut’
Julia Spencer-Fleming, Edgar Award finalist and author of All Mortal Flesh
‘Fans of Sandford, Cornwell and Reichs will relish every page.’
J.A. Konrath, author of Dirty Martini
‘Shocking suspense, compelling characters and fascinating forensic details’
—Lisa Gardner, New York Times bestselling author of Catch Me
‘A Deeper Darkness has everything I love in a thriller: stunning twists and shocks, fascinating forensics and heroines I deeply cared about. J.T. Ellison is one of the best writers in the game.’
—Tess Gerritsen, New York Times bestselling author of The Silent Girl
J.T. ELLISON is a bestselling author based in Nashville, Tennessee. She writes the Taylor Jackson and Samantha Owens series, which have been published in more than twenty countries. Visit her website, www.JTEllison.com, for more information or follow her on Twitter @Thrillerchick.
Also by J.T. Ellison A DEEPER DARKNESS*
ALL THE PRETTY GIRLS
14
JUDAS KISS
THE COLD ROOM
THE IMMORTALS
SO CLOSE THE HAND OF DEATH
WHERE ALL THE DEAD LIE
*A Samantha Owens novel
Edge of Black
J.T. Ellison
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
For Sherrie Saint—whose twisted mind is a writer’s delight,
and, as always, for my Randy.
Contents
Praise for J.T. Ellison (#u77e2e3c1-ea49-527b-81c3-002010d75b0a)
About the Author (#u4135cef7-78d2-5c66-8361-f1ac7082b0b3)
Title Page (#ubfa6ca13-56ac-5075-b798-a69b32ce96bf)
Dedication (#ud7cb7d8e-1bce-5736-8c3f-27935f3e74e5)
Epigraph (#u2ff1e5f0-60fb-5f8a-8cc8-eb176a1b9ae7)
TUESDAY (#u41145c43-eeef-555e-83ab-aa00fee48f4d)
Chapter 1 (#ud64d45da-2fae-5443-b1fb-7466a9954427)
Chapter 2 (#uc9041bfd-f290-55d9-ae77-023bd3b41525)
Chapter 3 (#uff94a33e-1e29-593a-a951-0b1b32f0dab2)
Chapter 4 (#u6114f080-19ab-5115-91cf-7024d5b99c77)
Chapter 5 (#uac5c63dd-e4f8-5227-9064-34698501c5f7)
Chapter 6 (#u04fdcff5-a0f4-5820-ae00-f98d56804738)
Chapter 7 (#ucc43a732-f1da-5601-aeb7-235abab58070)
Chapter 8 (#u47d75c47-82ba-53f8-a975-585fbcbb99da)
Chapter 9 (#u0a6c0b60-2e7c-56e5-86d3-8551830e80ef)
Chapter 10 (#ubfcf6bea-6e16-598a-99d2-1551cd8a095e)
Chapter 11 (#ub11aa501-d868-5f04-86f4-5b91e47ae3aa)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
WEDNESDAY (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
THURSDAY (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)
FRIDAY (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 51 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 52 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
“In all men is evil sleeping;
the good man is he who will not awaken it,
in himself or in other men.”
—Mary Renault
TUESDAY
Chapter 1
Washington, D.C.
A single beam of light illuminated the path ahead, hovering and bobbing against the concrete walls. The tunnel was narrowing, growing tighter across his shoulder, forcing the joints to compress, pushing on his lungs. His breath came fast. He reminded himself to calm down, inhale through his nose. The mask was making it difficult to see, to smell, anything that might give him a sense of where he was. He paused, counted the number of times his limbs had moved forward. Once, twice, three times, twenty. Roger that. Five more evolutions and he’d be in place.
He squeezed forward, slithering like a snake along on his belly, his legs bunching up behind him, his arms forward, the Maglite in his left hand, his right feeling for the way. Slowly. Slowly.
There. He felt the hinge. Turned it gently, sensed the cooler air blowing up into the vent from below. Reached down into his shirt and pulled out the canister. The gloves made his hands clumsy, but he couldn’t risk contact. He’d die stuck in this shaft, wedged in above the vent, stinking and rotting until someone finally sought the source of the smell.
No one would think to look for him if he were to go missing.
He had no one. He was alone.
He double-checked his mask, made sure he was breathing clean. All systems go.
The clock in his head ticked away, closing down to the final moments.
Five. Four. Three. Two. One.
Time.
With sure hands, he opened the cylinder and depressed the button. The can discharged, spraying silently into the vent.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
Empty.
He shook it lightly, but there was nothing else to release. It was done.
He tucked the cylinder back into his shirt and started to move away. He needed to get out of the shaft and back onto the platform, all while avoiding the cameras.
He could do it. He had faith. He’d done three dry runs, and all went according to plan.
He moved out, reversing the slither, arms bunching, forcing his body backward until the resistance ended and he could move his shoulders and hips without constriction. The pipe grew larger, big enough that he crawled onto his knees, turned and faced the exit. He fed a mirror mount down the shaft. No one was around.
Clear.
He dropped lightly to the ground, took three steps to the right to make sure he didn’t accidentally get caught on film, found the metal ladder and began to climb. Higher and higher, his heart lighter and lighter. Success was his.
Below, he felt the first blast of air that indicated a train was coming. The rumbling grew louder, the ladder began to shake. He could have sworn he heard a cough. He paused his climb, held on and breathed into his mask.
This was a better high than you could pay for.
The train passed below him, streaking silver in the dark, rushing the air from the vent toward the platform. He let the rumbling shake his body for a few moments, counting off again, then continued to climb. The exit would be deserted, he’d made sure of that. He had a two-minute window during the shift change to get out.
He set the stopwatch in his head. Two minutes. Mark.
He opened the hatch and climbed onto the deserted platform. Three steps to the right, two steps forward. He’d left his backpack in the trash receptacle. He worked quickly. The mask, canister and gloves went into a sealable plastic bag. His clothes were next: he exchanged the black running suit for jeans and a white cotton T-shirt, pulled on yellow Timberlands. He used hand sanitizer on his arms to eliminate any traces that might have been left behind.
He zippered the bag, tossed it on his shoulder and started walking.
One minute.
The giant disposal catchall was nearly full. As he passed it, he tossed the bag into the depths. He knew they’d be around to empty it in two hours, and all tangible evidence of the crime would disappear into the vast chaos that was the dump.
Now unencumbered, he made better time.
Thirty seconds.
He could hear voices, ahead in the gloom.
Twenty seconds.
He stretched his stride, long legs eating up the pathway.
The elongated shaft of the tunnel appeared before him. His senses were overloaded—orange and blue and white lights, people milling about, yellow hard hats obscuring peripheral vision, getting ready to go back into the tunnels and hammer for the next several hours. He ducked around a column, reversing direction, and slid into the last of the line with the rest of the workers.
Ten seconds.
The first shift ended with a shrieking whistle, and a subway train arrived, rumbling to a stop on the platform. He followed the crowd into the metal tube, took a seat. The rest of the workers filed in behind him, exhausted after their long overnight.
Time.
The train pulled away, building speed, taking him farther and farther from the scene, away, in the other direction, from the canister’s contents.
He was safe.
He risked a small smile. Around him, men’s heads nodded in time as the train rushed along the tracks. He started counting forward, and at ninety-eight, the train began to lurch to a stop.
At exactly one hundred, the doors opened, and he stepped out into the brilliant early-morning sunshine.
Only one thing left to do, then he could depart. Leave this cesspool of a city behind.
Glory was his. Glory be. Glory be.
Chapter 2
Washington, D.C.
Dr. Samantha Owens
Dr. Samantha Owens walked into her lecture hall at exactly 7:00 a.m. The students were already arranged in the chairs, some sitting upright, some obviously wilting. Sam placed her notes on the lectern and turned to the class.
“Perk up, buckaroos. I know it’s early, and I realize the ice-cream social last night involved more ethanol than frozen coagulants, but we have work to do. Who can tell me what Locard’s Exchange Principle is?”
There was quiet laughter, the rustling of paper and laptops opening. Despite the obvious hangovers of many of the students, hands shot up all over the room. Sam called on the closest.
“First row, blue shirt. Go.”
The boy didn’t hesitate. “Any time you come in contact with an object or a space, you take something away and leave something behind.”
“Very good. So when you’re thinking in terms of a crime scene?”
The class chanted together, “There are no clean crime scenes.”
“Exactly.” Sam turned to the whiteboard and wrote Locard’s Theory at the top.
Sam was two weeks into her first teaching gig, and loving every minute of it. She missed the hands-on work that came with being a medical examiner, sure, but this was almost like vacation. Eager, happy, excited, sometimes—okay, often—hungover kids, all dying to learn the tricks of the trade so they could rush out and become the latest and greatest forensic investigators. Once the fall semester began, she’d be teaching at Georgetown University, heading up their new forensic pathology program, but in the meantime, her boss, Hilary Stag, the Georgetown University Head of Pathology, had volunteered Sam for the summer science continuing education program, which included a week of guest lecturing at their rival medical school, George Washington.
She’d been back in D.C. for just a month now. The move had gone smoothly, almost too smoothly. Her house in Nashville had sold quickly despite the depressed market, so instead of rushing into another mortgage, she’d decided to rent on N Street in Georgetown, a beautiful three-story Federalist townhouse that had been gutted inside and completely redone in nearly severe modernism, all glass and stainless and open stairwells, with an infinity lap pool in the backyard. It was as opposite from her snug home in Nashville as she could find, and she quickly realized the minimalist aesthetics pleased her. The only pricks of color were from the flowers she brought in and a few Pollock-like paintings on the walls. Everything else was black and white. She’d sold the vast majority of her furniture anyway, keeping just a few things she couldn’t bear to part with, including a supple white leather couch and her rolltop writing desk—it had been her grandmother’s. She purchased a bed, a small glass table and Eames chairs for the eat-in, and left the rest to chance.
Once the house was set up to her liking, she’d ventured west, into the mountains, to another aesthetically pleasing home nestled in the Savage River State Forest. Alexander Whitfield—Xander—a former first sergeant in the Army Rangers, held a similar outlook: less is most definitely more.
She’d spent a month on the mountain with him, fishing, hiking, sitting in companionable silence in front of his huge fire pit, listening to him play the piano, scratching his gorgeous German shepherd Thor’s ears in languorous time with the music. He wrote songs for her, and with each new note, she could feel the pieces of her soul slowly knitting back together. She treaded gingerly but purposefully into the new relationship, finding surprising compatibilities in many areas, intellectually and physically.
Running away from Nashville had been the smartest move she’d ever made.
D.C. greeted her with warm, sunny days, white marble-columned buildings, grassy expanses and gray-blue waters flowing quickly under the majestic bridges. Xander greeted her with himself. The city paled in comparison.
She realized heads were cocked, awaiting her next bit of wisdom. Anytime Xander got into her thoughts, she got distracted. She figured that was a good thing.
With a smile, she apologized, then ran the class through a typical homicide crime scene, from the job of the death investigator to investigation and collection of the body to the postmortem. A few faces pinched when she started with the autopsy slides, but most hung on her every word.
She was nearly to the last slide when a low murmur began in the back of the room.
She turned to see what the issue was. No one was looking her way. Instead, they were staring at one of the students, a slight blonde who was clearly not paying attention.
“Are my slides boring you?” Sam asked.
The girl didn’t look Sam’s way. She was slumped in her chair. Sam could immediately see something was wrong, though her first thought was, Wow, she’s completely hungover. Hope she doesn’t puke.
A brunette four rows back raised her hand. “Um, Dr. Owens? I think she’s really sick.”
The room began to titter. Sam glanced at her teacher’s assistant. “Reggie, hit the lights.”
The room brightened immediately, and she could see concern written on the students’ faces.
She walked up the stairs to the student and started to take inventory.
Her eyes were glassy. She was shivering, a fine tremor that moved on a loop through her body. Her breathing was shallow and labored, and a sheen of sweat glistened across her face. Her lips were even tinged blue.
Respiratory distress. Hypoxia. Fever.
Shit.
“What’s your name, sweetie?”
Sam felt terrible that she didn’t already know the answer to the question; she’d only learned a few names so far. The students had a month of different classes, and this group had only rotated in a couple of days before. The girl didn’t answer, just stared at the floor and coughed a bit.
“Her name is Brooke Wasserstrom. She’s in my dorm.” The brunette who’d alerted Sam was standing over her friend, worry etched on her face.
Sam put her fingers on the girl’s pulse, which was weak and thready. Her skin was terribly warm.
“Was she drinking last night?”
“Yeah, maybe a little bit. She left early—she was going home to spend the night and the Metro closes at midnight. She came back this morning, I saw her come out of Foggy Bottom when I went for coffee.”
“Do you know if she has any preexisting conditions? Is she diabetic?”
“Not that I know of. I’ve never seen her take anything other than, like, Advil. I don’t know her that well, she lives on my hall is all.”
Brooke’s breathing was getting worse. She needed medical attention immediately. And thankfully, there was a hospital less than half a block away. It would be faster to take her there than call EMS to come to the school.
Decision made, Sam stood up and announced, “I need someone to carry her.”
Reggie came to her side. “I’ll carry her. What’s wrong? Do we need to alert the school?”
“We need to get her over to the emergency room. She needs oxygen. We can worry about the school after she’s stabilized. Let’s go. Kids, class is dismissed.”
The students poured forth from the room, quiet and somber. A few were crying, including Brooke’s dorm mate, who stood frozen on the steps. Sam reached back and touched her arm.
“You need to come with us. Sorry, what’s your name?”
“Elizabeth.”
“Elizabeth. I know you’re concerned. But we need your information about Brooke’s activities over the past few days. So tag along, okay?”
“Yes, Dr. Owens.”
Reggie lifted Brooke into his arms. She folded into him, lethargic and coughing, and Sam grew even more concerned. Elizabeth grabbed the girl’s backpack.
Sam led the way, out the doors, down the hallway and out onto the street. The thin wail of sirens rose in the background, and she felt a chill crawl down her spine. Premonition. Déjà vu. Something.
They exited the building on 22nd and crossed the street to the GW Medical Center. Sam walked them directly into the emergency room entrance, and right up to the triage window. There was a lot of activity behind the glass. Sam glanced around and realized the emergency room was full. Strange for this time of day—they usually filled up at night, when people were ill and couldn’t see their primary doctor, or got themselves involved in a brawl or had too much to drink or took too many drugs. Ten on a Tuesday morning wasn’t exactly peak time.
She pounded on the glass until she got the attention of the harried triage nurse, who flung the glass window open and said, “Have a seat, we’ll be with you in a minute.”
“I have a hypoxic teenager here in acute respiratory distress. She needs oxygen immediately.”
“Jesus, another one?” The nurse slammed the window closed and came around the desk to open the door. “Bring her in.”
Another one? What the hell?
They brought Brooke into the triage station. The nurse took one look at her, opened the door to the back and yelled, “Stretcher, oxygen, STAT.”
Two seconds later a gurney rolled up to the door. Reggie deposited Brooke on the white sheet. She was looking even worse, her eyes closed, her breath coming in little pants. Sam could hear the laboring breath, wheezing in and out, knew the girl was most likely developing rales, the first steps to pulmonary edema. But without a stethoscope, she couldn’t be sure.
This was maddening.
“You may need to intubate her. What do you mean, another one?”
“You’re a doctor?”
“Yes.”
“We’re getting slammed with people with breathing issues this morning. From all over town.” The nurse glanced furtively at Reggie and Elizabeth, whose faces were strained with shock. “We don’t know the cause yet. You two wait out here. You, Doc, come with me.”
Sam narrowed her eyes at the nurse. She turned to Reggie and Elizabeth. “I’ll take it from here. You guys don’t leave without me, okay?”
“Yes, Dr. Owens,” they chimed.
Sam followed the nurse as she pushed Brooke’s stretcher back into the bowels of the emergency room. Obviously she was trying to keep from alarming everyone, but it was clear something major was happening. This was an emergency room in crisis.
The nurse slammed an oxygen mask on Brooke’s face and shouted, “Dr. Evans, we have another one.”
A doctor, bald on top, with a tonsure of curly gray hair circling his skull, approached the stretcher as they pushed.
The nurse ran through the symptom list quickly as the doctor examined Brooke. Brooke’s breathing was declining, and as they pulled the stretcher into an open bay, he called for an intubation tray. A team of doctors and nurses leaped into action, swarming the girl, cutting off her clothes, putting the breathing tube down her throat, getting IVs started in both arms, taking blood. Brooke didn’t even whimper, or fight. She was just lying there, almost comatose.
Sam stepped back out of the way and let them do their work, but couldn’t help noticing that Brooke’s clothes were being handled with extreme care, and all the people working on her were in level-two special protective clothing.
Not good.
The doctor, who Sam surmised was a supervisor, turned to her.
“Are you exhibiting symptoms, too?”
“No.”
“Name?”
“Dr. Samantha Owens.”
“I’m just going to have a quick look.” He shone a light in her eyes, felt her pulse. “Ph.D.?”
“Forensic Pathology, thank you very much.”
He met her eyes then, a lopsided smile on his face. “Southern girl, too.”
“Nashville.”
“I’ve been there. Good barbecue. Any shortness of breath?”
“No. I’ve got no symptoms. I’m her professor, we were in class at GW when she decompensated.”
“Okay. Fever? Cough? Tightness in the chest?”
“No. Nothing. I’m fine. As far as I know, so is everyone in my class except for Brooke. What is going on?”
“We don’t know. We’re seeing people from across the city who are all presenting in respiratory distress. You stick around, okay? Just in case, here’s a mask. We’ll do everything we can for her. Might want to get her parents in, if you can.”
He turned away, dismissing her. He wasn’t telling her everything. Despite his attempt at good humor, she could see the tight lines around the edges of his mouth and eyes. She put on the mask, then allowed the triage nurse to lead her back to the waiting room.
Reggie and Elizabeth had found a corner oasis free of coughing people. Sam took two masks from the nurse and went to the students.
“Put these on.”
They both slipped into the masks, eyes wide with fear.
“What’s happening, Dr. Owens?”
Long low beeps began, different tones and beats. All of the phones in the room were chiming, including hers. She reached for it, but Reggie beat her. He turned his phone in her direction so she could read the text. It was from Alert DC.
Washington D.C. Metro System is temporarily closed. Tune to your local emergency channels for updates.
Sam felt a massive ripple of unease.
Reggie got another text. “It’s up on GW Alert, too. What do you think’s happening, Dr. Owens?”
“I don’t know. You know how emergency services can be, though. They tend to overreact.”
They both knew she was lying.
Sam wanted to comfort them. Reggie was handling himself, but Elizabeth looked like she was about to fall apart. “Okay, kids. Hopefully this is just a false alarm, a mistake, even a drill. We do need to get in touch with Brooke’s parents. Reggie, can you call the chancellor’s office and let them know what’s happening? Elizabeth, how about you get in touch with your RA. Let’s see if we can approach from two sides.”
Reggie received another text. Then another. With every new ding Sam’s heart beat harder.
“It’s official. They’re sending people with symptoms here, to GW.”
Reggie finally started to look worried.
“Why?” Elizabeth asked.
Sam met her eyes. “Because they have the largest mass decontamination unit in D.C.”
Decontamination. That was not the word she wanted to speak right now. Decontamination implied a biological or chemical attack. Which meant only one thing.
Terrorism.
Reggie nodded. “It gets worse. It’s happening right below us.”
“Below us?”
He looked at her in horror. “They think it started at the Foggy Bottom Metro.”
Chapter 3
Foggy Bottom was the Metro stop that fed George Washington University, as well as Georgetown. It was the last D.C. stop on the Blue Line west before it slipped under the Potomac and headed into Virginia. Just a stone’s throw away from the Watergate and the Kennedy Center, six blocks from the White House, it was one of the deepest Metro stops in the system, with an escalator that defied gravity and was constantly under repair. You could cut half an hour off your gym workout if you climbed those stairs.
Sam’s mind was a blur, but she processed the information quickly. She had training for these types of situations—in the post 9/11 world, all law enforcement in Nashville had been given extensive briefings and training sessions, and as head of the medical examiner’s office, she’d been a part of that. Her first inclination was to figure out how to help.
“Stay here,” she said to Reggie and Elizabeth.
“Where are you going?”
“To see what I can do to help.”
“Dr. Owens, it’s not safe.”
She turned back to Reggie and Elizabeth. “I’ll be very careful. I promise. You follow the instructions you’re given by the doctors and nurses here.”
She booked it to the exit. The scene had changed dramatically in the fifteen minutes they’d been inside the hospital. Blue and white lights flashed, and she could hear shouting. The street was littered with fire engines, HAZMAT trucks, cops, ambulances and first responders rushing purposefully toward the Metro. Crime scene tape had already gone up around the park and the roads were closed, traffic being diverted away from the scene. Techs in Tyvek suits with SCBA—self-contained breathing apparatuses—streamed down the frozen escalator. A uniform shouted at Sam, gesticulating wildly toward the medical center. The message was clear. Get the hell out of the way.
The only comfort Sam took from the scene was that it was still intact. A suitcase bomb would have eliminated the area.
So not nuclear. Biological or chemical. It could be anything, really. Her mind started into overdrive, and she could swear she was starting to itch. She hoped it was a psychosomatic response.
A first receiver, bundled in Tyvek and nearly unrecognizable as a male aside from his size, stopped her. People dressed similarly were streaming past them into the bowels of the Metro.
“Ma’am, were you in the Metro?”
“No. What’s happening? I’m a doctor, with disaster training. Can I help?”
“Not until we can be sure you’re okay. Get inside the hospital. You’ll be decontaminated and asked to stay for observation.”
“I just came from the hospital. I’m fine. I want to help.”
The receiver shook his head and pointed toward the doors. “Too bad. You’ve exposed yourself. You have to go though the process. Get inside.”
Oh, son of a bitch. She shouldn’t have gone back out until the scene had cleared. Now she was going to be stuck.
Sam was tempted to disregard him, to surge forward, but the thought was fleeting. She’d just be in the way.
She turned and went back into the hospital. A line was forming on the right side of the emergency room, snaking down the hall. Sam knew immediately what they were doing: triage for the people who were in the Metro, and triage for those who weren’t. So whatever substance this was, they were taking precautionary measures for the people who were close to the attack, and a whole different set for those actually exposed to the contaminant.
Another receiver met her, this time a no-nonsense nurse with steel-gray hair and a sharp chin. Sam tried again. “I’m a doctor. What are we dealing with? What kind of toxin?”
The woman shook her head. “We don’t know anything just yet, sugar. Now shut up and get in line, you’re holding things up.”
Nurses. The same everywhere. All dedicated to helping, and no time for bullshit.
Maybe this was just a massive false alarm. She prayed fervently that was the case, but the precautions now being taken—those that she could see, anyway—precluded that.
Sam was passed from hand to hand, interviewed briefly, and when it was clear she hadn’t been in the Metro proper, nor was exhibiting any symptoms, was sent to yet another line. People formed in behind her, more excited than scared.
What the hell was going on? Sam wasn’t used to being incapacitated like this. She felt just fine. Obviously the exposure was in the Metro. She could see people coming in on stretchers, their clothes rapidly being cut off and disposed of, oxygen applied. One man was intubated, the rest were just moaning. Sam watched the first receivers bathe his body with a solution of soapy water, getting whatever he had been exposed to off his skin.
Words were starting to float around now, from the people coming in off the street.
Respiratory distress. Coughing. Burning eyes. White powder.
Sam’s trained mind went to a different place.
Anthrax. Ricin. Sarin.
D.C. was always on extra high alert, just like New York, and all the major cities, really, for any hint of terrorist activity. There was one plus to the situation—they were prepared for nearly anything. But the fallout from any of those kinds of attacks could last for days. She combed her memory—what was today? An anniversary of some sort, with meaning only to those involved?
Her line, the double-check line, she’d dubbed it, took only ten minutes, but it felt like hours. Sam was finally in front of Dr. Evans again.
“Name?”
“Dr. Samantha Owens. We met an hour ago.”
He was taken aback for a moment, then nodded. “I remember. Nashville. What are you doing here?”
“I went outside to see if I could help.”
“Brilliant, Doctor. We’ll need you on the back end of this, not in the middle. Any new symptoms?”
“No. I’m fine.”
“Since you’ve been in the contamination zone you have to stay isolated for the time being. Maybe you could keep an eye on the folks here, let us know if any of them start showing symptoms. The reports are coming in that the people who are sick took the Metro this morning. So we’re just being extra cautious with people who were in the area. Can you do that for me? Keep yourself out of any more trouble?”
“Of course. But what should I be looking for outside of respiratory distress? What are we dealing with?”
“We don’t know yet. They’re in the tunnels doing air-quality tests. HAZMAT is getting positives for an unidentified neurotoxin. Might be a false alarm, but I’ve seen too many people who aren’t looking good to think it’s just a mistake. Good news is, while we’ve got a few critical, none are dead yet. Hang in there. It’s going to be a while before we can release you.”
“I have HAZMAT training. I can help.”
“We’re fine right now. We’re the best in the country at response. Thanks, though.”
She was shuffled off to the right again, taken down a long hallway, then asked to sit on the floor and wait.
This was insane. She should be helping, not sitting in a hallway with a bunch of scared people waiting to see if any of them started coughing.
They couldn’t stop her from thinking about the situation, though. She knew exactly what the HAZMAT teams were doing, the tests they’d be running. If there was powder, they’d be able to analyze it on-site. If it was airborne, that was a whole different kind of response.
The logic of the situation started to eat at her. If Foggy Bottom was ground zero, why stage a biological or chemical attack at the Metro station closest to the best decontamination unit in the area? Remorse? Desire to allow innocents to live? Terrorists wouldn’t be kind, or allow for convenience. They’d stage as far away from help as they could to maximize the dead, then hit the first responders as they came in, as well.
Come on, Sam. You are really jumping to conclusions now. You don’t even know what’s happening—it could just as easily be a chemical fire as it could a terrorist attack. The Metro was constantly under repair, and steady work was being made on the new Silver Line to the airport. This was most likely just a local issue that needed extra precautions.
That made her feel better. It wasn’t like her to assume: she was a scientist, after all, logic and evidence her closest friends. But it felt different to be involved, not on the outside trying to figure out what was happening. Without a cadaver, a set of sharpened Henckel knives and a dissection tray, she was sometimes lost.
But she’d been involved in plenty of investigations in the past. She couldn’t help herself. She let her thoughts distract her. How many victims would there be? If it was a biological or chemical hazard, it could take hours until they knew what they were dealing with. If it was airborne, it could be ten times worse. So many of the airborne toxins took hours to manifest symptoms, and were practically impossible to contain. With this many people already down, perhaps it was something else. Chemical, most likely.
It was rather cruel and unusual punishment that there wasn’t a TV in the hallway they could tune to. She figured the media was going absolutely stark raving mad by now.
Her iPad was first generation wireless only, damn it, or else she could be researching exactly what was going on right now. Her phone was just that, a phone, with the ability to dial in and out, and receive texts. She wished she could text Reggie, let him and Elizabeth know she was stuck back here, but she didn’t have his number in her phone.
She wished she could call Xander. But he was fishing today, off in the wilderness. She’d never be able to reach him. One of the things that they were both happy about in the relationship was the freedom. Sam wasn’t a hoverer, and Xander needed his space. He liked being able to come and go without letting her know his every move, and so did Sam. It was becoming the bedrock of their relationship. But right now, all Sam wanted was to hear his voice, to know that he was okay. To feel his arms around her.
The people near her started talking among themselves, and she listened to the rumors fly.
“It’s all over Twitter. They don’t know what’s going on but they’re saying fifteen dead.”
“I just heard two dead.”
“Twenty-nine bodies.”
“No one knows what the deal is.”
“Holy shit. They’re ordering extra body bags.”
Sam felt the blow to her gut. Any casualty would be too many. Two, fifteen, twenty-nine—she hoped to God those numbers weren’t just climbing as more cases were reported. If that number was even close to the truth...and with many airborne toxins, instant death was rare. Obviously people had made it out of the Metro; the triage nurse wouldn’t have asked her if they hadn’t.
Jesus. She just wanted to know what they were dealing with.
Fletcher.
Ah. Why hadn’t she thought of it before? Detective Darren Fletcher, her buddy in D.C. homicide. He’d tell her what was going on, if he knew, at least.
She went through her phone until she found his cell number. She hadn’t talked to him since she got back to town and started teaching, irrationally hoping he wouldn’t be upset with her. She’d worked a case with him before she moved back to D.C., the death of her ex-boyfriend, and the two of them had formed a bond. Fletcher would have liked that bond to go further, but he’d respected the fact that she was with Xander now. Sort of. She hadn’t been willing to test that theory yet.
The phone rang and rang and rang, finally going to voice mail. Well, that wasn’t good. That meant he was either avoiding her call or too busy to take it. She decided to try one more contact—Dr. Amado Nocek, one of the city’s medical examiners. Nocek had offered her a position with the M.E.’s office when she told him she wanted to move to D.C. She appreciated that offer so much, but being an M.E. wasn’t what she needed to be doing right now. She was still recovering, still trying to make sense of her life. Her job in Nashville had become an albatross around her neck instead of a joy. She needed to do something that didn’t involve day-to-day contact with the dead.
That’s why teaching appealed to her. She could talk about her field in a theoretical way, and not be hands-on again until she was ready.
Nocek answered on the first ring. His strangely lilting voice, the result of a European upbringing that drew on both Italian and French, combined with several years in the polyglot accent that made up D.C., calmed her immediately. “Samantha. It is very fine to hear from you this morning. I suppose you are calling to ask the nature of the emergency we find ourselves in, and not developing plans for a small, intimate gathering for dinner at your new house?”
Nocek always did have a way of cutting to the chase.
“You know me too well, Amado. I’m actually sitting outside the decontamination unit at GW. No one’s been forthcoming with information.”
“I will give you what I myself know. We have been getting reports of a biological contaminant that was released in the Metro. Multiple reports of people being taken ill, all over the city.”
“Any idea what the contaminant is?”
“No. People are presenting with respiratory distress, fever and coughing. It could be most anything.”
“Casualties?”
“None that are related to this that we are aware of yet, but that will most likely change as the day wears on. We are in an uncertain time at the moment, Samantha. I am well pleased to hear that you are safe.”
A stern-looking nurse tapped Sam on the shoulder. “Ma’am. Please turn off your cell phone.”
“And you, Amado. I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to go. Will you call me if you can once you find out more?”
“Of course. Be well, my dear.”
Sam hung up the phone. The nurse nodded at her, satisfied that the breach was under control, and strode away.
There was a young man sitting next to her. He raised an eyebrow and said, “Well?”
“Nothing concrete,” Sam said. She wasn’t about to tell a stranger what Nocek had just disclosed. That was just enough information to cause a wild panic.
“Are they going to let us out of here?”
“I hope so. My friend said there have been no confirmed casualties. So that’s good news. This may be a false alarm after all. Sometimes in an emergency situation, people who are already sick have issues.”
She turned away from him and stared at the floor.
This wasn’t how her new life was supposed to begin.
Is it possible to ever really start over? To find yourself after a tragedy? How do you measure the pain you’ve experienced, and know what is appropriate and what isn’t? Sam had lost her husband and her twins in the Nashville floods two and a half years ago. And lost part of herself, too. She’d come to D.C. the shell of a person, one going through the motions of a daily life, a breathing ghost. More loss had led her to Xander, and her path back to the land of the living.
She had to admit she felt a little snake-bit. Nashville, and her life there, had been decimated. She’d run to D.C., and now it, too, was under attack.
She could only hope that the damage would be minimal. To all of them.
Chapter 4
Another hour passed. Sam was just about to start stamping her feet and demanding answers when the nurse who’d run the initial triage came down the hall.
“Is everyone feeling all right?”
There was a chorus of affirmations.
“You’ve been cleared to leave. Please come back immediately if you have any unusual symptoms. Use your masks until you get home.”
Sam couldn’t wait to get out of there. If she’d been stuck much longer, fretting and worrying, she might not be able to control her anxiety. And losing it in a group of strangers wasn’t exactly her cup of tea.
They broke off into packs and left the hospital through the emergency room doors. A corridor had been created for their exit, and they were able to leave unmolested. Sam tried to look for the kids but didn’t see them. Hopefully, they’d been released much earlier.
The scene had calmed considerably since her preliminary foray outside. The bright summer sun beat down on the asphalt, making waves of heat shimmer in the foreground. News trucks had replaced the first responders, though there were still a few HAZMAT trucks parked at the curb.
Sam turned her phone on the second she was clear of the doors. She had two messages—both from Fletcher.
She played them in order.
“Saw you called, I assume you’re wondering about what’s going down. Call me back when you get this.”
The second was more abrupt. “Where the hell are you, Owens?”
Ah, that was sweet. He was actually worried about her. Fletcher was a good man. A good man, but not her type. They were destined for friendship only.
Sam hiked up to 23rd Street, found a bench and called Fletcher back. He answered on the first ring, obviously annoyed.
“Where have you been?”
“At the hospital, Mom. One of my students got extremely ill and I took her to GW, then got caught in the decontamination fuss. I’ve been sitting in a hallway for two hours. They made me turn off my phone.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. What’s going on? I talked to Amado and he told me—” she glanced around then covered her mouth with her hand “—it’s a biological attack.”
“We don’t know yet. Total clusterfuck. People sick from all corners of town, we can’t trace it down, and the entire city is on alert. Homeland Security raised the threat level. They are in a dither.”
“That’s to be expected. What can I do to help?”
“Nothing.” Fletcher sounded horrified at the idea, which hurt Sam’s feelings a little.
“I can’t just sit here, Fletch.”
“You most certainly can. Better yet, get home and stay there. I have to go, but I’ll call you later. Don’t interfere, Sam. Just let us do our jobs. It’s our town, we know how to handle things.”
He hung up, and she felt stung all over again. Dismissed like a civilian. It was her town now, too.
She stowed the phone in her pocket and started the walk home. It would only take fifteen minutes or so on a normal day, but the sidewalks were crowded with people, and the traffic was a snarled nightmare.
As pissed and upset as she was, she reminded herself again that she was no longer involved in the day-to-day operations of law enforcement. And that had been her choice. A choice that until this very moment she thought she was content with. Instead, here she was, a victim again. Caught in an attack, unable to do anything to alter her course. She started itching for some hot water, satisfied the urge with a dollop of antibacterial gel.
At Washington Circle she turned left on Pennsylvania Avenue and followed the throngs of people trying to get out of the city on foot. She’d worn sandals today, thank goodness. Hiking all the way home in heels would have been brutal. It was bright and sunny, warm, but without the summer humidity that usually choked D.C.’s air from May until September. All around her people were talking, worrying, panicking, preening, many on cell phones relaying their close call with...something. They didn’t know for sure what. A fever of excitement and nervousness permeated the crowds, overlaid with an overwhelming sense of fear.
Fear of the unknown. Of what could be happening. Of getting home and finding out that someone you know, someone you love, was involved. Was hurt. Or worse.
Sam remembered that awful feeling from 9/11, the hours of uncertainty, the unanswered phone calls, the nightmarish quality of the news reports, almost as if Hollywood had decided to drop a CGI green screen against the Manhattan and D.C. backdrops and shoot a heart-wrenching action sequence. She’d lost several friends that day: two who were in the towers when they fell, one on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon.
Even one casualty was too much.
When she arrived at her house on N Street, it was just after 2:00 p.m. Four hours had passed since Brooke’s swan dive in class. Four interminably long hours. She was exhausted. She just wanted to take a long, hot shower, and wait for Xander to get back within cell range.
Sam took the steps to her front door, inserted her key. The door was unlocked.
She thought back, trying to remember if she’d locked it this morning when she left for class. Of course she had. She always locked her doors.
She heard her best friend’s voice mentally admonish, “Back out, and call the police.”
Sam shook homicide lieutenant Taylor Jackson out of her head. There was a perfectly legitimate reason for her front door to be open. The only problem was the timing. She turned the knob and pushed the door open with her foot.
“Xander?” she called out.
“Sam!” Xander came barreling out of the kitchen. She was struck by how handsome he was, even with worry lines creasing his forehead. His dark eyes locked on hers. He reached her in two long strides and pulled her to his chest.
“Jesus, I’ve been worried sick. You weren’t answering your phone.”
She let him hold her, just reveling in the normalcy of it, how warm his skin was beneath his T-shirt, how she could just reach all the way across his tightly muscled back, his scent, woodsy and clean. He’d showered recently; the edges of his dark hair were still damp.
She pulled back.
“What are you doing here?”
He didn’t answer, instead kissed her, long and soft, so sweetly that she nearly forgot everything that had happened this morning. Nearly everything.
When he released her, she smiled up at him. He topped her by several inches. He made her feel downright dainty.
“Trying again. Why are you here, Xander? Not that I’m not thrilled to see you, but I thought you were fishing.”
He draped an arm across her shoulders, walked her into the kitchen.
“There’s tea. It should still be warm. And I did go fishing. My guy never showed, and nothing was biting so I decided to head back to civilization and check my email. I heard about the attack and started down here immediately. I called as soon as I got here. Why didn’t you answer your phone?”
Sam reached into her pocket. She opened the phone and saw a blank screen. It must have run out of battery on her walk home.
“Whoops. It’s dead.”
“That’s a seriously cheap-ass phone, lady.”
“It’s a seriously old phone, and I should probably get a new battery for it. Otherwise, it does its job.”
His playful tone changed.
“How bad is it?” He didn’t need to say more.
“I don’t know yet. Fletcher blew me off and Nocek said there were no casualties yet. It’s a biological agent of some kind. What’s the news saying?”
“Multiple contradictory accounts. I’m so glad you’re home. I was worried about you. Are you...okay?”
Sam knew what he was talking about. Since the flood, since she lost her family, these kinds of events had a tendency to shake her. Natural disasters—tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, floods—fed her anxiety and caused her to relapse into obsessive hand washing. She tried not to sit up nights watching the Weather Channel, but sometimes succumbed. She felt that the only way she could ever move past the fear was through immersion. If you’re afraid of spiders, you spend time letting tarantulas crawl on your arm. If you’re afraid to fly, you get on airplanes as often as possible.
If you’re worried a terrible flood might sweep your life away...
It wasn’t necessarily a healthy choice, but it worked for her.
Xander, on the other hand, spent his time avoiding all things that could remind him of his own stormy past. He didn’t understand her need to watch, to experience, to relive. To punish herself through others’ pain. He’d served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, seen things she could only imagine in her worst nightmares. He’d lost friends. He’d spent nights under fire, days in armored carriers driving IED-laden roads, weeks on foot in the desert, not knowing if each breath was his last. When he got out of the Army, he went to ground, alone in the woods, cut off from everyone and everything. Until Sam.
They were a perfect fit. Each damaged, each desperate. Each so very alone.
She considered his question. Was she okay? Strangely, she’d only had a few moments today where she wanted to wash. Instead, she’d been slightly jazzed by it all. She took that as an encouraging sign.
“I’m good. I promise. I was worried about you, too. I’m really glad you’re here, Xander.”
She poured a cup of tea, and they settled in the living room where Xander already had the television on. Every channel was in full-on breaking-news alert. Sam had enough experience with emergency situations to know that half of the information was wrong, and the other half would change fifty times before the end of the day. What they could glean so far wasn’t much more than what Sam already knew.
She flipped channels while Xander used her computer to surf the internet, searching for anything he could find. As a former Ranger, he had a different set of contacts than Sam. When the news broke another piece of the story, Xander would confirm or deny based on what his military brethren were saying across their message boards and chat rooms.
By 5:00 p.m. things had boiled down to a set of certainties no one could deny. Someone had released an airborne toxin in the Washington, D.C., Metro. It caused a progressive pulmonary distress. And two people were confirmed dead.
Everything else at this point was just speculation. The tests were being done on the toxin; so far they’d ruled out some of the obvious—the ones that would have created different symptoms. Sarin, ricin. Anthrax was still high on the list of possibles. The words made chills slip through her system.
The problem was, testing took time.
Just the idea of that made her skin crawl.
Sam decided she’d had enough. She went to the kitchen and began making dinner. She’d just unwrapped a head of butter lettuce when her phone rang. She glanced at the caller ID, saw Fletcher’s number. She pretended not to notice the uptick in her pulse as she answered.
“Fletch? Everything okay?”
“No. I need you, Sam. I’ll be there in five minutes. Meet me out front, we don’t have much time.”
“Need me for what?” she asked, but he’d already hung up the phone.
She replaced the receiver and put the lettuce back in the refrigerator.
Xander was on the laptop in her office. “Hey,” she said. “Anything new?”
“No. Same old shit—speculation and fear mongering. No one has a clue what’s going down.”
“I have to go. Fletcher just called. He’s picking me up in a few minutes.”
He rolled back in the chair. “Go where?”
“I don’t know. He just said he needed me and to meet him outside.”
“Why don’t I come with you?”
“I get the sense I may be a while. He sounded totally stressed-out. They might just need some extra hands.”
“But there’s only two dead.”
“Xander, I have no idea what he needs. I would assume it’s my services with the sharp end of a scalpel. Come out to the street with me, let’s see what’s happening. I’m sure he’ll tell us when he gets here.”
She grabbed her bag and her phone, tossed a light sweater over her shoulders just in case. Xander held her hand as they walked down her front steps to wait for Fletcher. She appreciated that he didn’t nag her about running off with another man. He was special, he knew it, and he was comfortable with his place in her world.
They didn’t have to wait long, Fletcher arrived with a squeal of tires a moment later. He put the passenger window down.
“Get in, Doc. We gotta go.”
She stuck her head in the window. “What’s up?”
He shot a glance at Xander, who was leaning in as well, over her shoulder. His face tightened imperceptibly.
“Classified.”
“Come on, Fletcher. He has the right to know.”
“Sorry. This one comes from above. You can call him later. Now, Sam. I’m not kidding.”
She turned back to Xander, who had a frown on his face. “I’ll call you as soon as I know anything. Don’t worry, okay?” She kissed him lightly, then got in the car before he could protest.
Fletcher slammed the gas and the car leaped from the curb. Sam grabbed the seat belt and jammed it into the lock.
“Jesus, Fletch. What the hell?”
He didn’t move his eyes from the road, spoke grimly.
“Congressman Leighton is dead.”
Chapter 5
Sam recognized the congressman’s name, but that was all. She told Fletcher that. He glanced over at her and barked a small, humorless laugh.
“You’re probably the only one in D.C. who doesn’t know everything about him. Peter Leighton is the head of the Armed Services Subcommittee. Four-term congressman from Indiana, Democrat, big-time dove. He’s been shooting down the military for years, authoring bills to cut spending, shutting down VA hospitals, the works. But lately, he’s had a change of heart. He authored an appropriations bill that will give more funding to the military. It’s a massive reversal. He’s been under fire.”
“Now I’ve got him. Xander isn’t a fan.”
“I can’t imagine why not,” he said drily.
“So what’s the story?”
“He collapsed in his office on the Hill about two hours ago. They said he was having trouble breathing. He was dead on the scene but they transported him anyway. Called it at GW half an hour ago.”
“And I’m racing with you where, why?”
“Morgue. Nocek wants you to help post him.”
“Why me?”
He glanced at her again. “I may have asked if he’d be cool with having you come in.”
“I’m flattered. Again, why me?”
“Because something isn’t right with the congressman’s death. I want to move fast, and I trust you to take an unbiased look. That’s all I’m going to say.”
“Cloak-and-dagger doesn’t suit you, Fletch.”
“Just trust me, okay?”
“Was he on the Metro this morning?”
“Undetermined.”
“God, you sound just like Xander when he doesn’t want to give up information. One word grunts. Come on, Fletch. I can’t do my job if you don’t give me the facts.”
He sighed. “They’re still running air-quality tests in the Metro. Nothing is registering. It’s not ricin, sarin or anthrax. It made over two hundred people really sick, but only two are confirmed dead. They were on the Metro early this morning, so the thinking is they were exposed directly, soon after the toxin was released. More could die—there are a few in medically induced comas and a couple in critical. We need to find out what the cause was, and fast, so the injured can get proper treatment.”
“Shouldn’t I be posting the two who died then?”
“Nocek is on it. He and his team finished the two from earlier and have run all the samples to the labs. But Leighton is different.”
“Different how?”
“Just...trust me.”
They were screaming up Constitution now, heading toward the Capitol. Even in a disaster, the view was stunning. The lights of the city shone brightly on the eerily empty sidewalks. The corners were manned by police in full armor, weapons at the ready. No one was on the streets, an unnerving sight. She’d never been able to travel so quickly through the city before—Fletcher had his mounted light going, was blowing through the stoplights like they didn’t exist. Sam was getting the sense that something much, much bigger was going on than just the death of a congressman.
* * *
The morgue was as depressingly bland and old as it had been the last time she’d been forced to visit—to do a secondary autopsy on her former boyfriend, Edward Donovan. Donovan’s murder had led her directly to Xander, who had been, at the moment she met him, the police’s prime suspect. Things worked out for the best, but she hadn’t held a scalpel over dead flesh for three months.
Would she be rusty? Would she be compelled to wash? Would the stillness overwhelm her and make her run away?
She didn’t like not knowing how she was going to react. It made her anxious. And her anxiety triggered all kinds of demoralizing, embarrassing tics.
She hadn’t been like this before the flood. She had never considered herself a strong woman, that was Taylor’s job. But Sam was steady. Reliable. Rational. She saw herself as a skilled forensic pathologist, nothing less, nothing more. She wasn’t a people person to start with, had few friends she truly trusted, but now she got to add in a dead husband and a lost family. She’d been systematically pushing people away for two years, and at the moment, their invisible absence stung.
Jesus, Sam. Way to go, feeling sorry for yourself in the middle of someone else’s crisis.
She shook her head slightly to dispel the melancholy, and followed Fletcher into the morgue.
A small, young woman with lively green eyes was waiting for them.
“Detective Fletcher? Dr. Owens? I’m Leslie Murphy, death investigator. Dr. Nocek is waiting for you. The press hasn’t arrived yet, but it’s only a matter of time.”
Sam turned to Fletcher in surprise. “You’ve managed to keep this quiet?”
He gave her a smug grimace. “I told you it was classified.”
Sam shook Leslie’s hand. “Let’s get me suited up then.”
“Right away, ma’am. Follow me.”
“Please don’t call me ma’am. Sam is fine.”
The girl looked back over her shoulder. “I’m Murphy then. My mom’s the only one who calls me Leslie.”
“Gotcha,” Sam said.
The doors opened into the antechamber that led to the autopsy suite, and Sam was pleased by her reaction. She felt relaxed, comfortable. The tension bled from her shoulders.
Home. You’re home.
Moments later, gloved and prepped, she entered the nave of her own personal church.
The smells were right. The air, cold and dead, whispering from the vents. The warm musk of blood, the slight meaty scent of open bodies. Metallic notes from the stainless tables and scales, overlaid with the squeaky markers used on the whiteboards. Thin scents of bleach and formalin, worn linoleum, and sweat.
The normal aromas of the autopsy suite, as comforting and natural to her as fresh roses in a vase.
Sam heard Fletcher curse softly under his breath. She caught his gaze and understood immediately.
A small boy lay in full rigor on a table off to the side, against the far wall. Out of the way. Eight, maybe nine years old. A quiet hush went through her, perhaps a prayer, maybe less than that. Her own son hadn’t gotten out of his second year; she had no way to compare the real with the might-have-been—the length of bone in the femur, or the shock of dark hair, only slightly mussed. The marble pale flesh of his body, unmarred for the moment.
Nocek caught them staring. “Such a saddening case. He was hit by a car while on his bicycle. He was not wearing the helmet, and as such suffered a traumatic brain injury. They took him off life support last night. We will do a partial autopsy, there is no doubt as to his cause of death.”
A partial autopsy—an exterior examination, X-rays, a vitreous fluid sample and blood draw. No cutting. Small mercies.
Sam felt a flash of anger—such a perfect boy, his brain damaged but his organs intact and usable, yet his family had not chosen to allow him to help others through donation. She chided herself for the thought. Who are you to judge, Sam?
She turned away from the child, touched Fletcher once on the shoulder in comfort. He had a son, a live one.
“I’m ready. Where is the congressman?”
“He is separated from the rest. Please, follow me.”
Nocek led them to a door to the right of the main room. “Let us take a few extra precautions. I would request that you double your masks and wear them at all times. We have set up special ventilation for the room. We are still unsure as to what the situation may be.”
Sam washed her hands again, thoroughly, even though she could hardly give the dead man her germs. There were levels of prevention based on the situation at hand. Because of the nature of the investigation, she wanted to be as sterile as possible to ward off any hint of cross-contamination and potential problems down the road. She had to wear special protective gear as well, also just in case. Which was fine, but it got in her way.
Once she was finished and they were all gloved and prepped, they entered what Sam knew to be a decomp suite: every decent-size morgue has a separate room for the decomposed bodies that come in to be posted. For the most part, the natural effluvia of fresh bodies wasn’t terribly offensive to the olfactory system, especially once you grew accustomed to the smells. But decomps were a different story. By isolating them, several things occurred: chain of custody remained intact; special precautions could be taken; evidence collected could be kept separate from the rest of the suite. Blowflies could be isolated; they had a pesky tendency to colonize decomposing bodies. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. But before that could happen, the biological chain of command kicked into high gear. Blowflies and maggots and larvae, oh my. Sam knew several forensic entomologists who lived for decomps.
Sam noticed several desiccated fly husks near the drain, under the table. Hatchlings, with no food to sustain them. Not unusual.
More interesting was the man lying on top of the stainless tray. Mid-fifties, silvery-gray hair, probably five-ten or so, naked, which was where it got interesting: he was as smooth and hairless as the eight-year-old boy on the other side of the door.
Sam circled the body, absorbing details. There were classic marks on his chest where someone had tried to revive him. His flesh seemed doughy and dented easily, which led her right to excessive edema. The cavities of his mouth and nose were red and irritated, his throat slightly ulcerated. Petechial hemorrhaging in his blank, bluish eyes gave her even more bits of the story.
It hadn’t been an easy death, that was for sure.
She looked closer at his legs, groin and chest, ran her fingers along his calf. The stubble there was no more perceptible than Sam’s was at the end of the day, several hours after she shaved her legs during her morning shower.
The congressman shaved his legs. And everything else, besides. This took manscaping to a whole new level.
“He shaved. His whole body. Thoroughly. Regularly. And practiced. Why?”
Neither man responded, and she started to get a glimmer of why she’d been asked to come in and do the post on the congressman. Discretion was needed. Real discretion.
“What was he into?” she asked.
“We don’t know for sure,” Fletcher answered. “There’s been scuttlebutt about him for years, but really subtle stuff. A couple of the girls in town might have mentioned in passing that he enjoyed trying on their clothes. Primarily their underclothes.”
“Seems harmless enough. He wouldn’t be the first cross-dresser in the government.”
“And a couple of the boys might have mentioned he liked to have a few cameras around while they did their thing.”
Sam met Fletcher’s eyes. “A bisexual cross-dresser with film? Anyone ever gotten their hands on it?”
“I haven’t seen it. And a few of them have said he’s gone a bit too far before.”
“Too far how?”
“Choke and revive. People being asked to play dead. That sort of thing.”
“Sounds like you have more than rumors to go on,” Sam said.
“Listen, Doc. This guy is a really big deal. Former dove, now an outspoken proponent for the military, looking for funding from every quarter. Served for years, a decorated veteran. He has a kid in Afghanistan. He had a presidential run in mind. His proclivities get out, it’s embarrassing for a whole bunch of people, you know?”
“He’s just a study in contradictions.”
“Sam...”
“That’s fine, I understand. But why all the secrecy around his autopsy?”
“Because of this. A text that came to the congressman’s phone. His office reported it about an hour ago.”
Fletcher pulled his notebook from his pocket and read the text verbatim.
Dear Congressman Pervert,
You messed with the wrong people.
Today’s attack is on you, shithead.
Chapter 6
Washington, D.C.
Alexander Whitfield
Xander didn’t like waiting, even though it was something he was accustomed to doing. In the three years since he’d left the service, he’d been marching to the beat of his own drummer. His background made that an easy choice—his parents had been hippies who lived on a commune, and originally named him, in the trippy-dippy fashion of all their friends, Alexander Moonbeam. He’d taken the necessary steps to reclaim a normal name and was now legally Alexander Roth Whitfield. The Third.
And instead of Moonbeam, which his parents still preferred, he went by Xander.
Xander’s grandfather was a hearty son of a bitch who ran a television enterprise. Xander’s dad had told his father to take the money and shove it, and as such, married Xander’s mom, Sunshine, and had two children in quick succession, Xander and his sister Yellow. They moved their burgeoning little family from San Francisco to a mountain farm in Dillon, Colorado, when Xander was a baby. He’d grown up in the woods, homeschooled, self-motivated and a prodigy. His parents were furious when he enlisted instead of attending Julliard. Dedicated pacifists, they didn’t know where they’d gone wrong. They wanted a life of pleasure for him, a life without hatred or fear. Instead, he ran headlong in the other direction.
When he was eighteen, he didn’t know how to make them understand his point of view. He didn’t want to smoke dope and drop acid and find the universal meanings of life in the shiny swirls of colorful trips. He didn’t want to grow organically or manufacture hemp linens. He wanted to see the world. He wanted to give back to the land who’d given him the freedom to make that choice. Yellow had been a dutiful daughter, opened a metaphysical shop in Modesto, California, carried her parents’ all-natural products. Xander played with guns.
There was something as soothing about disassembling an assault weapon blindfolded as there was in mastering Chopin for him. He knew he was different. Smart, yes, but there was something more. Something he couldn’t put his finger on. His commanding officers called it courage, intelligence, instinct. The school psychiatrists called it genius. His parents called him gifted.
He just saw it as a way to distinguish right from wrong, to use his gifts to milk the world of its incredible beauty. Under his fingers, the piano could render 8400 chords, each of which, when combined with another, told a story with infinite possibilities. Bullets did the same thing, if used properly.
He ended up in infantry on purpose. He could have been a pilot, he just didn’t feel like dealing with all the extra training. It was more enjoyable to be on the ground than in the air, anyway. More chance for a little one-on-one action, instead of floating above it all. He’d actually started the Apache training once, but pulled out to go to sniper school when a candidate had to drop and a slot unexpectedly opened. He was nineteen at the time with a raging hard-on for the Army. Anything they wanted to teach him, he wanted to learn.
Age tempered his enthusiasm a bit, but only just. Ranger School, Airborne, Sniper, Demolition—anything they could throw at him, he jumped at the chance. It was so different from the world he grew up in, so structured, so formal. There were regulations that he was expected to follow, and he thrived in the environment. Of course, he was a rising star, which meant he was getting respect and extra attention along the way, and that helped things a great deal. If he’d been a grunt and been treated like a grunt, dismissed out of hand by his superiors, he may have felt differently. He recognized that, tried to keep his star from burning too brightly so he could at least maintain some friendships along the way. If he hadn’t been an enlisted man, he could have gone pretty damn far.
But he mustered out at First Sergeant and was happy as hell to go. The Army had changed in the years he’d been suckling at her teat, marveling at his toys. A war that he felt was mismanaged, an officer he respected committing the ultimate sin, the constant day-to-day grind that became his life in the desert, fighting for every little thing he could gather up for his men—it turned him sour on the whole enterprise. After the shooting of his friend Perry Fisher, who they’d jokingly called King, it was all over for him. He knew the military would never again have that shine, the excitement that it first held, so he took his gear and his medals and his still-living ass and hurried on home.
Part of him was ashamed, and the other part knew it was for the best. The Army was an ever-evolving beast, and in the intervening years, as he grew from boy to man to warrior under their direction, it had become a different place, a political football. He didn’t feel his skills were being put to proper use, nor those of any of his brethren.
Of course, they were all dead now, too. He was the only one left from his tight-knit unit, and he felt the absence of his comrades keenly. When he mustered out, he found a quiet place in the mountains, away from everyone, his family, his friends. He led a monastic life on the land—something his parents could finally get behind.
The Savage River forest was kind to him. He fished and hunted when he needed meat. He brought vegetables and herbs from the ground when he needed flavors. He picked fruit from the trees when he needed something sweet. He watched the breeze wind sinuously through the trees when he needed a distraction, and used the sun and the moon as his guide when he needed to establish time. He was happy alone, felt safer that way. Since he’d been trained to kill, to be able to take a life without a second thought, he felt the need to repent.
The joke among his brethren, what do you feel when you kill a terrorist? Recoil.
And not the kind that meant your stomach was turned.
Repent wasn’t the right word. Recalibrate was more like it. He was a dangerous man, and he knew it. His mind needed to adjust back to the world where threats didn’t linger in the shadows, where he could sleep without his hand on the trigger.
He wasn’t quite there yet.
And then Samantha paraded into his life, and turned his world on its ear.
Samantha was more than his lover; she was his savior. He hated the circumstances that brought them together, but he’d fallen in love with her almost immediately, though he hadn’t shared that information with her. He hadn’t needed to—she’d felt the same pull. A connection, however faint, however strong, had been made in their first meeting. Pheromones, maybe, or their beings acknowledging kindred spirits. Regardless, something about her made his soul sing. He’d had other women—not many, sex was still a sacred act for him, another anomaly he’d developed in spite of his exceptionally liberal upbringing, where sex and nudity were as natural as the sun rising in the east—but enough to know the difference between lust and love. But Sam, beautiful, smart, good Sam, was different. He finally understood how his father could abandon his entire life and legacy for a woman.
And with that understanding came another—he’d been on the path to becoming an empty soul, devoid of feeling, of being unable to find the splendor in the world anymore. Sam was more than just the aesthetics. She’d brought him back from the near-dead. He would do anything for her.
Which was the reason, while watching the top of the hourly news update and waiting for Sam to confirm why she’d been rushed away by Fletcher, he felt compelled to reach out to a group of people he was familiar with.
The answers were out there.
And Xander might be able to help find them.
Chapter 7
Washington, D.C.
Dr. Samantha Owens
Sam read the text again, then looked up. “Did the congressman see this before he died?”
Fletcher shook his head. “This came in to his official cell number, so an aide holds the phone. There’s a ton of incoming calls we have to trace, and texts. The number was blocked, though, so it was probably a burner phone. We can get the details on it, but you know how long that can take.”
She did. Paperwork on disposable phones was akin to wandering through the seven circles of hell—doable, but no one in their right mind would choose that path.
“Good luck with that.”
“Thanks.” Fletcher got quiet for a moment. “In case the text was sent by the suspect, we need to look at this situation with a fresh eye. That the congressman was the real target. So call me if there’s anything weird here, okay? You can’t imagine the pressure I’m under right now.”
“I can imagine, and of course, I’ll call as soon as I have something.”
With a grateful smile, Fletcher left to start his investigation into the congressman’s last hours. Nocek asked if she needed help. She demurred, so he went to deal with the other insanities, and she and Murphy got to work.
Leighton was the third death of the day, that was indisputable. But without more information, doing the post, seeing the other victims, Sam couldn’t say conclusively that he was a part of the attack.
So she focused on the task at hand. After her initial examination of the body’s exterior, which showed exceptional edema of the head, neck, eyelids, upper and lower extremities, frothy blood coming from the mouth and nose, and a bluish cast to the skin, Murphy did the preliminary dissection, opening Leighton’s chest with her scalpel, a wide-legged Y incision. She fed the flesh away from the breastplate and used the shears to snap the ribs, one crunch at a time, until the breastplate came clear and Sam could look into the chest cavity unhindered.
What she saw was unusual, to say the least. More frothy blood, plus all of Leighton’s organs swollen beyond proportion, especially his heart, bulging in its pericardial sac, and his lungs, so distended they engulfed the chest cavity and touched at the midpoint. She poked around a bit, trying to get the lay of the land. His spleen was visibly bloated, the liver fatty, and more edema present. She began the dissection. His enlarged heart was otherwise healthy for a man his age, with little cholesterol plaque built up in the arteries, so cardiac arrest wasn’t the culprit. She started to work on the block of lungs and quickly realized Leighton was suffering from an underlying disease. His lungs were distended and the air pockets diffusely enlarged, ravaged most certainly from a lifetime of asthma. Bronchiectasis. Which made her wonder—why hadn’t he used his inhaler? In a case of fulminant pneumonia, surely the congressman would have been sucking hard on his albuterol. And if that didn’t work...
“Hey, Murphy, you have his clothes?”
“Sure.” She pulled out the plastic bag and held it up. “What do you need?”
“Look through his pockets for an inhaler. He’s asthmatic. Just curious what he was using.”
Murphy dug in, but came up empty.
“That’s weird. I guess he could have dropped it at his office, right?”
“Sure. In the heat of the moment, absolutely. It’s not something we would grab to bring in, either. What are you thinking, Doc?”
“He’s had asthma for a long time. He definitely had an attack quite recent to his death. The airways are reddened and swollen inside. His inhaler would have started to make at least a little dent in the swelling in his bronchial tree, but I’m not seeing any evidence of that. Honestly, I’m not seeing anything that indicated he tried to arrest the attack at all.”
She went back to the body and looked him over carefully. On a man who had a normal spread of hair on his body, a needle mark could be concealed and missed on the initial examination. On skin as smooth as the congressman’s, though, an injection site should show itself easily. She couldn’t find one. He was in shape, no extra folds of fat to hide the marks. His thighs were clear, as were his buttocks, arms and stomach.
Interesting.
She thought about how the situation must have gone down. The attack would have started small. Staying calm and not hyperventilating is the key to keeping a mild asthma attack from becoming a major event. The congressman might have breathed into a paper bag, or something equally calming. But that didn’t work, so he brought out the defenses—his inhaler, maybe a nebulizer. Perhaps even popped a bit of prednisone, knowing the anti-inflammatory would help. Toxicology would tell what medications he’d taken. A witness would be of help, too, especially since the tox screen wouldn’t show the corticosteroid.
When none of the usual treatments worked, he should have called 911 and broken out his EpiPen. Jammed the lifesaving medicine into his thigh and gotten his ass to the hospital.
But he didn’t have a mark on him.
But he did have massive pulmonary edema. His lungs were yellowish and heavy, and the fluid in the chest cavity was bloody. Significant airway wall thickening showed evidence of a hyperacute pulmonary attack and fulminant pneumonia.
All signs pointed to a massive asthma attack, of that Sam was sure.
But what had triggered it? Without knowing Leighton’s schedule, without knowing if he’d been exposed this morning, she couldn’t say for sure that his death was related to the others.
Tracking down Leighton’s every move was Fletcher’s job. For the meantime, all Sam could do was send the samples to the lab and have them tested, and begin the long wait. But there was something more present in the congressman’s system. An irritant, something that caused the blood to froth.
She’d never seen a ricin poisoning up close and personal, but this certainly looked like what she’d read about. But the tests so far had been negative for ricin. That was very strange.
Sam made quick work of the rest of Leighton’s organs, dictated her findings to Murphy, then stripped off her gloves and mask and tossed them in the trash. She desperately wanted to wash her hands, and it wasn’t just the OCD talking. Posting the congressman had solidified her feeling that there was more than met the eye about the attacks this morning.
She left Murphy behind to close the body and sought out Dr. Nocek. He was in his office, writing up his findings from the earlier autopsies.
She took a seat across from him and smiled. “Good thing you talked me into getting licensed here in D.C. This is becoming a regular event for us.”
“My dear Samantha, I wish that it would be a daily occurrence. Your talents are not wasted teaching our young doctors the skills they need to succeed in pathology, but they could certainly be put to advantageous use with us. It was kind of you to indulge the detective’s wish for a completely unbiased postmortem. Perhaps you’d like to rethink your current path and join us?”
Nocek smiled at her. He was an odd man, cadaverously thin, with thick glasses and a long beak of a nose. He was called Lurch behind his back, or The Fly. He did bear an uncanny resemblance to a winged insect. But he was unfailingly kind, intelligent, intuitive and unafraid to ask for help when he felt it was needed. Sam liked him a great deal.
“I’ll think about it. How many are ill?”
“At this point, reported illnesses have topped two hundred. But still only the three deaths. If this is a biological agent, it could be several days before we are in the clear on mortality rates. It is entirely possible people have been exposed and are simply not showing symptoms yet.”
“I was thinking it could be ricin despite the negative field finding. But it’s not textbook, that’s for sure. What were your findings on the two dead?”
“Internal bleeding, pulmonary edema and hemorrhage. Perhaps anthrax. Do you recall the case in 2001? Five died, seventeen survived. I worked on two of the victims. The findings had some similarities.”
“Similarities, but not exact, right?”
“Yes. I did not witness the external pustules that were apparent in the 2001 cases.”
“We won’t know until the toxicology comes back, so there’s no sense in speculating. But just between us, it looked very much like ricin poisoning to me.”
“Detective Fletcher is not going to want to hear you say that.”
Sam played with the stress ball Nocek kept on his desk. Squish, roll, squish, roll. “Fletch will live. I will tell you this. The congressman had a massive, acute asthma attack, and that was what killed him. He had pneumonia, too, which didn’t look like it was being treated. Until the tests are back on the tissue and blood, I won’t know if he inhaled what everyone else did. But it is feasible his death is unrelated to the attack. Just a matter of bad timing.”
Nocek steepled his considerably long fingers in front of him.
“Do you believe this is the case?”
“I don’t know. Something isn’t right. If he was in acute respiratory distress, there were steps he would have taken. He’d been asthmatic for a very long time, surely this wouldn’t have been his first pulmonary event. I didn’t find any evidence he used an EpiPen. So either things progressed normally and he stupidly forgot his pen today, or...”
“Or?”
She shifted in her seat. “The possibilities are endless. Let’s see what Fletch has to say first. Now, why don’t you show me the bodies of the other two DOAs.”
Chapter 8
Washington, D.C.
Detective Darren Fletcher
Detective Darren Fletcher was getting incredibly frustrated. He had been left sitting in the antechamber of Congressman Leighton’s stuffy office for over half an hour now. He was about to start banging on the door to the great man’s inner sanctum and demand to be seen.
To kill just a bit more time, he checked his phone and saw the new message from the head of his division, Captain Armstrong, who had some semi-interesting news. Fletcher was being assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force that was investigating the subway attack. And three different Middle Eastern terror groups had stepped forward to claim responsibility. Fletcher was to report to the JTTF offices as soon as possible to get briefed.
He knew he should be honored, but all he could think about was the other cases he’d been working on that would have to be reassigned. And damn his partner, Lonnie Hart, who was on an island somewhere in the Pacific taking his first vacation in five years. He was still on disability after the shooting three months earlier, and honestly, Fletcher was wondering if he’d ever come back from it.
He didn’t like working alone, true, but the JTTF? All of their open cases would be given away. Fletcher wondered if he could fight to keep on one or two of them but knew that was probably wishful thinking.
His phone began to vibrate. Sam. Finally.
“What’s up?”
“Leighton’s official COD is an asthma attack.”
“I didn’t know he had asthma.”
“You do now. He didn’t have his inhaler on him, so if you could ask around and see if they know what he was taking, it would be a help. Save us the time while we wait for a subpoena of his medical records. Have you found out whether he rode the Metro this morning?”
“I don’t know yet. They’ve kept me waiting.”
“Well, this is just between us then. All signs are pointing to a ricin-like toxin. It looks and acts like it, but it’s not exactly right. It could be some sort of hybrid. I’ve given the samples to Amado for him to run through their lab, so we won’t know anything conclusive until those come back. I’m going to keep hunting to see if I can narrow it down even further. But if you can get a picture of his day, that would help.”
“I’m trying. Thanks, Sam. I’ll pick you up and get you home in just a bit.”
“No hurry. I only had a peek at the other bodies, I’d like to go over them more thoroughly.”
She hung up. Okay. No more Mr. Nice Guy.
He went back to the intern sitting at the front desk. She was a timorous thing, eyes wide and staring, probably wondering what she was going to do next. Most likely be sent back home to Indiana, if she’d been from Leighton’s district. If she were local, she might be reassigned, or be out of luck entirely. When he said, “Excuse me,” she jumped a mile.
“Yes, sir?”
“I’m going to have to insist on seeing the chief of staff immediately.”
“I’m sorry, sir. They’re in a meeting, and they said they weren’t to be disturbed. For anyone. He told me that you need to wait outside.”
Fletcher gave her his most charming smile. “You go in there and let him know he has one minute to open the doors or I’ll kick them in.”
Her rabbit eyes grew wide and she made a beeline for the doors. Fletcher didn’t wait, he followed right behind her, and when she opened the door, he touched her on the shoulder.
“Thanks. I’ll take it from here.”
“But, but...” Fletcher left her stammering in the doorway and stepped through into the congressman’s office. He didn’t make a habit of interrupting meetings—he had no right to do so—but there were exigent circumstances at play.
A thin man with precisely cut brown hair and a pristine gray pin-striped suit was sitting behind the desk, with three people, less well dressed, facing him—two men and a woman. If Fletcher hadn’t known the congressman was dead, he would have assumed the man behind the desk held the power. Which, in many ways, he did.
All four were staring at him now, but it was Pinstripe that Fletcher locked on to. His coolly appraising eyes swiveled to Fletcher, to the open door and the desperate intern, then back to Fletcher. Without moving, he said, “That’s fine, Becky. We don’t need you anymore today. Why don’t you head home. Someone will be in touch about tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir,” she whispered, and beat a hasty retreat, pulling the door closed behind her.
Silence. Fletcher cleared his throat and opened his badge case, flashed them his gold. “Sorry to bother you, but I’ve been waiting quite a while, and I have other places to be. Detective Darren Fletcher, Metro homicide.”
Pinstripe didn’t move. “Glenn Temple. I’m the congressman’s chief of staff. It is an unfortunate day.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Fletcher said automatically, a phrase he’d uttered too many times.
“Thank you. What can I do for you, Detective?”
“I’m investigating your boss’s death. I need to know everything that happened today.”
Temple flicked his hand at the three staffers. “Sperry, get the datebook for the detective. Allison, you and David are dismissed. I’ll be in touch later.”
Fletcher needed to get the upper hand here, and fast. “I’d actually appreciate all of you sticking around. I’m going to have to interview each of you individually.”
Three sets of eyes looked to Temple for approval. There was no question who was running this little fiefdom. All of Fletcher’s nerves were singing; something was wrong with this picture. It wouldn’t have been the first time a group met to practice their stories, making sure they had all the details straight.
“Why don’t we start with you, Mr. Temple?”
A pause, just a few breaths, and Temple nodded. “That’s fine.”
The three underlings stood and melted away, out the door, silent as the grave.
Fletcher helped himself to a seat.
“Mr. Temple, can you give me an idea of what’s happening here?”
Temple got up and went to the small wet bar in the corner of the spacious office, dropped a few ice cubes in a glass, poured in a clear amber liquid from a crystal decanter.
“Just some damage control. The congressman has enemies. Drink?”
“Scotch, if you have it.” A disarming answer. A by-the-book cop would never drink on duty. It was meant to show Temple Fletcher was a good sport. That this talk was man-to-man. Trust could be built in the strangest ways. And it had been a seriously shit day. He needed a drink.
Fletcher accepted the crystal lowball and took a sip. “Mmm. Macallan 25?”
Temple gave the first hint of a smile. “You know your Scotch.”
“Occupational hazard. You say the congressman has enemies. Any of them crazy enough to want to kill him?”
Temple resumed his spot behind his boss’s desk. “You think he was murdered?”
“You don’t?”
“I don’t know what to think. One minute he was fine. The next, he was down on the floor, choking to death.”
“You witnessed his collapse?”
“The end of it, yes. He arrived this morning at eight, like he always does. We had the morning staff meeting. He was upbeat, cheery. The vote on the new appropriations bill is tomorrow, and he felt like it was a done deal. The last vote before recess, and trust me, these guys have earned a rest. Without him, without the promises he’s made, the deals he’s guaranteed, that bill has no chance of passing. I’ve spent the day trying to shore up our votes, but it’s not going to happen. Months of work, down the drain. We’re fucked.”
Temple tossed back half of his glass.
Fletcher was again reminded of why he hated politics and politicians. Cold-blooded bastards, the lot of them.
“So after staff, we watched the news about the attacks for about ten minutes, then had a few meet and greets, the usual stuff, people in from Indiana who want to bend his ear, get their picture taken. He had five minutes with each of them, then a coffee down in the dining room with Windsor Mann, the head of Ways and Means. He came back to the office a little ruffled, but Mann always pisses him off. They have to pretend to be friends in front of the cameras, but they don’t like each other much. He came back to the office, had just hung up his jacket and shut the door for some quiet time when Becky heard a commotion and knocked. He didn’t answer so she came and found me. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes, but when I got the door open, he was down. He has asthma, I don’t know if that’s part of the record yet. It looked like he was having a really bad asthma attack. He didn’t like to let people know, thought it made him look weak.”
“How’d he make it into the service?”
“Oh, this was something he picked up in the first Gulf War. Bunch of them came home with lung damage. His manifested as asthma. Pretty severe, too, and stress didn’t help things.”
“So you entered the office, saw he was down, and then what?”
“I searched his jacket pocket, thinking I’d get his inhaler, but it wasn’t there. Then I saw it on the floor next to him. I picked it up and handed it to him. He could barely hold on to it. We got it in his mouth and I pressed the trigger, but it didn’t seem to help. His eyes were rolling into the back of his head, and he was turning blue. He kept an EpiPen in his briefcase, but his briefcase wasn’t in the office. I looked everywhere. He’d stopped breathing by that point, so I started CPR and yelled for someone to call nine-one-one.”
“Where’s the inhaler?”
“I have no idea. The EMTs probably took it.” He looked to the ceiling and shut his eyes. “I should have called earlier. If I had...”
“If it makes you feel better, I don’t think that would have made a difference. The autopsy has been completed, and the attack was quite severe.”
Temple didn’t say anything, just maintained his position with his face aimed at the ceiling, like he was trying to hold back tears from spilling down his cheeks.
“Did the congressman take the Metro this morning?”
Temple sniffed once, hard, then faced Fletcher again. “He takes it every morning. Part of his job, he says, to be with the people, be a part of the populace. Of course, he has security on him, and he only rides it one stop, from Eastern Market to Capitol South. You know. Kisses his wife goodbye, hops on the subway. It makes him feel normal, like a regular guy. Joe six-pack, he liked to say. So yes, he was on the subway today.”
“Where’s his wife now?”
“Gretchen? Flying in from Terre Haute. She’d gone home to get one of their...charities settled. She is devastated.”
“I’ll need to speak to her as soon as she arrives. And I need to speak to his detail. I’ll also need the names of all the supporters who were here this morning.”
“I will have the detail get in touch immediately, and the list of people sent to you.”
“The detail weren’t here, in the office?”
“Not at his time of death. In the building, yes. More than likely. They were scheduled to go out with him at two. The congressman had a meeting this afternoon at the University Club. He was scheduled to speak to the Daughters of the American Revolution, of all things.”
Fletcher appreciated the irony—speaking to a group whose membership could trace their lineage to the first attempts of the country to gain their freedom on the day the most important city in the world was attacked by terrorists was rich.
Temple tapped a pencil on the clean desktop. “Do they know what the attack was comprised of? What the agent was?”
“We don’t know yet,” Fletcher replied. “What about the rest of it?”
Temple glanced at him.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I think you do.”
He gave Fletcher a pointed look. “Trust me. I don’t know.”
“Mr. Temple. We’re both grown-ups here. I have no intention of using the information to demean or embarrass the congressman’s legacy. You saw the text. The language seemed...purposefully inflammatory. Has the congressman been harassed lately?”
He shook his head, finally showing some interest in the situation. No, that wasn’t fair. He hadn’t been disinterested before. He was under control. Very much under control.
“Peter Leighton is an American patriot. He served his country honorably in the service, came home and decided to continue his selflessness in this thankless job. He is the greatest man I know.”
Fletcher sat back in his chair and took a sip of his Scotch. “You know, I’ve been a cop in D.C. for eighteen years. I’ve seen a lot of shit. It is not my job to be judge or jury. Your boss had a reputation in the very quiet corners of this town, and you can’t expect me to believe that, as his number-one guy, you aren’t aware of that.”
There it is. Right over the plate.
“No idea what you’re talking about.”
“Come on. You want to tell me what this is all about? Who might have sent something like this? Who did the congressman piss off?”
Temple swiveled the computer screen around to face Fletcher.
“Who hasn’t he pissed off? My God, we get five thousand emails a day, and I’d say a solid ninety percent are upset about something. Take, take, take, blame, blame, blame. That’s all these people know.”
“Mr. Temple. Please. I’m talking about something a little more private than constituents with a burning desire for a new road.”
Temple shook his head but wouldn’t meet Fletcher’s eye.
“Truly, don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“There are rumors...”
Temple laughed. “This is D.C., Detective. If there isn’t a rumor about you, you’re doing something wrong.”
* * *
It was a good story, as far as stories went. Temple looked like a hero, he’d done everything he could think of to save his boss. The interviews with the three other staffers corroborated his story. Either they were all telling the truth, or they had decided on the story before Fletcher got there.
Not a single one was willing to breathe a bad word against their boss.
This was going nowhere, fast.
Fletcher got a crime scene tech to come to the office and take exclusionary fingerprint samples. That took fifteen minutes, and while it was going on, Temple arranged for the service detail who’d been with the congressman this morning to meet them in the office. Fletcher dismissed Temple and talked to them—a man and a woman, Mac and Sally—grizzled old hats who’d been assigned to the congressman for several months. Nothing in the routine this morning was different from any other day. They didn’t know where his briefcase was. Neither were feeling ill. Both were going for stoic, but Fletcher could see they were genuinely distressed over the news.
He pushed them on the rumors, too, but they clammed up. He took their statements, assured them he’d let them know what was happening, and let them leave, feeling vaguely uneasy.
They gave him a list of the people who’d been in the office over the past few days, and this morning. The official congressional photographer would send over the photos from the morning’s meet and greet. Otherwise, it seemed there was nothing here.
Someone was lying to him. He just didn’t know who. Or why.
Chapter 9
Washington, D.C.
Dr. Samantha Owens
Sam waited for Fletcher in Nocek’s office, watching the late-breaking news story that had finally leaked its way into the media. The anchors looked shaken; even though they’d known for at least an hour, the media had kindly waited for the wife to land in D.C. and get to her husband’s side before they broke the news.
Congressman Peter Leighton, Democrat from Indiana, was dead, a suspected victim of the morning’s attack.
Sam was always amazed at how thorough the media could be when they wanted. Granted, Leighton was a public figure, and as such, packages were built in the event of an untimely death. But considering he was just one of four hundred and thirty-five serving members, there was quite a bit of material that had been collected on him.
The minute the news was out, the attack itself became secondary. Every station was giving their own eulogies of the congressman.
Leighton had been a classic dove for most of his career, using his own service record as an example of why the United States should stay out of foreign domains. He’d flip-flopped about a year prior, started fighting for the troops, for them to get more money, better equipment and better services when they mustered out, damaged and broken. A seismic shift, brought about by the death of his son, Peter Leighton, Junior, a battalion commander in the Army who’d gone to Afghanistan and been decimated by a roadside IED.
Grief changes you. Sam understood that. It mutates your soul, your emotions, your thoughts. Green becomes yellow, the sun disappears from the sky, and your lifelong convictions no longer seem to matter. As she watched the multitude of clips of the congressman defending his change of heart, she understood completely. He hadn’t done enough to keep his own child secure and protected, so he’d launched a campaign to keep the remainder of the soldiers on the ground and in the air safe. Too bad he hadn’t been fighting for them earlier. It might have meant a different outcome for his own son, not to mention countless others.
At least the media didn’t have the text message yet. Once that slipped out, the wolves would circle and all bets would be off. The congressman would stop being lauded and start being blamed.
And maybe he should. If the text was real, authored by the perpetrator behind the attacks, there was something to be discovered in the congressman’s very publicly private world.
Sam muted the television. The message was unmistakably clear. What she was trying to ascertain was why, if the attack was directed at him, had so many others been included.
Two hundred sick, some clinging to life. Two other deaths, random, people wholly unrelated to the congressman. She felt bad that their deaths were being overshadowed by the demise of someone more famous.
Even one death is too much.
Planes were flying overhead, the high-pitched roaring whine of the F/A-18s unmistakable. Helicopters chattered. There was talk of shutting down the bridges. There was a curfew in place, yet there were still news stories about chaos and absolute fear reigning in some neighborhoods. There’d even been a couple of reports of looting, down near Anacostia. But the congressman’s face was taking up ninety percent of the airtime.
And they still didn’t know what had caused the turmoil.
There were hundreds of people working on figuring out what the substance was. She knew that. But it was disturbing that nearly twelve hours after the event, they still had nothing more than speculations to go on.
That told her something unique was happening.
Sam shut the television off and went over her notes again. Fletcher had called to tell her that, yes, the congressman had been on the Metro this morning. But in looking at the maps, he was on the Blue Line, and it had been confirmed that the other two casualties had taken the Orange Line right through Foggy Bottom early this morning.
It made sense that people who were immunosuppressed would have a more severe reaction. The congressman was an asthmatic, so any irritant could trigger an attack. Without the proper medication to arrest the attack, he could very easily die, as he had.
The other two deaths weren’t as cut-and-dried. She had notes on them from the initial investigation Fletcher and his team had done when they’d come into the morgue. The only thing they had in common was the fact that they were smokers.
Different parts of the city, different ages, different worlds, all affected by a single event. D.C. was a giant ecosystem, with thousands of moving parts, and each world was unique unto itself. Like species that couldn’t intermingle and breed, the people of D.C. found their comfort zones and rarely, if ever, deviated from course. Debutantes hung out with debutantes, jocks with jocks, politicos with politicos, lawyers with lawyers, lobbyists with lobbyists, teachers with teachers. There might be a Sadie Hawkins Day every once in a while, and a debutante would get it on with a politico, but that generally ended up in The Washingtonian, disguised as a society wedding, and the aftermath was full of fireworks and lawyers and mistresses and front-page news.
Sam pulled the charts of the two other victims and flipped through the pages. She had nothing better to do.
The first was a forty-year-old woman named Loa Ledbetter. She owned a market research firm on L Street, lived in the Watergate. She rarely used the Metro to go to work—she made off-site calls to clients, so she normally drove—but her car was in the shop.
The second was a nineteen-year-old junior from American University, Marc Conlon. He lived in Falls Church, and took the Metro into town for school daily. He’d switch from the Orange Line to the Red at Metro Center and scoot out to the Tenleytown/AU stop, then take the shuttle bus onto the AU campus. On Tuesdays, he had an 8:00 a.m. history class, so he made sure to get into town extra early, to have a coffee and beat the crowds.
Sam said a little prayer for her own student, Brooke Wasserstrom, who at last check was holding steady in the intensive care unit. Sam hoped that her quick actions meant Brooke had a decent chance of survival, but without knowledge of what they were dealing with, all they could do was treat, and pray.
A congressman, a student and a market researcher.
Three strangers, brought together at the hand of a madman. What had they done to deserve death as a punishment?
Now, Sam, you know that this isn’t a healthy line of thinking. Random things happened. There aren’t always answers as to why people have to die. Why their number has suddenly come up. They were obviously in the wrong place at the wrong time. She could fully comprehend that. She knew that they weren’t connected in any way law enforcement could use their deaths to track their killer. A terrorist attack is a random event.
Random. Chosen without method or conscious decision.
She hadn’t chosen for her family to die. That had been random, too.
She shook them away, the voices of her dead, and refocused.
A random act.
Then why did someone send a text to Congressman Leighton blaming the morning’s events on him?
The only real evidence they had was the text. It could be the key. Leighton could be the key.
Not Dr. Loa Ledbetter, a small brilliant redheaded beauty with a gaping slit in her chest, nor Marc Conlon, too young to even have grown fully into his bones, his sagittal suture not entirely fused.
Quit personalizing, Sam.
What Sam was interested in was why those three, out of all the people exposed and the two hundred exhibiting symptoms, were the only ones who died.
Ledbetter was dead on arrival at GW, after being found collapsed on the floor of the ladies’ room at her office by one of her staffers.
Conlon died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. He’d gone into cardiac arrest at the top of the stairs of the Tenleytown Metro.
Neither had a history of lung disease; that was reserved for the congressman. Neither exhibited signs of illness, their initial blood work had been normal, and neither had a history of ill health.
Their families could give more information. Sam was itching to talk to them.
But this wasn’t her investigation. She’d been brought in to do a task, used for her discretion and talent, not to run off trying to explain the unexplainable.
Except she knew every puzzle had a solution.
Someone wanted Leighton to feel responsible, yes, but dead? Perhaps that was just chance. Perhaps that was a fluke. And there was absolutely nothing that said the text-sender was the same person who’d indiscriminately put a foreign substance into the air ducts at the Foggy Bottom Metro and made so many people ill. It could just be a pissed-off constituent who wrongly blamed the congressman for a completely random event.
There she was, back to the arbitrary again.
Fletcher had brought her into this investigation when he asked her to post Leighton. He wasn’t dumb; he knew she’d press for more information, for a chance to help. She wasn’t constricted by the rule of law here. She was a private citizen. She’d sworn a different kind of oath, one that she believed in, one that bound her to care for the sick, to have special obligations to the public she served. She could do whatever she chose, so long as she worked within the bounds of her ethics and didn’t break the law.
She was starting to feel a bit tingly.
She debated for exactly ten seconds before writing down the addresses of the other victims, folding the paper into halves, then quarters, and stashing it in the pocket of her trousers.
It was damn good timing, too, because she’d barely raised her palm from the linen when Dr. Nocek came into the room, followed by Fletcher.
“You ready, Doc?” Fletcher asked. He looked worried and rumpled and tired. His beard was just starting to make its appearance, and lent him a vaguely menacing air. Next to the taller, more collected Nocek, he looked a bit like a brawl just waiting to happen.
Sam gathered her bag and sweater. “I’m ready. How are things on the Hill?”
“Fucked.”
That’s all she got. Nocek raised an eyebrow in her direction, and she responded by giving him a warm hug. “I’ll see you soon. We’ll have dinner.”
“I would like that very much,” he said, and she sensed the sadness in him. Nocek was a widower, not fully used to going home alone in the evenings. On a day like today, after all the hoopla, the fear and adrenaline, having only ghosts to talk to could be hard.
She squeezed his arm and said, “Call me if you need anything,” then followed a glowering Fletcher from the room.
The longest day she’d had since she left Nashville was finally drawing to a close.
Chapter 10
The streets were still eerily deserted, the dark skies interrupted by the scream of jets. Fletcher was silent until they hit M Street. Sam knew better than to try and drag information out of him; he’d share when he was ready. They got stuck at the light at Wisconsin, and he finally started talking.
“Leighton’s chief of staff is giving me the runaround,” he grumbled.
Sam smiled. “Isn’t that his job?”
Fletcher glanced at her, saw the amusement etched on her face. It provoked a smile of his own, and he relaxed a bit.
“Yeah, I suppose it is. Fingerprints on the inhaler belong to him. That matches his statement that when he came into the office and saw the congressman down, he retrieved the inhaler and gave it to his boss.”
“Okay. So where’s the issue?”
He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, then ran his hands through his hair. “I don’t know. I’m tired as hell. I’m getting put on the Joint Terrorism Task Force.”
“That’s good, right? You’ll be able to see this through to the end.”
“Maybe. We’ll see. They might have me running around town with my dick in my hand.”
She cleared her throat, trying to hide the laugh.
“Sorry, Sam. That was crude of me.”
“You’re fine, Fletch. The image was priceless.”
He laughed with her then, and the light turned. He took a right, then a left, and she was at her door a moment later. There was a pause, awkward and three beats too long. He looked like he wanted to say something important, but refrained. Instead, he shook it off and said, “Get some sleep. You did good today.”
“Thanks, Fletch. You, too. Call me if you need anything else, okay? And if they get the results back on the toxin, let me know.”
“Will do. Last round of calls got it down to two or three, with ricin still leading the pack.”
“If that’s true, we’re damn lucky there are only three people dead.”
“You said it, sister.”
He watched her go up the stairs, waited until the door was unlocked to drive away.
She caught the blue glow of the clock on the microwave. It was nearly two in the morning.
Exhaustion suddenly paraded through her body, and she sagged a bit. She wanted a shower and bed. She took the stairs carefully, quietly.
She found Xander crashed out cold on top of the covers. Just the sight of him caused a little thrum in her stomach. She stopped in the doorway and watched him, marveling at the fact that he belonged to her.
With a soldier’s unerring ability to sense a threat, he opened his eyes, and she saw he already had one hand tucked under his pillow, where she knew he kept a loaded weapon. Only one of many stashed throughout the house.
“It’s me,” she whispered. “Go back to sleep.”
He rolled up in one smooth motion, both hands free.
“I’m glad you’re home. We need to talk.”
* * *
He gave her fifteen minutes to S-cubed—military jargon for shit, shower and shave—and met her in the kitchen with a fresh pot of coffee and her laptop glowing on the table. She took one look at him and went to the liquor cabinet, fetched a bottle of Lagavulin. She splashed some in both their cups, then tucked her damp hair behind her ears and settled in, recognizing Xander in full operational mode. He might as well have had his uniform on and a rifle strapped to his chest.
Loaded for bear.
He sat across from her, took a deep drink from his cup. Xander made seriously good tea, but he was a first-class coffee maker. A connoisseur. Sam was amused when the first thing he did was buy her a Bunn, claiming it was one of the finest coffeemakers in the world. She found that ironic, considering he often made his coffee by throwing the grounds in a pan of water and heating it over the fire. He took personal affront at Starbucks and the like, instead preferred to grind his own beans, which he imported from a friend in Colombia. She wasn’t entirely sure that was legal, but she could hardly complain—the coffee it made was out of this world.
“There’s a message from GW on the answering machine. I heard them leave it. School’s closed for the rest of the week.”
“Not surprising. I assume they are going to have people combing that Metro stop and the surrounds for a few days to make sure things are safe.”
They sipped their coffee. Finally, Xander set down his cup.
“Aren’t you going to ask?”
She stared into his eyes, best described as a deep chocolate-espresso—eyes that were so like the dark, intense brews he favored—and sighed.
“Fine. You were here in D.C. at least an hour before you should have been if you’d heard about the attacks on the news. Which means you fibbed to me this morning about your fishing date gone wrong.”
He smirked. “I didn’t fib. My guy didn’t show, and I did go to the café to check things out.”
She knew the café he mentioned was the Mountain City Coffeehouse in Frostburg, Maryland—the closest internet café to Xander’s cabin that had decent food and coffee. She had to admit, it was a quaint, charming place, perfect for him to stay under the radar. He liked the window by the fireplace; he was able to see the rest of the room, the entrance and exits. Once a soldier, always a soldier. The cabin didn’t have internet access, so Xander made it a routine to head to Frostburg a couple of times a month to check his mail, set up his appointments as a fishing guide, and generally check up on the world. She was tempted to buy him an iPad so he could save himself the trip, but she knew it was more than that. He shed his humanity in the woods—like his daily piano practice, the bimonthly sojourns were his way of keeping himself engaged. He didn’t want more than that, and his psyche couldn’t stand less. Without some sort of socialization, he might truly get lost.
Then he dropped his bomb.
“But that was all yesterday.”
All sorts of words rushed to mind, but all she managed was, “What?”
He flipped the laptop around so it was facing her.
“See this?”
She looked at the screen. It was a message board of some kind. “What’s this?”
“One of the groups I sometimes look in on. It’s comprised of people...like me.”
He rose to fill his cup again, leaving her to wonder exactly what that meant. She wasn’t able to focus properly.
“Soldiers?”
“Some. Some want to be. Some could have been, but chose a different path.”
Sam felt the edge begin, the panic, like an annoying little mosquito buzzing around her head. She pulled her hair back into a chignon, stuck a chopstick through the knot to hold it in place. She closed her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. In four counts, hold four, out four, wait four. Then, the urge to wash her hands dispatched, she addressed her lover.
“Xander, honey. It’s late. I’ve been up for twenty hours, been in the middle of a terrorist attack, did an autopsy on a congressman, and have my own little anxiety disorder brewing. Would you mind cutting to the chase?”
“Survivalists, Sam. I don’t think this was a terror attack. I think it was one of our own.”
Chapter 11
Sam’s expression moved from confusion to incredulity in a matter of seconds.
“You’ve got to be kidding. Are you talking like...what, a militia?”
“No. Well, sure, some of them. It’s like any group of people, there’re bad seeds mixed in with the good and innocent. There are militias spread all across the country, homegrown groups who like to think they’re the law, parade around in uniforms, ragtag batches of locals who spew nonsense and are basically harmless. But there are groups who are dead serious, people you wouldn’t want to cross. The government keeps a damn close eye on them. And some of them are idiots, people who are just wrong in the head and can’t be fixed. Skinheads, those kinds of yahoos.”
“Ruby Ridge?”
“Right. But the people I’m talking about—no, they’re not militia. Just concerned private citizens who have shared their knowledge of survival to help like-minded individuals prepare in case there’s a catastrophic event. Anything from a nuclear bomb to economic collapse to a tornado.”
She noticed he didn’t say flood, though that would certainly qualify.
“They’re good people, just trying to figure out where we’re headed, and what to do in case something awful happens.”
Sam raised an eyebrow. Sometimes she forgot that they came from very, very different worlds. She was a debutante from Nashville, a good little Southern girl, raised on manners and money and all things genteel, and he was a soldier who’d been raised by hippies, seen too much and had a healthy mistrust of the government.
He must have caught her thought, because he continued. “Okay, this isn’t something that you and I have talked a lot about. It’s hard to understand, but there are people out there who think things are going to hell in a handbasket, and are trying to make preparations in case it does. They’re harmless, and smart. They’re like pioneers, able to grow food and build shelter and live off the land and, most importantly, defend themselves if it’s needed.”
“Like you.”
He smiled.
“Like me. Many of them are ex-military, of all generations. You know many of us don’t fit back into the world anymore, Sam. What we’ve seen, what we’ve done, civilians can’t necessarily comprehend. It’s only natural that some of us fall back on our training, and want to be prepared. Just in case, you know? When, or if, the shit hits the fan, you’re going to want us on your side, if you get my drift.”
“I follow.”
“Okay. So this one group that I check in on from time to time lit up last night. Like they knew something was about to go down. Chatter.”
“And the feds didn’t see it?”
“Trust me, there are no feds in this group. It is very private.”
“There’s no privacy online. You’ve told me that a million times.”
“And that’s true. But even if they do know about it, they can’t get in.”
“My God, Xander, if these friends of yours were talking about an imminent attack, why didn’t you do anything? Say anything?”
She’d said the wrong thing. He closed up tight as a drum. Slammed the laptop closed and stalked from the room. He went to the bedroom, started gathering his things.
She followed. “Xander, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. This isn’t your fault. None of it is your fault.”
He kept his back turned. “You don’t get it. I’m not mad at you, I’m mad at myself. I should have said something. Maybe if I had, it wouldn’t have happened. Instead, I couldn’t sleep, and finally ended up leaving Thor with Bryan at the Forest Ranger station and heading down to the city. I must have just missed you this morning, but by then it was too late. The attack had already occurred.”
She took the bag and his semi-folded shirt from his hands and set them gently on the bed.
“Hey. I’m sorry. I’m exhausted, and that came out wrong.”
He was silent for a moment, then shrugged. “Accepted. There was nothing specific anyway, just a couple of guys talking about this dude they knew who had recently joined up, and was flapping his gums. It just felt...wrong to me.”
“All right. So let’s call Fletcher and let him know.”
“It’s too late.”
“It’s not. He can get a subpoena, go after their records—”
“Seriously, it’s too late. The site’s dark.”
“Dark?”
“Gone. The owners took it down. It’s like it never existed.”
Sam wasn’t a computer expert, but she knew that it was virtually impossible to get rid of every footprint on the internet. Caches existed of material. It could be accessed. Someone talented enough could get in there and find it. She told Xander that. He shook his head.
“You don’t understand. The group doesn’t exist. The site doesn’t exist. It was a closed portal on another site’s network, accessible only to certain people who knew certain ways to get into it, and then had the proper passwords. They’ve erased everything.”
He sat on the edge of the bed, looking despondent.
“You know who they are, though, don’t you?”
He was quiet for a moment.
“I know their internet handles. I’ve been looking for them since you left. I’ve trolled every site I can think of, and a few that I had no idea existed. They’ve gone gray.”
“What’s that mean?”
“They’re hiding in plain sight, where no one will be able to find them until this thing is over. They’ll lay low and wait until the time is right to resurface. They can’t take the chance that they’ll be strung up in this mess.”
Sam’s pulse increased. “Until this is over...you mean he’s not through? Whoever did the Metro attack?”
“Not by a long shot.”
“Xander. There’s no choice here. We have to tell Fletcher. Right now. He’s been added to the Joint Terrorism Task Force. He’ll know what to do.”
His answer was very pointed. “I know what to do.”
“You just said you’ve been searching for them all afternoon with no luck. Let Fletch and the JTTF take it from here. This is too much for just you. You’re brilliant and talented and, given the right amount of time, I have no doubt you could find them. But, Xander, people are dead. More may die. It’s bigger than you, or me, or a group of like-minded individuals on the internet. We need every available resource on this. If they know who this is, or what he might do next, they must be found.”
“Fletcher won’t find them. He has no idea what he’s up against.”
Sam knelt before him, took his face in her hands.
“We have to let him try. Okay?”
Xander hesitated a minute, then nodded. “Okay. But you better get a guarantee out of him first.”
“A guarantee of what?”
“That he doesn’t come roaring in here and arrest my lily-white ass.”
“He wouldn’t.”
“Fletcher might not. But the feds? They don’t exactly stop to ask questions. Shoot first, that’s what they’re taught.”
“You mean that metaphorically, don’t you?”
He gave her an exceptionally oblique look that again reminded her just how different they really were.
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J.T. Ellison
The killer is armed with a lethal weapon: an invisible pathogen that has been released into the Washington Metro.Two hundred people exhibit symptoms, but only three are pronounced dead. Dr Samantha Owen is the forensic pathologist called to consult on the case, but as she dissects the mysterious connections between the victims it becomes clear that this attack is not random.This pathogen is targeted. As Sam starts to close in on the killer’s identity, the further she propels herself into danger. Finding the truth might just lead Sam into risking her life…
The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides
Dr. Samantha Owens is starting over: new city, new job, new man, new life. She’s trying to put some distance between herself and the devastating loss of her husband and children—but old hurts leave scars.
Before she’s even unpacked her office at Georgetown University’s forensic pathology department, she’s called to consult on a case that’s rocked the capital and the country. An unknown pathogen released into the Washington Metro has caused nationwide panic. Three people died—just three.
A miracle and a puzzle...
Amid the media frenzy and Homeland Security alarm bells, Sam painstakingly dissects the lives of those three victims and makes an unsettling conclusion. This is no textbook terrorist causing mayhem with broad strokes, but an artist wielding a much finer, more pointed instrument of destruction. An assassin, whose motive is deeply personal and far from understandable.
Xander Whitfield, a former Army Ranger and Sam’s new boyfriend, knows about seeing the world in shades of gray. About feeling compelled to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. Only his disturbing kinship with a killer can lead Sam to the truth...and once more into the line of fire.
Praise for J.T. Ellison
‘Scintillating… Suspenseful… Startling…’
Publishers Weekly
‘Mystery fiction has a new name to watch.’
John Connolly, New York Times bestselling author
‘Tennessee has a new dark poet.’
—Julia Spencer-Fleming
‘J.T. Ellison’s debut novel rocks.’
Allison Brennann, New York Times bestselling author of Fear No Evil
‘Creepy thrills from start to finish’
James O. Born, author of Burn Zone
‘Fast-paced and creepily believable…gritty, grisly and a great read’
M.J. Rose, internationally bestselling author of The Reincarnationist
‘A turbo-charged thrill ride of a debut’
Julia Spencer-Fleming, Edgar Award finalist and author of All Mortal Flesh
‘Fans of Sandford, Cornwell and Reichs will relish every page.’
J.A. Konrath, author of Dirty Martini
‘Shocking suspense, compelling characters and fascinating forensic details’
—Lisa Gardner, New York Times bestselling author of Catch Me
‘A Deeper Darkness has everything I love in a thriller: stunning twists and shocks, fascinating forensics and heroines I deeply cared about. J.T. Ellison is one of the best writers in the game.’
—Tess Gerritsen, New York Times bestselling author of The Silent Girl
J.T. ELLISON is a bestselling author based in Nashville, Tennessee. She writes the Taylor Jackson and Samantha Owens series, which have been published in more than twenty countries. Visit her website, www.JTEllison.com, for more information or follow her on Twitter @Thrillerchick.
Also by J.T. Ellison A DEEPER DARKNESS*
ALL THE PRETTY GIRLS
14
JUDAS KISS
THE COLD ROOM
THE IMMORTALS
SO CLOSE THE HAND OF DEATH
WHERE ALL THE DEAD LIE
*A Samantha Owens novel
Edge of Black
J.T. Ellison
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
For Sherrie Saint—whose twisted mind is a writer’s delight,
and, as always, for my Randy.
Contents
Praise for J.T. Ellison (#u77e2e3c1-ea49-527b-81c3-002010d75b0a)
About the Author (#u4135cef7-78d2-5c66-8361-f1ac7082b0b3)
Title Page (#ubfa6ca13-56ac-5075-b798-a69b32ce96bf)
Dedication (#ud7cb7d8e-1bce-5736-8c3f-27935f3e74e5)
Epigraph (#u2ff1e5f0-60fb-5f8a-8cc8-eb176a1b9ae7)
TUESDAY (#u41145c43-eeef-555e-83ab-aa00fee48f4d)
Chapter 1 (#ud64d45da-2fae-5443-b1fb-7466a9954427)
Chapter 2 (#uc9041bfd-f290-55d9-ae77-023bd3b41525)
Chapter 3 (#uff94a33e-1e29-593a-a951-0b1b32f0dab2)
Chapter 4 (#u6114f080-19ab-5115-91cf-7024d5b99c77)
Chapter 5 (#uac5c63dd-e4f8-5227-9064-34698501c5f7)
Chapter 6 (#u04fdcff5-a0f4-5820-ae00-f98d56804738)
Chapter 7 (#ucc43a732-f1da-5601-aeb7-235abab58070)
Chapter 8 (#u47d75c47-82ba-53f8-a975-585fbcbb99da)
Chapter 9 (#u0a6c0b60-2e7c-56e5-86d3-8551830e80ef)
Chapter 10 (#ubfcf6bea-6e16-598a-99d2-1551cd8a095e)
Chapter 11 (#ub11aa501-d868-5f04-86f4-5b91e47ae3aa)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
WEDNESDAY (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
THURSDAY (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)
FRIDAY (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 51 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 52 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
“In all men is evil sleeping;
the good man is he who will not awaken it,
in himself or in other men.”
—Mary Renault
TUESDAY
Chapter 1
Washington, D.C.
A single beam of light illuminated the path ahead, hovering and bobbing against the concrete walls. The tunnel was narrowing, growing tighter across his shoulder, forcing the joints to compress, pushing on his lungs. His breath came fast. He reminded himself to calm down, inhale through his nose. The mask was making it difficult to see, to smell, anything that might give him a sense of where he was. He paused, counted the number of times his limbs had moved forward. Once, twice, three times, twenty. Roger that. Five more evolutions and he’d be in place.
He squeezed forward, slithering like a snake along on his belly, his legs bunching up behind him, his arms forward, the Maglite in his left hand, his right feeling for the way. Slowly. Slowly.
There. He felt the hinge. Turned it gently, sensed the cooler air blowing up into the vent from below. Reached down into his shirt and pulled out the canister. The gloves made his hands clumsy, but he couldn’t risk contact. He’d die stuck in this shaft, wedged in above the vent, stinking and rotting until someone finally sought the source of the smell.
No one would think to look for him if he were to go missing.
He had no one. He was alone.
He double-checked his mask, made sure he was breathing clean. All systems go.
The clock in his head ticked away, closing down to the final moments.
Five. Four. Three. Two. One.
Time.
With sure hands, he opened the cylinder and depressed the button. The can discharged, spraying silently into the vent.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
Empty.
He shook it lightly, but there was nothing else to release. It was done.
He tucked the cylinder back into his shirt and started to move away. He needed to get out of the shaft and back onto the platform, all while avoiding the cameras.
He could do it. He had faith. He’d done three dry runs, and all went according to plan.
He moved out, reversing the slither, arms bunching, forcing his body backward until the resistance ended and he could move his shoulders and hips without constriction. The pipe grew larger, big enough that he crawled onto his knees, turned and faced the exit. He fed a mirror mount down the shaft. No one was around.
Clear.
He dropped lightly to the ground, took three steps to the right to make sure he didn’t accidentally get caught on film, found the metal ladder and began to climb. Higher and higher, his heart lighter and lighter. Success was his.
Below, he felt the first blast of air that indicated a train was coming. The rumbling grew louder, the ladder began to shake. He could have sworn he heard a cough. He paused his climb, held on and breathed into his mask.
This was a better high than you could pay for.
The train passed below him, streaking silver in the dark, rushing the air from the vent toward the platform. He let the rumbling shake his body for a few moments, counting off again, then continued to climb. The exit would be deserted, he’d made sure of that. He had a two-minute window during the shift change to get out.
He set the stopwatch in his head. Two minutes. Mark.
He opened the hatch and climbed onto the deserted platform. Three steps to the right, two steps forward. He’d left his backpack in the trash receptacle. He worked quickly. The mask, canister and gloves went into a sealable plastic bag. His clothes were next: he exchanged the black running suit for jeans and a white cotton T-shirt, pulled on yellow Timberlands. He used hand sanitizer on his arms to eliminate any traces that might have been left behind.
He zippered the bag, tossed it on his shoulder and started walking.
One minute.
The giant disposal catchall was nearly full. As he passed it, he tossed the bag into the depths. He knew they’d be around to empty it in two hours, and all tangible evidence of the crime would disappear into the vast chaos that was the dump.
Now unencumbered, he made better time.
Thirty seconds.
He could hear voices, ahead in the gloom.
Twenty seconds.
He stretched his stride, long legs eating up the pathway.
The elongated shaft of the tunnel appeared before him. His senses were overloaded—orange and blue and white lights, people milling about, yellow hard hats obscuring peripheral vision, getting ready to go back into the tunnels and hammer for the next several hours. He ducked around a column, reversing direction, and slid into the last of the line with the rest of the workers.
Ten seconds.
The first shift ended with a shrieking whistle, and a subway train arrived, rumbling to a stop on the platform. He followed the crowd into the metal tube, took a seat. The rest of the workers filed in behind him, exhausted after their long overnight.
Time.
The train pulled away, building speed, taking him farther and farther from the scene, away, in the other direction, from the canister’s contents.
He was safe.
He risked a small smile. Around him, men’s heads nodded in time as the train rushed along the tracks. He started counting forward, and at ninety-eight, the train began to lurch to a stop.
At exactly one hundred, the doors opened, and he stepped out into the brilliant early-morning sunshine.
Only one thing left to do, then he could depart. Leave this cesspool of a city behind.
Glory was his. Glory be. Glory be.
Chapter 2
Washington, D.C.
Dr. Samantha Owens
Dr. Samantha Owens walked into her lecture hall at exactly 7:00 a.m. The students were already arranged in the chairs, some sitting upright, some obviously wilting. Sam placed her notes on the lectern and turned to the class.
“Perk up, buckaroos. I know it’s early, and I realize the ice-cream social last night involved more ethanol than frozen coagulants, but we have work to do. Who can tell me what Locard’s Exchange Principle is?”
There was quiet laughter, the rustling of paper and laptops opening. Despite the obvious hangovers of many of the students, hands shot up all over the room. Sam called on the closest.
“First row, blue shirt. Go.”
The boy didn’t hesitate. “Any time you come in contact with an object or a space, you take something away and leave something behind.”
“Very good. So when you’re thinking in terms of a crime scene?”
The class chanted together, “There are no clean crime scenes.”
“Exactly.” Sam turned to the whiteboard and wrote Locard’s Theory at the top.
Sam was two weeks into her first teaching gig, and loving every minute of it. She missed the hands-on work that came with being a medical examiner, sure, but this was almost like vacation. Eager, happy, excited, sometimes—okay, often—hungover kids, all dying to learn the tricks of the trade so they could rush out and become the latest and greatest forensic investigators. Once the fall semester began, she’d be teaching at Georgetown University, heading up their new forensic pathology program, but in the meantime, her boss, Hilary Stag, the Georgetown University Head of Pathology, had volunteered Sam for the summer science continuing education program, which included a week of guest lecturing at their rival medical school, George Washington.
She’d been back in D.C. for just a month now. The move had gone smoothly, almost too smoothly. Her house in Nashville had sold quickly despite the depressed market, so instead of rushing into another mortgage, she’d decided to rent on N Street in Georgetown, a beautiful three-story Federalist townhouse that had been gutted inside and completely redone in nearly severe modernism, all glass and stainless and open stairwells, with an infinity lap pool in the backyard. It was as opposite from her snug home in Nashville as she could find, and she quickly realized the minimalist aesthetics pleased her. The only pricks of color were from the flowers she brought in and a few Pollock-like paintings on the walls. Everything else was black and white. She’d sold the vast majority of her furniture anyway, keeping just a few things she couldn’t bear to part with, including a supple white leather couch and her rolltop writing desk—it had been her grandmother’s. She purchased a bed, a small glass table and Eames chairs for the eat-in, and left the rest to chance.
Once the house was set up to her liking, she’d ventured west, into the mountains, to another aesthetically pleasing home nestled in the Savage River State Forest. Alexander Whitfield—Xander—a former first sergeant in the Army Rangers, held a similar outlook: less is most definitely more.
She’d spent a month on the mountain with him, fishing, hiking, sitting in companionable silence in front of his huge fire pit, listening to him play the piano, scratching his gorgeous German shepherd Thor’s ears in languorous time with the music. He wrote songs for her, and with each new note, she could feel the pieces of her soul slowly knitting back together. She treaded gingerly but purposefully into the new relationship, finding surprising compatibilities in many areas, intellectually and physically.
Running away from Nashville had been the smartest move she’d ever made.
D.C. greeted her with warm, sunny days, white marble-columned buildings, grassy expanses and gray-blue waters flowing quickly under the majestic bridges. Xander greeted her with himself. The city paled in comparison.
She realized heads were cocked, awaiting her next bit of wisdom. Anytime Xander got into her thoughts, she got distracted. She figured that was a good thing.
With a smile, she apologized, then ran the class through a typical homicide crime scene, from the job of the death investigator to investigation and collection of the body to the postmortem. A few faces pinched when she started with the autopsy slides, but most hung on her every word.
She was nearly to the last slide when a low murmur began in the back of the room.
She turned to see what the issue was. No one was looking her way. Instead, they were staring at one of the students, a slight blonde who was clearly not paying attention.
“Are my slides boring you?” Sam asked.
The girl didn’t look Sam’s way. She was slumped in her chair. Sam could immediately see something was wrong, though her first thought was, Wow, she’s completely hungover. Hope she doesn’t puke.
A brunette four rows back raised her hand. “Um, Dr. Owens? I think she’s really sick.”
The room began to titter. Sam glanced at her teacher’s assistant. “Reggie, hit the lights.”
The room brightened immediately, and she could see concern written on the students’ faces.
She walked up the stairs to the student and started to take inventory.
Her eyes were glassy. She was shivering, a fine tremor that moved on a loop through her body. Her breathing was shallow and labored, and a sheen of sweat glistened across her face. Her lips were even tinged blue.
Respiratory distress. Hypoxia. Fever.
Shit.
“What’s your name, sweetie?”
Sam felt terrible that she didn’t already know the answer to the question; she’d only learned a few names so far. The students had a month of different classes, and this group had only rotated in a couple of days before. The girl didn’t answer, just stared at the floor and coughed a bit.
“Her name is Brooke Wasserstrom. She’s in my dorm.” The brunette who’d alerted Sam was standing over her friend, worry etched on her face.
Sam put her fingers on the girl’s pulse, which was weak and thready. Her skin was terribly warm.
“Was she drinking last night?”
“Yeah, maybe a little bit. She left early—she was going home to spend the night and the Metro closes at midnight. She came back this morning, I saw her come out of Foggy Bottom when I went for coffee.”
“Do you know if she has any preexisting conditions? Is she diabetic?”
“Not that I know of. I’ve never seen her take anything other than, like, Advil. I don’t know her that well, she lives on my hall is all.”
Brooke’s breathing was getting worse. She needed medical attention immediately. And thankfully, there was a hospital less than half a block away. It would be faster to take her there than call EMS to come to the school.
Decision made, Sam stood up and announced, “I need someone to carry her.”
Reggie came to her side. “I’ll carry her. What’s wrong? Do we need to alert the school?”
“We need to get her over to the emergency room. She needs oxygen. We can worry about the school after she’s stabilized. Let’s go. Kids, class is dismissed.”
The students poured forth from the room, quiet and somber. A few were crying, including Brooke’s dorm mate, who stood frozen on the steps. Sam reached back and touched her arm.
“You need to come with us. Sorry, what’s your name?”
“Elizabeth.”
“Elizabeth. I know you’re concerned. But we need your information about Brooke’s activities over the past few days. So tag along, okay?”
“Yes, Dr. Owens.”
Reggie lifted Brooke into his arms. She folded into him, lethargic and coughing, and Sam grew even more concerned. Elizabeth grabbed the girl’s backpack.
Sam led the way, out the doors, down the hallway and out onto the street. The thin wail of sirens rose in the background, and she felt a chill crawl down her spine. Premonition. Déjà vu. Something.
They exited the building on 22nd and crossed the street to the GW Medical Center. Sam walked them directly into the emergency room entrance, and right up to the triage window. There was a lot of activity behind the glass. Sam glanced around and realized the emergency room was full. Strange for this time of day—they usually filled up at night, when people were ill and couldn’t see their primary doctor, or got themselves involved in a brawl or had too much to drink or took too many drugs. Ten on a Tuesday morning wasn’t exactly peak time.
She pounded on the glass until she got the attention of the harried triage nurse, who flung the glass window open and said, “Have a seat, we’ll be with you in a minute.”
“I have a hypoxic teenager here in acute respiratory distress. She needs oxygen immediately.”
“Jesus, another one?” The nurse slammed the window closed and came around the desk to open the door. “Bring her in.”
Another one? What the hell?
They brought Brooke into the triage station. The nurse took one look at her, opened the door to the back and yelled, “Stretcher, oxygen, STAT.”
Two seconds later a gurney rolled up to the door. Reggie deposited Brooke on the white sheet. She was looking even worse, her eyes closed, her breath coming in little pants. Sam could hear the laboring breath, wheezing in and out, knew the girl was most likely developing rales, the first steps to pulmonary edema. But without a stethoscope, she couldn’t be sure.
This was maddening.
“You may need to intubate her. What do you mean, another one?”
“You’re a doctor?”
“Yes.”
“We’re getting slammed with people with breathing issues this morning. From all over town.” The nurse glanced furtively at Reggie and Elizabeth, whose faces were strained with shock. “We don’t know the cause yet. You two wait out here. You, Doc, come with me.”
Sam narrowed her eyes at the nurse. She turned to Reggie and Elizabeth. “I’ll take it from here. You guys don’t leave without me, okay?”
“Yes, Dr. Owens,” they chimed.
Sam followed the nurse as she pushed Brooke’s stretcher back into the bowels of the emergency room. Obviously she was trying to keep from alarming everyone, but it was clear something major was happening. This was an emergency room in crisis.
The nurse slammed an oxygen mask on Brooke’s face and shouted, “Dr. Evans, we have another one.”
A doctor, bald on top, with a tonsure of curly gray hair circling his skull, approached the stretcher as they pushed.
The nurse ran through the symptom list quickly as the doctor examined Brooke. Brooke’s breathing was declining, and as they pulled the stretcher into an open bay, he called for an intubation tray. A team of doctors and nurses leaped into action, swarming the girl, cutting off her clothes, putting the breathing tube down her throat, getting IVs started in both arms, taking blood. Brooke didn’t even whimper, or fight. She was just lying there, almost comatose.
Sam stepped back out of the way and let them do their work, but couldn’t help noticing that Brooke’s clothes were being handled with extreme care, and all the people working on her were in level-two special protective clothing.
Not good.
The doctor, who Sam surmised was a supervisor, turned to her.
“Are you exhibiting symptoms, too?”
“No.”
“Name?”
“Dr. Samantha Owens.”
“I’m just going to have a quick look.” He shone a light in her eyes, felt her pulse. “Ph.D.?”
“Forensic Pathology, thank you very much.”
He met her eyes then, a lopsided smile on his face. “Southern girl, too.”
“Nashville.”
“I’ve been there. Good barbecue. Any shortness of breath?”
“No. I’ve got no symptoms. I’m her professor, we were in class at GW when she decompensated.”
“Okay. Fever? Cough? Tightness in the chest?”
“No. Nothing. I’m fine. As far as I know, so is everyone in my class except for Brooke. What is going on?”
“We don’t know. We’re seeing people from across the city who are all presenting in respiratory distress. You stick around, okay? Just in case, here’s a mask. We’ll do everything we can for her. Might want to get her parents in, if you can.”
He turned away, dismissing her. He wasn’t telling her everything. Despite his attempt at good humor, she could see the tight lines around the edges of his mouth and eyes. She put on the mask, then allowed the triage nurse to lead her back to the waiting room.
Reggie and Elizabeth had found a corner oasis free of coughing people. Sam took two masks from the nurse and went to the students.
“Put these on.”
They both slipped into the masks, eyes wide with fear.
“What’s happening, Dr. Owens?”
Long low beeps began, different tones and beats. All of the phones in the room were chiming, including hers. She reached for it, but Reggie beat her. He turned his phone in her direction so she could read the text. It was from Alert DC.
Washington D.C. Metro System is temporarily closed. Tune to your local emergency channels for updates.
Sam felt a massive ripple of unease.
Reggie got another text. “It’s up on GW Alert, too. What do you think’s happening, Dr. Owens?”
“I don’t know. You know how emergency services can be, though. They tend to overreact.”
They both knew she was lying.
Sam wanted to comfort them. Reggie was handling himself, but Elizabeth looked like she was about to fall apart. “Okay, kids. Hopefully this is just a false alarm, a mistake, even a drill. We do need to get in touch with Brooke’s parents. Reggie, can you call the chancellor’s office and let them know what’s happening? Elizabeth, how about you get in touch with your RA. Let’s see if we can approach from two sides.”
Reggie received another text. Then another. With every new ding Sam’s heart beat harder.
“It’s official. They’re sending people with symptoms here, to GW.”
Reggie finally started to look worried.
“Why?” Elizabeth asked.
Sam met her eyes. “Because they have the largest mass decontamination unit in D.C.”
Decontamination. That was not the word she wanted to speak right now. Decontamination implied a biological or chemical attack. Which meant only one thing.
Terrorism.
Reggie nodded. “It gets worse. It’s happening right below us.”
“Below us?”
He looked at her in horror. “They think it started at the Foggy Bottom Metro.”
Chapter 3
Foggy Bottom was the Metro stop that fed George Washington University, as well as Georgetown. It was the last D.C. stop on the Blue Line west before it slipped under the Potomac and headed into Virginia. Just a stone’s throw away from the Watergate and the Kennedy Center, six blocks from the White House, it was one of the deepest Metro stops in the system, with an escalator that defied gravity and was constantly under repair. You could cut half an hour off your gym workout if you climbed those stairs.
Sam’s mind was a blur, but she processed the information quickly. She had training for these types of situations—in the post 9/11 world, all law enforcement in Nashville had been given extensive briefings and training sessions, and as head of the medical examiner’s office, she’d been a part of that. Her first inclination was to figure out how to help.
“Stay here,” she said to Reggie and Elizabeth.
“Where are you going?”
“To see what I can do to help.”
“Dr. Owens, it’s not safe.”
She turned back to Reggie and Elizabeth. “I’ll be very careful. I promise. You follow the instructions you’re given by the doctors and nurses here.”
She booked it to the exit. The scene had changed dramatically in the fifteen minutes they’d been inside the hospital. Blue and white lights flashed, and she could hear shouting. The street was littered with fire engines, HAZMAT trucks, cops, ambulances and first responders rushing purposefully toward the Metro. Crime scene tape had already gone up around the park and the roads were closed, traffic being diverted away from the scene. Techs in Tyvek suits with SCBA—self-contained breathing apparatuses—streamed down the frozen escalator. A uniform shouted at Sam, gesticulating wildly toward the medical center. The message was clear. Get the hell out of the way.
The only comfort Sam took from the scene was that it was still intact. A suitcase bomb would have eliminated the area.
So not nuclear. Biological or chemical. It could be anything, really. Her mind started into overdrive, and she could swear she was starting to itch. She hoped it was a psychosomatic response.
A first receiver, bundled in Tyvek and nearly unrecognizable as a male aside from his size, stopped her. People dressed similarly were streaming past them into the bowels of the Metro.
“Ma’am, were you in the Metro?”
“No. What’s happening? I’m a doctor, with disaster training. Can I help?”
“Not until we can be sure you’re okay. Get inside the hospital. You’ll be decontaminated and asked to stay for observation.”
“I just came from the hospital. I’m fine. I want to help.”
The receiver shook his head and pointed toward the doors. “Too bad. You’ve exposed yourself. You have to go though the process. Get inside.”
Oh, son of a bitch. She shouldn’t have gone back out until the scene had cleared. Now she was going to be stuck.
Sam was tempted to disregard him, to surge forward, but the thought was fleeting. She’d just be in the way.
She turned and went back into the hospital. A line was forming on the right side of the emergency room, snaking down the hall. Sam knew immediately what they were doing: triage for the people who were in the Metro, and triage for those who weren’t. So whatever substance this was, they were taking precautionary measures for the people who were close to the attack, and a whole different set for those actually exposed to the contaminant.
Another receiver met her, this time a no-nonsense nurse with steel-gray hair and a sharp chin. Sam tried again. “I’m a doctor. What are we dealing with? What kind of toxin?”
The woman shook her head. “We don’t know anything just yet, sugar. Now shut up and get in line, you’re holding things up.”
Nurses. The same everywhere. All dedicated to helping, and no time for bullshit.
Maybe this was just a massive false alarm. She prayed fervently that was the case, but the precautions now being taken—those that she could see, anyway—precluded that.
Sam was passed from hand to hand, interviewed briefly, and when it was clear she hadn’t been in the Metro proper, nor was exhibiting any symptoms, was sent to yet another line. People formed in behind her, more excited than scared.
What the hell was going on? Sam wasn’t used to being incapacitated like this. She felt just fine. Obviously the exposure was in the Metro. She could see people coming in on stretchers, their clothes rapidly being cut off and disposed of, oxygen applied. One man was intubated, the rest were just moaning. Sam watched the first receivers bathe his body with a solution of soapy water, getting whatever he had been exposed to off his skin.
Words were starting to float around now, from the people coming in off the street.
Respiratory distress. Coughing. Burning eyes. White powder.
Sam’s trained mind went to a different place.
Anthrax. Ricin. Sarin.
D.C. was always on extra high alert, just like New York, and all the major cities, really, for any hint of terrorist activity. There was one plus to the situation—they were prepared for nearly anything. But the fallout from any of those kinds of attacks could last for days. She combed her memory—what was today? An anniversary of some sort, with meaning only to those involved?
Her line, the double-check line, she’d dubbed it, took only ten minutes, but it felt like hours. Sam was finally in front of Dr. Evans again.
“Name?”
“Dr. Samantha Owens. We met an hour ago.”
He was taken aback for a moment, then nodded. “I remember. Nashville. What are you doing here?”
“I went outside to see if I could help.”
“Brilliant, Doctor. We’ll need you on the back end of this, not in the middle. Any new symptoms?”
“No. I’m fine.”
“Since you’ve been in the contamination zone you have to stay isolated for the time being. Maybe you could keep an eye on the folks here, let us know if any of them start showing symptoms. The reports are coming in that the people who are sick took the Metro this morning. So we’re just being extra cautious with people who were in the area. Can you do that for me? Keep yourself out of any more trouble?”
“Of course. But what should I be looking for outside of respiratory distress? What are we dealing with?”
“We don’t know yet. They’re in the tunnels doing air-quality tests. HAZMAT is getting positives for an unidentified neurotoxin. Might be a false alarm, but I’ve seen too many people who aren’t looking good to think it’s just a mistake. Good news is, while we’ve got a few critical, none are dead yet. Hang in there. It’s going to be a while before we can release you.”
“I have HAZMAT training. I can help.”
“We’re fine right now. We’re the best in the country at response. Thanks, though.”
She was shuffled off to the right again, taken down a long hallway, then asked to sit on the floor and wait.
This was insane. She should be helping, not sitting in a hallway with a bunch of scared people waiting to see if any of them started coughing.
They couldn’t stop her from thinking about the situation, though. She knew exactly what the HAZMAT teams were doing, the tests they’d be running. If there was powder, they’d be able to analyze it on-site. If it was airborne, that was a whole different kind of response.
The logic of the situation started to eat at her. If Foggy Bottom was ground zero, why stage a biological or chemical attack at the Metro station closest to the best decontamination unit in the area? Remorse? Desire to allow innocents to live? Terrorists wouldn’t be kind, or allow for convenience. They’d stage as far away from help as they could to maximize the dead, then hit the first responders as they came in, as well.
Come on, Sam. You are really jumping to conclusions now. You don’t even know what’s happening—it could just as easily be a chemical fire as it could a terrorist attack. The Metro was constantly under repair, and steady work was being made on the new Silver Line to the airport. This was most likely just a local issue that needed extra precautions.
That made her feel better. It wasn’t like her to assume: she was a scientist, after all, logic and evidence her closest friends. But it felt different to be involved, not on the outside trying to figure out what was happening. Without a cadaver, a set of sharpened Henckel knives and a dissection tray, she was sometimes lost.
But she’d been involved in plenty of investigations in the past. She couldn’t help herself. She let her thoughts distract her. How many victims would there be? If it was a biological or chemical hazard, it could take hours until they knew what they were dealing with. If it was airborne, it could be ten times worse. So many of the airborne toxins took hours to manifest symptoms, and were practically impossible to contain. With this many people already down, perhaps it was something else. Chemical, most likely.
It was rather cruel and unusual punishment that there wasn’t a TV in the hallway they could tune to. She figured the media was going absolutely stark raving mad by now.
Her iPad was first generation wireless only, damn it, or else she could be researching exactly what was going on right now. Her phone was just that, a phone, with the ability to dial in and out, and receive texts. She wished she could text Reggie, let him and Elizabeth know she was stuck back here, but she didn’t have his number in her phone.
She wished she could call Xander. But he was fishing today, off in the wilderness. She’d never be able to reach him. One of the things that they were both happy about in the relationship was the freedom. Sam wasn’t a hoverer, and Xander needed his space. He liked being able to come and go without letting her know his every move, and so did Sam. It was becoming the bedrock of their relationship. But right now, all Sam wanted was to hear his voice, to know that he was okay. To feel his arms around her.
The people near her started talking among themselves, and she listened to the rumors fly.
“It’s all over Twitter. They don’t know what’s going on but they’re saying fifteen dead.”
“I just heard two dead.”
“Twenty-nine bodies.”
“No one knows what the deal is.”
“Holy shit. They’re ordering extra body bags.”
Sam felt the blow to her gut. Any casualty would be too many. Two, fifteen, twenty-nine—she hoped to God those numbers weren’t just climbing as more cases were reported. If that number was even close to the truth...and with many airborne toxins, instant death was rare. Obviously people had made it out of the Metro; the triage nurse wouldn’t have asked her if they hadn’t.
Jesus. She just wanted to know what they were dealing with.
Fletcher.
Ah. Why hadn’t she thought of it before? Detective Darren Fletcher, her buddy in D.C. homicide. He’d tell her what was going on, if he knew, at least.
She went through her phone until she found his cell number. She hadn’t talked to him since she got back to town and started teaching, irrationally hoping he wouldn’t be upset with her. She’d worked a case with him before she moved back to D.C., the death of her ex-boyfriend, and the two of them had formed a bond. Fletcher would have liked that bond to go further, but he’d respected the fact that she was with Xander now. Sort of. She hadn’t been willing to test that theory yet.
The phone rang and rang and rang, finally going to voice mail. Well, that wasn’t good. That meant he was either avoiding her call or too busy to take it. She decided to try one more contact—Dr. Amado Nocek, one of the city’s medical examiners. Nocek had offered her a position with the M.E.’s office when she told him she wanted to move to D.C. She appreciated that offer so much, but being an M.E. wasn’t what she needed to be doing right now. She was still recovering, still trying to make sense of her life. Her job in Nashville had become an albatross around her neck instead of a joy. She needed to do something that didn’t involve day-to-day contact with the dead.
That’s why teaching appealed to her. She could talk about her field in a theoretical way, and not be hands-on again until she was ready.
Nocek answered on the first ring. His strangely lilting voice, the result of a European upbringing that drew on both Italian and French, combined with several years in the polyglot accent that made up D.C., calmed her immediately. “Samantha. It is very fine to hear from you this morning. I suppose you are calling to ask the nature of the emergency we find ourselves in, and not developing plans for a small, intimate gathering for dinner at your new house?”
Nocek always did have a way of cutting to the chase.
“You know me too well, Amado. I’m actually sitting outside the decontamination unit at GW. No one’s been forthcoming with information.”
“I will give you what I myself know. We have been getting reports of a biological contaminant that was released in the Metro. Multiple reports of people being taken ill, all over the city.”
“Any idea what the contaminant is?”
“No. People are presenting with respiratory distress, fever and coughing. It could be most anything.”
“Casualties?”
“None that are related to this that we are aware of yet, but that will most likely change as the day wears on. We are in an uncertain time at the moment, Samantha. I am well pleased to hear that you are safe.”
A stern-looking nurse tapped Sam on the shoulder. “Ma’am. Please turn off your cell phone.”
“And you, Amado. I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to go. Will you call me if you can once you find out more?”
“Of course. Be well, my dear.”
Sam hung up the phone. The nurse nodded at her, satisfied that the breach was under control, and strode away.
There was a young man sitting next to her. He raised an eyebrow and said, “Well?”
“Nothing concrete,” Sam said. She wasn’t about to tell a stranger what Nocek had just disclosed. That was just enough information to cause a wild panic.
“Are they going to let us out of here?”
“I hope so. My friend said there have been no confirmed casualties. So that’s good news. This may be a false alarm after all. Sometimes in an emergency situation, people who are already sick have issues.”
She turned away from him and stared at the floor.
This wasn’t how her new life was supposed to begin.
Is it possible to ever really start over? To find yourself after a tragedy? How do you measure the pain you’ve experienced, and know what is appropriate and what isn’t? Sam had lost her husband and her twins in the Nashville floods two and a half years ago. And lost part of herself, too. She’d come to D.C. the shell of a person, one going through the motions of a daily life, a breathing ghost. More loss had led her to Xander, and her path back to the land of the living.
She had to admit she felt a little snake-bit. Nashville, and her life there, had been decimated. She’d run to D.C., and now it, too, was under attack.
She could only hope that the damage would be minimal. To all of them.
Chapter 4
Another hour passed. Sam was just about to start stamping her feet and demanding answers when the nurse who’d run the initial triage came down the hall.
“Is everyone feeling all right?”
There was a chorus of affirmations.
“You’ve been cleared to leave. Please come back immediately if you have any unusual symptoms. Use your masks until you get home.”
Sam couldn’t wait to get out of there. If she’d been stuck much longer, fretting and worrying, she might not be able to control her anxiety. And losing it in a group of strangers wasn’t exactly her cup of tea.
They broke off into packs and left the hospital through the emergency room doors. A corridor had been created for their exit, and they were able to leave unmolested. Sam tried to look for the kids but didn’t see them. Hopefully, they’d been released much earlier.
The scene had calmed considerably since her preliminary foray outside. The bright summer sun beat down on the asphalt, making waves of heat shimmer in the foreground. News trucks had replaced the first responders, though there were still a few HAZMAT trucks parked at the curb.
Sam turned her phone on the second she was clear of the doors. She had two messages—both from Fletcher.
She played them in order.
“Saw you called, I assume you’re wondering about what’s going down. Call me back when you get this.”
The second was more abrupt. “Where the hell are you, Owens?”
Ah, that was sweet. He was actually worried about her. Fletcher was a good man. A good man, but not her type. They were destined for friendship only.
Sam hiked up to 23rd Street, found a bench and called Fletcher back. He answered on the first ring, obviously annoyed.
“Where have you been?”
“At the hospital, Mom. One of my students got extremely ill and I took her to GW, then got caught in the decontamination fuss. I’ve been sitting in a hallway for two hours. They made me turn off my phone.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. What’s going on? I talked to Amado and he told me—” she glanced around then covered her mouth with her hand “—it’s a biological attack.”
“We don’t know yet. Total clusterfuck. People sick from all corners of town, we can’t trace it down, and the entire city is on alert. Homeland Security raised the threat level. They are in a dither.”
“That’s to be expected. What can I do to help?”
“Nothing.” Fletcher sounded horrified at the idea, which hurt Sam’s feelings a little.
“I can’t just sit here, Fletch.”
“You most certainly can. Better yet, get home and stay there. I have to go, but I’ll call you later. Don’t interfere, Sam. Just let us do our jobs. It’s our town, we know how to handle things.”
He hung up, and she felt stung all over again. Dismissed like a civilian. It was her town now, too.
She stowed the phone in her pocket and started the walk home. It would only take fifteen minutes or so on a normal day, but the sidewalks were crowded with people, and the traffic was a snarled nightmare.
As pissed and upset as she was, she reminded herself again that she was no longer involved in the day-to-day operations of law enforcement. And that had been her choice. A choice that until this very moment she thought she was content with. Instead, here she was, a victim again. Caught in an attack, unable to do anything to alter her course. She started itching for some hot water, satisfied the urge with a dollop of antibacterial gel.
At Washington Circle she turned left on Pennsylvania Avenue and followed the throngs of people trying to get out of the city on foot. She’d worn sandals today, thank goodness. Hiking all the way home in heels would have been brutal. It was bright and sunny, warm, but without the summer humidity that usually choked D.C.’s air from May until September. All around her people were talking, worrying, panicking, preening, many on cell phones relaying their close call with...something. They didn’t know for sure what. A fever of excitement and nervousness permeated the crowds, overlaid with an overwhelming sense of fear.
Fear of the unknown. Of what could be happening. Of getting home and finding out that someone you know, someone you love, was involved. Was hurt. Or worse.
Sam remembered that awful feeling from 9/11, the hours of uncertainty, the unanswered phone calls, the nightmarish quality of the news reports, almost as if Hollywood had decided to drop a CGI green screen against the Manhattan and D.C. backdrops and shoot a heart-wrenching action sequence. She’d lost several friends that day: two who were in the towers when they fell, one on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon.
Even one casualty was too much.
When she arrived at her house on N Street, it was just after 2:00 p.m. Four hours had passed since Brooke’s swan dive in class. Four interminably long hours. She was exhausted. She just wanted to take a long, hot shower, and wait for Xander to get back within cell range.
Sam took the steps to her front door, inserted her key. The door was unlocked.
She thought back, trying to remember if she’d locked it this morning when she left for class. Of course she had. She always locked her doors.
She heard her best friend’s voice mentally admonish, “Back out, and call the police.”
Sam shook homicide lieutenant Taylor Jackson out of her head. There was a perfectly legitimate reason for her front door to be open. The only problem was the timing. She turned the knob and pushed the door open with her foot.
“Xander?” she called out.
“Sam!” Xander came barreling out of the kitchen. She was struck by how handsome he was, even with worry lines creasing his forehead. His dark eyes locked on hers. He reached her in two long strides and pulled her to his chest.
“Jesus, I’ve been worried sick. You weren’t answering your phone.”
She let him hold her, just reveling in the normalcy of it, how warm his skin was beneath his T-shirt, how she could just reach all the way across his tightly muscled back, his scent, woodsy and clean. He’d showered recently; the edges of his dark hair were still damp.
She pulled back.
“What are you doing here?”
He didn’t answer, instead kissed her, long and soft, so sweetly that she nearly forgot everything that had happened this morning. Nearly everything.
When he released her, she smiled up at him. He topped her by several inches. He made her feel downright dainty.
“Trying again. Why are you here, Xander? Not that I’m not thrilled to see you, but I thought you were fishing.”
He draped an arm across her shoulders, walked her into the kitchen.
“There’s tea. It should still be warm. And I did go fishing. My guy never showed, and nothing was biting so I decided to head back to civilization and check my email. I heard about the attack and started down here immediately. I called as soon as I got here. Why didn’t you answer your phone?”
Sam reached into her pocket. She opened the phone and saw a blank screen. It must have run out of battery on her walk home.
“Whoops. It’s dead.”
“That’s a seriously cheap-ass phone, lady.”
“It’s a seriously old phone, and I should probably get a new battery for it. Otherwise, it does its job.”
His playful tone changed.
“How bad is it?” He didn’t need to say more.
“I don’t know yet. Fletcher blew me off and Nocek said there were no casualties yet. It’s a biological agent of some kind. What’s the news saying?”
“Multiple contradictory accounts. I’m so glad you’re home. I was worried about you. Are you...okay?”
Sam knew what he was talking about. Since the flood, since she lost her family, these kinds of events had a tendency to shake her. Natural disasters—tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, floods—fed her anxiety and caused her to relapse into obsessive hand washing. She tried not to sit up nights watching the Weather Channel, but sometimes succumbed. She felt that the only way she could ever move past the fear was through immersion. If you’re afraid of spiders, you spend time letting tarantulas crawl on your arm. If you’re afraid to fly, you get on airplanes as often as possible.
If you’re worried a terrible flood might sweep your life away...
It wasn’t necessarily a healthy choice, but it worked for her.
Xander, on the other hand, spent his time avoiding all things that could remind him of his own stormy past. He didn’t understand her need to watch, to experience, to relive. To punish herself through others’ pain. He’d served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, seen things she could only imagine in her worst nightmares. He’d lost friends. He’d spent nights under fire, days in armored carriers driving IED-laden roads, weeks on foot in the desert, not knowing if each breath was his last. When he got out of the Army, he went to ground, alone in the woods, cut off from everyone and everything. Until Sam.
They were a perfect fit. Each damaged, each desperate. Each so very alone.
She considered his question. Was she okay? Strangely, she’d only had a few moments today where she wanted to wash. Instead, she’d been slightly jazzed by it all. She took that as an encouraging sign.
“I’m good. I promise. I was worried about you, too. I’m really glad you’re here, Xander.”
She poured a cup of tea, and they settled in the living room where Xander already had the television on. Every channel was in full-on breaking-news alert. Sam had enough experience with emergency situations to know that half of the information was wrong, and the other half would change fifty times before the end of the day. What they could glean so far wasn’t much more than what Sam already knew.
She flipped channels while Xander used her computer to surf the internet, searching for anything he could find. As a former Ranger, he had a different set of contacts than Sam. When the news broke another piece of the story, Xander would confirm or deny based on what his military brethren were saying across their message boards and chat rooms.
By 5:00 p.m. things had boiled down to a set of certainties no one could deny. Someone had released an airborne toxin in the Washington, D.C., Metro. It caused a progressive pulmonary distress. And two people were confirmed dead.
Everything else at this point was just speculation. The tests were being done on the toxin; so far they’d ruled out some of the obvious—the ones that would have created different symptoms. Sarin, ricin. Anthrax was still high on the list of possibles. The words made chills slip through her system.
The problem was, testing took time.
Just the idea of that made her skin crawl.
Sam decided she’d had enough. She went to the kitchen and began making dinner. She’d just unwrapped a head of butter lettuce when her phone rang. She glanced at the caller ID, saw Fletcher’s number. She pretended not to notice the uptick in her pulse as she answered.
“Fletch? Everything okay?”
“No. I need you, Sam. I’ll be there in five minutes. Meet me out front, we don’t have much time.”
“Need me for what?” she asked, but he’d already hung up the phone.
She replaced the receiver and put the lettuce back in the refrigerator.
Xander was on the laptop in her office. “Hey,” she said. “Anything new?”
“No. Same old shit—speculation and fear mongering. No one has a clue what’s going down.”
“I have to go. Fletcher just called. He’s picking me up in a few minutes.”
He rolled back in the chair. “Go where?”
“I don’t know. He just said he needed me and to meet him outside.”
“Why don’t I come with you?”
“I get the sense I may be a while. He sounded totally stressed-out. They might just need some extra hands.”
“But there’s only two dead.”
“Xander, I have no idea what he needs. I would assume it’s my services with the sharp end of a scalpel. Come out to the street with me, let’s see what’s happening. I’m sure he’ll tell us when he gets here.”
She grabbed her bag and her phone, tossed a light sweater over her shoulders just in case. Xander held her hand as they walked down her front steps to wait for Fletcher. She appreciated that he didn’t nag her about running off with another man. He was special, he knew it, and he was comfortable with his place in her world.
They didn’t have to wait long, Fletcher arrived with a squeal of tires a moment later. He put the passenger window down.
“Get in, Doc. We gotta go.”
She stuck her head in the window. “What’s up?”
He shot a glance at Xander, who was leaning in as well, over her shoulder. His face tightened imperceptibly.
“Classified.”
“Come on, Fletcher. He has the right to know.”
“Sorry. This one comes from above. You can call him later. Now, Sam. I’m not kidding.”
She turned back to Xander, who had a frown on his face. “I’ll call you as soon as I know anything. Don’t worry, okay?” She kissed him lightly, then got in the car before he could protest.
Fletcher slammed the gas and the car leaped from the curb. Sam grabbed the seat belt and jammed it into the lock.
“Jesus, Fletch. What the hell?”
He didn’t move his eyes from the road, spoke grimly.
“Congressman Leighton is dead.”
Chapter 5
Sam recognized the congressman’s name, but that was all. She told Fletcher that. He glanced over at her and barked a small, humorless laugh.
“You’re probably the only one in D.C. who doesn’t know everything about him. Peter Leighton is the head of the Armed Services Subcommittee. Four-term congressman from Indiana, Democrat, big-time dove. He’s been shooting down the military for years, authoring bills to cut spending, shutting down VA hospitals, the works. But lately, he’s had a change of heart. He authored an appropriations bill that will give more funding to the military. It’s a massive reversal. He’s been under fire.”
“Now I’ve got him. Xander isn’t a fan.”
“I can’t imagine why not,” he said drily.
“So what’s the story?”
“He collapsed in his office on the Hill about two hours ago. They said he was having trouble breathing. He was dead on the scene but they transported him anyway. Called it at GW half an hour ago.”
“And I’m racing with you where, why?”
“Morgue. Nocek wants you to help post him.”
“Why me?”
He glanced at her again. “I may have asked if he’d be cool with having you come in.”
“I’m flattered. Again, why me?”
“Because something isn’t right with the congressman’s death. I want to move fast, and I trust you to take an unbiased look. That’s all I’m going to say.”
“Cloak-and-dagger doesn’t suit you, Fletch.”
“Just trust me, okay?”
“Was he on the Metro this morning?”
“Undetermined.”
“God, you sound just like Xander when he doesn’t want to give up information. One word grunts. Come on, Fletch. I can’t do my job if you don’t give me the facts.”
He sighed. “They’re still running air-quality tests in the Metro. Nothing is registering. It’s not ricin, sarin or anthrax. It made over two hundred people really sick, but only two are confirmed dead. They were on the Metro early this morning, so the thinking is they were exposed directly, soon after the toxin was released. More could die—there are a few in medically induced comas and a couple in critical. We need to find out what the cause was, and fast, so the injured can get proper treatment.”
“Shouldn’t I be posting the two who died then?”
“Nocek is on it. He and his team finished the two from earlier and have run all the samples to the labs. But Leighton is different.”
“Different how?”
“Just...trust me.”
They were screaming up Constitution now, heading toward the Capitol. Even in a disaster, the view was stunning. The lights of the city shone brightly on the eerily empty sidewalks. The corners were manned by police in full armor, weapons at the ready. No one was on the streets, an unnerving sight. She’d never been able to travel so quickly through the city before—Fletcher had his mounted light going, was blowing through the stoplights like they didn’t exist. Sam was getting the sense that something much, much bigger was going on than just the death of a congressman.
* * *
The morgue was as depressingly bland and old as it had been the last time she’d been forced to visit—to do a secondary autopsy on her former boyfriend, Edward Donovan. Donovan’s murder had led her directly to Xander, who had been, at the moment she met him, the police’s prime suspect. Things worked out for the best, but she hadn’t held a scalpel over dead flesh for three months.
Would she be rusty? Would she be compelled to wash? Would the stillness overwhelm her and make her run away?
She didn’t like not knowing how she was going to react. It made her anxious. And her anxiety triggered all kinds of demoralizing, embarrassing tics.
She hadn’t been like this before the flood. She had never considered herself a strong woman, that was Taylor’s job. But Sam was steady. Reliable. Rational. She saw herself as a skilled forensic pathologist, nothing less, nothing more. She wasn’t a people person to start with, had few friends she truly trusted, but now she got to add in a dead husband and a lost family. She’d been systematically pushing people away for two years, and at the moment, their invisible absence stung.
Jesus, Sam. Way to go, feeling sorry for yourself in the middle of someone else’s crisis.
She shook her head slightly to dispel the melancholy, and followed Fletcher into the morgue.
A small, young woman with lively green eyes was waiting for them.
“Detective Fletcher? Dr. Owens? I’m Leslie Murphy, death investigator. Dr. Nocek is waiting for you. The press hasn’t arrived yet, but it’s only a matter of time.”
Sam turned to Fletcher in surprise. “You’ve managed to keep this quiet?”
He gave her a smug grimace. “I told you it was classified.”
Sam shook Leslie’s hand. “Let’s get me suited up then.”
“Right away, ma’am. Follow me.”
“Please don’t call me ma’am. Sam is fine.”
The girl looked back over her shoulder. “I’m Murphy then. My mom’s the only one who calls me Leslie.”
“Gotcha,” Sam said.
The doors opened into the antechamber that led to the autopsy suite, and Sam was pleased by her reaction. She felt relaxed, comfortable. The tension bled from her shoulders.
Home. You’re home.
Moments later, gloved and prepped, she entered the nave of her own personal church.
The smells were right. The air, cold and dead, whispering from the vents. The warm musk of blood, the slight meaty scent of open bodies. Metallic notes from the stainless tables and scales, overlaid with the squeaky markers used on the whiteboards. Thin scents of bleach and formalin, worn linoleum, and sweat.
The normal aromas of the autopsy suite, as comforting and natural to her as fresh roses in a vase.
Sam heard Fletcher curse softly under his breath. She caught his gaze and understood immediately.
A small boy lay in full rigor on a table off to the side, against the far wall. Out of the way. Eight, maybe nine years old. A quiet hush went through her, perhaps a prayer, maybe less than that. Her own son hadn’t gotten out of his second year; she had no way to compare the real with the might-have-been—the length of bone in the femur, or the shock of dark hair, only slightly mussed. The marble pale flesh of his body, unmarred for the moment.
Nocek caught them staring. “Such a saddening case. He was hit by a car while on his bicycle. He was not wearing the helmet, and as such suffered a traumatic brain injury. They took him off life support last night. We will do a partial autopsy, there is no doubt as to his cause of death.”
A partial autopsy—an exterior examination, X-rays, a vitreous fluid sample and blood draw. No cutting. Small mercies.
Sam felt a flash of anger—such a perfect boy, his brain damaged but his organs intact and usable, yet his family had not chosen to allow him to help others through donation. She chided herself for the thought. Who are you to judge, Sam?
She turned away from the child, touched Fletcher once on the shoulder in comfort. He had a son, a live one.
“I’m ready. Where is the congressman?”
“He is separated from the rest. Please, follow me.”
Nocek led them to a door to the right of the main room. “Let us take a few extra precautions. I would request that you double your masks and wear them at all times. We have set up special ventilation for the room. We are still unsure as to what the situation may be.”
Sam washed her hands again, thoroughly, even though she could hardly give the dead man her germs. There were levels of prevention based on the situation at hand. Because of the nature of the investigation, she wanted to be as sterile as possible to ward off any hint of cross-contamination and potential problems down the road. She had to wear special protective gear as well, also just in case. Which was fine, but it got in her way.
Once she was finished and they were all gloved and prepped, they entered what Sam knew to be a decomp suite: every decent-size morgue has a separate room for the decomposed bodies that come in to be posted. For the most part, the natural effluvia of fresh bodies wasn’t terribly offensive to the olfactory system, especially once you grew accustomed to the smells. But decomps were a different story. By isolating them, several things occurred: chain of custody remained intact; special precautions could be taken; evidence collected could be kept separate from the rest of the suite. Blowflies could be isolated; they had a pesky tendency to colonize decomposing bodies. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. But before that could happen, the biological chain of command kicked into high gear. Blowflies and maggots and larvae, oh my. Sam knew several forensic entomologists who lived for decomps.
Sam noticed several desiccated fly husks near the drain, under the table. Hatchlings, with no food to sustain them. Not unusual.
More interesting was the man lying on top of the stainless tray. Mid-fifties, silvery-gray hair, probably five-ten or so, naked, which was where it got interesting: he was as smooth and hairless as the eight-year-old boy on the other side of the door.
Sam circled the body, absorbing details. There were classic marks on his chest where someone had tried to revive him. His flesh seemed doughy and dented easily, which led her right to excessive edema. The cavities of his mouth and nose were red and irritated, his throat slightly ulcerated. Petechial hemorrhaging in his blank, bluish eyes gave her even more bits of the story.
It hadn’t been an easy death, that was for sure.
She looked closer at his legs, groin and chest, ran her fingers along his calf. The stubble there was no more perceptible than Sam’s was at the end of the day, several hours after she shaved her legs during her morning shower.
The congressman shaved his legs. And everything else, besides. This took manscaping to a whole new level.
“He shaved. His whole body. Thoroughly. Regularly. And practiced. Why?”
Neither man responded, and she started to get a glimmer of why she’d been asked to come in and do the post on the congressman. Discretion was needed. Real discretion.
“What was he into?” she asked.
“We don’t know for sure,” Fletcher answered. “There’s been scuttlebutt about him for years, but really subtle stuff. A couple of the girls in town might have mentioned in passing that he enjoyed trying on their clothes. Primarily their underclothes.”
“Seems harmless enough. He wouldn’t be the first cross-dresser in the government.”
“And a couple of the boys might have mentioned he liked to have a few cameras around while they did their thing.”
Sam met Fletcher’s eyes. “A bisexual cross-dresser with film? Anyone ever gotten their hands on it?”
“I haven’t seen it. And a few of them have said he’s gone a bit too far before.”
“Too far how?”
“Choke and revive. People being asked to play dead. That sort of thing.”
“Sounds like you have more than rumors to go on,” Sam said.
“Listen, Doc. This guy is a really big deal. Former dove, now an outspoken proponent for the military, looking for funding from every quarter. Served for years, a decorated veteran. He has a kid in Afghanistan. He had a presidential run in mind. His proclivities get out, it’s embarrassing for a whole bunch of people, you know?”
“He’s just a study in contradictions.”
“Sam...”
“That’s fine, I understand. But why all the secrecy around his autopsy?”
“Because of this. A text that came to the congressman’s phone. His office reported it about an hour ago.”
Fletcher pulled his notebook from his pocket and read the text verbatim.
Dear Congressman Pervert,
You messed with the wrong people.
Today’s attack is on you, shithead.
Chapter 6
Washington, D.C.
Alexander Whitfield
Xander didn’t like waiting, even though it was something he was accustomed to doing. In the three years since he’d left the service, he’d been marching to the beat of his own drummer. His background made that an easy choice—his parents had been hippies who lived on a commune, and originally named him, in the trippy-dippy fashion of all their friends, Alexander Moonbeam. He’d taken the necessary steps to reclaim a normal name and was now legally Alexander Roth Whitfield. The Third.
And instead of Moonbeam, which his parents still preferred, he went by Xander.
Xander’s grandfather was a hearty son of a bitch who ran a television enterprise. Xander’s dad had told his father to take the money and shove it, and as such, married Xander’s mom, Sunshine, and had two children in quick succession, Xander and his sister Yellow. They moved their burgeoning little family from San Francisco to a mountain farm in Dillon, Colorado, when Xander was a baby. He’d grown up in the woods, homeschooled, self-motivated and a prodigy. His parents were furious when he enlisted instead of attending Julliard. Dedicated pacifists, they didn’t know where they’d gone wrong. They wanted a life of pleasure for him, a life without hatred or fear. Instead, he ran headlong in the other direction.
When he was eighteen, he didn’t know how to make them understand his point of view. He didn’t want to smoke dope and drop acid and find the universal meanings of life in the shiny swirls of colorful trips. He didn’t want to grow organically or manufacture hemp linens. He wanted to see the world. He wanted to give back to the land who’d given him the freedom to make that choice. Yellow had been a dutiful daughter, opened a metaphysical shop in Modesto, California, carried her parents’ all-natural products. Xander played with guns.
There was something as soothing about disassembling an assault weapon blindfolded as there was in mastering Chopin for him. He knew he was different. Smart, yes, but there was something more. Something he couldn’t put his finger on. His commanding officers called it courage, intelligence, instinct. The school psychiatrists called it genius. His parents called him gifted.
He just saw it as a way to distinguish right from wrong, to use his gifts to milk the world of its incredible beauty. Under his fingers, the piano could render 8400 chords, each of which, when combined with another, told a story with infinite possibilities. Bullets did the same thing, if used properly.
He ended up in infantry on purpose. He could have been a pilot, he just didn’t feel like dealing with all the extra training. It was more enjoyable to be on the ground than in the air, anyway. More chance for a little one-on-one action, instead of floating above it all. He’d actually started the Apache training once, but pulled out to go to sniper school when a candidate had to drop and a slot unexpectedly opened. He was nineteen at the time with a raging hard-on for the Army. Anything they wanted to teach him, he wanted to learn.
Age tempered his enthusiasm a bit, but only just. Ranger School, Airborne, Sniper, Demolition—anything they could throw at him, he jumped at the chance. It was so different from the world he grew up in, so structured, so formal. There were regulations that he was expected to follow, and he thrived in the environment. Of course, he was a rising star, which meant he was getting respect and extra attention along the way, and that helped things a great deal. If he’d been a grunt and been treated like a grunt, dismissed out of hand by his superiors, he may have felt differently. He recognized that, tried to keep his star from burning too brightly so he could at least maintain some friendships along the way. If he hadn’t been an enlisted man, he could have gone pretty damn far.
But he mustered out at First Sergeant and was happy as hell to go. The Army had changed in the years he’d been suckling at her teat, marveling at his toys. A war that he felt was mismanaged, an officer he respected committing the ultimate sin, the constant day-to-day grind that became his life in the desert, fighting for every little thing he could gather up for his men—it turned him sour on the whole enterprise. After the shooting of his friend Perry Fisher, who they’d jokingly called King, it was all over for him. He knew the military would never again have that shine, the excitement that it first held, so he took his gear and his medals and his still-living ass and hurried on home.
Part of him was ashamed, and the other part knew it was for the best. The Army was an ever-evolving beast, and in the intervening years, as he grew from boy to man to warrior under their direction, it had become a different place, a political football. He didn’t feel his skills were being put to proper use, nor those of any of his brethren.
Of course, they were all dead now, too. He was the only one left from his tight-knit unit, and he felt the absence of his comrades keenly. When he mustered out, he found a quiet place in the mountains, away from everyone, his family, his friends. He led a monastic life on the land—something his parents could finally get behind.
The Savage River forest was kind to him. He fished and hunted when he needed meat. He brought vegetables and herbs from the ground when he needed flavors. He picked fruit from the trees when he needed something sweet. He watched the breeze wind sinuously through the trees when he needed a distraction, and used the sun and the moon as his guide when he needed to establish time. He was happy alone, felt safer that way. Since he’d been trained to kill, to be able to take a life without a second thought, he felt the need to repent.
The joke among his brethren, what do you feel when you kill a terrorist? Recoil.
And not the kind that meant your stomach was turned.
Repent wasn’t the right word. Recalibrate was more like it. He was a dangerous man, and he knew it. His mind needed to adjust back to the world where threats didn’t linger in the shadows, where he could sleep without his hand on the trigger.
He wasn’t quite there yet.
And then Samantha paraded into his life, and turned his world on its ear.
Samantha was more than his lover; she was his savior. He hated the circumstances that brought them together, but he’d fallen in love with her almost immediately, though he hadn’t shared that information with her. He hadn’t needed to—she’d felt the same pull. A connection, however faint, however strong, had been made in their first meeting. Pheromones, maybe, or their beings acknowledging kindred spirits. Regardless, something about her made his soul sing. He’d had other women—not many, sex was still a sacred act for him, another anomaly he’d developed in spite of his exceptionally liberal upbringing, where sex and nudity were as natural as the sun rising in the east—but enough to know the difference between lust and love. But Sam, beautiful, smart, good Sam, was different. He finally understood how his father could abandon his entire life and legacy for a woman.
And with that understanding came another—he’d been on the path to becoming an empty soul, devoid of feeling, of being unable to find the splendor in the world anymore. Sam was more than just the aesthetics. She’d brought him back from the near-dead. He would do anything for her.
Which was the reason, while watching the top of the hourly news update and waiting for Sam to confirm why she’d been rushed away by Fletcher, he felt compelled to reach out to a group of people he was familiar with.
The answers were out there.
And Xander might be able to help find them.
Chapter 7
Washington, D.C.
Dr. Samantha Owens
Sam read the text again, then looked up. “Did the congressman see this before he died?”
Fletcher shook his head. “This came in to his official cell number, so an aide holds the phone. There’s a ton of incoming calls we have to trace, and texts. The number was blocked, though, so it was probably a burner phone. We can get the details on it, but you know how long that can take.”
She did. Paperwork on disposable phones was akin to wandering through the seven circles of hell—doable, but no one in their right mind would choose that path.
“Good luck with that.”
“Thanks.” Fletcher got quiet for a moment. “In case the text was sent by the suspect, we need to look at this situation with a fresh eye. That the congressman was the real target. So call me if there’s anything weird here, okay? You can’t imagine the pressure I’m under right now.”
“I can imagine, and of course, I’ll call as soon as I have something.”
With a grateful smile, Fletcher left to start his investigation into the congressman’s last hours. Nocek asked if she needed help. She demurred, so he went to deal with the other insanities, and she and Murphy got to work.
Leighton was the third death of the day, that was indisputable. But without more information, doing the post, seeing the other victims, Sam couldn’t say conclusively that he was a part of the attack.
So she focused on the task at hand. After her initial examination of the body’s exterior, which showed exceptional edema of the head, neck, eyelids, upper and lower extremities, frothy blood coming from the mouth and nose, and a bluish cast to the skin, Murphy did the preliminary dissection, opening Leighton’s chest with her scalpel, a wide-legged Y incision. She fed the flesh away from the breastplate and used the shears to snap the ribs, one crunch at a time, until the breastplate came clear and Sam could look into the chest cavity unhindered.
What she saw was unusual, to say the least. More frothy blood, plus all of Leighton’s organs swollen beyond proportion, especially his heart, bulging in its pericardial sac, and his lungs, so distended they engulfed the chest cavity and touched at the midpoint. She poked around a bit, trying to get the lay of the land. His spleen was visibly bloated, the liver fatty, and more edema present. She began the dissection. His enlarged heart was otherwise healthy for a man his age, with little cholesterol plaque built up in the arteries, so cardiac arrest wasn’t the culprit. She started to work on the block of lungs and quickly realized Leighton was suffering from an underlying disease. His lungs were distended and the air pockets diffusely enlarged, ravaged most certainly from a lifetime of asthma. Bronchiectasis. Which made her wonder—why hadn’t he used his inhaler? In a case of fulminant pneumonia, surely the congressman would have been sucking hard on his albuterol. And if that didn’t work...
“Hey, Murphy, you have his clothes?”
“Sure.” She pulled out the plastic bag and held it up. “What do you need?”
“Look through his pockets for an inhaler. He’s asthmatic. Just curious what he was using.”
Murphy dug in, but came up empty.
“That’s weird. I guess he could have dropped it at his office, right?”
“Sure. In the heat of the moment, absolutely. It’s not something we would grab to bring in, either. What are you thinking, Doc?”
“He’s had asthma for a long time. He definitely had an attack quite recent to his death. The airways are reddened and swollen inside. His inhaler would have started to make at least a little dent in the swelling in his bronchial tree, but I’m not seeing any evidence of that. Honestly, I’m not seeing anything that indicated he tried to arrest the attack at all.”
She went back to the body and looked him over carefully. On a man who had a normal spread of hair on his body, a needle mark could be concealed and missed on the initial examination. On skin as smooth as the congressman’s, though, an injection site should show itself easily. She couldn’t find one. He was in shape, no extra folds of fat to hide the marks. His thighs were clear, as were his buttocks, arms and stomach.
Interesting.
She thought about how the situation must have gone down. The attack would have started small. Staying calm and not hyperventilating is the key to keeping a mild asthma attack from becoming a major event. The congressman might have breathed into a paper bag, or something equally calming. But that didn’t work, so he brought out the defenses—his inhaler, maybe a nebulizer. Perhaps even popped a bit of prednisone, knowing the anti-inflammatory would help. Toxicology would tell what medications he’d taken. A witness would be of help, too, especially since the tox screen wouldn’t show the corticosteroid.
When none of the usual treatments worked, he should have called 911 and broken out his EpiPen. Jammed the lifesaving medicine into his thigh and gotten his ass to the hospital.
But he didn’t have a mark on him.
But he did have massive pulmonary edema. His lungs were yellowish and heavy, and the fluid in the chest cavity was bloody. Significant airway wall thickening showed evidence of a hyperacute pulmonary attack and fulminant pneumonia.
All signs pointed to a massive asthma attack, of that Sam was sure.
But what had triggered it? Without knowing Leighton’s schedule, without knowing if he’d been exposed this morning, she couldn’t say for sure that his death was related to the others.
Tracking down Leighton’s every move was Fletcher’s job. For the meantime, all Sam could do was send the samples to the lab and have them tested, and begin the long wait. But there was something more present in the congressman’s system. An irritant, something that caused the blood to froth.
She’d never seen a ricin poisoning up close and personal, but this certainly looked like what she’d read about. But the tests so far had been negative for ricin. That was very strange.
Sam made quick work of the rest of Leighton’s organs, dictated her findings to Murphy, then stripped off her gloves and mask and tossed them in the trash. She desperately wanted to wash her hands, and it wasn’t just the OCD talking. Posting the congressman had solidified her feeling that there was more than met the eye about the attacks this morning.
She left Murphy behind to close the body and sought out Dr. Nocek. He was in his office, writing up his findings from the earlier autopsies.
She took a seat across from him and smiled. “Good thing you talked me into getting licensed here in D.C. This is becoming a regular event for us.”
“My dear Samantha, I wish that it would be a daily occurrence. Your talents are not wasted teaching our young doctors the skills they need to succeed in pathology, but they could certainly be put to advantageous use with us. It was kind of you to indulge the detective’s wish for a completely unbiased postmortem. Perhaps you’d like to rethink your current path and join us?”
Nocek smiled at her. He was an odd man, cadaverously thin, with thick glasses and a long beak of a nose. He was called Lurch behind his back, or The Fly. He did bear an uncanny resemblance to a winged insect. But he was unfailingly kind, intelligent, intuitive and unafraid to ask for help when he felt it was needed. Sam liked him a great deal.
“I’ll think about it. How many are ill?”
“At this point, reported illnesses have topped two hundred. But still only the three deaths. If this is a biological agent, it could be several days before we are in the clear on mortality rates. It is entirely possible people have been exposed and are simply not showing symptoms yet.”
“I was thinking it could be ricin despite the negative field finding. But it’s not textbook, that’s for sure. What were your findings on the two dead?”
“Internal bleeding, pulmonary edema and hemorrhage. Perhaps anthrax. Do you recall the case in 2001? Five died, seventeen survived. I worked on two of the victims. The findings had some similarities.”
“Similarities, but not exact, right?”
“Yes. I did not witness the external pustules that were apparent in the 2001 cases.”
“We won’t know until the toxicology comes back, so there’s no sense in speculating. But just between us, it looked very much like ricin poisoning to me.”
“Detective Fletcher is not going to want to hear you say that.”
Sam played with the stress ball Nocek kept on his desk. Squish, roll, squish, roll. “Fletch will live. I will tell you this. The congressman had a massive, acute asthma attack, and that was what killed him. He had pneumonia, too, which didn’t look like it was being treated. Until the tests are back on the tissue and blood, I won’t know if he inhaled what everyone else did. But it is feasible his death is unrelated to the attack. Just a matter of bad timing.”
Nocek steepled his considerably long fingers in front of him.
“Do you believe this is the case?”
“I don’t know. Something isn’t right. If he was in acute respiratory distress, there were steps he would have taken. He’d been asthmatic for a very long time, surely this wouldn’t have been his first pulmonary event. I didn’t find any evidence he used an EpiPen. So either things progressed normally and he stupidly forgot his pen today, or...”
“Or?”
She shifted in her seat. “The possibilities are endless. Let’s see what Fletch has to say first. Now, why don’t you show me the bodies of the other two DOAs.”
Chapter 8
Washington, D.C.
Detective Darren Fletcher
Detective Darren Fletcher was getting incredibly frustrated. He had been left sitting in the antechamber of Congressman Leighton’s stuffy office for over half an hour now. He was about to start banging on the door to the great man’s inner sanctum and demand to be seen.
To kill just a bit more time, he checked his phone and saw the new message from the head of his division, Captain Armstrong, who had some semi-interesting news. Fletcher was being assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force that was investigating the subway attack. And three different Middle Eastern terror groups had stepped forward to claim responsibility. Fletcher was to report to the JTTF offices as soon as possible to get briefed.
He knew he should be honored, but all he could think about was the other cases he’d been working on that would have to be reassigned. And damn his partner, Lonnie Hart, who was on an island somewhere in the Pacific taking his first vacation in five years. He was still on disability after the shooting three months earlier, and honestly, Fletcher was wondering if he’d ever come back from it.
He didn’t like working alone, true, but the JTTF? All of their open cases would be given away. Fletcher wondered if he could fight to keep on one or two of them but knew that was probably wishful thinking.
His phone began to vibrate. Sam. Finally.
“What’s up?”
“Leighton’s official COD is an asthma attack.”
“I didn’t know he had asthma.”
“You do now. He didn’t have his inhaler on him, so if you could ask around and see if they know what he was taking, it would be a help. Save us the time while we wait for a subpoena of his medical records. Have you found out whether he rode the Metro this morning?”
“I don’t know yet. They’ve kept me waiting.”
“Well, this is just between us then. All signs are pointing to a ricin-like toxin. It looks and acts like it, but it’s not exactly right. It could be some sort of hybrid. I’ve given the samples to Amado for him to run through their lab, so we won’t know anything conclusive until those come back. I’m going to keep hunting to see if I can narrow it down even further. But if you can get a picture of his day, that would help.”
“I’m trying. Thanks, Sam. I’ll pick you up and get you home in just a bit.”
“No hurry. I only had a peek at the other bodies, I’d like to go over them more thoroughly.”
She hung up. Okay. No more Mr. Nice Guy.
He went back to the intern sitting at the front desk. She was a timorous thing, eyes wide and staring, probably wondering what she was going to do next. Most likely be sent back home to Indiana, if she’d been from Leighton’s district. If she were local, she might be reassigned, or be out of luck entirely. When he said, “Excuse me,” she jumped a mile.
“Yes, sir?”
“I’m going to have to insist on seeing the chief of staff immediately.”
“I’m sorry, sir. They’re in a meeting, and they said they weren’t to be disturbed. For anyone. He told me that you need to wait outside.”
Fletcher gave her his most charming smile. “You go in there and let him know he has one minute to open the doors or I’ll kick them in.”
Her rabbit eyes grew wide and she made a beeline for the doors. Fletcher didn’t wait, he followed right behind her, and when she opened the door, he touched her on the shoulder.
“Thanks. I’ll take it from here.”
“But, but...” Fletcher left her stammering in the doorway and stepped through into the congressman’s office. He didn’t make a habit of interrupting meetings—he had no right to do so—but there were exigent circumstances at play.
A thin man with precisely cut brown hair and a pristine gray pin-striped suit was sitting behind the desk, with three people, less well dressed, facing him—two men and a woman. If Fletcher hadn’t known the congressman was dead, he would have assumed the man behind the desk held the power. Which, in many ways, he did.
All four were staring at him now, but it was Pinstripe that Fletcher locked on to. His coolly appraising eyes swiveled to Fletcher, to the open door and the desperate intern, then back to Fletcher. Without moving, he said, “That’s fine, Becky. We don’t need you anymore today. Why don’t you head home. Someone will be in touch about tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir,” she whispered, and beat a hasty retreat, pulling the door closed behind her.
Silence. Fletcher cleared his throat and opened his badge case, flashed them his gold. “Sorry to bother you, but I’ve been waiting quite a while, and I have other places to be. Detective Darren Fletcher, Metro homicide.”
Pinstripe didn’t move. “Glenn Temple. I’m the congressman’s chief of staff. It is an unfortunate day.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Fletcher said automatically, a phrase he’d uttered too many times.
“Thank you. What can I do for you, Detective?”
“I’m investigating your boss’s death. I need to know everything that happened today.”
Temple flicked his hand at the three staffers. “Sperry, get the datebook for the detective. Allison, you and David are dismissed. I’ll be in touch later.”
Fletcher needed to get the upper hand here, and fast. “I’d actually appreciate all of you sticking around. I’m going to have to interview each of you individually.”
Three sets of eyes looked to Temple for approval. There was no question who was running this little fiefdom. All of Fletcher’s nerves were singing; something was wrong with this picture. It wouldn’t have been the first time a group met to practice their stories, making sure they had all the details straight.
“Why don’t we start with you, Mr. Temple?”
A pause, just a few breaths, and Temple nodded. “That’s fine.”
The three underlings stood and melted away, out the door, silent as the grave.
Fletcher helped himself to a seat.
“Mr. Temple, can you give me an idea of what’s happening here?”
Temple got up and went to the small wet bar in the corner of the spacious office, dropped a few ice cubes in a glass, poured in a clear amber liquid from a crystal decanter.
“Just some damage control. The congressman has enemies. Drink?”
“Scotch, if you have it.” A disarming answer. A by-the-book cop would never drink on duty. It was meant to show Temple Fletcher was a good sport. That this talk was man-to-man. Trust could be built in the strangest ways. And it had been a seriously shit day. He needed a drink.
Fletcher accepted the crystal lowball and took a sip. “Mmm. Macallan 25?”
Temple gave the first hint of a smile. “You know your Scotch.”
“Occupational hazard. You say the congressman has enemies. Any of them crazy enough to want to kill him?”
Temple resumed his spot behind his boss’s desk. “You think he was murdered?”
“You don’t?”
“I don’t know what to think. One minute he was fine. The next, he was down on the floor, choking to death.”
“You witnessed his collapse?”
“The end of it, yes. He arrived this morning at eight, like he always does. We had the morning staff meeting. He was upbeat, cheery. The vote on the new appropriations bill is tomorrow, and he felt like it was a done deal. The last vote before recess, and trust me, these guys have earned a rest. Without him, without the promises he’s made, the deals he’s guaranteed, that bill has no chance of passing. I’ve spent the day trying to shore up our votes, but it’s not going to happen. Months of work, down the drain. We’re fucked.”
Temple tossed back half of his glass.
Fletcher was again reminded of why he hated politics and politicians. Cold-blooded bastards, the lot of them.
“So after staff, we watched the news about the attacks for about ten minutes, then had a few meet and greets, the usual stuff, people in from Indiana who want to bend his ear, get their picture taken. He had five minutes with each of them, then a coffee down in the dining room with Windsor Mann, the head of Ways and Means. He came back to the office a little ruffled, but Mann always pisses him off. They have to pretend to be friends in front of the cameras, but they don’t like each other much. He came back to the office, had just hung up his jacket and shut the door for some quiet time when Becky heard a commotion and knocked. He didn’t answer so she came and found me. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes, but when I got the door open, he was down. He has asthma, I don’t know if that’s part of the record yet. It looked like he was having a really bad asthma attack. He didn’t like to let people know, thought it made him look weak.”
“How’d he make it into the service?”
“Oh, this was something he picked up in the first Gulf War. Bunch of them came home with lung damage. His manifested as asthma. Pretty severe, too, and stress didn’t help things.”
“So you entered the office, saw he was down, and then what?”
“I searched his jacket pocket, thinking I’d get his inhaler, but it wasn’t there. Then I saw it on the floor next to him. I picked it up and handed it to him. He could barely hold on to it. We got it in his mouth and I pressed the trigger, but it didn’t seem to help. His eyes were rolling into the back of his head, and he was turning blue. He kept an EpiPen in his briefcase, but his briefcase wasn’t in the office. I looked everywhere. He’d stopped breathing by that point, so I started CPR and yelled for someone to call nine-one-one.”
“Where’s the inhaler?”
“I have no idea. The EMTs probably took it.” He looked to the ceiling and shut his eyes. “I should have called earlier. If I had...”
“If it makes you feel better, I don’t think that would have made a difference. The autopsy has been completed, and the attack was quite severe.”
Temple didn’t say anything, just maintained his position with his face aimed at the ceiling, like he was trying to hold back tears from spilling down his cheeks.
“Did the congressman take the Metro this morning?”
Temple sniffed once, hard, then faced Fletcher again. “He takes it every morning. Part of his job, he says, to be with the people, be a part of the populace. Of course, he has security on him, and he only rides it one stop, from Eastern Market to Capitol South. You know. Kisses his wife goodbye, hops on the subway. It makes him feel normal, like a regular guy. Joe six-pack, he liked to say. So yes, he was on the subway today.”
“Where’s his wife now?”
“Gretchen? Flying in from Terre Haute. She’d gone home to get one of their...charities settled. She is devastated.”
“I’ll need to speak to her as soon as she arrives. And I need to speak to his detail. I’ll also need the names of all the supporters who were here this morning.”
“I will have the detail get in touch immediately, and the list of people sent to you.”
“The detail weren’t here, in the office?”
“Not at his time of death. In the building, yes. More than likely. They were scheduled to go out with him at two. The congressman had a meeting this afternoon at the University Club. He was scheduled to speak to the Daughters of the American Revolution, of all things.”
Fletcher appreciated the irony—speaking to a group whose membership could trace their lineage to the first attempts of the country to gain their freedom on the day the most important city in the world was attacked by terrorists was rich.
Temple tapped a pencil on the clean desktop. “Do they know what the attack was comprised of? What the agent was?”
“We don’t know yet,” Fletcher replied. “What about the rest of it?”
Temple glanced at him.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I think you do.”
He gave Fletcher a pointed look. “Trust me. I don’t know.”
“Mr. Temple. We’re both grown-ups here. I have no intention of using the information to demean or embarrass the congressman’s legacy. You saw the text. The language seemed...purposefully inflammatory. Has the congressman been harassed lately?”
He shook his head, finally showing some interest in the situation. No, that wasn’t fair. He hadn’t been disinterested before. He was under control. Very much under control.
“Peter Leighton is an American patriot. He served his country honorably in the service, came home and decided to continue his selflessness in this thankless job. He is the greatest man I know.”
Fletcher sat back in his chair and took a sip of his Scotch. “You know, I’ve been a cop in D.C. for eighteen years. I’ve seen a lot of shit. It is not my job to be judge or jury. Your boss had a reputation in the very quiet corners of this town, and you can’t expect me to believe that, as his number-one guy, you aren’t aware of that.”
There it is. Right over the plate.
“No idea what you’re talking about.”
“Come on. You want to tell me what this is all about? Who might have sent something like this? Who did the congressman piss off?”
Temple swiveled the computer screen around to face Fletcher.
“Who hasn’t he pissed off? My God, we get five thousand emails a day, and I’d say a solid ninety percent are upset about something. Take, take, take, blame, blame, blame. That’s all these people know.”
“Mr. Temple. Please. I’m talking about something a little more private than constituents with a burning desire for a new road.”
Temple shook his head but wouldn’t meet Fletcher’s eye.
“Truly, don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“There are rumors...”
Temple laughed. “This is D.C., Detective. If there isn’t a rumor about you, you’re doing something wrong.”
* * *
It was a good story, as far as stories went. Temple looked like a hero, he’d done everything he could think of to save his boss. The interviews with the three other staffers corroborated his story. Either they were all telling the truth, or they had decided on the story before Fletcher got there.
Not a single one was willing to breathe a bad word against their boss.
This was going nowhere, fast.
Fletcher got a crime scene tech to come to the office and take exclusionary fingerprint samples. That took fifteen minutes, and while it was going on, Temple arranged for the service detail who’d been with the congressman this morning to meet them in the office. Fletcher dismissed Temple and talked to them—a man and a woman, Mac and Sally—grizzled old hats who’d been assigned to the congressman for several months. Nothing in the routine this morning was different from any other day. They didn’t know where his briefcase was. Neither were feeling ill. Both were going for stoic, but Fletcher could see they were genuinely distressed over the news.
He pushed them on the rumors, too, but they clammed up. He took their statements, assured them he’d let them know what was happening, and let them leave, feeling vaguely uneasy.
They gave him a list of the people who’d been in the office over the past few days, and this morning. The official congressional photographer would send over the photos from the morning’s meet and greet. Otherwise, it seemed there was nothing here.
Someone was lying to him. He just didn’t know who. Or why.
Chapter 9
Washington, D.C.
Dr. Samantha Owens
Sam waited for Fletcher in Nocek’s office, watching the late-breaking news story that had finally leaked its way into the media. The anchors looked shaken; even though they’d known for at least an hour, the media had kindly waited for the wife to land in D.C. and get to her husband’s side before they broke the news.
Congressman Peter Leighton, Democrat from Indiana, was dead, a suspected victim of the morning’s attack.
Sam was always amazed at how thorough the media could be when they wanted. Granted, Leighton was a public figure, and as such, packages were built in the event of an untimely death. But considering he was just one of four hundred and thirty-five serving members, there was quite a bit of material that had been collected on him.
The minute the news was out, the attack itself became secondary. Every station was giving their own eulogies of the congressman.
Leighton had been a classic dove for most of his career, using his own service record as an example of why the United States should stay out of foreign domains. He’d flip-flopped about a year prior, started fighting for the troops, for them to get more money, better equipment and better services when they mustered out, damaged and broken. A seismic shift, brought about by the death of his son, Peter Leighton, Junior, a battalion commander in the Army who’d gone to Afghanistan and been decimated by a roadside IED.
Grief changes you. Sam understood that. It mutates your soul, your emotions, your thoughts. Green becomes yellow, the sun disappears from the sky, and your lifelong convictions no longer seem to matter. As she watched the multitude of clips of the congressman defending his change of heart, she understood completely. He hadn’t done enough to keep his own child secure and protected, so he’d launched a campaign to keep the remainder of the soldiers on the ground and in the air safe. Too bad he hadn’t been fighting for them earlier. It might have meant a different outcome for his own son, not to mention countless others.
At least the media didn’t have the text message yet. Once that slipped out, the wolves would circle and all bets would be off. The congressman would stop being lauded and start being blamed.
And maybe he should. If the text was real, authored by the perpetrator behind the attacks, there was something to be discovered in the congressman’s very publicly private world.
Sam muted the television. The message was unmistakably clear. What she was trying to ascertain was why, if the attack was directed at him, had so many others been included.
Two hundred sick, some clinging to life. Two other deaths, random, people wholly unrelated to the congressman. She felt bad that their deaths were being overshadowed by the demise of someone more famous.
Even one death is too much.
Planes were flying overhead, the high-pitched roaring whine of the F/A-18s unmistakable. Helicopters chattered. There was talk of shutting down the bridges. There was a curfew in place, yet there were still news stories about chaos and absolute fear reigning in some neighborhoods. There’d even been a couple of reports of looting, down near Anacostia. But the congressman’s face was taking up ninety percent of the airtime.
And they still didn’t know what had caused the turmoil.
There were hundreds of people working on figuring out what the substance was. She knew that. But it was disturbing that nearly twelve hours after the event, they still had nothing more than speculations to go on.
That told her something unique was happening.
Sam shut the television off and went over her notes again. Fletcher had called to tell her that, yes, the congressman had been on the Metro this morning. But in looking at the maps, he was on the Blue Line, and it had been confirmed that the other two casualties had taken the Orange Line right through Foggy Bottom early this morning.
It made sense that people who were immunosuppressed would have a more severe reaction. The congressman was an asthmatic, so any irritant could trigger an attack. Without the proper medication to arrest the attack, he could very easily die, as he had.
The other two deaths weren’t as cut-and-dried. She had notes on them from the initial investigation Fletcher and his team had done when they’d come into the morgue. The only thing they had in common was the fact that they were smokers.
Different parts of the city, different ages, different worlds, all affected by a single event. D.C. was a giant ecosystem, with thousands of moving parts, and each world was unique unto itself. Like species that couldn’t intermingle and breed, the people of D.C. found their comfort zones and rarely, if ever, deviated from course. Debutantes hung out with debutantes, jocks with jocks, politicos with politicos, lawyers with lawyers, lobbyists with lobbyists, teachers with teachers. There might be a Sadie Hawkins Day every once in a while, and a debutante would get it on with a politico, but that generally ended up in The Washingtonian, disguised as a society wedding, and the aftermath was full of fireworks and lawyers and mistresses and front-page news.
Sam pulled the charts of the two other victims and flipped through the pages. She had nothing better to do.
The first was a forty-year-old woman named Loa Ledbetter. She owned a market research firm on L Street, lived in the Watergate. She rarely used the Metro to go to work—she made off-site calls to clients, so she normally drove—but her car was in the shop.
The second was a nineteen-year-old junior from American University, Marc Conlon. He lived in Falls Church, and took the Metro into town for school daily. He’d switch from the Orange Line to the Red at Metro Center and scoot out to the Tenleytown/AU stop, then take the shuttle bus onto the AU campus. On Tuesdays, he had an 8:00 a.m. history class, so he made sure to get into town extra early, to have a coffee and beat the crowds.
Sam said a little prayer for her own student, Brooke Wasserstrom, who at last check was holding steady in the intensive care unit. Sam hoped that her quick actions meant Brooke had a decent chance of survival, but without knowledge of what they were dealing with, all they could do was treat, and pray.
A congressman, a student and a market researcher.
Three strangers, brought together at the hand of a madman. What had they done to deserve death as a punishment?
Now, Sam, you know that this isn’t a healthy line of thinking. Random things happened. There aren’t always answers as to why people have to die. Why their number has suddenly come up. They were obviously in the wrong place at the wrong time. She could fully comprehend that. She knew that they weren’t connected in any way law enforcement could use their deaths to track their killer. A terrorist attack is a random event.
Random. Chosen without method or conscious decision.
She hadn’t chosen for her family to die. That had been random, too.
She shook them away, the voices of her dead, and refocused.
A random act.
Then why did someone send a text to Congressman Leighton blaming the morning’s events on him?
The only real evidence they had was the text. It could be the key. Leighton could be the key.
Not Dr. Loa Ledbetter, a small brilliant redheaded beauty with a gaping slit in her chest, nor Marc Conlon, too young to even have grown fully into his bones, his sagittal suture not entirely fused.
Quit personalizing, Sam.
What Sam was interested in was why those three, out of all the people exposed and the two hundred exhibiting symptoms, were the only ones who died.
Ledbetter was dead on arrival at GW, after being found collapsed on the floor of the ladies’ room at her office by one of her staffers.
Conlon died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. He’d gone into cardiac arrest at the top of the stairs of the Tenleytown Metro.
Neither had a history of lung disease; that was reserved for the congressman. Neither exhibited signs of illness, their initial blood work had been normal, and neither had a history of ill health.
Their families could give more information. Sam was itching to talk to them.
But this wasn’t her investigation. She’d been brought in to do a task, used for her discretion and talent, not to run off trying to explain the unexplainable.
Except she knew every puzzle had a solution.
Someone wanted Leighton to feel responsible, yes, but dead? Perhaps that was just chance. Perhaps that was a fluke. And there was absolutely nothing that said the text-sender was the same person who’d indiscriminately put a foreign substance into the air ducts at the Foggy Bottom Metro and made so many people ill. It could just be a pissed-off constituent who wrongly blamed the congressman for a completely random event.
There she was, back to the arbitrary again.
Fletcher had brought her into this investigation when he asked her to post Leighton. He wasn’t dumb; he knew she’d press for more information, for a chance to help. She wasn’t constricted by the rule of law here. She was a private citizen. She’d sworn a different kind of oath, one that she believed in, one that bound her to care for the sick, to have special obligations to the public she served. She could do whatever she chose, so long as she worked within the bounds of her ethics and didn’t break the law.
She was starting to feel a bit tingly.
She debated for exactly ten seconds before writing down the addresses of the other victims, folding the paper into halves, then quarters, and stashing it in the pocket of her trousers.
It was damn good timing, too, because she’d barely raised her palm from the linen when Dr. Nocek came into the room, followed by Fletcher.
“You ready, Doc?” Fletcher asked. He looked worried and rumpled and tired. His beard was just starting to make its appearance, and lent him a vaguely menacing air. Next to the taller, more collected Nocek, he looked a bit like a brawl just waiting to happen.
Sam gathered her bag and sweater. “I’m ready. How are things on the Hill?”
“Fucked.”
That’s all she got. Nocek raised an eyebrow in her direction, and she responded by giving him a warm hug. “I’ll see you soon. We’ll have dinner.”
“I would like that very much,” he said, and she sensed the sadness in him. Nocek was a widower, not fully used to going home alone in the evenings. On a day like today, after all the hoopla, the fear and adrenaline, having only ghosts to talk to could be hard.
She squeezed his arm and said, “Call me if you need anything,” then followed a glowering Fletcher from the room.
The longest day she’d had since she left Nashville was finally drawing to a close.
Chapter 10
The streets were still eerily deserted, the dark skies interrupted by the scream of jets. Fletcher was silent until they hit M Street. Sam knew better than to try and drag information out of him; he’d share when he was ready. They got stuck at the light at Wisconsin, and he finally started talking.
“Leighton’s chief of staff is giving me the runaround,” he grumbled.
Sam smiled. “Isn’t that his job?”
Fletcher glanced at her, saw the amusement etched on her face. It provoked a smile of his own, and he relaxed a bit.
“Yeah, I suppose it is. Fingerprints on the inhaler belong to him. That matches his statement that when he came into the office and saw the congressman down, he retrieved the inhaler and gave it to his boss.”
“Okay. So where’s the issue?”
He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, then ran his hands through his hair. “I don’t know. I’m tired as hell. I’m getting put on the Joint Terrorism Task Force.”
“That’s good, right? You’ll be able to see this through to the end.”
“Maybe. We’ll see. They might have me running around town with my dick in my hand.”
She cleared her throat, trying to hide the laugh.
“Sorry, Sam. That was crude of me.”
“You’re fine, Fletch. The image was priceless.”
He laughed with her then, and the light turned. He took a right, then a left, and she was at her door a moment later. There was a pause, awkward and three beats too long. He looked like he wanted to say something important, but refrained. Instead, he shook it off and said, “Get some sleep. You did good today.”
“Thanks, Fletch. You, too. Call me if you need anything else, okay? And if they get the results back on the toxin, let me know.”
“Will do. Last round of calls got it down to two or three, with ricin still leading the pack.”
“If that’s true, we’re damn lucky there are only three people dead.”
“You said it, sister.”
He watched her go up the stairs, waited until the door was unlocked to drive away.
She caught the blue glow of the clock on the microwave. It was nearly two in the morning.
Exhaustion suddenly paraded through her body, and she sagged a bit. She wanted a shower and bed. She took the stairs carefully, quietly.
She found Xander crashed out cold on top of the covers. Just the sight of him caused a little thrum in her stomach. She stopped in the doorway and watched him, marveling at the fact that he belonged to her.
With a soldier’s unerring ability to sense a threat, he opened his eyes, and she saw he already had one hand tucked under his pillow, where she knew he kept a loaded weapon. Only one of many stashed throughout the house.
“It’s me,” she whispered. “Go back to sleep.”
He rolled up in one smooth motion, both hands free.
“I’m glad you’re home. We need to talk.”
* * *
He gave her fifteen minutes to S-cubed—military jargon for shit, shower and shave—and met her in the kitchen with a fresh pot of coffee and her laptop glowing on the table. She took one look at him and went to the liquor cabinet, fetched a bottle of Lagavulin. She splashed some in both their cups, then tucked her damp hair behind her ears and settled in, recognizing Xander in full operational mode. He might as well have had his uniform on and a rifle strapped to his chest.
Loaded for bear.
He sat across from her, took a deep drink from his cup. Xander made seriously good tea, but he was a first-class coffee maker. A connoisseur. Sam was amused when the first thing he did was buy her a Bunn, claiming it was one of the finest coffeemakers in the world. She found that ironic, considering he often made his coffee by throwing the grounds in a pan of water and heating it over the fire. He took personal affront at Starbucks and the like, instead preferred to grind his own beans, which he imported from a friend in Colombia. She wasn’t entirely sure that was legal, but she could hardly complain—the coffee it made was out of this world.
“There’s a message from GW on the answering machine. I heard them leave it. School’s closed for the rest of the week.”
“Not surprising. I assume they are going to have people combing that Metro stop and the surrounds for a few days to make sure things are safe.”
They sipped their coffee. Finally, Xander set down his cup.
“Aren’t you going to ask?”
She stared into his eyes, best described as a deep chocolate-espresso—eyes that were so like the dark, intense brews he favored—and sighed.
“Fine. You were here in D.C. at least an hour before you should have been if you’d heard about the attacks on the news. Which means you fibbed to me this morning about your fishing date gone wrong.”
He smirked. “I didn’t fib. My guy didn’t show, and I did go to the café to check things out.”
She knew the café he mentioned was the Mountain City Coffeehouse in Frostburg, Maryland—the closest internet café to Xander’s cabin that had decent food and coffee. She had to admit, it was a quaint, charming place, perfect for him to stay under the radar. He liked the window by the fireplace; he was able to see the rest of the room, the entrance and exits. Once a soldier, always a soldier. The cabin didn’t have internet access, so Xander made it a routine to head to Frostburg a couple of times a month to check his mail, set up his appointments as a fishing guide, and generally check up on the world. She was tempted to buy him an iPad so he could save himself the trip, but she knew it was more than that. He shed his humanity in the woods—like his daily piano practice, the bimonthly sojourns were his way of keeping himself engaged. He didn’t want more than that, and his psyche couldn’t stand less. Without some sort of socialization, he might truly get lost.
Then he dropped his bomb.
“But that was all yesterday.”
All sorts of words rushed to mind, but all she managed was, “What?”
He flipped the laptop around so it was facing her.
“See this?”
She looked at the screen. It was a message board of some kind. “What’s this?”
“One of the groups I sometimes look in on. It’s comprised of people...like me.”
He rose to fill his cup again, leaving her to wonder exactly what that meant. She wasn’t able to focus properly.
“Soldiers?”
“Some. Some want to be. Some could have been, but chose a different path.”
Sam felt the edge begin, the panic, like an annoying little mosquito buzzing around her head. She pulled her hair back into a chignon, stuck a chopstick through the knot to hold it in place. She closed her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. In four counts, hold four, out four, wait four. Then, the urge to wash her hands dispatched, she addressed her lover.
“Xander, honey. It’s late. I’ve been up for twenty hours, been in the middle of a terrorist attack, did an autopsy on a congressman, and have my own little anxiety disorder brewing. Would you mind cutting to the chase?”
“Survivalists, Sam. I don’t think this was a terror attack. I think it was one of our own.”
Chapter 11
Sam’s expression moved from confusion to incredulity in a matter of seconds.
“You’ve got to be kidding. Are you talking like...what, a militia?”
“No. Well, sure, some of them. It’s like any group of people, there’re bad seeds mixed in with the good and innocent. There are militias spread all across the country, homegrown groups who like to think they’re the law, parade around in uniforms, ragtag batches of locals who spew nonsense and are basically harmless. But there are groups who are dead serious, people you wouldn’t want to cross. The government keeps a damn close eye on them. And some of them are idiots, people who are just wrong in the head and can’t be fixed. Skinheads, those kinds of yahoos.”
“Ruby Ridge?”
“Right. But the people I’m talking about—no, they’re not militia. Just concerned private citizens who have shared their knowledge of survival to help like-minded individuals prepare in case there’s a catastrophic event. Anything from a nuclear bomb to economic collapse to a tornado.”
She noticed he didn’t say flood, though that would certainly qualify.
“They’re good people, just trying to figure out where we’re headed, and what to do in case something awful happens.”
Sam raised an eyebrow. Sometimes she forgot that they came from very, very different worlds. She was a debutante from Nashville, a good little Southern girl, raised on manners and money and all things genteel, and he was a soldier who’d been raised by hippies, seen too much and had a healthy mistrust of the government.
He must have caught her thought, because he continued. “Okay, this isn’t something that you and I have talked a lot about. It’s hard to understand, but there are people out there who think things are going to hell in a handbasket, and are trying to make preparations in case it does. They’re harmless, and smart. They’re like pioneers, able to grow food and build shelter and live off the land and, most importantly, defend themselves if it’s needed.”
“Like you.”
He smiled.
“Like me. Many of them are ex-military, of all generations. You know many of us don’t fit back into the world anymore, Sam. What we’ve seen, what we’ve done, civilians can’t necessarily comprehend. It’s only natural that some of us fall back on our training, and want to be prepared. Just in case, you know? When, or if, the shit hits the fan, you’re going to want us on your side, if you get my drift.”
“I follow.”
“Okay. So this one group that I check in on from time to time lit up last night. Like they knew something was about to go down. Chatter.”
“And the feds didn’t see it?”
“Trust me, there are no feds in this group. It is very private.”
“There’s no privacy online. You’ve told me that a million times.”
“And that’s true. But even if they do know about it, they can’t get in.”
“My God, Xander, if these friends of yours were talking about an imminent attack, why didn’t you do anything? Say anything?”
She’d said the wrong thing. He closed up tight as a drum. Slammed the laptop closed and stalked from the room. He went to the bedroom, started gathering his things.
She followed. “Xander, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. This isn’t your fault. None of it is your fault.”
He kept his back turned. “You don’t get it. I’m not mad at you, I’m mad at myself. I should have said something. Maybe if I had, it wouldn’t have happened. Instead, I couldn’t sleep, and finally ended up leaving Thor with Bryan at the Forest Ranger station and heading down to the city. I must have just missed you this morning, but by then it was too late. The attack had already occurred.”
She took the bag and his semi-folded shirt from his hands and set them gently on the bed.
“Hey. I’m sorry. I’m exhausted, and that came out wrong.”
He was silent for a moment, then shrugged. “Accepted. There was nothing specific anyway, just a couple of guys talking about this dude they knew who had recently joined up, and was flapping his gums. It just felt...wrong to me.”
“All right. So let’s call Fletcher and let him know.”
“It’s too late.”
“It’s not. He can get a subpoena, go after their records—”
“Seriously, it’s too late. The site’s dark.”
“Dark?”
“Gone. The owners took it down. It’s like it never existed.”
Sam wasn’t a computer expert, but she knew that it was virtually impossible to get rid of every footprint on the internet. Caches existed of material. It could be accessed. Someone talented enough could get in there and find it. She told Xander that. He shook his head.
“You don’t understand. The group doesn’t exist. The site doesn’t exist. It was a closed portal on another site’s network, accessible only to certain people who knew certain ways to get into it, and then had the proper passwords. They’ve erased everything.”
He sat on the edge of the bed, looking despondent.
“You know who they are, though, don’t you?”
He was quiet for a moment.
“I know their internet handles. I’ve been looking for them since you left. I’ve trolled every site I can think of, and a few that I had no idea existed. They’ve gone gray.”
“What’s that mean?”
“They’re hiding in plain sight, where no one will be able to find them until this thing is over. They’ll lay low and wait until the time is right to resurface. They can’t take the chance that they’ll be strung up in this mess.”
Sam’s pulse increased. “Until this is over...you mean he’s not through? Whoever did the Metro attack?”
“Not by a long shot.”
“Xander. There’s no choice here. We have to tell Fletcher. Right now. He’s been added to the Joint Terrorism Task Force. He’ll know what to do.”
His answer was very pointed. “I know what to do.”
“You just said you’ve been searching for them all afternoon with no luck. Let Fletch and the JTTF take it from here. This is too much for just you. You’re brilliant and talented and, given the right amount of time, I have no doubt you could find them. But, Xander, people are dead. More may die. It’s bigger than you, or me, or a group of like-minded individuals on the internet. We need every available resource on this. If they know who this is, or what he might do next, they must be found.”
“Fletcher won’t find them. He has no idea what he’s up against.”
Sam knelt before him, took his face in her hands.
“We have to let him try. Okay?”
Xander hesitated a minute, then nodded. “Okay. But you better get a guarantee out of him first.”
“A guarantee of what?”
“That he doesn’t come roaring in here and arrest my lily-white ass.”
“He wouldn’t.”
“Fletcher might not. But the feds? They don’t exactly stop to ask questions. Shoot first, that’s what they’re taught.”
“You mean that metaphorically, don’t you?”
He gave her an exceptionally oblique look that again reminded her just how different they really were.
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J.T. Ellison
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: The killer is armed with a lethal weapon: an invisible pathogen that has been released into the Washington Metro.Two hundred people exhibit symptoms, but only three are pronounced dead. Dr Samantha Owen is the forensic pathologist called to consult on the case, but as she dissects the mysterious connections between the victims it becomes clear that this attack is not random.This pathogen is targeted. As Sam starts to close in on the killer’s identity, the further she propels herself into danger. Finding the truth might just lead Sam into risking her life…