The 500: A Novel (26 page)

Annie could tell something was wrong. She asked me to take a walk the night after I spoke to my father, to get me away from the thousand excuses—work, e-mail, phone calls—that I’d been using to avoid talking about what was on my mind. We passed through Adams Morgan then turned down Calvert St. and stopped on Duke Ellington Bridge, a ribbon of limestone stretching over Rock Creek Park.

“What really happened on Saturday, Mike?”

I guess the ghostly look I had after the murders was enough to keep her from prying then. But I’d known that wouldn’t last.

“Someone got hurt,” I said. “I tried to stop it but I couldn’t.”

She watched the clouds slide over a fingernail moon.

“Haskins.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You’re not alone in this, Mike. Tell me what I can do to help you.”

“I just need you around. That’s enough.”

I listened to the creek rush over the boulders below, and I gripped the railing. Annie’s eyes stayed on me.

“Something very wrong happened. Part of it’s on me. And I’m going to make it right. I’m going to get the truth out there. Even if that means going against Henry Davies.”

She stood close to me and rubbed my back.

“Listen,” I said. “I’m going to ask you a dumb question, because I don’t know how this is all going to work out. I’m…I’m worried. Because I may mess things up with Davies, with the job, and that could put everything at risk: the job, the house, maybe me and you. You’ll still be here, right? Without all that stuff, if I end up on my ass with nothing left?”

She was glaring at me, her arms folded across her chest. I hadn’t wanted to make her choose between me and Davies, because I wasn’t sure that was a contest I could win. She might have been interested in me only because I was Davies’s new rising star. For all I knew, Davies had arranged the whole relationship—the offices so close, the same assignments. She spent all that time one-on-one with him in his office. Was it crazy to think he’d set his right-hand girl up with me so he could keep his eye on me? Maybe. But given what I’d seen Davies pull, it wasn’t all that far-fetched. No. I pushed the thought out of mind. The pressure, the fear, was getting to me. “Forget I asked,” I said.

“That’s a silly question, Mike. Because you know I will.”

She unfolded her arms and put them around me.

It was a dumb question, not because the truth was obvious but because her answer didn’t tell me anything. It was the same as when Marcus and Davies asked me if I was going to play along with their cover-up. There was really only one thing Annie could say, whether she was going to stick with me or not.

The truth or a lie, I didn’t care. It felt good to hear her say it.

I was going to talk to the police, but not because I was certain it was the right move. In fact, I was pretty sure I was running headlong into a world of pain. I possessed dangerous information. No secret stayed safe from Henry for long, and I’d rather go after him than wait for him to come after me.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

HENRY HAD HINTED
he would be watching me, and losing any tails, real or imagined, turned out to be the easiest part. The area around Nineteenth and L Street Northwest is built like a multilevel labyrinth: generic glass office buildings, back alleys, one-way streets, and underground garages with four exits each. I nearly lost myself.

The hard part was finding a working pay phone. I finally came upon a greasy one outside a Greek deli. I made a call to the Metro Police main number and asked them to put me through to the extension for Detective Rivera, just to make sure he was who he said.

No answer. I left a voicemail. I told him I wanted to talk, in a safe place, provided he could prove his identity and good faith. I left him a Hotmail e-mail address and a password. I’d leave any messages for him in the drafts folder, without sending them, and he could do the same to get in touch with me. I’d read an article about terrorists using that to communicate, so I figured if it worked for the Taliban, it ought to give me a decent chance of avoiding Henry’s electronic sniffers.

Once I called Rivera, the creeping nausea of the last few weeks lifted almost instantly. The dread was all in the anticipation. However lunatic the plan, now that I was moving against Henry Davies, I felt relieved, almost manic.

I could barely stomach watching as the lies about the murder spread through the news, but that day, the story changed. I watched with growing satisfaction as Henry’s neat narrative of the murder—an obsessed Haskins killing Irin and then himself—unraveled on the front page.

With all the scrutiny that came with a case like this—the FBI had been called in to investigate the deaths in Fauquier County—surely even he couldn’t conceal the fact that both had been murdered. CNN had sources saying it might be more than a murder-suicide. Other rumors suggested the police were searching for a gunman still at large.

The updates only bolstered my confidence. Part of Henry’s strength was that image he projected of being all-powerful and everywhere, of being able to lever anyone he wanted, no matter how influential, and remake the world as he saw fit. But that image was starting to crack. Marcus’s and Davies’s neat narrative of the murder was getting a whole lot messier, and I could relax a little, knowing that even their power had limits. Sure, they could buy off a few local cops, but the whole FBI? Come on. I’d made the right call.

I kept up appearances at Davies Group. Around seven forty-five that night, I was still working, down in the law library on the first floor. I was reading, digging in on Rado Dragović and the alien tort statute. Normally the building would be almost empty at that time, but I heard a commotion.

I took the stairs up, following the noise. When I opened the stairway door on the third floor, I saw a few detectives walking away from me, down the hallway and toward the executive suite—to Marcus’s and Davies’s offices.

I swallowed a smile. So much for omnipotence. Had the cops figured out Henry’s role in the murders that quickly? I was almost disappointed. I’d expected a bit more sport.

Soon enough, Henry Davies came striding down the hallway, leading the detectives. I ducked back into the stairwell before they could see me. Henry sure didn’t look like a man in the early stages of a perp walk.

When I poked my head out on the second level, where my office was, I started to understand what was happening. Through the windows, I could see the festive flashing reds and blues of a large assembly of police cruisers. I took a rear corridor and glimpsed Henry leading the detectives to my office. Another cop took a post near the main stairwell. More clustered around my office door.

I checked the news on my BlackBerry. I didn’t have to look very long. There were banner headlines on every site. I’d just entered the center ring of the circus.

They hadn’t published my name, but according to various officials close to the investigation, the police were closing in on a person of interest in the murders of Justice Malcolm Haskins and Irin Dragović. Henry had told me he’d know my next move even before I did. He must have known somehow that I was working against him. Had he set me up as the killer?

Sneaking away from cops happened to be one of my specialties, though I was a bit rusty. One former burgling buddy of mine, a guy everybody called Smiles, had quit the residential-break-in game to be an “office creeper.” He tripled what he’d been making. You’d be amazed at the tunnel vision people acquire at the workplace. Smiles would just pick a building and waltz in wearing halfway decent clothes, and no questions were asked. He’d take a couple laptops, maybe a cup of coffee from the commissary, then head out with a wave to the security guard.

The cops hadn’t fully mobbed the Davies Group mansion yet. I hoped, per my buddy’s experience with office creeping, that no one would notice the well-dressed young murder suspect dragging himself by his elbows along the carpet between the lesser-used cubicles.

I slunk fifty feet, past an occupied office and a fellow listening to headphones and bopping slightly in his chair, then hauled myself past one of the executive assistants’ desks. My vantage brought me eyeball to eyeball with a small collection of heels that Jen, another senior associate, kept under her desk. She wore sneakers on the Metro and changed when she arrived at work.

More cops were moving in by the second, and when I noticed them posted by the men’s john and the main stairwells, I was pretty sure they’d have the exits covered. Something occurred to me then. It would probably be too generous to call it a plan, but it’s all I had, so I went with it.

By crawling through a little-used conference room, I made my way past the two cops acting as sentries and into the women’s room. There were only three female senior associates—Davies Group was a bit of a boys’ club—and it looked like they’d left, so I had a good chance of having the place to myself. The cops were all men too. I figured, with the nice pair of Jimmy Choo sling-backs I’d grabbed from under Jen’s desk, I could wait them out in the ladies’ room.

It certainly was a lot less badass than drop-kicking my way through the thin blue line, but man, that women’s room was something else. It had flowers, and a couch, and magazines. I was starting to feel positively discriminated against as I grabbed a
Martha Stewart Living
and camped out in the far stall.

It seemed to be working. I sat undisturbed for an hour as the police made their sweep. Then I guess one of the cops worked up the courage to check the ladies’ room. I’d been hoping it wouldn’t come to this, but I went ahead and crammed my feet into the heels against the creaking protests of the leather, tearing a few stitches in the process.

I was glad I had the shoes, because the cop started trying the doors one by one. If I’d just squatted on top of the toilet, he’d have found me as soon as he came to a locked door with no feet behind it.

When he got to my stall, I gave my daintiest throat-clear.

“Excuse me,” the cop said. I heard the footsteps get closer, then a little groan, probably the guy leaning over to check out the feet. I stretched my dress pants a little forward to cover most of my feet, and I guess I gave a fair impression of the fairer sex from the ankle down.

I listened to him walk away and finally let myself breathe once the door opened.
The Shawshank Redemption
it wasn’t, but it had worked.

Then I heard talking in the hallway. The door opened again, and I heard footsteps on the bathroom tiles. Bad news.

An hour is a long time to be stuck in a toilet stall, and during my stay I realized a couple things. First, from reading
Martha,
that I really needed to deal with my junk drawers, and second, and more important, that being framed for two murders by Henry Davies wasn’t all bad. Sure, they still have the death penalty out in Virginia, where I’d be brought to trial, and they use it. But I try to be a glass-half-full guy, and the fact was that now I really had nothing to lose. In good white-collar-speak, the marginal cost of any further crimes was zero. I could go to town, indulge every criminal impulse I’d been bottling up for the last ten years, and still be no more fucked than I was now, because with Marcus and Davies gunning for me, I was
completely
fucked.

And so, when the cop came back to the stall a second time, my pulse picked up: a little fear, sure, but mostly I felt liberated. No more hiding and waiting. When he stuck his head under the door, I could see in his face the face of the cop who had slammed my adolescent nose into the patrol-car door’s frame and then shoved me, cuffed, into its backseat as he chuckled and said, “Oops”; I could see the face of the flattopped piece of shit who showed up one morning when I was twelve and took my dad away forever; I could see the face of the corrections officer with the huge gut in the visiting room at Allenwood who, when my mother, bone-thin with cancer, reached for my father’s hand, barked, “No touching.”

The cop looked up from under the bathroom door, smiled, and said, “Nice pumps, asshole.”

I stomped his temple before he could get to his holster. His head slammed into the marble tile and his body flopped like a quilt onto the floor. A lifetime of resentment uncorked, or maybe I was just sensitive about my shoes.

I cuffed him to the bottom of the stall and checked out the hallway. Fortunately, the KO’d cop in the women’s room had been the one watching the rear stairwell. I double-timed it downstairs to the underground parking garage without being seen.

I guess the bathroom cop’s reconnoitering was a last-ditch effort. There were still a couple patrol cars out front, and a loose perimeter of police around the building, but not nearly as many as before.

A few cops probably saw the cleaning service’s truck pull away, but they must have missed when it slowed at the stop sign and a shadow jumped from the back of the truck and booked it toward Rock Creek Park. That was me.

I’d gotten away, but every cop in DC would be looking for me.

Fortunately, Rock Creek Park threads its fingers through Northwest Washington, connecting to parks that run through Georgetown and the surrounding neighborhoods.

I’d spent a lot of time running in it, and I knew it well. It’s twice as big as Central Park, and much more wooded, full of hidden homeless encampments and God knows what else. I figured if Chandra Levy’s body went undiscovered for a year in there, I had at least a few days’ freedom. I was sure whoever was looking for me had gotten to my apartment by now, but maybe not Annie’s.

I picked my way along the trails toward the Naval Observatory and then across Wisconsin Ave. to Glover-Archbold Park. Every rustling branch or startled raccoon made me jump, but the dark kept my mind occupied with old, simple fears, a relief from the real dangers waiting for me in the city.

I took a roundabout route through Annie’s neighborhood, watching for signs of surveillance and finding none. She had a second-floor apartment in a converted townhouse. Taking no chances of being seen from the street, I clambered up the wood-frame decks in the rear and hauled myself over the railing.