The 500: A Novel (27 page)

She sat on the couch, in an oversize sweatshirt and flannel pajama bottoms, drinking tea and reading. I could have watched her for hours.

I tried to get her attention without scaring her, so I tapped gently on the window with my knuckle and said, “Hey, Annie. It’s me.”

She didn’t spook, just laid her book down on the arm of the couch, walked into the kitchen, and pulled out the fourteen-inch Wüsthof chef’s knife I’d gotten her for Christmas. She held it in a hammer grip and, unafraid, sidled toward the door.

God, I loved that girl.

“Mike?” she said.

“Yes, it’s me.”

“Oh Jesus,” she said, and slid open the door. “I nearly killed you.”

“It’s been that kind of day.”

She laid the knife on the table, then pulled me in and hugged me.

“What the hell is going on?” she asked. “Have you seen the news? Are they talking about you? Are you a suspect?”

She had CNN on mute. The irresistible news-bait of the country-house murders had only grown juicier. Now they were reporting that the incident had stemmed from a love triangle. The killer was believed to be Irin’s jealous stalker, a double murderer now on the run. I was amazed that they didn’t yet have my picture plastered over every channel.

“Don’t believe any of it,” I said.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s happening?”

“Remember that I told you I was going to try to make things right? That what happened had something to do with Haskins? Well, Davies was behind the murders. I knew about it, and I was going to tell the police. Davies warned me I should play along, that I didn’t understand the price I would pay. This is what he meant. He framed me. Everything you see on TV is a lie. He’s behind it all.”

“But how could he orchestrate all that? There are so many people involved.”

“He owns this town, Annie. Blackmail, extortion; he’s gotten every player in DC, one by one, into his pocket. Haskins was the grail: the Supreme Court.”

As I heard myself say it, I knew it sounded like the ravings of a conspiracy wack. She stepped back and crossed her arms.

“They said something happened at Davies Group. That a police officer was assaulted.”

“I had to get away, Annie. Henry owns the cops. I’ve seen it myself.”

I was losing her, I knew. What would I have thought if the roles were reversed, if she’d been spouting this sort of madness and stomping on cops’ heads? I was just a crook’s son once more, out of my league, the con slowly unraveling because I’d stayed too long and gotten too greedy.

“You’re only making it look worse by running, Mike. What are people going to think?”

“I can’t turn myself in, Annie. Henry can get to anyone.”

Lights flared in the front window of the apartment. I stepped over to look. It was Marcus’s Mercedes-Benz. He and Henry Davies stepped out.

Henry can get to anyone. I looked from the window back to Annie.

“Did you tell them what we talked about last night, that I was going to try to stop them?”

“No, Mike.” She stepped away. Her eyes widened. I could see she was afraid.

The whole romance with Annie had been so easy. As I thought back, I saw Henry’s hand in it: setting me up near her on the second floor, talking me up to her at the company Christmas party. God knows what other tricks he’d used, with or without her knowing, to throw us together.

Framing me for the murders must have taken some time, had probably started well before I called Rivera that morning. I’d told Annie that I was going to talk the night before. No one knew as much as she did; she knew that I was going to the authorities, that I knew the truth about Haskins’s death. She must have told Henry and Marcus. Was our whole relationship a setup? Annie another honeypot? All of it engineered from the beginning so Henry could spy on me, keep me under his thumb? Is that what he’d meant when he said he’d know before I did that I was going to talk?

I’d stayed in control all that week but I could feel my grip starting to loosen. I felt the same pull, the thrill of action without concern for consequence I’d felt right before I crossed out that cop in the bathroom.

Annie saw it in me. She glanced over at the knife on the table. And that’s when I knew, whether she’d told Henry or not, whether this whole relationship had been a sham or not, that I’d lost her.

“Stop running, Mike,” she said.

Henry and Marcus were at the front door.

“I’m innocent. It’s the truth.”

“Then turn yourself in.”

“No. The truth doesn’t matter anymore.”

I opened the door to her deck and vaulted onto the soft spring grass twelve feet down. A few stitches tore in the wound in my thigh as I landed and started sprinting toward the dark woods.

CHAPTER TWENTY

ANNIE RATTING ME
out to Marcus and Davies destroyed me, of course, but in a way it also eased my mind. Davies had framed me after he learned I was going to talk to the police. If Annie was the one who had told him, then the leak didn’t come from Rivera. And right now I needed to trust Rivera.

Ever since the murders last Saturday, I’d been digging into the evidence that Justice Haskins had given me before he was killed. He’d pointed me toward a man named Karl Langford and provided his address. Langford was the only person who knew how to find the evidence that would link Henry Davies to the murder of the journalist, Hal Pearson, forty years ago. The only reason Langford was still alive was that Henry didn’t know Langford knew.

Justice Haskins had tried for years, through legal means, to coerce Langford into cooperating, into producing the evidence against Henry. He failed, but I didn’t have to worry about niceties like the law anymore. I’d done a bit of homework and knew Langford was in Sarasota. He wouldn’t be too difficult to chase down, because—and here’s where things get tricky—he was dead: a stroke in 1996.

So, getting the evidence from this guy and nailing Henry on my own was a dead end. I needed Rivera. Maybe he could help me reopen the case or piece together what Langford had known. I certainly couldn’t do it with no help and every cop on the East Coast looking for me. I didn’t even have a change of clothes.

Detective Rivera had left a message for me through my Hotmail account. The Friday after the murders, I called him from a prepaid cell phone I’d bought. He told me that I was the prime suspect in the Paris killings, and that my identity and photo had gone out over the wire to all law enforcement agencies.

The first thing I wanted to know was why a DC cop would be mixed up in a political corruption case.

“Davies does plenty of dirty work in the District,” Rivera told me. “He has sources everywhere, from paid-off concierges and maître d’s, all the way up to madams and purveyors of every other form of high-end vice. That’s what first got me interested in him. I’d have kicked it upstairs to the Feds a long time ago, but I learned he has even more people on the take at the top of the heap than on the street. I have people I trust I can get this to, but first I need to know how strong is the evidence you have against him.”

Rivera kept pressing me on what I had on Henry, on the details of the murder. I was still wary, of course. But when the law is convinced you’re a homicidal maniac who likes to wear ladies’ shoes, it’s hard to overstate how nice it is to hear someone say, “Mike, I know you’re innocent. I can help get you out of this. I’ve been talking to a few folks at the FBI, people I’m sure of. They want to bring you in as a witness against Henry.”

I taped him saying that and discussing his suspicions about Henry Davies, and I told him I’d keep it as insurance. I was sure the press would gobble it up in the frenzy around Haskins’s death and my escape.

Never do what they expect. It’s the first rule of running. I told Rivera to meet me the next day at the coat check in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art. That’s the classical half of the museum, a Roman Pantheon–inspired building, all great halls, columns, and domes, designed by the man who later did the Jefferson Memorial. It’s a place they’d expect from a guy like me, all excited about my first date with the boys in blue.

Rivera and I were supposed to meet at 3:30 p.m., which was why at 3:30 p.m. I was in the East Building—all hard angles and contemporary art—on the upper floor. From there you can look over the atrium with a clean view of all the exits. Both buildings had metal detectors, so any uninvited guests—whether the cops or Marcus—would, I hoped, be unarmed.

I pulled out the prepaid cell and called over to the coat check in the West Building. After hearing my lost-tourist story, the sweet lady who’d answered the phone asked around for Rivera. He was there, right on time.

I heard her tell him, “Your son is in the East Building, at the Flavin installation. It’s the top floor. Look for a lot of lightbulbs.”

She was right about that. Behind me there was a tunnel made of fluorescent tubes in every color of the spectrum. Walking through it felt like a Willy Wonka acid trip.

I waited and watched. If Rivera was going to trap me, I would have a better chance of spotting the ambush now, when he and any accomplices hustled across the courtyard from the West to the East Building.

The National Gallery was a requisite stop on the tourist death march, and among the class-trippers, bored teens, and snap-happy Asian tour groups, I spotted Rivera. He didn’t look like he had company, though that may have simply meant that they were skilled enough to avoid being spotted.

“What the fuck happened to you?” Rivera asked once he found me at the end of the art installation. I was wearing a bandage over my nose, and sunglasses.

“Nothing.”

“Not a bad idea,” he said.

I couldn’t go around DC wearing a ski mask to avoid being recognized by the police, but the bandage did the trick. My face was mostly hidden, and people figured I’d broken my nose or had some work done.

“So what do you have on Davies?” he asked.

“I witnessed his lieutenant William Marcus kill two people.”

“You said you had evidence.”

“I need immunity,” I said. “A deal with the Feds. Assurances that the murder allegations against me will go away.”

“It’s not looking good for you, Mike. There was a store owner who spotted you in Paris. He said you followed Haskins out on the night of the murder. Your buddy Eric Walker says you had a thing for the Irin girl, were asking about her sex habits. The stalker profile fits with some purchases you made, specifically these GPS trackers. One that you purchased was found a few miles from the crime scene. And the whole putting on heels and tying up a cop in a ladies’ room…” He clicked his tongue. It didn’t look good.

“Now, I know enough about how Davies works to know that there’s a good chance he’s behind all this somehow. But dumb cops like me prefer simple cases. It’s an uphill battle clearing you, and I’m not about to make a martyr of myself. What do you have? The tighter the evidence and the less it’s just your word against his, the better.”

“Like what?” I said.

I knew from Haskins that Langford had hidden away some open-and-shut evidence implicating Henry Davies in the reporter’s murder. But I held off on mentioning that to Rivera. There was something about his manner I didn’t like, beyond my usual distaste for police. He was sweating, lightly, but the lurid red and purple glow of the fluorescents made it more visible. I wanted to tease him out some more.

“Did Haskins tell you anything?” Rivera asked. “Give you anything?”

I concentrated on his question, keeping silent. I wanted him to talk, to say more than he should.

“Any evidence we can use against Henry?”

I’m sure he was a good cop—pigheaded and uncurious—but he was a bad con man. The rub at the center of most swindles is this: you have to not want what you desperately want. You have to hide any greed, even go so far as to refuse at first when the mark offers you the item you’re trying to steal, keep going until you make the mark practically force it on you. The minute you ask about the object in question—a watch, a wallet, whatever—the minute you want, the minute greed comes to town, it botches everything. People smell it, then it’s game over. And Rivera was all greed right now.

“No,” I said. “Nothing.”

I took a step away and considered my exits.

Rivera lifted his hand and ran his finger along his right eyebrow. The guy was a brick shithouse, the opposite of twitchy. It was a bad signal for him to use, because it didn’t seem natural. To make things worse, he looked toward the gesture’s recipient as he tipped it—just a glance, but it was there.

Without a word, I started walking fast in the opposite direction. “I have to go check something,” I said. “I’ll meet you back here.”

“What?” Rivera started after me.

During the whole conversation, Rivera had focused on the one thing Henry would want: the evidence Haskins had pointed me to. The details of the double murder—what should have been Rivera’s priority—he’d more or less skipped over. He also seemed sure not only that I was in the house but that I’d had time alone with Haskins. I’d never said so. Maybe I was paranoid, but everything about his performance smelled. I was out.

I thought I had decent radar for undercovers, but apparently not today. As I moved out, Rivera’s backup materialized. Where one minute there was a student, a retired guy, and a tourist, the next there were several men, clearly working with Rivera and watching me, who looked like they knew how to handle themselves. Switching buildings may have bought me a little time, knocked them off their game, but now they were closing in quickly.

Most of my fighting experience has come while drunk, very drunk. Funny coincidence. As a result, the lessons learned are a little hazy. Nonetheless, I picked up two moves in the service that have, for the most part, helped me avoid getting the shit beaten out of me too badly.

Thing one: As I raced away from Rivera, a guy in shorts and a ball cap came around the corner and tried to collar me. I peeled his hand off, grabbed his wrist, and twisted his right arm back across his body. I know from firsthand experience (open bar, military police) that this hurts like a motherfucker, especially when you get the elbow going in the opposite direction, twisting the ligaments in the shoulder like a dishrag. Like most of the other goons coming at me, the guy had a fifty-pound advantage, so this sneaky-bastard stuff was my only hope. Once he was off balance I leaned my hip in near his center of gravity and threw him over my shoulder.