The Architect (17 page)

Clevenger realized he was being sold a story about why Crosse might be the killer, and that Jones had a vested interest in his buying it. But that didn’t make it untrue. “Why do you think you kept him around so long?” he asked.

“Honestly?” Jones smiled, but only for an instant. “The company was young.” He nodded at the drawings on the table. “I needed those,” he said. He looked at Clevenger. “And I wanted Lauren.”

FORTY-TWO

West Crosse had chartered
a Citation X to take him back to Thunder Bay. He landed at 9:05 A.M. The plane would wait there for his return trip at 5:00 P.M.

He had a limousine take him home. He wanted to spend several hours in his studio completing more detailed sketches of the Museum of Freedom to deliver to Elizabeth Buckley in the morning.

But he had more to do before returning to Washington. His plans for the Buckleys went far beyond an addition to the East Wing. He would free the first family from the terror of their broken child and increase the president’s power to liberate people around the world.

Crosse had not voted in the five years since he left Jones, Alison Design, left New York, left behind all useless compromise and all half-truths, and committed himself fully and irrevocably to God’s vision. Now he sat at his desk and filled out the New York State Voter Registration form, writing in the address of a studio apartment in Greenwich Village he had rented five weeks before, and changing his party affiliation from

Republican to Democrat. He sealed the envelope, stamped it, set it aside.

He turned on the computer in his office and pulled up the Web site of Bradley Jay, the most liberal of radio talk show hosts, clicked on the Feedback button and typed out a message:

How can a president and first lady possibly fathom the suffering of those who have lost sons and daughters in war when they have never suffered the loss of a child themselves? The party of Abraham Lincoln, who knew the grief of losing not one, but two sons, was once mine. But no longer.

—West Crosse

He called up Web sites for Jack Forbes, President Buckley’s opponent in the last election, for the Democratic National Committee,
The New York Times
, a dozen other liberal newspapers, MoveOn.org, Common Cause, the ACLU. He sent the same message to each.

He turned off the computer, took an engraved sheet of stationery from his desk drawer, and wrote out the same message in flowing script. He penned a tiny cross in the corner of the page. Then he folded it, tucked it in an envelope, and addressed it to President Warren Buckley at the White House.

He turned off the computer, stood up from his desk, and walked down a winding stone corridor to a two-story library, its domed glass ceiling etched with an outstretched hand. The hand of God.

An entire wall of bookshelves was filled, floor to ceiling, with anatomy and surgery texts.

He pulled down
Grant’s Atlas of Anatomy
, Ronan O’Rahilly’s
Basic Human Anatomy
, Ben Pansky’s
Gross Anatomy
, Naomi Nicholi’s
Obstetric and Gynecologic Surgery
, and Randolph Maloney’s
Principles and Practice of Vascular Surgery
, He laid them on a mahogany library table ten feet long, engraved with the Yale University crest beside the emblem of Skull and Bones—a skull and crossbones atop the number 322, reflecting the year 1832, when the Yale chapter was founded, along with it being the second such chapter in an international network.

He sat down to study.

He started with
Grant’s Atlas
, opened to chapter 3, the Perineum and Pelvis. He turned to Diagram 3-11, the female pelvis, in median section.

God’s greatness was everywhere visible—in the ovaries designed to marry egg and sperm, the uterus designed to cradle new life and deliver it into the world. And the perversion of that greatness by Blaire Buckley, unwed, herself genetically unfit, nauseated him.

What he would create the next night would look horrifying to others. Monstrous. He knew this. Yet to him, it would be beautiful beyond all words. Because he would create it in the name of the Lord, and in the cause of freedom, taking no personal pride in its perfection, all glory to God.

FORTY-THREE

Clevenger landed at Reagan
International in Washington at 2:30 P.M. He checked his cell phone as he was walking out of the terminal and saw he had missed four calls—one from North Anderson and three with blocked caller IDs.

He dialed voice mail. He had three messages. The first was Anderson’s, telling him he had arrived in Washington and made it over to the Mayflower Hotel. He’d been able to pull up a photo of Crosse on the Web, but hadn’t spotted him yet.

The second message was from Whitney Mc-Cormick, suggesting she meet Clevenger at 4:00 P.M. at
1789
, an exclusive Georgetown restaurant tucked away on a quiet block of Thirty-sixth Street.

The third message made him stop dead in the middle of the corridor. He felt someone bump him from behind, turned, and muttered an apology. Then he just stood there several seconds, listening to Billy’s voice, unable to focus on his words.

He walked to the side of the wide corridor and hit Replay.

“It’s Billy,” Billy Bishop said. “I got out. The lawyer they gave me was pretty good. The drugs—or whatever—were in that house and on a couple other guys, not me. They can’t yank my probation until they prove something called ‘constructive possession” when I go to trial. I don’t want to go back with those guys, but I can’t find my keys to the loft. So if you’re around, give me a call, okay?”

He’d lost his keys. Clevenger shook his head, wishing he and Billy were like other fathers and sons who could make a big deal out of lost keys. What a gift it would be to be able to scream at one another over something that mundane. They had much bigger problems. Billy was still all about legal wrangling and street smarts. He liked his lawyer just fine because he’d sprung him from jail. Now he needed a place to crash. Who knew why? Maybe the DEA hadn’t left any Royals on the street. Or maybe they were all running scared, worried which of them would flip and make a deal with prosecutors to nail the others.

He dialed Billy back.

He answered after five rings. “Hey.”

“I got your message,” Clevenger said.

“Are you around? I’m just hanging around downtown right now.”

There was no anxiety in his voice. No remorse. Something had to give. “No, I’m away.”

“Oh,” Billy said. “Does North still have a key?”

“He’s away, too,” Clevenger said. He closed his

The Architect
eyes, forced the words out. “Even if I were there, I wouldn’t let you in.”

Silence.

“I won’t let you come back home until you check yourself into detox and complete a rehab program.”

“I don’t need detox. I’m clean.”

Clevenger opened his eyes. “Give me a fucking break, will you? You expect me to take your word for that?” He took a deep breath and let it out. “I’m making it easy: Go back to Mass General and get yourself readmitted. If you do all right there, you can come home.”

“And if I don’t, I can’t?” Billy asked. “Like, ever?”

Clevenger felt his throat getting tight.

“I was totally out of line on Suffolk Street, I know, but I didn’t mean any of that,” Billy said.

Clevenger pictured Billy’s cold stare, remembered his words: “This is my family. You’re nothing to me.”

“Maybe you meant it, maybe you didn’t,” he said. “That doesn’t matter right now. Right now you have to—”

“It matters if you think I’m a liar,” Billy said, righteous indignation creeping into his voice.

It was time for a dose of reality. “Of course you are.”

“No more than anybody else. Everybody lies.”

Everybody lies
. It sounded like Billy might be about to rehash the hypocrisy of Clevenger drinking while he was leaning on him to stay sober. Or maybe it was Billy’s genuine worldview as the biological son of a man imprisoned for murder and a mother who was no better. Hie questions a psychiatrist would ask were clear
to Clevenger:
Who is ‘everybody”? Who lied to you? Let’s go back, one by one, as far as you can remember
.

But Billy wasn’t Clevenger’s patient, and the moment seemed to scream out for limits, not hand-holding. “Forget ‘everybody,”” Clevenger said. “Worry about yourself. You have a son you’re no father to. You have a second chance in life you don’t have the balls to take. You run away like a ten-year-old to a gang of losers and pump yourself up with drugs because you’re scared to feel anything—about yourself or anyone else.” He was trembling. “I love you, Billy. As God is my witness, I do. But you’re turning into a liar and a coward, and it’s getting pretty late in the game to turn that around. Maybe it’s too late. I don’t know. I know one thing: The way out is
in
, toward your pain—detox, then rehab, then therapy. First step, go to Mass General. That’s the deal, take it, or leave it.”

The phone went dead.

“Billy?”

Silence.

“You there?”

Nothing.

Clevenger dialed him back. No answer. He waited for the beep. “Call me, and I’ll let the E.R. at Mass General know you’re on your way,” he said. “I don’t care what time it is. It can be now, or two in the morning.” He paused. “Just call.” He hung up.

FORTY-FOUR

“It ‘s not my decision
alone, obviously,” Whitney Mc-Cormick said, seated at an out-of-the-way table at
1789
, with Clevenger. “But, personally, I don’t think it’s enough to move on. To investigate further, put resources on it, sure. But an arrest? No way.”

“We’ve got an architect designing victims” homes who happens to be a part-time surgeon,” Clevenger said. “How is that not enough?”

McCormick sipped her coffee. “We don’t know for sure he designed those homes, Frank. They look like the work of this West Crosse to you, but you’re not an architect. And the fact that his ex-wife and her new husband say he has a collection of surgery books and operated on her is beyond bizarre, but we don’t even know if it’s true. You said yourself this Laine Jones seemed to be trying pretty hard to get you interested in Crosse as a suspect.”

“Crosse is in D.C. under a pseudonym. North confirmed it. He’s registered at the Mayflower.”

“It’s still a free country. You can’t be thrown in jail
because you want to pay cash and use an assumed name.” She smiled. “Unless I’m wrong, you and I did that a dozen times at the Ritz in Boston.”

Clevenger sat back a bit in his seat, looked at Mc-Cormick. “How about the Skull and Bones connection?”

“What about it?”

“He’s using the name of the founder of the order.”

“Can we look at this like scientists for a second?”

“Alright...”

“We have someone who may or may not have designed the victims” homes. We have an author— Sutton—who lists Crosse as Skull and Bones, alongside members of the victims” families. Now, that list might or might not be accurate. But even if it is, I’ve told you before: You’re talking about America’s leading famihes. They invest together, educate their children together, buy vacation retreats together. Even if Crosse is Skull and Bones, even if he designed their homes, that doesn’t equal probable cause for an arrest warrant.”

“You could bring him in for questioning.”

“We might barely meet the threshold for that. I could ask.”

“You could...”

“I will ask. But here’s my real point: We’ll get more mileage out of watching him. Let’s find out who he’s visiting here, who he knows, maybe where he heads next. Uien maybe we have enough for a search warrant for his hotel room.”

Clevenger nodded to himself. “I’m good with that.” He kept looking at her.

“Doesn’t sound like you are.”

He wasn’t sure he wanted to tell her what was on his mind.

“C’mon,” she said.

He shrugged.

“What?”

A few seconds passed.

“Say it,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“Your father is Skull and Bones. He’s on the Sutton list, too. So maybe you can’t see this objectively.”

“You’re joking. I’d let a killer go because of some rumor my dad belongs to a college fraternity? That’s absurd.”

It did sound absurd when she said it. He didn’t respond.

She leaned forward slightly in her seat. “My father is a Yale grad and former congressman who donates heavily to Republican candidates around the country, including President Buckley. Of course he’s on the list. They say he’s been to Roswell, too, seen the aliens in formaldehyde out there. And who knows? I guess it’s possible he kept his secret society a secret from me his whole life. But if he is Skull and Bones, I wish he had at least pulled a few strings for me. I got wait-listed at Yale, then rejected.” She winked. “Maybe they were just trying to throw me off the scent.”

“You want to have Crosse followed, for starters, that’s fine. It feels anemic to me, but it’s your investigation.”

She looked at him askance. “What’s going on here? Is Billy alright?”

‘This has nothing to do with him,” Clevenger said. “Why are you bringing him up?”

“Can I be honest?”

“I hope so.” He felt his words increase the tension between them, even as he spoke them.

“I think you’re burnt out and you’re being sloppy.”

“What?”

“You’ve got a favorite horse in this race and you want to bet everything on him. You don’t want to look at the field. But what if you’re wrong? What if Crosse isn’t our man? What if one of his clients is the killer, or a draftsman who worked with him years back, or his former partner—this Laine Jones? He’s an architect, too, after all. How mad is he that Crosse took business from him? How about the ex-wife, Lauren? How mad is she that Crosse gave her to another man?”

Clevenger rubbed his eyes, looked up at the ceiling, back at McCormick. He nodded. “You’re right. I’ve got a little tunnel vision going here.”