The Next President (36 page)

The man had explained to her father that when somebody died accidentally during the commission of a felony it was just like you planned to kill him. It was murder and her father would be executed for the death of a worthless biker unless he let the blame be laid off on Evan.

The man had even told her she could be locked up for being an accessory after the fact.

Pru apologized to Evan for not coming forward to clear him, but she couldn’t let her father face the death penalty. Not when he’d done what he did only to benefit her. She promised that if Evan went to trial for Ivar McCray’s killing, she would come forward. Her father would have had enough time to run somewhere far away by then.

Pru repeated how sorry she was… and that she still loved Evan.

Tears ran down Evan Cade’s face.

“That statement exonerates you,” Blair told him in a soft voice.

Evan looked at him and asked, “Weren’t you sorry that it wasn’t you who nailed the sonofabitch?”

“I got to see him shot through the head. That was enough for me.”

The morgue was in the basement of the hospital, four floors below where Evan Cade talked with Blair McCray. There was only one attendant on duty and he had his nose buried in a Dean Koontz novel right up until the time the Toad creased his skull with the barrel of his pistol.

The Toad put the attendant on an empty gurney and covered him with a sheet. He left him among the four other bodies awaiting the medical examiner’s attention. A classic example of hiding something in plain sight.

Farrel was under the second sheet that the Toad lifted. He looked at Parrel’s fingertips: no ink stains. So he hadn’t been fingerprinted the oldfashioned way. A quick search of the morgue revealed no bio morphic scanner, so he hadn’t been printed the modern way, either. Which saved the Toad a lot of trouble. If someone wanted to try to track down Farrel under the name of Jack Armstrong, good luck to him.

The Toad dropped the sheet back into place and wheeled Farrel out the door the meat wagons used when they ferried bodies to and from the hospital.

Per his custom, the Toad had rented a full-sized car with a huge trunk.

He made Farrel fit easily enough.

Motoring away, the Toad thought it was as neat a job of morgue robbing as he’d ever done. Of course, small-town hospitals with their nonexistent security were no great challenge. Still, details like not allowing the local cops to get any clue as to whose body they had briefly held were part of the drill when you ran a first-rate covert operation.

And the Toad had sold himself to the Gardener as indisputably first-rate.

He’d bury Farrel’s body in one of the endless stretches of national forest that lay so conveniently close at hand. Then he’d plan how to take care of the rest of his chores. He kept envisioning that trailer in the woods as the silver basket into which he’d put all his eggs.

“There is one thing about Prudence Laney’s statement that bothers me a great deal,” Blair told Evan, “something that’s just not true.”

“What?” Evan asked.

Blair began to pace the room.

“She said the reason that sonofabitch went after Ivar in the first place was that Ivar cheated him in a business deal somehow.” Blair shook his head.

“No way. If Ivar disagreed how a pie got sliced, he’d certainly fight you about it.

But it’d be bare knuckles. He wasn’t given to guile and sneakiness. Didn’t have the capacity morally or mentally. So if it wasn’t that…” Blair stopped and looked directly at Evan.

“It’s almost as if Ivar was chosen to die to start up the old feud again.”

“And the blame would be pinned on me.” Evan carried Blair’s idea one step farther.

“Maybe there’s someone else out there. Maybe somebody who planned this whole thing. Maybe a second thug ready to do more dirty work.”

While they considered that possibility’, the room’s telephone rang. Evan answered, listened, and said, “Just a minute.”

He extended the phone to Blair.

“Your in-law, the chief. You were seen entering the hospital. He was notified and figured you’d be here.”

Blair took the phone and said, “Hello.” A moment later he added, “I’ll be right down.”

He gave the phone back to Evan, who hung it up.

“What’d he want?” Evan asked.

“No question we’ve got somebody else involved,” Blair told him.

“Somebody just broke into the morgue downstairs and stole the body of the man Deena Nokes killed.”

Dixie Wynne rolled into the driveway of his home in Gainesville, Florida, with his lights out. He tapped the button on his garage door opener and watched the door roll up. Then he eased his GMC 4x4 inside and lowered the door behind him.

He slipped into his house without turning on any of the lights. His plan was to stay in his house a day or two without letting anybody know he was back. He’d do a little peeking out from behind his blinds and drapes. If everything seemed okay, he’d emerge like he’d just returned from the hunting trip he’d told his neighbor Tag Olethy he’d been on. If anything at all seemed wrong to him, he’d slip away in the middle of the night and accept that he’d have to make a new life for himself somewhere else.

Dixie lay down in the comfort of his own bed. After having slept on the ground far too long for a man who wouldn’t see fifty again, he was asleep within minutes. He never knew that as soon as his garage door had gone up, a circuit had been closed and a signal had been sent to his former colleagues on the Gainesville PD SWAT team.

The neighbors would be evacuated first and then they’d come for Dixie.

Before going to sleep, J. D. checked for a message from Pickpocket and found one:

Might be on to something big re Townes. Will advise if it pans out.

Haven’t found Donnel Timmons’ new line of work yet, but made another interesting discovery. He has a Michigan permit to carry a concealed weapon.

Wednesday, September 22, 2004

It seemed to J. D. that he’d been asleep for only minutes when the phone rang. He blinked twice to clear his vision and saw that it was in fact 2 A.M.

His heart went cold when he thought that somehow the call would bring him bad news about Evan.

His voice was little more than a grunt.

“Hello.”

“J. D.” it’s Jenny. I’m sorry to wake you, but we have a crisis here.”

“Where?” he asked.

“I’m calling from Del’s suite. He asked if you could sit in with the rest of us.”

“Now?”

A new strain of anxiety swam through his mind. It was the middle of the night. No innocent bystanders around. They were springing the trap on him.

“As soon as you can make it. Can we expect you shortly?”

What could he say?

“Give me ten minutes.”

A pair of Secret Service agents was waiting for him when he opened his door. Not to arrest him, but to escort him to the meeting. So he’d just been feeling paranoid. This time.

Del Rawley convened the predawn meeting around a conference table in his suite. With the candidate were Jenny and the rest of the brain trust. Also present was Donnel Timmons. J. D. was the last to arrive. Donnel gave him a small nod when he entered the room.

Everyone listened to what Jenny had learned from Don Ward.

J. D. kept his face impassive when he heard the M-100 that had been found was a copy. His weapon had been a copy, too. A perfectly lethal copy.

If the second weapon had belonged to Donnel, J. D. was sure it could do the job, too. The claim that it was a shoddy knockoff had to be spin to support the president’s claim of a hoax.

But the others had different concerns.

“This is despicable,” Alita said.

“Del almost dies and they say it was all a seam to gain sympathy.”

Baxter was uncharacteristically restrained, which meant he was thinking as hard as he could.

“Despicable, but pretty damn smart. How do we disprove their assertion? Ask the assassin to step forward and say a few words on our behalf?”

J. D. maintained his mask of neutrality.

“We can expect big, big drops in our numbers if we don’t find an effective way to fight this,” Jim Greenberg informed them.

“And if this lie gains popular credence, we’re finished.”

Del looked at Jenny. She was the campaign manager. She was the one who had to figure out a way to fight back. But at the moment she seemed as stuck for an answer as any of them.

“I’ll think of something,” she assured everyone.

“Better be fast,” Baxter Brown replied.

J. D. was surprised that he had an idea and a reason to offer it. If, for what ever reason, he failed to keep both Evan and himself alive, if he didn’t, in fact, kill Del Rawley, who did he want to see as president? It was crazy… but what wasn’t these days?

He gently cleared his throat and all eyes shifted to him.

“I’m new to all this. So I don’t know if this is a good idea or not.”

“What’s that, Mr. Cade?” Del asked, very interested that the man who liked to fire rifles had a suggestion. Then a thought occurred to the candidate: If Cade really was the man who had taken the shot at him in Chicago, and he was now working so closely with the campaign, who would ever believe that the attempt on his life hadn’t been a fake?

“You believe the incumbent is using this tactic strictly for political advantage?” J. D. asked.

“Yes.”

“And he, in fact, knows that the assassination attempts were real?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, why don’t you invite him to campaign with you?”

Everyone was stunned by the notion, but Jenny smiled brightly.

“Sure, I see it. Call his bluff. Ask him to share the same stage with Del, where he might wind up in somebody’s gun sight… Oh, I’m sorry, Del, I shouldn’t have put it that way.”

The candidate smiled thinly.

“That’s pretty much what it amounts to.” He turned to J. D. “Make the man put up or shut up, that’s the idea, Mr. Cade?”

J. D. nodded.

“Turn it around on him, Senator. If he says you’re a fraud, he should have no reason to be afraid of making appearances with you. If he refuses, he’s either a liar or a coward.” J. D. asked Jim Greenberg, “What’d that do to the numbers?”

Del smiled.

“I think you have an aptitude for this business, Mr. Cade.”

“Beginner’s luck, Senator.”

While the candidate and his brain trust started to work out the details of their response to the incumbent’s ploy, J. D. went back to his suite and gave the matter further thought. What was it Rawley’s political adviser had said?

Could they ask the assassin to step forward and admit he’d been working in deadly earnest? No, of course they couldn’t.

Even so, Colonel Townes couldn’t take the chance of letting J. D. ever reveal the truth. So if there was a new strategy in place to eliminate Del Rawley politically rather than mortally, and the current propaganda had it that there was no assassin and never had been, it then became a necessity to get rid of anyone who could prove that assertion wrong. Him.

Donnel, too.

Of course, that assumed that Townes was working directly for the president.

The problem with that was, from what J. D. knew of Townes, the colonel never worked directly with or for anyone. His mind was too twisted to proceed along straight lines. It was entirely likely that the president’s political people had come up with this strategy independently of what Townes was doing.

His attempt to kill Del Rawley and the two attempts to drive Rawley from the race politically seemed to be the products of two separate sets of thinking.

Two different planners. So there could be crosscurrents at play here. J. D.‘s guess was that Townes still wanted to see Del Rawley dead. If not, why would he have placed two assassins so close to the man?

Having lost his M-100, Donnel would have to get the job done up close.

And if anything, Donnel’s access to Rawley was even better than J. D.‘s.

Garvin Townes walked along Mission Beach in the predawn darkness. He heard the soft lapping of water on sand. The sound murmured in his ear

like a lover’s invitation: Join me. The notion of suicide had occurred to him before.

It was especially apt now when, one way or another, the consequence of failure at the game he was playing would be the loss of his life.

Death had been his lifelong companion. Granted, he’d been its agent, but being so intimate with the mortality of others, he had lost all fear of his own.

It was not dying that was to be feared, Townes knew, it was dying badly.

Dying young was bad, Townes conceded. So was dying at the hands of an enemy. Dying one day at a time in a prison cell was very bad. Perhaps worst of all, in Townes’ view, was dying and leaving important work undone.

Of the latter two, which were the only possibilities he could see applying to him, he was sure that he could take his life to avoid imprisonment. And if someone took away from him the last opportunity he had to do something significant with the remainder of his life, then suicide seemed like a choice he could… No, you couldn’t say live with, could you? But should he be denied what would be his crowning achievement, killing himself was something he could see doing without regret.

As long as he removed J. D. Cade and maybe a few others first.

Del Rawley showed up at the CBS affiliate in San Diego at 4:25 a.m. One of the anchors of the local morning news show was an old friend who used to work in Madison, Wisconsin, where Rawley lived. He trusted her. She and her coanchor were stunned to have the leading presidential candidate drop in out of the blue five minutes before airtime, five minutes before the president was to make what was billed as a crucial announcement concerning the election.

The anchors had thought they would be part of the mob fighting for Rawley’s reaction to whatever it was the president had to say. Del Rawley was quickly patted down with makeup as the show’s producer called New York to let the network know about their unexpected guest.

Jenny and the Secret Service detail looked on as the anchors started to question Del.

Did he know what the president was going to say?