The President's Killers (20 page)

EIGHTY-SEVEN

Crittenden pulled onto the Rock Creek parkway.

“That’s crazy, Bud,” his brother-in-law said. “Who would the broad be?”

Crittenden was sorry he’d mentioned the young woman who came to his door.

“I’m not saying she’s got something to do with Kinney,” he snapped. “I just want to get back to the house.”

“I think Kinney just chickened out. Little piss ant. He’ll call you again, Bud.”

“We damn well better hope so.”

“Heard from Lee?”

That was a sore point. It had been nearly a week since Groark contacted him.

“Not a word.”

“Where the hell is he?”

“How do I know?”

Crittenden thought he’d made it clear he wanted Groark to keep him posted on what was happening. But he had heard nothing since Groark drove up to Jersey to stake out the apartment of Kinney’s girlfriend.

“You don’t think Kinney would try to contact the Witch, do you?” Sal said.

Crittenden glared at Conti. “Someday you’re going to call our esteemed Director that in front of the wrong person. She’s in Vegas.”

“Vegas!”

“There’s a police chiefs conference there.”

“Brooks a gambler?”

“I have no idea.”

“Probably plays the slots with all the other little old ladies. Bitch is too dumb to handle anything else.”

Crittenden started to change lanes as a car came up behind them.

“Watch it!”

He hit the brakes, the car lurching, tires squealing.

“Jesus Christ!”

Crittenden shook his head. His brother-in-law was enough to make anyone forget what he was doing. Helping Sal get into the Secret Service had probably hurt his own career. He’d done it as a favor for Lettie, and he came to regret it long before his poor wife departed this earth.

Meesh saw the headlights approaching from the next block.

She turned and started towards their rental car at the other end of the block. As she walked, she kept waiting for the car to go past, but it didn’t. It had halted in front of Crittenden’s house.

One of the car doors opened. She stepped behind a tree to watch.

The headlights went out and another door opened. In the darkness, she couldn’t be sure how many people got out. They started up the walk to the house.

There were two or three of them. The rental Taurus was still a half-block away. With her heart pounding, she ran as fast as she could.

EIGHTY-EIGHT

“Go on into the living room,” Crittenden told Sal. “I just want to check the kitchen.”

A moment later, he heard Conti yell. “What are you doing to your den, Bud? Are you remodeling or something?”

Remodeling? He wheeled around and hurried back to the front of the house. “What are you talking about?”

Conti was staring into the den. The room was a mess, the floor strewn with papers and folders, the drawers of the file cabinets pulled out.

It was Kinney, Crittenden knew immediately. It had to be.

He drew his Sig Sauer semiautomatic. “While we were cooling our heels at those goddamn monuments that smart-ass kid was here!”

He checked the hallway. Kinney might still be in the house. He went into the kitchen to check the rear door. There was no sign of damage. Maybe he had come in through the basement.

“I’m going down the basement,” he yelled. “You check upstairs.”

Listening to the voices below him, Denny decided there were two of them. Crittenden had somebody with him.

When he heard them at the front door, he had darted up the stairs to the darkened second floor. There was still another floor above him, and he began to creep up the next set of carpeted stairs

At the landing the staircase made a hundred-eighty-degree turn. Above him, he saw the silhouette of the handrail and banisters. There were two small rectangles of dim light — curtained windows — behind them.

When he reached the third floor, he saw a window about thirty feet to his left and another about the same distance to his right. They were the only other sources of light.

He studied the dark forms around him, trying to figure out what they were. He seemed to be in a hallway with a large room at either end and a small room between them.

With one hand extended in front of him, he followed the railing at the top of the stairs to his right, then crept into the room, feeling his way along the wall.

His hand brushed against something. A small metal latch. He explored it with his fingers. It was attached to a smooth plywood panel, a small sliding door that led into total blackness, apparently a crawl space beneath the eaves.

He felt his way along the wall and came to two cardboard boxes, one on top of the other. He crept around them. There was a nightstand and, beyond it, a bed. As he started across the center of the room, his leg bumped a cardboard box containing glass bottles or jars. They clinked loudly, one of them shattering.

On the first floor, Sal Conti cocked his head, looking up at the ceiling above him. It sounded as though someone had broken a window.

He ran into the hallway and peered up the dark staircase. Sig Sauer in hand, he flipped the light switch on and started up the stairs.

EIGHTY-NINE

“911,” the weary male voice said. “What’s your emergency?”

“They’re going to kill my fiancé!” Meesh shouted into her cell phone.

“Ma’am?”

“Two men. Maybe three. Call the FBI.”

“Where are you?”

“They’re going to kill him.”

“I need you to calm down, ma’am. Where are you?”

“I’m not sure. Someplace on Ogden Place. The home of Warren Crittenden, wherever that is.”

“Warren…?”

“Crittenden, Crittenden.” She spelled the name. “Please hurry. They’re going to kill Denny.”

“Hang on a minute, ma’am…”

“Call the FBI. Please. One of them is Denny Kinney.”

“Who?”

“Denny Kinney.”

“The guy who shot the President?”

“Yes. I mean, no!” The tears came. “I’m his fiancée.”

NINETY

Conti had never been on the third floor of his brother-in-law’s house before.

He found the light switch at the top of the stairs. Across the hall in front of him was a small bathroom with a sloping ceiling. To his left was a room that appeared to be filled with cardboard boxes and stored furniture. At the other end of the hall was a dusty-looking bedroom.

With his pistol in hand, he peeked into the bathroom. Nothing.

He edged toward the bedroom. In the half-light within the room, he could see an old twin bed, a scarred old bookcase, some cardboard boxes.

He reached into the room and flicked on the light switch beside the door. The room was empty.

Kneeling on one knee, he looked under the bed. Two suitcases, that was all.

Behind him, near the door he had entered, was a closet door. If there was anybody in the room, he was in the closet.

In the crawl space behind the wall panel, Denny heard the footsteps enter the bedroom, stop, and then begin to move away from him.

He slid the panel open a fraction of an inch and saw a man with a gun tiptoeing away from him toward another door. It wasn’t Crittenden.

He nudged the panel open another quarter of an inch.

The man yanked the other door open, leaned forward, and looked to either side of him. He squatted and poked at something on the floor. Then he straightened up and started back towards Denny.

Denny held his breath. Only three feet from him were the boxes he had brushed against. The man bent down, his back to Denny, and looked inside the boxes, apparently examining the broken glass.

Denny eased the panel door open, took two steps, and jammed the Glock against the man’s neck.

Two dark, frightened eyes stared up at him.

Denny knocked the pistol out of his hand, grabbed the man’s arm, and twisted it behind his back.

“Get Crittenden up here! Call him like you’re all alone.”

NINETY-ONE

“Warren! Up here!”

Crittenden stared up the staircase at the lighted second and third floors, immediately suspicious. His brother-in-law never called him Warren.

He started up the stairs, pistol in his hand. “You all right?”

“I just want you to look at something,” Sal yelled.

Crittenden kept his finger on the trigger.

When he reached the third floor, his brother-in-law called out again. “In here, Warren.”

His voice came from the bedroom. With both hands cradling his pistol, arms thrust in front of him, Crittenden stepped into the doorway and saw Kinney crouched behind his brother-in-law, using him as a shield.

“Put the gun down, Crittenden!”

Denny kept behind his hostage, clutching the man’s belt and pressing his pistol against his head.

“Do it, for Chrissake, Bud!”

Crittenden stared at them over the barrel of his pistol, a faintly ridiculous-looking figure in a warm-up suit in a menacing crouch.

“You’ve got things mixed up, Kinney.”

“You’re the one who’s mixed up, Crittenden.”

For a fraction of a second Denny saw Crittenden’s eyes dart to a spot behind them. Whatever he saw surprised him.

“Bud,” his hostage whined, “he’s serious.”

Denny adjusted his position just enough to allow him to catch a glimpse of a red light flashing outside the window behind them.

From below them, he heard a banging noise. Someone was pounding on the front door. There were muffled shouts. Cops? They had to be cops.

Crittenden looked alarmed. The resolve in his eyes seemed to give way, as if he realized it was over. The string had run out.

“All right, okay, Kinney. Let’s wait for the police.”

They heard heavy feet on the stairs, the voices growing louder. Denny felt the muscles in his back and legs begin to relax.

Suddenly, Crittenden’s pistol exploded.

His hostage spun loose from Denny’s grip, the bullet sending the man reeling to the floor.

With Crittenden’s pistol pointed directly at him, it exploded again just as Denny squeezed the trigger.

Crittenden tumbled forward.

Denny felt a stinging sensation in his side. Blood was streaming from his arm. He dropped to one knee to examine his arm.

“Freeze!”

Crouching in the doorway was a uniformed cop with his pistol leveled at him.

Denny was jubilant. It was over, he’d made it!

He grinned at the cop and was starting to stand up when the barrel of the pistol flashed.

NINETY-TWO

Handcuffed in the back seat of a police car, Meesh could catch only glimpses of the house’s front entrance.

The police officers standing next to the patrol car blocked her view.

The driveway and street were jammed with police vehicles and flashing multi-colored lights. Uniformed officers and detectives kept hurrying past.

The cops had put the cuffs on her and dumped her into the police cruiser when she told them she’d been with Denny when he broke into the house. How could she have been so stupid?

Suddenly, there was a commotion at the front door of the house, loud voices and people coming out. She twisted around to try to see what was happening. Someone was being carried out on a stretcher. They came towards her for a short distance and disappeared from view.

A few minutes later, there was more excitement, another stretcher coming out. Meesh’s heart pounded. One of the uniformed cops beside the patrol car moved, blocking her view.

She yelled and kicked the door.

The door opened. “Hey, pipe down in there!”

“Who are they taking out?”

“I don’t know which one, but one’s Kinney.”

“Is he okay?”

“One’s dead. Let’s hope it’s your shit-face boyfriend.”

NINETY-THREE

If the FBI types grilling her thought they could intimidate her, they were mistaken. Meesh was beyond that.

The old guy named Bambrick stared at her through his huge eyeglasses, his fierce eyes as big as a horse’s.

“So, in this great big metropolitan center, with millions of people,” he repeated with heavy sarcasm, “you and Kinney were able to find this guy Crittenden?”

“I’m not answering any more questions,” she said softly. “Not until somebody tells me Denny’s condition.”

They had brought her to a small, bare room in the J. Edgar Hoover headquarters building.

Bambrick turned to the other two men in the room. “What the hell happened to Judd?”

One of them, a stocky man with a pink complexion, hurried out to look for him.

“What’s the story on the papers she claims she had?” Bambrick asked the other one. “Have they found them?”

“We haven’t heard back yet, Ed.”

She saw the door open. A younger, sandy-haired man entered, his eyes fixed on Bambrick. “We’ve got a statement from Conti, the agent with the flesh wound.”

“Good. What about the other agent?”

“Died on the operating table.”

Nobody said anything.

“Too bad,” Bambrick finally said. “What does Conti have to say?”

“He says he and Crittenden, the one who died, were out on a search mission, hoping to find Kinney. They came back to Crittenden’s house, saw it was ransacked, and — “

The stocky man returned with Judd in tow.

Meesh stared at him, trying to interpret the grave expression on his face.

“— and they found Kinney hiding in the attic. He ambushed them and all hell broke loose.”

Bambrick turned to Judd, who was obviously intimidated by him.

“Sorry, Ed,” Judd said. “I had trouble getting through. They’re operating on Kinney right now.”

He was alive! Meesh wanted to shout out loud.

“He took a bullet in his forehead. It’s bad. Another one in his side. Just a flesh wound.”

“He going to make it?” Bambrick asked.

“They’re taking a look inside his head. He’s going to be in the operating room for several hours.” Judd hesitated, searching for the right words. “The doctors aren’t making any promises.”

Bambrick gave her no time to absorb the fact Denny might die on the operating table.

“With that Secret Service agent dead,” he said, “you could be looking at an accessory-to-murder charge, young lady.”

The threat meant nothing to her. She didn’t care what happened to her.

He started all over again. “You’re telling us there are papers containing incriminating material which should be in your rental car… except for some reason we can’t find them.”

“They should be in the car. All I was thinking about was Denny in that house. Alone, against two or three of them. I wasn’t sure how many.”

“We found the officers who went through the car yet?” Bambrick asked the stocky, pink-faced man.

“Let me check again.”

Bambrick softened his voice. “You said there was material about President Merrill in Crittenden’s files.”

“That’s right,” she said. “Crittenden was assigned to him when he was Vice President.”

Bambrick went back to the one subject that frightened her. “Tell me again how you tracked Crittenden to Patrice’s.”

She hadn’t told them about Denny’s fight with Lott under the stands at Camp Randall. If she brought that up, they’d pin Lott’s death on him, too.

“Denny had part of the address on a slip of paper. I don’t know where he got it.”

Somehow Bambrick sensed she was holding back something.

“We’re the folks, young lady, who are going to determine whether you walk out of here a suspect or just a witness. You’re a very pretty young woman. But you’re not going to be quite as pretty when you come out of prison after doing fifteen years on an accessory-to-murder rap.”

She looked Bambrick in the eye.

“Denny Kinney isn’t a murderer.”