“Delicious,” she said.
I took the card. “No, you had it right a minute ago—scary.”
Chapter 83
I WAS SURPRISED to hear from one of Tony Nicholson’s attorneys the next afternoon. It wasn’t the bow-tie-and-suspenders nerd from the night of the raid, but someone else entirely. This one sounded even more expensive, with a 202 phone number on the ID. The heart of the heart of the capital.
“Detective Cross, my name is Noah Miller. I’m with Kendall and Burke. I believe you’re familiar with my client Anthony Nicholson?”
“I’ve been trying to meet with your client since last week,” I told him. “I’ve left half a dozen messages for Anthony.”
“At Nyth-Klein?” he asked.
“That’s right.”
“Yes, they represent the LLC and its holdings in Virginia. We’ve taken over individual representation for Mr. Nicholson—which brings me back to the subject at hand. I want to be very clear that I’m making this call at his request, and that he’s choosing to ignore counsel on the matter.”
That got my attention. “How soon can I see him?” I asked.
“You can’t. That’s not why I’m calling. Please listen carefully. What I have for you is a safe-deposit key, if you’d like to come pick it up. Mr. Nicholson says it’s important to your investigation. He also believes that the Metro Police are his best chance of staying alive. He doesn’t want to deal with the FBI.”
I was Googling Kendall and Burke while we spoke. “I’ve already been to Nicholson’s safe-deposit box,” I told him, as the firm came up on my screen. Big, reputable one on K Street.
“Yes, I know. This is in the same bank but a different box,” he said, and my hands stopped over the keyboard. What would Nicholson have in a second box? More important, how could we protect him? And from whom?
“Can I assume you’ll come pick this up today?” Miller continued.
“Definitely, but let me ask you something,” I said. “Why Metro? Why me? Why wouldn’t Nicholson give this up to the Federal Bureau?”
“Honestly, my client doesn’t trust the people who are holding him—or, frankly, the integrity of their investigation. One more thing—he wants to make sure his cooperation doesn’t go unnoticed.”
I couldn’t help a little smile. How weird, to suddenly be on the same side of the fence as Tony Nicholson, ah, Anthony. It sounded like he was getting as paranoid as I was—and maybe for good reason.
“Twenty-twenty K Street, fourth floor?” I asked, printing it off the screen.
“Very good, Detective Cross. Make it between one thirty and two o’clock. I’ll be gone after that.”
“I’ll see you at one thirty,” I said, and hung up on Lawyer Miller before he could hang up on me.
Chapter 84
IT DIDN’T TAKE long to snag the key from Nicholson’s attorney at Kendall and Burke, and not much longer than that to get in and out of the Exeter Bank. It was as if the lawyer, Noah Miller, and the bank manager, Ms. Currie, were competing to see who could get me out of their lives faster. Fine with me.
It turned out that the only thing in the new deposit box was a single, unmarked disk, which was about what I’d expected. I drove straight back to the Daly Building with it and called Sampson on my way. He was already there, so it was no problem to meet as soon as I arrived with the disk.
In fact, the big man was sitting with his feet up, fooling around on a laptop, when I came into my office.
“Did you know Zeus was also called the Cloud Gatherer?” he said. “His symbols are the thunderbolt, eagle, bull, and oak. Oh, and he was a pederast too. Rumored to be.”
“Fascinating,” I said. “Get your shoes off my desk and slide this in.”
I handed him the disk and closed the door behind me.
“What is it?” Sampson asked.
“Tony Nicholson thinks it’s his life insurance.”
Seconds later, the video started playing.
Right away, I recognized the bedroom from the carriage barn apartment at Nicholson’s club. It looked the same except for some clean sheets on the bed and maybe a few more knickknacks.
A time signature at the bottom of the screen put it at 1:30 a.m. on July 20 of the previous summer.
“Can those signature numbers be faked?” I asked Sampson.
“No doubt. Why? Do you think Nicholson is screwing with you?”
“Maybe. Probably. I don’t know yet.”
After about thirty seconds, the image hiccupped, and the time jumped ahead to 2:17 a.m.
Now there was a girl on the bed, wearing nothing but black lace panties. She was blond and petite, with black cuffs on her wrists that were strapped to the posts over her head. Her legs were spread open as wide as humanly possible.
There was no sound, but the way she was moving looked more alluring than scared or defensive to me. Still, I had a fierce knot in my stomach. Whatever this was, I didn’t think I wanted to see it proceed.
A man walked into the frame—a real creep wearing full S&M garb, with either rubber or latex pants and a long-sleeved shirt. Also heavy boots and a fitted hood that zipped all the way up the back of his head. Other than the fact that he was tall and well muscled, I couldn’t tell much more about him.
“He knows the camera’s there,” Sampson said. “Maybe he wanted this filmed.”
“Let’s just watch, John.”
I couldn’t talk much right now. I was already thinking about what had happened to Caroline, possibly in this room, and maybe at the hands of the same creep we were watching.
Zeus, or whoever it was, bent over the girl and placed a black kidney-shaped blindfold over her eyes. “There’s a ring,” I said. “On his right hand.”
It looked like a class ring, but the image quality wasn’t good enough to make it out.
He took his time, pulled a few more things out of the dresser, a spreader bar that he cuffed to both of her ankles; a small brown bottle of something, possibly amyl nitrate.
When he waved it under her nose, the blond girl’s face went very red. Then her head lolled from side to side.
Sampson and I watched silently as they had sex. Most of the time, the creep kept one hand on the mattress for balance and the other over her throat. It looked like he was performing asphyxophilia to me, controlling the girl’s oxygen, giving it and then taking it away.
The girl played along and didn’t seem distressed, which was distressing to watch. Then suddenly he arched up off of her, climaxing, I think, raised his free hand like he’d just won some kind of contest.
All his weight appeared to be on her throat, and suddenly her movements became jerky and desperate. Her legs jutted straight out under him. It was a horrible thing to watch, like it was happening right now, and there was nothing we could do to stop it.
The more the blond girl struggled, the more excited he got, until finally her body went limp and she stopped moving altogether. Only then did he kiss her.
“Oh, Christ,” Sampson said under his breath. “What’s the matter with the world?”
The killer climbed off the bed after that. There was no lingering, no fetishizing with the body. In less than a minute, he was gone from the private suite.
Twenty seconds later, the video cut out altogether.
“Come on, John. We’re going to Alexandria. We need to find out if that was Zeus.”
Chapter 85
AT THE DETENTION center in Alexandria, Sampson and I walked in through the visitors’ area. We went down a familiar path—past Records and Door 15, where inmates are released, until we got to the Command Center.
At that point, our police IDs were enough to get us buzzed through another pair of steel doors, to the booking desk.
All that was the easy part.
As usual, three guards were stationed on the desk. Two of them were middle-aged and hung in the background. One younger guy had the grunt job of processing walk-ins like us. A gold tooth caught the light when he spoke.
&nbs
p; “State your business.”
“Detectives Cross and Sampson, MPD. We need a temporary custody order on two prisoners, Anthony Nicholson and Mara Kelly.”
“You got a letter on file?” He was already picking up the phone.
“We’ve interviewed them before,” I said. “Just a few follow-up questions and we’re out of here.”
It was worth a shot, anyway. Maybe there was a crack we could fall through.
The deputy wasn’t on the phone for long, and he shook his head at me as he hung up.
“Well, A, you don’t have a letter for today, and B, it don’t matter anyway. Your people are gone, Nicholson and Kelly both.”
“Gone?” I couldn’t believe what I’d heard. “Please tell me you mean they were transferred.”
“I mean gone, man.” He flipped open a black binder on the desk. “Yep, right here. Eleven hundred hours today. Someone named Miller posted—Jesus—full cash bonds on both of them. A quarter mil each.”
That got the attention of the other two guards, and they came to look over his shoulder. One of them whistled low. “Must be nice,” the other one said.
“Yeah, right?” the kid agreed.
This wasn’t their doing and it wasn’t their fault, but they were the ones standing in front of me.
“What is going on around here?” I said. “Nicholson is a major flight risk. Did anybody bother to check on that? He had plane tickets booked the day he was arrested!”
The young guard was staring at me now. The other two had hands on their batons. “I hear you, man, but you’ve got to step back, right now.”
I felt Sampson pulling on my shoulder. “Don’t waste your breath here, Alex. Let’s go. Nicholson and the girl are gone.”
“This is a disaster, John.”
“I know, and it’s done. Come on.”
I let him pull me away, but I would have paid good money to take a swing at someone. Tony Nicholson, for one. Or that smug lawyer Miller.
Even as we were leaving, I could hear the guards talking about their former prisoners. “Fuckin’ Richie Riches, man. They get their own breaks and everyone else’s too.”
“Yeah, right? It’s like they say, the rich just get richer, and the poor—”
“Work here.”
The last thing I heard was the guards laughing among themselves.
Chapter 86
WHAT AN INCREDIBLE circus! Whether or not it was Nicholson’s own money that got him out, he still would have needed a federal judge to sign the Form 41, and someone else even higher in the food chain to broker the deal.
The cover-up was getting broader and deeper and dirtier every day, wasn’t it? I think I was more awed than shocked by the whole thing, and worse, I suspected it wasn’t close to being over.
John and I went through the motions of running out to Nicholson’s house and then Mara Kelly’s apartment, but we found exactly what we expected.
There was yellow police tape on the doors, but no indication that anyone had been there for at least a couple of days. Even if they had been, they were long gone now. I doubted that we would ever see Nicholson or Kelly again.
Before we got back on the highway, I asked Sampson to pull over at an Exxon station near Mara Kelly’s apartment. I bought a little Nokia prepaid phone for thirty-nine dollars and used it to dial the number I’d gotten the other day.
Wylie Rechler answered on the first ring. “This is Jenna. Talk to me.”
“It’s Detective Alex Cross, Jenna. We met the other day out in Friendship Heights,” I said. “Are you ready to jump into this thing?”
I heard a melodramatic little gasp on the other end. “Honey, I was ready the last time we chatted. What have you got for me now?”
“Ever heard the name Tony Nicholson?”
“I don’t think so. No, definitely not. Should I have?”
“He’s the one with the little black book you’d love to get your hands on, not that any of us ever will. Until eleven o’clock this morning, he was in federal custody. Now he’s out on bail, and if I had to guess, he’s on his way out of the country. With the little black book.”
“What does this mean for me?”
“It could mean a lot, Jenna. If you help me out. I want you to put a bug in Sam Pinkerton’s ear at the Post,” I said. “Could you do that?”
“I suppose I could.” She paused, and then her voice dropped. “Sam covers the White House. You know that, correct?”
“That’s right.”
“Oh Jesus, I’m wet—excuse my French. Okay, so what’s Mr. Pinkerton going to have for me when I call? If I call.”
I told Jenna the truth. “Maybe nothing right away. But you two might make a pretty good team on this one. You’ll have all the right angles covered.”
“I think I’m in love with you, Detective.”
“That’s another thing,” I said. “Sam pretty much hates my guts. You’ll probably get a lot further with him if you don’t happen to mention my name.”
As I hung up, Sampson was giving me a once-over from the driver’s seat. “I thought Sam Pinkerton was a friend of yours.”
“He is.” I pocketed the new phone next to my old one. “I’m just trying to keep it that way.”
Chapter 87
I HAD ONE more place to be that afternoon, and I asked Sampson to drop me off.
One of Washington’s favorite sons, and one of my favorite people too, Hilton Felton, had died a while back, way too young at the age of sixty. I’d spent countless nights listening to Hilton play at Kinkead’s in Foggy Bottom, where he’d been the house pianist since 1993. That’s where they were having a memorial concert for him.
Something like a hundred and fifty people squeezed in to celebrate Hilton’s life, and, of course, hear some great music from his friends. It was all very beautiful and relaxed and wonderful in its own way. The music could only have been better if Hilton had been there to play it himself.
When Andrew White got up and played one of Hilton’s original compositions, it made me feel incredibly lucky to have known the man behind that music, but also deeply sorry to know that I’d never hear him play it again in the way that only Hilton could.
I missed him terribly, and all the while I was there, I couldn’t stop thinking about Nana Mama too. She was the one who first took me to hear Hilton.
Chapter 88
AFTER THE EMOTIONAL stop at Kinkead’s I caught a cab over to Fifth Street, then went upstairs to work. As if things weren’t already interesting enough, we had a couple of unwanted visitors at the house that night. It was around eleven when Bree came up to my office in the attic to tell me the news.
“Alex, we’ve got company outside. Two guys in a Ford Explorer, parked across the street for the last hour. Cups on the dash, no coming and going. Just sitting there, watching the house. Maybe watching you up here.”
Bree has the best instincts I know, so I didn’t doubt that we had a new problem. I holstered my Glock and slid on a windbreaker over it.
Then I stopped in Damon’s room on my way downstairs for his old Louisville Slugger. A good piece of ash, not aluminum.
“Please don’t come out,” I asked Bree at the front door. “Call dispatch if there’s a problem.”
“If there’s a problem, I’m calling dispatch and I’m coming out,” she said. I took off out the front door and down the stoop. The Explorer was parked just past the house on the opposite side. The driver was getting out when I took my first swing and obliterated his left taillight.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he screamed at me. “Are you nuts, man?”
In the streetlight, I could see he was hefty but not fat, with a shaved head and a nose that had been broken a few times. I’d been thinking government, but now that I’d seen him, he looked more like a Yellow Pages PI.
“Why are you here watching my house?” I shouted at him. “Who are you?”
His partner got out on the other side, but they both kept their distance.
??
?Alex?” I heard Bree coming up behind me. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I shouted back. “Washington plates, DCY 182.”
“Got it,” she said.
The bald-headed guy flashed his palms for me. “Seriously, just take it down a notch, man. We know you’re a cop.”
“I’ll take it down when you tell me what you’re doing here where I live.”
“We’re not in for anything heavy, all right? I’m not even wearing a piece.” He opened his overshirt to show me. “Somebody hired us to keep an eye on you for a little while. That’s all this is.”
“On me?” I cocked the Slugger a little higher. “Or me and my family?”
“On you. On you.” I didn’t know if he was telling me the truth or just what I wanted to hear.
“Who are you working for?” I asked.
“We don’t know. Seriously. It’s a cash job. All I know is what you look like and where you’ve been today.”
That didn’t do much to calm me down. I stepped over and took out another taillight.
“And where have I been?”
“You’re working a murder case for Metro. Something to do with a detainee in Alexandria, and for fuck’s sake, lay off the car already!”
Something had just flipped about this case. It hit me hard, in a way I couldn’t deny. The people I’d been pursuing were starting to pursue me now.
“You know, you should be more careful,” the second PI told me.
I took a step in his direction. “Why is that?”
“We’re not the ones you need to worry about. Whoever this is, and whatever they don’t want you doing—they’ve got some suction. That’s all I’m saying. You can take it for what it’s worth.”
“Thanks for the warning.” I pointed up the street. “You’re done here. If I catch either of you in this neighborhood again, I’m going to arrest you and have this car towed, you got it?”