Acts of Mercy

Three

Sitting on the Cadillac’s rear seat, Justice kept thinking: Was it murder, what happened to Briggs and Wexford? Is someone close to the President a psychopathic killer?

He did not want to believe it. Yet years of experience in police work had taught him to distrust extreme coincidence, and you could not find any more extreme coincidence than two fatal accidents to two high-ranking political figures in as many days. And even though his conscious mind had refused to consider it, there had been a small suspicion in him from the beginning, from the moment he had found Briggs’s body under the office window, that the press secretary might not have died by accident-the seed that had spawned the lingering fear.

A psychopath. Every person had homicidal tendencies; that was a proven psychological fact. In most people they were buried deeply, and in others they came closer to the surface but were held in careful check; but in some individuals the impulse to murder became too great, eventually controlled reason and exploded into violence. Usually when that happened the person ran amok; in rarer instances he turned cunning and clever and committed his crimes in secret, so that you had no way of telling just by looking at him or talking to him that he was psychotic. Justice had read about such cases, had even investigated one during his time on the Washington police force-a mild-mannered business executive with a wife and three children who had strangled four women in the space of three months before he was finally caught. It could happen, it had happened, to people from all races, creeds, professions, classes, and intellects. And that meant it could happen to someone in the hierarchy of the U.S. government.

But even a psychopath had motives. If someone had murdered Briggs and Wexford-why?

Blank.

Justice did not know what to do. His training demanded that he immediately take his suspicions to the President, or at least to his superiors in the Secret Service. And yet, suppose he was wrong? Suppose he was creating a monster out of misfortune and anxiety? He had no proof, not even a shred of circumstantial evidence; he had nothing but an ugly, half-formed hunch. There was no reason why the President should believe him, no reason why his superiors should believe him. And he could not go to his superiors in any case, he realized, because then he would have to tell them about Briggs, whose body had still not been discovered in Washington. (And why hadn’t it been? Somebody should have found him by now.) Then the removal of the corpse from the White House might come to light, and that was something he could not take responsibility for. He had given the President his oath of silence.

All right, then. The only other alternative was to find proof himself. But how? In mystery novels the detectives solved all sorts of bizarre and improbable crimes by incisive questioning and astute observation, by stringing together clues to establish a pattern of truth. But he was no deductive genius like Poirot or Peter Wimsey or Gideon Fell; he lacked the capacity for ratiocination. He was nothing more than a simple working police officer, and simple working police officers conducted their investigations on the basis of evidence and fact…

They were almost to The Hollows now. Ahead, through the windshield, Justice could see the President’s limousine approaching the main gate to the ranch complex. Then he became aware of Ed Dougherty sitting on his left, Maxwell Harper on his right, Elizabeth Miller in the front seat. One of them? he thought. Or the agent, Judson, at the wheel? One of the other staff aides? One of the other security people? Who?

Who?

The main gate swung open electronically as the limousine neared it, and the caravan proceeded onto the estate grounds. As always, there was an aura of pastoral serenity to the landscaped lawns and outer gardens, the redwood-and-stone buildings, the horses roaming inside the paddock and the split-log corral; but this time it struck Justice as false illusion, like a set for a movie in which terror was the dominant theme.

If murder had been done in the White House and on the Presidential Special, it could be done here too.