Blood Trust

FOUR

THE MOMENT the shrink left, Alli broke down and cried. She wept as she hadn’t wept in nearly a year. Her sobs were deep and heartfelt, all the more so because she had forced herself to keep them in abeyance for the hundred minutes or so that the shrink was questioning her. He was a small, dark man with a scraggly beard and a sharp nose. He smelled faintly of tobacco and loss.

Now that she was alone, she desperately wanted to hear Jack’s reassuring voice. But the lawyer had taken away her cell as evidence and there was no phone in her uncle’s study where she sat on a voluminous, high-backed chair, so familiar to her from the days when her father took her here and she hung out while he and Uncle Hank went downstairs into the cellar to talk. As a young girl, it had never occurred to her to question why they chose the cellar. Later, however, it became clear that they had ensured that the cellar was the most secure place in the house. Security was the last thing on her mind as she thought about the current nightmare in which she was enmeshed.

The study was exactly as she remembered it, filled with Old World–carved, hand-turned wood, a coffered ceiling, bookcases from floor to ceiling, and an immense stone fireplace over which a stuffed buck’s head with impressive antlers gazed down on her with, she was sure, steady compassion.

Forty-five or so minutes later, her uncle and his lawyer appeared.

Alli was struggling to blot out the sight of Billy Warren, drained of blood, cut all over, his carotid breached as if by a vampire’s fang, but the image refused to be banished. It hung in her mind like a guest who, overstaying his welcome, now threatens to take over your home.

“Alli,” Henry Holt Carson said, as he sat down on the sofa facing her. “How are you feeling?” Behind him stood Harrison Jenkins, as immobile as a cigar store Indian.

“How d’you think I’m feeling,” she said dully.

“I’m afraid I have no idea.”

“That’s just the problem!” She honed the accusatory note to a fine point. “Why are you keeping me here? Why can’t I even call Jack?”

“McClure is busy, trying to clear your name, one hopes,” Carson said. “Besides, by court order you cannot leave here.”

“Then I want to speak with him.”

“In time, perhaps.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Alli, I wish you’d learn to curb your tongue.” He shifted, obviously uncomfortable. Then he set two prescription vials onto the low table between them. “The psychopharmacologist who interviewed you…”

At the word she stared at the vials. “You want to give me drugs?” She leapt up and, with a backhand swipe, sent the vials flying across the room. “I’m not taking any fucking drugs!” She was white and trembling.

“Alli, I don’t think you understand the true nature of your situation.”

“Henry, allow me.” Jenkins came around and gestured for Alli to sit back down. When she did, he sat on a chair next to her. “The detectives were anxious to take you into custody. I used a technicality to forestall them. Nevertheless, I had to go before a federal judge this morning and defend you with the district attorney breathing down my neck. This much you know. A horrific crime has been committed and there is a tremendous amount of pressure from all sides to find the murderer and bring him or her to justice.”

“I didn’t kill Billy!” Alli cried. “Why won’t anyone listen?”

“I didn’t say you killed him. Frankly, I believe you’re innocent, but there are two pieces of incriminating evidence that say otherwise”—he held up a hand to stop her protest—“or lead to the conclusion that someone very clever has, for whatever reason, set you up.” He took a breath. “Can you think of anyone who would have cause to implicate you in a capital crime?”

She glanced at her uncle before shaking her head. Her eyes drifted away. “No.”

Jenkins studied Alli for a moment, then turned to Carson. “Henry, please give me a few moments.”

Carson frowned. “Are you sure?”

“Henry, I imagine there is a backlog of calls impatiently awaiting your attention.”

Carson grunted, rose, and, crossing the carpet, went out the door, closing it softly behind him.

Jenkins took a deep breath, then turned to Alli. “Now, my dear, what is it you wish to say?” Seeing her quick glance at the closed door, he added, “Anything you tell me is privileged information … even from your uncle.”

Alli worried her lower lip before she put her elbows on her knees. “Someone is framing me. I mean there’s no way I dosed my roommate or killed Billy. God!”

He nodded sagely.

“You don’t believe me.”

“What makes you say that?”

Alli ran a hand through her hair. “This is a nightmare.” She cleared her throat. “Everyone thinks I’m suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome.”

Jenkins waited a moment. “That’s it?”

“Yes.”

“So it’s your contention that you’re fine.”

“I didn’t poison anyone, I didn’t kill anyone.”

He slid back in his chair and pursed his lips. “I’ll take that into consideration.”

“I’d like to speak to Jack.”

“Would you now?” Jenkins had a way of saying no without actually saying the word. “It is your uncle’s opinion that you have formed a … how shall I put it?… an unnatural attachment to Jack McClure.”

She stared at him, wide-eyed. “And you believe that?”

“It doesn’t matter what I believe. I work for your uncle.”

She stared out the one window at the snaking gravel driveway. All of a sudden, she took up a poker from the fireplace and slammed it against the window. It bounced off, as if the pane was made of rubber. Alli swung again and again, grunting with each swing, without even a single crack to show for her effort.

She whirled on Jenkins just as the door burst open and a man with the massive sloping shoulders and raw, red face of a weightlifter rushed in.

Jenkins raised a placating hand. “It’s all right, Rudy. No harm done.”

As if to prove his words, he crossed to where Alli stood and took the poker from her. Rudy relieved him of it, and, with a last look at Alli, went out of the study, closing the door behind him.

“The windows are both bulletproof and alarmed,” Jenkins said.

Alli turned to the attorney. “I used to come here when I was a kid. I broke that window once. When did that happen?”

“Five years ago,” Jenkins said. “Maybe six.”

“So I’m a prisoner in my uncle’s house.”

“I’m afraid so.”

His words hung in the room for some time. A phone rang distantly and then stopped. A dog began to bark somewhere outside, its excitement rising.

“You’re both mental as anything.” Her voice was thin and ragged with despair. She felt herself crawl back into the shell she had created for herself when she had been kidnapped.

Jenkins appeared to be aware of this, because he said in his most soothing voice, “The most absurd aspect of the accusation is, of course, the torture. Scientific study tells us that the female of the species, though she can be as cold-blooded and capable of murder as a male, rarely has the stomach for torture. On the other hand, it is the torture of William Warren, so disturbing by its very nature, that is dictating this rush to judgment, at least in my estimation. It’s also the largest question mark. What did his killer or killers want from him? What information did he possess that they needed to go to such extreme lengths to get from him?”

He regarded her steadily. Clearly, he was looking for an answer from her. She shook her head. “I can’t say. I really didn’t know him that well.”

“Come on, Alli, you two were carrying on a love affair for five months.”

“That’s just it,” Alli said, “it wasn’t a love affair.”

“No, what was it then?”

“I was…” Her eyes darted away for a moment. “I was trying to regain a sense of myself, to, I don’t know, feel my body again, to be in control of it again.”

Jenkins sat studying her for a while, or perhaps he was pondering her words. At last, he said, “Did you care about Mr. Warren?”

“Of course I did.” She hesitated, but it was clear she had more to say. “But not … just not in the way you think.”

“What do you think I meant?”

“We weren’t lovers in the classical sense—like Romeo and Juliet.”

“If memory serves, Romeo dies.”

She snorted in derision.

“About the psychopharmacologist,” Jenkins went on. “One of the things he said about you in his report is that, in his opinion, you’re lacking in affect.”

“I think he’s lacking in affect.”

Jenkins gave her a tight smile. “What his diagnosis means is that, basically, you have difficulty locating your emotions. Sometimes you can’t find them at all. In other words, there are times when you just don’t care about anything … or anyone.”

She looked away again.

“His evaluation will hold a great deal of weight in the course of the investigation. Typically, people who can’t feel—”

“I told you,” she flared. “No fucking drugs!”

“You’re not listening to me,” he continued doggedly. “Your reaction to your boyfriend’s death—or rather your lack of one—was duly noted by everyone at the crime scene, including those sympathetic to you.”

“You can’t possibly understand.”

He spread his hands. “Now is your chance to enlighten me.”

She stared at him, stone-faced.

Jenkins sighed heavily. “In return for you being held in your uncle’s recognizance instead of in a federal holding cell, the judge ordered a psychiatric evaluation.” He took another breath and let it out slowly, as if anticipating the coming storm. “You must comply with the psychopharmacologist’s diagnosis, which, of course, includes your taking whatever psychotropic medications he prescribes.”

Alli leapt up again and retreated behind the chair back, as if he were a lion from which she needed saving. “I can’t! I fucking won’t!”

“I’m sorry.” Jenkins regarded her with what seemed to be genuine pity. “I’m afraid you have no choice.”

DAYLIGHT SEEPED into the grove of trees with the blue-white flicker of a television screen. Jack, exhausted and frightened for Alli, had been scrutinizing the crime scene for hours. The detectives had made their reluctant exit, but Naomi Wilde and Peter McKinsey remained, along with Fearington’s commander, Brice Fellows, who had had sandwiches and thermoses of strong black coffee brought out from the academy’s commissary. Fellows, to his credit, stood back, sipping coffee, silently observing him as he worked. Jack was unfamiliar with McKinsey, but he had gotten to know Naomi well enough when she was guarding the FLOTUS. Carson had plucked Naomi out of her daily assignments specifically to guard his wife. That was how Edward Carson did things—by instinct. In thinking of Lyn Carson, Jack realized that no one had informed Alli that her mother was dead. On reflection, Jack supposed such news was better left undelivered for the time being.

Jack had spent his time wisely. As soon as there was sufficient natural light he switched off the spots and got to work. He had learned to distrust spotlights, which tended to distort perspective and played havoc with the impressions received by his brain. Circling the body in ever closing circles, his dyslexic brain literally took pictures of the corpse—not only the ashen color and unnatural granular quality of the skin, the grotesque disfigurement of body and face, but aspects other people could not see or perhaps accurately interpret. His brain, however, worked more than three hundred times faster than other people’s, and so it could recognize tiny anomalies and dislocations, and, in the time it took a human being to inhale and exhale, analyze them.

This was how he discovered the fracture below the left eye. It was precise, like a break a surgeon would make in the process of resetting a bone. There was, also, a deliberateness about it that intrigued him. He said nothing of either his find or his musings to the people in the grove with him.

He stood up and said to Fellows, “Commander, do you really believe Alli capable of this crime?”

Fellows’s meaty shoulders lifted and fell. “To be honest, Mr. McClure, I found myself a failure at human psychology the moment my wife of twenty years walked out on me without a word of explanation.”

He turned. “Naomi?”

She shook her head. “I can’t imagine it.” Her brow furrowed. “On the other hand, she’s like a closed book to everyone except you, so I’d ask you the same question: Is she capable of this kind of protracted violence?”

“Absolutely not,” Jack said.

“But we have the vial with traces of roofies under her bed,” McKinsey pointed out, “and a bloody knife in the trash behind her dorm.”

Jack nodded. “We’ve yet to determine whether it’s Billy’s blood on the blade, or if her prints are on the haft.”

“And if they are her prints?” Naomi asked.

He waved away her concern. “Someone has gone to a lot of trouble setting her up. This has been meticulously thought out.”

“What about the bizarre nature of the murder?” McKinsey said. “The knife wounds, draining the victim of blood?”

“Red herrings,” Jack said, “designed to get us going around in circles.”

McKinsey made a noise in the back of his throat.

“What,” Jack said, “you think there’s a vampire infesting Fearington?”

“Of course not, but don’t you think it’s possible that when Alli found out about this other girl…” He snapped his fingers.

“Arjeta Kraja,” Naomi cut in helpfully.

“Right. Isn’t it possible that when Alli found out Billy was boffing Arjeta Kraja she flipped out?”

“And the sky could be falling,” Jack said acidly. “Let’s deal with reality.”

McKinsey shrugged, as if to say, I tried.

“Something stinks in this setup.” Jack peered again at the corpse. “It’s weird, gothic, over the top. We need to find out where the stink is coming from.”

“We need to talk to this Arjeta Kraja,” Naomi said. “ASAP.”

Jack nodded, only partly engaged. There was another thing he was reluctant to share with Naomi and McKinsey. He had the nagging suspicion that Alli knew more about this girl than she had let on. Why she would keep that secret was anyone’s guess, but Jack knew Alli well enough to know that she must have a damn good reason. She better have.

No one would tell him where she was taken. Jack had called Henry Carson’s townhome in Georgetown without luck.

Jack, his mind made up, turned to Fellows. “I want to interview Alli’s roommate.”

VERA BARD lay on a bed in the academy infirmary. The pinkish light of dawn streamed in through windows and a small skylight high up in the ceiling. The walls were painted a cheerful yellow, but the floor was institutional gray linoleum, a veteran from another era.

The nurse led Jack over to Vera’s bed. Alli’s roommate was a dark-haired girl with large, slightly upswept chocolate eyes, an assertive nose, and a wide, expressive mouth.

“Please, just for a few minutes,” the nurse cautioned. “She is still very weak.”

Fluids dripped into Vera’s arm and her eyes were hooded, as if she was having trouble staying awake, but this only made her seem sultry. She looked vaguely Eurasian. Her long hair had lost its sheen to sweat; it lay lankly on the pillow in thick, Medusan coils. Still and all, Jack observed, she was an exceptionally beautiful young woman.

He sat on a painted metal chair and introduced himself. “Vera, would you tell me what happened last night?”

“I … I don’t know.” Her voice was soft and husky. “I went to bed as usual, read for a bit, took my pill, as usual, and went to sleep.” She licked her dry lips. “The next thing I knew I woke up here.”

“Alli was in the room when you went to sleep?”

“Yes.”

“And while you were reading?”

“Yes.”

“Did you two talk at all?”

“Before I went to the bathroom we were talking about…” Her brow crinkled. “I can’t remember about what. Boys, maybe.”

“About Billy?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“And after you came back from the bathroom?”

Vera shook her head and a lock of hair fell across her cheek.

Jack sat for a moment more. He smiled at her. “I’m sorry for what happened.”

Vera seemed not to have heard him. She licked her lips again. “I want to see Alli.”

“I’ll speak to Commander Fellows.” Jack rose. “By the way, what medication are you taking?”

“Crestor. I have high cholesterol.”

Jack nodded and smiled. “Thank you, Vera.”

ON THE way out of the infirmary, Jack encountered Naomi.

“DNA is going to take at least a week,” she said, “but the forensic team found Alli’s fingerprints on the water glass beside Vera’s bed.”

“Anyone else’s?”

“Just Alli’s.”

Jack’s cell phone buzzed, and then Dennis Paull was speaking rapidly and tensely in his ear. He strode down the hall, away from Naomi and McKinsey, who had appeared.

“A new position?” Jack said after a moment. “Is Crawford kicking you out?”

“Not exactly.” Paull further explained the changes. “You’re coming with me, Jack. I’m pulling all the details together. At midnight you and I are going to fly to Macedonia, then trek west into the mountains to a shithole called Tetovo, where we will terminate this sonuvabitch Arian Xhafa.”

Jack bit back a protest. Though Paull had made it clear that he was sympathetic to Alli’s plight, Jack suspected he’d simply argue that there were other people—Naomi Wilde chief among them—who were perfectly adequate to being Alli’s advocate. Besides, in Harrison Jenkins she had one of the most savvy criminal attorneys on the planet. Jack could hear him now: Forget it, Alli’s in good hands. The trouble was, that was only half true. No one knew Alli the way he did, and she wasn’t about to open up to anyone else, Naomi included. And keeping silent wouldn’t help her cause one iota.

Instead, he said, “Just like that? From what you’ve told me he’s exceptionally well defended and well armed. He won’t be easy to kill.”

Paull laughed. “I may have spent the last several years behind a desk, Jack, but believe me when I tell you that I still have a trick or two up my sleeve.”