Capitol murder

Chapter Twenty-one

After days of being raped and beaten, Dana was numb to almost all sensation. She no longer smelled the dank odor of mold on the basement walls or the stench from the foul water that pooled against them. She didn’t shiver when the chill air stroked her naked, battered body. She was dead to the pain caused by each thrust of the meth cook who was inside her.

There were, however, sensations she was capable of experiencing. There was the tactile pleasure she got from holding the smooth, cool rounded glass of the broken beer bottle the meth cook had foolishly discarded in his haste to satisfy his sexual desires. There was the joy she felt when she drove its jagged edge into the meth cook’s face and watched blood erupt from his eye socket. And there was the rage that gave her the strength to slash his face and throat until he was dead.

As the biker fell toward Dana, his lacerated head on a collision course with her face, she shot up in bed and screamed. It took a few seconds for her to realize that she had been dreaming. Dana fell back on the bed. Her breathing was ragged, and she was soaked with sweat. If Jake had been home, he would have comforted her until her night terrors smoothed out, but Jake was in Afghanistan, and she had to deal with her personal demons alone, in the dark.

During her yearlong stay in the mental hospital, Dana had learned how to deal with the horror of her captivity and the insane violence that had characterized her revenge against the men who had imprisoned her. She doubted that she would ever shake loose the graphic memories of her days in captivity, but those memories no longer had the power to paralyze her.

The nightmares had come less frequently by the time she was released from the hospital. For a while, she thought there might be a time when she was completely free of them, but they kept coming. At first, the nightmares had terrified her, because dreaming about the rapes was like being raped again. After a while, the nightmares made her furious, because the bikers were stealing a part of her life each night and she could not kill them again. Now the night terrors depressed her. They robbed her of sleep and left her exhausted.

Dana walked into the kitchen. She was tempted to unscrew the cap from the bottle of scotch Jake kept in their liquor cabinet, but she knew better than to go there. Instead, she filled a glass with ice-cold water and carried it into the living room. She sank down on the couch, closed her eyes, and held the glass to her forehead. The cold felt good.

Dana’s flashbacks and nightmares were usually triggered by stress. So what had triggered her dream? Was it her fear that something would happen to Jake? She loved Jake. For a long time, she could not tolerate even the thought of a man touching her. Jake had understood that, and he had been there for her anyway. It had taken her a long time to open up to him and admit that she loved him, because love made you vulnerable. Jake’s assignments were usually in places where violent death was common, and Dana suffered until he was home again and safe.

And then there was her business, which was not going well. All of the notoriety she had gotten from the articles in Exposed about the incidents involving President Christopher Farrington and Supreme Court Justice Felicia Moss had worked to her disadvantage. She was too well known to go undercover, and she heard that some potential clients worried about the fees someone as famous as Dana would charge.

The loss of income bothered Dana. She could not tolerate the idea that she wouldn’t be carrying her own weight in her relationship with Jake. For a good part of that relationship, Dana had lived in her own small apartment and stayed in Jake’s spacious house when she chose to. Jake had given her space after she was released from the hospital, and she had not let go of her apartment and moved in with Jake until she was able to admit to herself that she loved him. Although it wasn’t necessary, she insisted on splitting all of the expenses, and she worried that she might not be able to do that if the money from her private-investigation business dried up.

Dana forced herself to think about Brad and Ginny to take her mind off subjects that were making her anxious. Dana had been a policewoman, and she was used to danger. Brad and Ginny were ordinary citizens who had become involved in nation-shaking scandals due to forces beyond their control. What she admired most about her friends was their normalcy. They both came from loving families and had been raised in middle-class comfort. Until the Farrington affair, their biggest problems had been grades, dating, what college or law school would admit them, and what job choice they should make.

Dana’s mother had walked out on the family when Dana was a sophomore in high school, and her father had died of a stroke while working on a carburetor in the garage he owned. Money was always tight in Dana’s family, and she’d worked in high school and paid her way through community college by waitressing. She thought she’d found her niche when she joined the police force, but she’d left the force after being kidnapped and tortured while working undercover.

Dana was exhausted, but she doubted she could get to sleep right away, so she turned the television to CNN. Two talking heads were discussing a story that she gathered had led off the evening news programs. From late afternoon until eleven, Dana had been working surveillance for an insurance company and had not watched any TV. The newscasters paused while they replayed a clip of a press conference that had been held by United States Senator Jack Carson.

“Senator,” one of the reporters shouted, “didn’t you think about coming back to Washington when you heard about the murder in your town house?”

“Our cabin is in a remote area in the mountains, and I go there to decompress. Cell phones don’t work up there, we don’t have a television or radio, and I’m miles from a store that carries newspapers. So I had no idea that Miss Koshani had been killed.” Carson broke eye contact with the camera. “I guess I picked the wrong time to go on vacation,” he said with an embarrassed smile.

“Why was the murder victim staying in your town house?”

“We’re getting into areas of national security here, so I can’t respond to that question. And now, if you’ll excuse me.”

When the clip of the press conference ended, Dana was frowning. Something didn’t feel right. Brad had told her that Koshani was going to be a witness before a committee on which Carson sat. He put her up at his town house. Why would he leave before she testified? Then she shrugged. Whatever the reason, it was none of her business.

D ana had gotten back to bed at three thirty. The phone rang at seven. Dana struggled out of a deep sleep and managed to find the receiver after the third ring.

“Cutler?” a familiar voice said.

Shit! Dana thought.

“Cutler, wake up,” Patrick Gorman barked.

Dana struggled into a sitting position. “You called at a great time, boss. I ran into Elvis last night pumping gas at a Shell station in Bethesda, and he said he’d tell me how he was abducted by aliens if I slept with him. This could be a big scoop. You want me to wake him up?”

“Have a little respect for the fine newspaper stories that make it possible for me to pay your exorbitant fees,” Gorman answered, trying his best to sound like a gruff, old-time editor from a responsible newspaper. Patrick Gorman was the publisher of Exposed, D.C.’s most outrageous supermarket tabloid, and he couldn’t care less that he made his money by printing stories that only the most gullible readers would believe. He had also made a few pennies by running exclusives based on Dana’s inside knowledge of President Christopher Farrington’s involvement in a serial murder case and the attempts by an ex-CIA bigwig to rig the result in a case before the United States Supreme Court.

“If you didn’t know I was screwing Elvis, why did you wake me up?”

“Have you heard that Senator Jack Carson has surfaced?”

“Yeah,” Dana said as she rubbed her eyes.

“He says he was exhausted and went on vacation in a remote mountain cabin in Oregon to, open quote, ‘recharge my batteries,’ close quote.”

“And you’re calling me because…?”

“I don’t believe a word of it, so I want you to fly to Oregon and check out his story.”

A few days in Oregon’s spectacular mountains, all expenses paid, sounded like a great cure for the blues.

“My usual rates?” she asked.

“Yeah, and I’ll have the corporate jet fly you there. I’m probably not the only newspaper editor with this idea. When can you leave?”

“When can you fuel the jet?”