Absolute Power (33 page)

“Listen lady, I know every fucking thing that’s going on here. Everything. The letter opener. Who’s got it. Most importantly, how he got it. And now this recent correspondence from our little larcenous voyeur. Now any way you cut it, we got us a big problem, and seeing that you’ve screwed everything up from the get-go, I think a change of command is in order. Now go get out of the hooker clothes, and come back in here. If you want me to save your horny little ass, you’ll do exactly what I tell you to do. Do you understand? Because if you don’t then I suggest we go have a little chat with the President. It’s up to you. Chief!” Burton spat out the last word, communicating unequivocally his absolute disgust with her.

Burton slowly let go of her arm but still towered over her like a mountain. His massive bulk seemed to block out her ability to think. Russell gingerly rubbed her arm and almost timidly looked up at him as the hopelessness of her situation started to sink in.

She went immediately to the bathroom and threw up. It seemed like she was spending an increasing amount of her time doing that. The cold water on her face finally started to work through the throes of nausea until she was able to sit up and then walk slowly to her bedroom.

Her head spinning, she changed into long pants and a thick sweater, dropping the negligee on the bed, too ashamed to even look at it as the garment floated down; her dreams for a night of pleasure shattered with terrifying abruptness. She replaced her red stilettos with a pair of brown flats.

Patting her cheeks down as she sensed the rush of blood there, she felt like she had just been caught by her father with a boy’s hands far up her dress. That event had actually occurred in her life and probably contributed to her absolute focus on her career to the detriment of everything else, so embarrassed had she been by the entire episode. Her father had called her a whore and beaten her so badly that she had missed a week of school. She had prayed her entire life that she would never feel such embarrassment again. Until tonight that prayer had been answered.

She forced herself to breathe regularly and when she went back into the living room she noted that Burton had taken his jacket off and a pot of coffee sat on the table. She eyed the thick holster with its deadly occupant.

“Cream and sugar, right?”

She managed to meet his gaze. “Yes.”

He poured out the coffee and she sat down across from him.

She looked down at her cup. “How much did Ti . . . Collin tell you?”

“About the two of you? Nothing really. He’s not the kind of guy who would. I think he’s fallen for you pretty hard. You’ve fucked with his head and his heart. Nice going.”

“You don’t understand anything, do you?” She almost exploded out of her chair.

Burton was maddeningly calm. “I understand this much. We’re about one inch from the edge of the cliff and where we’re headed I can’t even see the bottom. Frankly, I don’t give a shit who you’re sleeping with. That’s not why I’m here.”

Russell sat back down and forced herself to drink the coffee. Her stomach started to finally settle down.

Burton leaned across and held her arm as gently as he could.

“Look, Ms. Russell. I’m not going to sit here and bullshit and tell you I’m here because I think the world of you and I want to get you out of a jam, and you don’t have to pretend to love me either. But the way I look at it, like it or not, we’re in this thing together. And the only way I see us making it through is to work as a team. That’s the deal I’m offering.” Burton sat back and watched her.

Russell put down her coffee and dabbed a napkin against her lips.

“All right.”

Burton immediately leaned forward. “Just to recount, the letter opener still has both the President’s and Christine Sullivan’s prints on it. And their blood. Correct?”

“Yes.”

“Any prosecutor would be salivating for that thing. We’ve got to get it back.”

“We’ll buy it. He wants to sell it. The next communication will tell us how much.”

Burton shocked her for the second time. He tossed the envelope across.

“The guy’s savvy, but at some point he has to tell us a drop point.”

Russell took out the letter and read it. The writing was block print as before. The message was brief:

Coordinates coming soon. Recommend advance steps be
taken for financial backing. For such prime property suggest mid seven figures. Would suggest consequences of default be considered thoroughly. Respond via
Post
personals if interested.

“He’s got quite a writing style, doesn’t he? Succinct, but he gets his point across.” Burton poured another cup of coffee. Then he tossed across another photograph of what Russell was desperately hoping to retrieve.

“He sure likes to tease, doesn’t he, Ms. Russell?”

“At least it sounds like he’s ready to deal.”

“We’re talking some big bucks. You prepared for that?”

“Let me worry about that piece, Burton. Money won’t be the problem.” Her arrogance was returning just in time.

“Probably not,” he agreed. “By the way, why the hell didn’t you let Collin wipe that thing clean?”

“I don’t have to answer that.”

“No, actually you don’t,
Madam
President.”

Russell and Burton actually smiled at each other. Maybe she had been wrong. Burton was a pain in her ass, but he was cunning and careful. She realized now that she needed those qualities more than Collin’s gallant naïveté even if it was accompanied by a fresh, hard body.

“There’s one more piece to the puzzle, Chief.”

“And that is?”

“When it comes time to kill this guy, are you gonna get squeamish on me?”

Russell choked on her coffee and Burton had to literally pound her on the back until she started breathing normally again.

“I guess that answers that.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Burton—killing him?”

“You still don’t understand what’s going on here, do you? I thought you were some brilliant professor somewhere. Ivory towers ain’t what they used to be I guess. Or maybe you need a little dose of common sense. Let me explain this real simply for you. This guy was an eyewitness to the President trying to murder Christine Sullivan, Sullivan trying to return the favor, and me and Collin doing our job and taking her out before the President gets stuck like a side of beef. An eyewitness! Remember that term. Before I found out about this little piece of evidence you left behind, I figured our asses were cooked anyway. Guy leaks the story somehow, some way and it snowballs from there. Some things we just can’t explain, right?

“But nothing happens and I figure maybe we all got lucky and this guy is too afraid to come forward. Now I find out about this blackmail shit and I ask myself what does that mean.”

Burton looked questioningly at Russell.

She answered, “It means he wants money in exchange for the letter opener. It’s his lottery. What else could it mean, Burton?”

Burton shook his head. “No, it means this guy is fucking with us. Playing mind games. It means we got an eyewitness out there who’s getting a little daring, a little adventurous. On top of that it took a real professional to crack the Sullivan nest. So this guy is not the type who’s gonna scare too easily.”

“So? If we get back the letter opener aren’t we home free?” Russell was dimly beginning to see what Burton was getting at, but it still wasn’t clear.

“If he doesn’t keep photos of it, which might end up on the front page of the
Post
any day now. An enlarged photo of the President’s palm print on a letter opener that came from Christine Sullivan’s bedroom on page one. Probably make for an interesting series of articles. Grounds enough for the papers to start digging around. Even the slightest hint of a connection between the President and Sullivan’s murder and it’s over. Sure, we can argue the guy’s a whacko and the picture’s a clever forgery, and maybe we’ll succeed. But one of those photos showing up at the
Post
doesn’t concern me half as much as our other problem.”

“Which is?” Russell sat forward now, her voice low, almost husky, as something terrible was beginning to dawn on her.

“You seem to have forgotten that this guy saw everything we did that night. Everything. What we were wearing. Everybody’s name. How we wiped the place clean, which I’m sure the police are still scratching their heads over. He can tell them how we arrived and how we left. He can tell them to check the President’s arm for traces of a knife wound. He can tell them how we dug one slug out of the wall and where we were standing when we fired. He can tell them everything they want to know. And when he does, they’ll at first think he knows all about the crime scene because he was there and was actually the trigger man. But then the cops will start to realize that this was more than a one-man show. They’ll wonder how he knows all this other stuff. Some of which he couldn’t have made up and which they can verify. They’ll begin to wonder about all those little details that just don’t make sense but that this guy can explain.”

Russell stood up and went over to the bar and poured her self a scotch. She poured one for Burton too. She thought about what Burton had said. The man
had
seen everything. Including her and an unconscious President having sex. Miserable, she pushed the thought from her mind.

“Why would he come forward after he’d been paid off?”

“Who says he actually has to come forward? Remember like you said that night? He could do it from a distance. Laugh all the way to the bank and take down an administration. Hell, he can write it all down and fax it to the cops. They’ll have to investigate it and who’s to say they won’t find something? If they got any physical evidence from that bedroom, hair root, saliva, seminal fluid, all they need is a body to match it against. Before there was no reason for them to look our way, but now, who the hell knows? You get a DNA match against Richmond, we’re dead. Dead.

“And so what if the guy never comes forward voluntarily? The detective on the case is no bonehead. And my gut tells me that, given time, he’s gonna find the sonofabitch. And a guy looking at life in prison or maybe the ultimate penalty will talk his head off, believe me. I’ve seen it happen too many times.”

Russell felt a sudden chill. What Burton said made absolute sense. The President had sounded so convincing. Neither of them had even considered this line.

“Besides, I don’t know about you, but I don’t plan on spending the rest of my life looking over my shoulder waiting for that shoe to drop.”

“But how can we find him?”

It amused Burton that the Chief of Staff had fallen in with his plans without much argument. The value of life apparently did not mean much to this woman when her personal well-being was threatened. He hadn’t expected less.

“Before I knew about the letters, I thought we had no chance. But with blackmail, at some point you gotta have the payoff. And then he’s vulnerable.”

“But he’ll just ask for a wire transfer. If what you say is true, this guy’s too smart to be looking for a bag of money in a Dumpster. And we won’t know where the letter opener will be until long after he’s gone.”

“Maybe, maybe not. You let me worry about that. What is imperative is that you string the guy along just a bit. If he wants the deal done in two days, you make it four. Whatever you put in the personals make it sincere. I’ll leave that up to you, Professor. But you’ve got to buy me some time.” Burton got up. She grabbed his arm.

“What are you going to do?”

“The less you know about it the better. But you do understand that if the whole thing blows up, we all go down, including the President? There’s nothing at this point I could or would do to prevent that. As far as I’m concerned you both deserve it.”

“You don’t sugarcoat things, do you?”

“Never found it useful.” He put on his coat. “By the way, you realize that Richmond beat Christine Sullivan up bad, don’t you? From the autopsy report it looks like he tried to turn her neck into a spaghetti loop.”

“So I understand. Is that important to know?”

“You don’t have any children, do you?”

Russell shook her head.

“I’ve got four. Two daughters, not much younger than Christine Sullivan. As a parent you think about things like that. Loved ones getting messed up by some asshole like that. Just wanted you to know the kind of guy our boss is. That is, if he ever gets frisky, you might want to think twice.”

He left her sitting in the living room contemplating her wrecked life.

As he climbed into his car, he took a moment to light a cigarette. Burton had spent the last few days reviewing the preceding twenty years of his life. The price being paid to preserve those years was heading into the stratosphere. Was it worth it? Was he prepared to pay it? He could go to the cops. Tell them everything. His career would be over, of course. The police could get him on obstruction of justice, conspiracy to commit murder, maybe some bullshit manslaughter charge for popping Christine Sullivan and other assorted nickel-and-dime stuff. It would all add up, though. Even cutting a deal he was going to do some serious time. But he could do the time. He could also endure the scandal. All the shit the papers would write. He’d go down in history as a criminal. He’d be inextricably linked to the notoriously corrupt Richmond administration. And yet he could take that, if it came to it. What the hard-as-rock Bill Burton could not take was the look in his children’s eyes. He would never again see pride and love. And the absolute and complete trust that their daddy, this big hulk of a man, was, indisputably, one of the good guys. That was something that was too tough even for him.

Those were the thoughts that had been racing through Burton’s head ever since his talk with Collin. A part of him wished he hadn’t asked. That he had never found out about the blackmail attempt. Because that had given him an opportunity. And opportunities were always accompanied by choices. Burton had finally made his. He wasn’t proud of it. If things worked out according to plan, he would do his best to forget it had ever happened. If things didn’t work out? Well, that was just too bad. But if he went down, so would everyone else.