Cape Disappointment (37 page)

“I don't believe you.”

“No. That's been your trouble all along. And it almost got her killed last time.”

“Kathy said you killed somebody and the cops were after you.”

“That was just some hooey to get her off the plane. Look, if she even mentions me, they'll have to shut her up.”

“Why? Because you were part of the plot?”

“Because I'm on record, both with Ponzi and others, as to that crash being part of a conspiracy. Anybody finds out I was certain enough to kidnap your wife and save her life by doing it, they'll want to know what I knew and how I knew it. My yanking her off that flight is the strongest piece of evidence in favor of a conspiracy, and it's one we don't dare reveal. They may be tracking you right now. I wouldn't be surprised if the FBI shows up on your doorstep.”

“The FBI's going to kill us?”

“No, they're going to turn you over to Homeland Security or the NSA or some other alphabet agency, and then you are going to disappear … you, Kathy, Snake, and anybody else dumb enough to be tagging along.”

“You're full of shit.”

“You willing to bet your life on it? Better yet, are you willing to bet Kathy's life on it?”

“Bastard.”

Two Saturdays ago I had been willing to bet Kathy's life he was wrong about the advisability of her traveling with Sheffield, but now Sheffield and the others were dead. I was thinking, too, about how fast Winston Seagram and the local gendarmes had closed in on us in the southern part of the state after I freed Kathy, if indeed that was where
they were headed. It was possible they'd been going out to Cape Disappointment to explore a major discovery on the beach, but I doubted they would be using emergency lights for that. “Bert? Let me ask you this. Who knew where Kathy was being held? Besides you and the two caretakers?”

“Nobody. That's what bothers me. How did
you
find her?”

“Was she in an accident?”

“You know she wasn't.”

“You were part of it, weren't you? That's the only way you could know all this.”

“I wasn't. I swear to God. Listen and listen good. Stash her somewhere where they can't find her. Then write out what happened and leave a note with your attorney or whatever. Keep her whereabouts secret. Make her safe.”

“Why didn't you tell me Kathy was alive?”

“I sent my brother over to keep an eye on you, didn't I?”

“That's like offering to paint my house after you've set fire to it.”

“Ten people were murdered. Eleven with Ponzi's husband. The most important thing now is to work on the links between the Sheffield camp and this outside cabal. If you've found a link, start tracing it.”

“Fuck you.”

The connection went dead.

The more I thought about Kathy being drugged and held in that musty old house while her mother and sister and I all went through hell, the angrier I became. There was a little part of me that said I was still being manipulated by Bert, that the plane had been brought down by design and that he'd had a part in it, that the reason he'd needed to conceal Kathy was because if his own co-conspirators ever found out he'd rescued one of the passengers, they would put
him
to death. Assuming that was true, I was tempted to reveal the fact that Kathy was still alive to the world and wait for Bert to get whacked.

As tempting as it was to upset Bert's applecart, I couldn't take the chance of endangering Kathy's life. I'd already put her at risk once by disregarding Bert's advice.

“All I want is my bathrobe and a hot mug of tea,” Kathy said. “I just want to curl up in that big chair in the living room and look at you all night.”

I wanted that, too, but a couple of blocks from our house I pulled into a side street. I got out and left Snake and Kathy in the car, making the rest of the trip on foot. It didn't take long to spot a government car on the other side of the street four doors up, two agents waiting in it. The house was being watched. I hated this. I was being sucked into something I didn't completely understand, my only guide a lunatic conspiracy theorist.

By the time I'd walked back to the car, I'd figured out where to go. Our receptionist, Beulah, had an unmarried sister who worked for the Seattle Police Department. The four of us went out to dinner together every couple of months. She lived alone in north Seattle, not far from the Northgate Mall, in a tiny house on a hill. Besides working for the SPD, Delilah taught martial arts, liked guns, fishing, and sex with women, all the same things Snake liked. It was midafternoon when I rapped on her door.

“Thomas? It's nice to see you. What's going on?”

“I wasn't sure you'd be home.”

“Yeah. Yeah. My first class isn't until six.”

“I need the biggest favor you'll ever do for me.”

Delilah had long drab brown hair and smoker's lines etched around her eyes and lips. She had the beginning of a smoker's rough voice, too. She was thin and muscular, a vein popping in the tiny biceps in her arm as she held the door. “You know me. I'll do anything for you.”

“Good.”

I knew Delilah cherished secrets above all else, knowing, keeping and savoring them. Knowing Kathy was alive while the rest of the world believed she was dead would be her cup of tea. What I didn't expect was the little yelp of surprise when we walked Kathy into the house. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” She said it five or six more times before she was able to settle down.

“It's kind of like I was resurrected from the dead,” said Kathy, smiling slowly. Because of the sedative, everything she did seemed to be in slow motion. There was a palpable grace to it. I brought her bag in, got her settled, made an agreement with Snake that he would stay here when Delilah went to work, and took Kathy aside. “I've got some things to do.”

Kathy gazed up at me, her blue eyes pale in the autumn light from a nearby window. “I'm glad you're not dead.”

“I'm glad
you're
not dead, too.”

“Well, I'm gladder.”

We ended with a long kiss that was salty from the tears streaming down her face. We talked for a while longer, and then when I saw she was getting drowsy again, I said goodbye.

“Don't die this time,” she said, as I walked out the door.

“Don't you, either.”

“That's always been one of my main goals. Not to die.”

I WASN'T GOING TO BAG
Bert without turning the entire Northwest inside out, so I decided to go after easier quarry.

When I called the Sheffield headquarters they told me Kalpesh was out of the building and probably wouldn't return before tomorrow morning. The Maddox people said Deborah Driscoll had signed out to go to a meeting with some campaign donors. I was pretty sure Kalpesh had been feeding information to the Maddox campaign through Deborah, but was suspicious of Bert's claim that an insider in the Sheffield camp had helped cause the airplane crash. I simply did not believe it. There was no way Kalpesh had leaked information that helped get his candidate killed.

When I drove to Deborah's condo on Capitol Hill, the lights were on in her unit. The streets were dry and the sky was gray, scudding clouds pushed along by a cold wind. In the west, the dying sunset had become a scratch of orange on the horizon. The streetlights were just beginning to come on. It had been my impression that Kathy and I had spent only a few minutes at Delilah's getting reacquainted, but somehow two hours were missing from my afternoon.

I parked on the street and walked to Deborah's building. She buzzed me in. Remembering that Deborah must have been the woman in the other room when Snake and I visited Kalpesh's fourteenth-floor digs, I wondered if I was going to now catch Kalpesh hiding in her place.

“Thomas,” Deborah said, pulling open the front door and leaning on it. “How nice to see you. Come in. Come in.”

She was in a skirt, stocking feet, and a beige blouse. Her face was slightly flushed, as if she'd been running around tidying. Or hiding a man in the back room. As usual, she was vivacious to the point almost of caricature.

“Have a seat. Oh, I got a call,” she said, picking up her cell off a table. She gave me a mischievous look. “It's from you.”

“I wanted to see you in person, anyway.”

“Sure. What is it?” As comfortable as a cat in the sun, she tucked her legs beneath her on a love seat. I sat across from her on the sofa.

“There are things going on in these two campaigns that aren't right. We talked about it the other day.”

Deborah's smile produced a dimple in her cheek. “Why do I get the feeling you're about to chew me out?”

“The other night I tracked Kalpesh to your doorstep. He's the Sheffield leak, isn't he?”

Deborah resettled herself on the love seat as if I'd knocked her off balance. “Whew. I wasn't expecting that.”

“You denying it?”

“You mean am I denying that he was at my place the other night? Or am I denying he's spying for us?”

“Are you denying he was feeding, or is feeding, you information from the Sheffield campaign?”

“I don't understand how this affects you.”

“A plane with eleven people on board went down. Since I've been asking about it, I've been warned off by the FBI and the NTSB. There are men parked in front of my house in a government vehicle. A reporter who was looking into it with us is in the hospital. Her husband is dead. Now tell me I'm wrong about you receiving information from Kalpesh.”

She came off the love seat and sat next to me, followed by a draft of warm air that was suffused with her scent, like fresh-cut apples and peach blossoms. Her voice grew soft. “Thomas, you're the only straight shooter in our whole office. And I feel awful for what you've gone through.” She was sagging against me on the sofa so that I could feel the side of her thigh against mine. She touched my hand, her fingers
shorter and bonier than I'd expected. “I thought you were going off the deep end with these accusations when we spoke before, but I've had a chance to mull it over and now I'm not so sure. Do you really think the Sheffield crash was not an accident?”

“It was murder.”

“I respectfully disagree, and I'm sure most everyone else you run into is going to disagree, too.”

“You guys were all so certain Maddox was going to win. Why?”

“Good Lord! Thomas, if we'd had any inkling anybody was going to get hurt … You can't believe that, can you?” She was wheedling now, scooting closer. I remembered enough of the single life to know what she was leading up to. She believed Kathy was out in the ocean and I was a widower, so it was possible she was working her way up to offering a mercy fuck. Or maybe Deborah just liked to have her fun where she found it. I didn't know her well enough to say either way.

“I believe you knew something. The polls had Maddox down by fifteen, eighteen, even twenty points, but you were all cocky as hell about winning.”

“Cocky? I wouldn't use that word. We were—”

“Conceited.”

“Confident. Thomas, I'll never admit this in public, but there were … notions being passed down. I guess, we knew
something
was going to happen. I thought it was going to be fairly innocuous, like vote rigging.”

“Vote rigging is innocuous?”

“Maybe it's not exactly innocuous, but it's not eleven people dead, either.”

“Tell me about it.”

“They've got these new electronic ballot counters, and there have been rumors circulating that the people supplying and running them favor Maddox, and that … well, maybe they'd be inclined to push a certain button enough times to put Maddox in the lead.”

“You thought the election was rigged?”

“Only that it was a possibility.”

“Holy crap.”

She flinched, gave me a look meant to be playful, and leaned against my arm. “Don't get worked up about it. We didn't engineer it.

We weren't even sure it was going to happen. It was just cocktail-party rumors.”

“You realize what you're saying here? You suspected there was going to be election fraud, and you didn't go to the authorities?”

“We heard a rumor. How many rumors have we heard this fall?”

“Did you hear a rumor there was going to be a plane crash?”

“Of course not.”

“Why not go to the authorities about the vote rigging?”

“Thomas, you don't actually believe Sheffield's husband would make a better senator than James, do you?”

“You're not going to give me an ends-justifies-the-means talk, are you? Because it's beginning to sound like you believe it's okay to subvert the democratic process if things aren't going your way.”

“We're getting kind of intense here. Tell you what.” She bounded off the sofa, strode across the room, made two drinks, and brought them back, handing one to me. “I know you don't drink. Ginger ale. It'll cheer you up.”

All I could think about was the numbing depression that descended on me the last time I ate the meal she prepared for me, and Bert's ridiculous warning to not accept food or drink from anyone. Not that I thought she was poisoning me … or that my earlier depression was related to anything I'd eaten or drunk … but then … I put the glass to my lips and pretended to imbibe.

“Deborah, tell me everything you know about Kalpesh's activities.”