Collateral Damage (11 page)

Catherine withdrew her hand and gazed searchingly at Marjorie.

“You told me this to show me you understand, I see that,” she said. “And I think you do understand. But you're doing more than that, aren't you? You're giving me permission. Permission to dump my own past on you.”

“Or not, as you like,” Marjorie said. “After all, isn't permission what you were seeking with those vague allusions you reproached yourself for?”

“I'm sorry,” Catherine said a bit petulantly as she snapped her head away from Marjorie. “I'm not used to being so transparent.”

“I'm not Cindy,” Marjorie said. “I'm not going to make decisions for your own good and cram them down your throat. If you want to talk, I'm here. If you'd rather not, there's no one in the world who'd understand better than I.”

Catherine sat quite still for a second or so. Then she pushed the soup bowl aside and began rummaging with frantic intensity through papers and notes spread over the dining-room table. When she spoke again the words came tumbling out, rapid-fire at first and then accelerating.

“Darn it, I knew I'd left one of the estimates upstairs. I'm being a terrible hostess. Could-you-excuse-me-one-minute-please?”

Without waiting for a response, she bolted from the dining-room table and raced upstairs. Marjorie stayed where she was. A woman is entitled to cry in private if she wants to.

She wasn't sure, later, how long she sat there. Five minutes in a strange, silent house can be an eon, ten minutes an eternity. When she eventually did move, it wasn't because she lost patience. At some point her gut just told her that something was wrong. She rose deliberately from the table and began quietly climbing the stairs toward the dark hallway above her.

She found Catherine in the first place she looked: the guest room where Demarest had died. Catherine sat on the floor in the dark bedroom, staring at fireplace stones that glinted in pale winter moonlight.

“It's funny,” Catherine said without turning around as soon as she'd had some time to sense Marjorie's presence. “I feel that I know you as well as I know anyone, even though I'd never met you until a short time ago. I've felt you understood things from the first time we met. About this house, and my father. And me. I've felt I could talk to you about things, the way I wish I could talk to my mother. I suppose a shrink would say that's why I was asking permission, as you put it, dropping all those soap opera hints, subconsciously hoping that you'd draw me out so I could unload on you.”

“I'm very glad you feel that way. But you don't owe me a thing. You don't have to tell me anything you'd rather keep to yourself.”

“This is where I found them,” Catherine said dully, turning her gaze back to the fireplace.

Marjorie braced herself. From Michaelson's summary she had a pretty good idea about what was coming, and she wasn't looking forward to it. But there was no leaving now. When you've brought someone this far, you see the thing through.

“A few years after Mom and Dad were divorced,” Catherine said, her voice now small and far off, “Cindy and I were in different schools with different vacation schedules for two semesters. Cindy was spending her spring vacation with Mom, and mine didn't start for a week. I was supposed to be on this weekend debate trip, to Richmond. But my partner got sick Friday afternoon, during the second round. So we couldn't go on, and one of the parents drove us both back. I didn't even think to call Dad. I just waltzed into the house without warning, right before midnight. My partner had given me some pot to hide for her so her parents wouldn't find it. I snuck up to this room because it wasn't used much and I figured this was a good place to stash it until I could get it back to her. I didn't even think about smoking it myself.”

Catherine shook her head and smiled briefly at this fastidious, honor student nuance. Then, offering Marjorie a now grimly self-mocking smile, she continued.

“And here they were. I walked in on my father doing a Clinton. Except with another man.”

At the last four words a quaintly bashful phrase from Stuart-era English law flooded unbidden into Marjorie's memory: “The abominable and detestable crime against nature not to be named among Christians.”

“Dear Lord,” she murmured.

“That was quite a jolt, as you can imagine. But that wasn't the worst part.”

Abruptly, Catherine rose to her feet, walked toward the door, and flipped on the overhead light. She strolled around the room, touching the bed, the lamp, the window. Her meanderings finally brought her to the bathroom door, where she fingered the ancient snap bolt. Turned the release knob to retract the bolt into its housing. Let go of the knob and watched the bolt shoot out. Swung the door shut and watched the bolt bounce off the newly repaired bracket, keeping the door from closing. Retracted the bolt again and pushed the catch up. Let go of the release knob and watched the bolt stay in place, inside the housing. Slammed the door shut as hard as she could. Trying to jar the bolt loose? Marjorie wondered. If so, she failed. Then, with a shrug, she pushed the catch back down. The bolt shot out of its housing into the bracket, locking the door.

“Preston had to have locked himself in, didn't he?” she said, her voice suggesting oddly detached and clinical interest. “There isn't any other way, is there?”

“It certainly looks that way,” Marjorie agreed.

“He wanted to make sure I didn't see him by accident, the way I had my father.” Just as suddenly as she'd broken off her previous train of thought, Catherine straightened, squared her shoulders, and whirled to face Marjorie. When she resumed speaking her tone had become almost accusatory. “The worst thing was this. The man kneeling in front of Dad like some White House intern in her presidential knee pads looked kind of like a male version of me. It was spooky. I mean, not a fraternal twin or anything like that, just a kind of resemblance in build and looks and movement. As if he'd gone to a lot of trouble to make himself look like me. He was wearing a girl's National Cathedral School uniform. He even had on a wig the same color as my hair, and cut about the same way.”

Catherine held Marjorie's eyes and gazed at her with an intense directness that nearly made Marjorie recoil.

“And so I knew what Dad really wanted. Me. All the time. All those years. And I felt so incredibly guilty. I was like, my parents are divorced, and that's my fault. My father's a pervert, and that's my fault. God knows what my mother is, but whatever it is that's my fault too.”

Marjorie reached out to grip Catherine's arms but found herself embracing air. Moaning softly in between dry gasps, Catherine had collapsed on the floor, knees tucked under her breasts and arms wrapped around her knees.

Marjorie glanced urgently around the room. No phone. Of course, that was the point of sending Demarest to this room the day of the auction. She hustled to the hall and into the sewing room next door, praying for a phone as she scurried. She spotted one on a table by the window and hurried over to it. She had just lifted the receiver when she heard a louder wail from the room she'd just left. Still gripping the receiver, she stepped quickly back toward the door. The receiver's connecting cord was long, but she ran out of slack about a foot short of the door. She threw the receiver impatiently to the floor and then almost bowled Catherine over as she ran back through the guest room doorway.

“It's okay,” Catherine said, very stiff-upper-lippish all of a sudden. “Sorry about that. I'm all right now.”

“I don't think so,” Marjorie said.

“No, really. I just had to get that out.”

“When did Cindy find out?” Marjorie asked, keeping an edgy eye on Catherine.

“That summer for sure. Maybe earlier. She was a very bright kid.”

“I don't know if it helps,” Marjorie said. “But I think she blames herself for not finding your father's body before you did. I've taken a couple of logical leaps, but I think she feels she should have gotten here before you did that day.”

“That's exactly the kind of thing she would think.” Catherine turned away then, shaking her head in the familiar self-critical way. “I'm sorry. I can't believe I inflicted this on you.”

Marjorie leaned forward and hugged the young woman as if she were a small girl who'd woken up shaking and sobbing from a nightmare.

“Please stop apologizing,” she said in gentle reprimand. “I'm very touched that you chose to trust me with this, and I'm grateful to have shared it with you.”

Then, at last, to Marjorie's vast relief, a cascade of healthy, cleansing tears finally came from Catherine.

As she drove back to Washington late that night, Marjorie thought about Preston Demarest. A lot. She thought about him choosing the ensemble he'd wear when he first approached Catherine; checking his hair to make sure he'd gotten every blazing copper strand in place; reviewing the briefing book someone had given him on the Stuart Restoration Society; glancing once more at the shrink's notes; and driving confidently out to Calvert Manor, knowing every scintilla of the searingly personal story Catherine had just recited, and planning exactly what buttons he was going to push and how he was going to push them; thinking about how he was going to use her; how he was going to manipulate her; how he was going to hurt her; and feeling his loins stir with excitement at the prospect.

Whoever killed him, Marjorie thought fiercely to herself, I'm glad he's dead. God damn him to hell.

Chapter Sixteen

So the next step is to talk to C-Sharp?” Marjorie asked the following morning after she and Michaelson had exchanged telephonic accounts of the previous day's escapades.

“That's the plan. Phillips has agreed to try it at Club Chat Fouetté early this evening, when the band shows up to get ready for its performance tonight.”

“It couldn't have been easy to talk him into that.”

“Best piece of negotiating I've done since I convinced you to try falafel,” Michaelson said.

“I'm sure you had your reasons, but I can see Phillips' point. It sounds like a pretty complicated way to interview someone.”

“I want this to be an interview, not an interrogation,” Michaelson said. “Phillips has an occasional penchant for excessive enthusiasm. I thought it best to arrange for witnesses.”

“Fair enough,” Marjorie said. “Please let me know what happens. I'll be passing my time running a bookstore and meeting a payroll. Do you have anything on your agenda between now and the rendezvous this evening?”

“I thought that all I had was a two o'clock symposium at Georgetown on the euro. During our conversation, however, the message-waiting light on my phone has come on, so my day may be filling up.”

“Let's hope mine does. Ciao.”

The message was from Connaught. His unctuous recorded voice covered the same basic ground he had gone over before, sounding a bit hurt that Michaelson hadn't returned his call. This time Michaelson wrote Connaught's number down when he gave it. Over the past sixteen hours his interest in talking to the gentleman had increased considerably.

He reached Connaught's voice mail when he called back. He kept his voice neutral to chilly as he recorded his own message.

“Richard Michaelson,” he said. “I can see you in my office between twelve-fifteen and twelve forty-five this afternoon. The receptionist will buzz someone to show you back.”

With plenty of time remaining before the arbitrary deadline he'd just given Connaught, Michaelson pulled out the investigative report on Demarest's death that he'd gotten from Phillips. He folded it over to the thick packet of appendices.

Appendix A was the Calvert Manor floor plan that Wilcox had marked to show where the various conference call participants should park themselves. For seven minutes he studied page one, covering the first floor. He left his mind blank, letting the information flow in unfiltered. He did the same thing, but for twice as long, with the schematic for the second floor.

He continued this process through the remaining items in the appendices: the list of people on the conference call and the numbers for the telephones they had used; a photocopied page from a book, broken up by equations and chemical formulas, with text explaining how to compute the rate of carbon dioxide buildup in the bloodstream induced by smoke inhalation; an inventory headed tagged and bagged, listing everything the police had taken from Calvert Manor as evidence; copies of the written purchase offers that had been submitted for Calvert Manor at the time of the conference call; and a list of everyone known to have been on the property when the conference call started, with indications of where they were, which ones had been interviewed, and which ones hadn't.

Prominent among the latter, of course, being Richard Michaelson, who still hadn't been contacted. Which, the more he thought about it, was rather interesting. If any investigation worthy of the name was going on, why hadn't anyone talked to him by now? If the investigation had effectively stopped, why? Or, more important, who had stopped it?

He turned back to the list of conference call participants. No surprises. Wilcox, Catherine, Cindy, Marjorie, and Willie, all on extensions using the phone number for Calvert Manor. Phillips at what the phone book verified was his office number. And Patrice Helmsing and Shepherd
mère
at numbers with exotic area codes.

He flipped to the two closely typed pages of the Tagged and Bagged section. Once again, nothing particularly striking: logs from the fireplace, fiber samples, a partial cast of the stonework in front of the fireplace, the Baggie that Marjorie had mentioned to him. The cover for the smoke detector in the guest room where Demarest had died. The clothes Demarest had been wearing. And, apparently, some clothes he hadn't been wearing:

gym bag, 1 (nike), vinyl, zippered

Contents: Running shorts, 1 pr. (men's L, Russell), n/blue; T-shirt, 1 (men's L, Nike), yellow; jockstrap, 1 (L, Bike); running shoes, 1 pr. (men's 10½, Nike Air), white w/black trim; tube socks, 1 pr. (knee length, Wigwam); street shoes, 1 pr. (men's 10½, Rockport), dark brown; sweatpants, 1 pr. (men's L, Russell), royal blue; hooded sweatshirt, 1 (men's L, Russell), royal blue.

Michaelson turned back to the text of the report and scanned through it until he found a sentence fragment mentioning that the police had found the gym bag in Demarest's car.

Locking the report away again, Michaelson glanced at his watch. Almost eleven-fifteen. Two floors down from his office and seven minutes later, he found a nook where a young woman gazed serenely at a computer screen from beneath no-nonsense brown bangs and behind no-nonsense glasses with black plastic frames.

“Good morning, Ms. Dennison,” he said.

“Good morning, Mr. Michaelson,” she said warily, her eyes still fixed on the screen. “Did you decide you'd like some visuals for your Georgetown presentation after all?”

“Oh no, nothing like that. For that kind of thing I wouldn't change my mind on two hours' notice.”

Leaning back in her steno chair, she folded her arms across her chest and looked up at him with undisguised skepticism.

“A one-eighty on minuscule notice wouldn't exactly set a precedent around here,” she said. “What can I do for you?”

“You can answer a question, I hope,” he said. “Is it possible to take part in a centrally controlled conference call on a cordless phone, without anyone else knowing?”

“‘Centrally controlled.' Like with an AT&T conference operator and so forth?”

“Yes. Specifically, could you be joined to the conference on a conventional phone and then somehow dial your own digital phone number and continue with the call on that phone?”

“Not without letting AT&T in on it,” Dennison said after a moment's thought. “They know every number that's in on the call because they charge for every number. The same electrical impulses that you'd make to connect your digital phone would tell AT&T's computer that you'd connected it. If one of the numbers already dialed had multiple extensions, you could pick up one of the extensions without tipping any computers off, but not an entirely new phone with a new number, cordless or not.”

“I've seen something advertised on television where a call to your office number automatically bounces to your home number and then your digital phone number. Would that work on a conference call?”

“Sure. But AT&T would pick up the bounces, and their records would show all three numbers.”

“Thank you very much,” Michaelson said.

***

Corbin James Connaught was only about fifteen pounds overweight, but the way he moved combined with the arrangement of his extra baggage to create an impression of striking corpulence. He waddled into Michaelson's office and settled heavily into the guest chair that Michaelson indicated. His sallow complexion emphasized puffy cheeks and saclike jowls. The first thing he did on sitting down was unbutton his suit coat. He seemed to wedge himself right hip first into the chair, so that he could brace his right forearm against the top of the chair back. He dispensed with amenities, which was fine with Michaelson.

“I think you know what I want,” he said.

“What I don't know is how badly you want it,” said Michaelson, who wasn't at all sure what Connaught wanted.

“I'm not going to kid you. I'm way down the food chain. Data security and opposition research. I can't guarantee the kind of thing you're after. Money I could do, but I expect that's not where your interests lie.”

“Fair enough,” Michaelson said, shrugging noncommittally.

“But if you deliver you have a place at the table,” Connaught said. His eyes gleamed and his teeth showed in a passable smile as he spoke the last four words. “Not because I give you one but simply because you will have delivered. And because of where we are in the process. You'd be getting in very early.”

“That's a little thin considering the risks, don't you think?” Michaelson asked, bluffing ferociously. “After all, the last chap you sent after this material ended up in the morgue.”

Connaught didn't bother pretending to be baffled or astonished by this comment.

“Demarest wasn't our boy,” he said flatly. “He shopped what he had to us after he got it, but that doesn't put us in a very exclusive club. He did everything but advertise the stuff in the classified section of the
Post
. But we didn't send him after it.”

“Right,” Michaelson said. “And I suppose he got the psychiatric report from the Library of Congress.”

“I don't know what report you're talking about,” Connaught said. “But if he got a confidential report and I had to guess where, my guess would be the same as yours.”

Michaelson decided that Connaught wouldn't have anyone in this year's Oscar competition looking over his shoulder. Before speaking again, he briskly reviewed the relevant data he had. Marjorie might look at Cindy's uncharacteristically intense reaction to traffic-snarling snow, note that Andrew Shepherd had killed himself on a snowy day, and feel that she had a sneak peak into Cindy's psyche. Michaelson didn't swing quite that freely in the psychological realm, but when it came to bureaucratic behavior, even a few pieces of hard evidence could provoke equally aggressive inferences from him.

Andrew Shepherd had given trip reports to Aldrich Ames at the CIA. Andrew Shepherd lived at Calvert Manor. Preston Demarest knew about the trip reports and, without being a rocket scientist, had somehow gotten the idea they were important. And, critically, he hadn't made the Andrew Shepherd/Calvert Manor connection on his own. Someone had told him about it, and prepared him well to pursue it.

“Help me to be certain that I'm clear on something, please,” Michaelson said after the four seconds that it took to run over this information. He leaned forward to plant his elbows on his desk, and his words became a little more clipped than usual. “I mention a psychiatric report and you act as if I'm talking Greek. Are you seriously asking me to believe that you personally had nothing to do with the Central Intelligence Agency sending someone to seduce Andrew Shepherd when the Aldrich Ames scandal was about to go public?”

“That was years ago,” Connaught protested, squeaking a bit near the end of the sentence. “Langley didn't need any shrink's notes to know that Shepherd swung with an occasional swish after his divorce. His predisposition was no secret, and once he got to be middle aged with thinning hair and a sausage gut, he was flattered by the attention of handsome young men. Not exactly a scoop. You're confusing two completely different episodes.”

“Then please unconfuse me.”

Michaelson leaned back and folded his arms across his chest, treating Connaught as if he were a junior subordinate trying to bluff his way through a report without thoroughly knowing the file. A typical Washington reaction to this attitude is to start displaying how much you know. Connaught responded with Pavlovian predictability.

“When Ames was about to blow,” Connaught said with an exasperated sigh, “of course we checked to see if his contacts had kept any souvenirs. The kind of thing the director should know about before
The New York Times
did.”

“Especially contacts like Shepherd, whom you'd used to give false information to Ames,” Michaelson said.

“Well,
duh
,” Connaught shot back. “You've been reading John le Carré again, haven't you?”

“That's the part I'd figured out all by myself,” Michaelson said. “Tell me about the episode I've confused it with.”

“After I left the agency, and well after Ames was old news, Demarest started telling anyone who could write a check that he could supply some hot information from Calvert Manor. I was working for the national committee by then and the committee wasn't interested. Demarest must have found someone who was interested because he apparently went back in. But it wasn't us.”

“You mean the national committee wasn't interested until you found out Avery Phillips was,” Michaelson said.

“That's the whole point,” Connaught rejoined. “I'm deeply interested in what Phillips is after, which is emphatically
not
what Demarest was peddling on his own. That's what I want from you, and I want it before Phillips gets it.”

“And you want it on spec.”

“Can't be helped. I could tell you that if you come through, NSC or State is yours, but I'd be lying and you'd know it. All I can offer is good faith and no guarantees.”

“That's what Jim Halliburton had, isn't it?” Michaelson asked in a very quiet voice. “Good faith and no guarantees.”

Connaught snapped his head in a quick, angry shake.

“I'm not taking the rap for that,” he said with feral petulance. “The stakes were high. He knew what he was getting into.”

“Yes,” Michaelson said. “When a policy has been crafted by State Department professionals, legislated by Congress, and paid at least lip service by the White House, the risks associated with deliberately subverting it are indeed high. What Halliburton couldn't know was that the people who convinced him that the fate of the republic depended on such subversion would abandon him the first time things got a little hot.”

“I know you'll go to your grave convinced that the bad guys on that are across the river, but you've got the wrong target. The critical leaks came from Foggy Bottom, not Langley. Jim Halliburton went down because an alumnus from your own shop sniffed out the money, followed the paper trail, and then goosed Congress into making a stink about it.”