Don't Look Away (Veronica Sloan) (21 page)

But he was right, they did need to find out, and they wouldn’t be able to i.d. him by the erect penis they’d both so unfortunately gotten to see, up-close and personal.

“I know.” She threw herself back on the couch, feeling her headache start to come back.

“Want me to watch it for you?” he asked, his tone not holding the slightest hint of salaciousness. He wasn’t offering because he wanted to get any kind of voyeuristic thrill, he was doing it because he knew she didn’t want to.

“No, I need to do it,” she said with a resigned sigh. “But thanks.”

As uncomfortable as it might be to watch something like this in front of someone else, she knew Daniels would provide a great backup set of eyes and a needed second perspective. Besides, watching it tonight, with him, seemed less troubling than the possibility of sitting through it tomorrow, with Sykes.
That
she couldn’t even stand to think about.

“Can you stay and help me slog through it? I’ve got a week’s worth of images here and I guess I should find out not only who this guy is but just how often this kind of thing was going on.”

“You sure?” he asked, his tone a little gruff, like he was suddenly embarrassed by the idea.

“I’m sure.”

“Okay. Give me a minute,” he said, heading toward the bathroom like he came here every day of the week.

Funny how comfortable he was—how comfortable they were around each other. Maybe that’s why she didn’t feel any sexual vibe between them, the way he apparently still did. He was just Daniels—eating like a slob, bitching about needing a beer, stopping to take a piss. Just her partner. Not somebody she thought about in a sexual way.

Even so, sitting here with him, watching somebody else have sex, was going to be anything but fun. Yet it had to be done. Though she knew she couldn’t have a drink after the recent head injury, she strongly wished she could go to the pantry, pull out a bottle of scotch and take a shot.

“Okay,” Daniels said as he returned and plopped down on the couch beside her. He had pulled a note pad out of his pocket and flipped it open. “In case I need to make an emergency sketch of that guy’s cock and balls.”

She snickered in spite of herself. “You jackass.” Then her laughter faded and she cued up the files. She’d scrolled back to what looked like an image of Leanne walking down a lit corridor, fully clothed, and re-started the program there.

“Hey, that’s the White House!” Daniels said, leaning forward and dropping his elbows onto his knees.

“Yes, it is,” she agreed, recognizing the hallway dissecting the main floor.

Leanne was alone, glancing down at a file folder tucked into her arm, jotting a note on the exterior of it with a pencil.

Suddenly, the image went dark. But not because the lights had gone off—she could actually see tiny slits of brightness shining between…

“Are those somebody’s fingers?” Daniels asked.

“I think so,” she said, putting the image together in her mind. Somebody had clapped their hands over Leanne’s eyes. She didn’t appear to struggle—her own hands didn’t come up and pull at the ones blocking her vision. Had her lover grabbed her for a quick assignation? The timing certainly fit—they were only a couple of minutes away from the blow-job scene.

The hands over the eyes moved away and Leanne was again looking down the hallway. She was also moving again, but the perspective was odd. Things in front of her were getting smaller—farther away—rather than bigger and closer.

“She’s walking backward,” Daniels said.

“Yes. Like she’s being tugged away by the guy who grabbed her.”

Tugged away playfully, sexually…by someone who’d played these games with her before.

Perhaps he had his arm around her waist and was whispering in her ear. They had no way of knowing. She only knew that Leanne didn’t seem to be at all worried or trying to get away. She was voluntarily taking those steps.

Suddenly Leanne begins to move her head, so she can look down. A man’s hand is visible on her breast. An arm is looped around her waist. Still no struggle going on. She’s liking this, letting it happen. The hand is cupping her, claiming her, pinching her nipple through her thin blouse.

“Wait, stop!” Daniels snapped.

Ronnie did so, immediately.

“Back up a couple of frames.”

She again did as he asked, not sure what had caught his attention. She stared at the screen intently, going back frame by frame, watching Leanne’s head move back up in tiny jerks. She saw the same deserted hallway, the plain-tiled floor, the bare white walls that would one day be elegantly decorated and trimmed with elaborate paintings and artwork.

And then she saw something else.

“Who’s that?” she whispered, realizing this was what must have drawn Mark’s keen eye. She had obviously blinked because the image was well in the background and didn’t appear for long.

“I don’t know,” he replied, moving close to the monitor so he could study the man, who was visible in the shadow of a nearly closed doorway up the hall. He was facing the camera—facing Leanne and her mystery man—but Ronnie didn’t think they’d even noticed him. He appeared in a couple of frames—there for two or three seconds and then gone. In those seconds, his shadowy, indistinct image had been caught by the O.E.P. device, but not seen by the people upon whom he was spying.

Interesting.

She moved forward again, to the frames immediately after he’d disappeared inside that room, and noticed the door had been left open a few inches.

“He’s still there spying,” Daniels said, “you can’t see him but you can practically feel him.”

“Definitely.”

But who? What kind of person would see two people behaving in an extremely inappropriate manner—in the frigging White House—and, instead of confronting them about their behavior, would merely step back and spy on them?

Creepy to the nth degree.

“Can you keep going backward, so we can maybe see the name or room number on that door?”

She did so, sending Leanne back in time, and further up the hallway, to the moment right before her mystery man had put his hands over her eyes. Their victim never got close enough to the door in question for them to read any identifying signs, but it didn’t matter. Ronnie suddenly realized right where it was. She and Daniels had been in it two days ago.

“That door leads into the operations office where we held our meeting,” she said, knowing she was right. “I remember it being the last door before that alcove you can see a little further down the hall.”

“You’re right.” Daniels crossed his arms over his chest. “Lots of people in and out of that office every day, I would assume.”

“Hey, you know what they say about the word assume making an ass out of you and me,” she mused, remembering everything she’d learned the other day. “From what I can recall, it sounded like SAIC Kilgore had pretty well claimed that room for his own office. I don’t think he liked being out in his trailer, he wanted to be able to tell people he had an office in the White House.”

“So, the head of the on-site Secret Service unit is a Peeping Tom?”

“I don’t think that bothers me as much as the fact that he didn’t put a stop to something that was so inappropriate,” she said.

“Not to mention he didn’t tell us one damn thing about this incident. There’s no way he wouldn’t remember, this was only, what, a week ago this past Tuesday?”

She checked the timestamp on the file. “Yes.” Just seven days before Leanne’s death. So why hadn’t Kilgore said anything?

“What kind of law enforcement officer doesn’t mention that a murder victim was having a secret affair with someone on the job?”

“A shitty one,” she replied. “Or one who didn’t want to mention it because it might reveal some secret of his own.”

“Like?”

“I dunno. Maybe he did something about that knowledge. Maybe he used it to try to put the moves on Leanne?”

“Ick.”

God, did she hope Leanne hadn’t kept Kilgore quiet by giving him some of what she’d given to the mysterious man from the closet. That was one sex scene she definitely didn’t want to sit through. “I guess it’s possible it wasn’t Kilgore,” she admitted, “but I’m definitely going to have to ask him about it.”

“Oh, goody. He liked you, I could tell.”

She snorted. “Okay,
you
ask him about it.”

“I can hardly wait.” He kicked his long legs out in front of him, crossing them at the ankles. “I think we can get back to our porn star wannabe now.”

She noted the time and the image number. Then, keeping the speed slow, she started the slideshow again. They watched the hands covering Leanne’s eyes, watched the backwards steps.

Suddenly, they’re back into a cluttered storage room. Leanne is pushing the door shut. She twists the lock on the knob—there was no coercion here. Her hand rises and she flips off the light switch. Darkness. She turns around to face a shadowy man-shape who is utterly undistinguishable.

“Damn it,” Ronnie whispered.

“Chill. It gets brighter, you know it does.

Yes, she knew…she’d gotten a much better look at this stranger’s junk than she’d ever want to. She only hoped the lighting improved before things progressed to the drop-to-your-knees stage. She’d really prefer to see his face and identify the man before she had to take another gander at his genitals.

The couple on the screen shifts. Leanne turns, walking deeper into the room, close to an uncurtained window. She glances back, looking at her own hand, which is twined with a masculine one. She tugs him with her, away from the door, into a private corner of the small room, pushing some boxes out of the way.

The window is now easily visible. It is night out.
Why is she working so late?
But there is light coming from somewhere—enough of it to brighten the corner of the room. Perhaps construction lighting, used to aid night-shift workers on this project, which had been worked 24/7 in recent days?

Leanne reaches the back corner. Stops. Turns around and stares at the shadowy man moving toward her. She’s looking at his body, staring with lustful intent at the tented crotch of his pants. She watches him move his hands to the top of his shirt and begin to slide the buttons free.

He comes closer. She lifts her hands to help him. Her pale fingers are stark against the…the…
green
shirt. It’s a green shirt. A dark green shirt.

Recognition began to tingle in the back of Ronnie’s mind. Her suspicion grows, though she has trouble believing it at first.

The shirt is undone, tugged up out of the pants. Leanne moves in to kiss his throat, her focus on the cords of muscle in his neck. Then on his jaw—smooth, hairless. Then his cheek—youthful looking. Then his nose—straight, small.

Then his lips, parted for a kiss.

The couple looks at one another and he shifts a little, as if wanting to better see her face. In that moment, he moves right into the light coming from the window, which shines like a spotlight on his features.

Ronnie’s suspicions are confirmed; she knows him immediately. But the shock makes it hard to believe for a second.

“Him?” Daniels barked in disbelief. “That was the dude she was going down on? That punk’s hung like a race-horse?”

“Yeah,” she muttered, not as stunned that Leanne had chosen this particular man for her lover, or even as surprised as Daniels was by the man’s endowment. Frankly, she found it far more shocking to think about how he had behaved on Wednesday.

How could he have stood there, in clear sight of his lover’s mangled remains, giving Ronnie her first run-down of the crime scene they’d been called out to investigate?

Because their victim’s mystery lover was the man who’d led Ronnie to Leanne Carr’s torture chamber. It was Secre
t Service Special Agent Bailey.

As Dr. Eileen Cavanaugh had predicted, Ronnie woke up the next morning feeling a lot better. She wouldn’t describe herself as completely back to normal, but her headache had finally gone away and she was no longer woozy or off-balance. The staples in her scalp were the tiniest bit itchy, which she took as a good sign.

Quickly showering, she got dressed for work and headed into the kitchen. Rather than grabbing a quick bite and heading right out the door, as she would on most Fridays, she made herself a big breakfast. She was starving, having eaten next to nothing in the hospital and only grabbing a frozen dinner last night. So she scrambled some eggs, fried some bacon, made fresh coffee and squeezed orange juice.

She made enough for two. Not because she had company—Daniels certainly hadn’t spent the night. He’d left at around one a.m., after they’d gone through more of Leanne’s data dump, in which they’d found another X-rated encounter between the murder victim and Agent Bailey.

No, it wasn’t him she expected to share her breakfast with. She had already told Daniels she’d be in a little late, and glanced at the clock while she ate, waiting for the pounding that would almost certainly be sounding on her door at any time.

It came at 7:50.

“Girl, I know you’re in there, open up and let me see how bad it is.”

Biting her lip, knowing Max was going to lose his shit when he saw her, she went to the door and opened it. “Good morning.”

“Ack!”

He burst in, a flurry of hands and motion, immediately pushing her into a kitchen chair so he could examine the damage.

Max, who was utterly gorgeous, charming, had great taste and worked as a hair-dresser, should, by all rights, be gay. Instead, he was the most hetero guy she knew. He was worse than Daniels when it came to women and his apartment door should revolve for ease of entrance and exit. His picture could be posted online to illustrate the term man-whore, and he loved to chortle about his sexual exploits whenever they had a movie night or got together to have a few beers.

Fortunately, he wasn’t attracted to her. He liked her—loved her, he often said—but when it came to sex, he was strictly into the girlish, weak and helpless type. Which so didn’t describe Ronnie.

That was a good thing. She liked him, a lot, but wouldn’t let him touch her with his cootie-covered self on a dare. That thing between his legs had been in more woman than Tampax and she’d often warned him it was going to catch some nasty disease some day.

“Okay, we can fix this,” he said.

“Eat something first,” she said, gesturing toward the big breakfast.

He sat down and ate, but she knew his attention was still on her head. He kept getting up between bites, walking behind her chair, pulling what was left of her hair, twisting it and muttering.

After he’d eaten, he reached for his big satchel, in which he’d carried over shears, combs and a drape, which he proceeded to slide over her shoulders. “I think this could end up being the greatest thing that could have happened to you. You know I’ve been dying to get a little creative on your boring head. Wish you’d let me add a splash of color, too. Blue streaks would be awesome with this jet black tone.”

“Forget it. Just do something simple,” she insisted with a sigh. “I don’t want to mess with it any more than I have to.”

That’s why she’d always kept her hair long. Yanking it into a ponytail, or a bun, which she always wore to work, was simple and quick, just the way she liked it.

Max didn’t make any promises, and immediately got to work with the comb and the shears. He was careful around her injury, but otherwise pretty ruthless when it came to yanking her head this way and that. “How’d it happen, anyway?”

She’d told him on the phone that she’d been hurt on the job, she hadn’t given him any details. Nor could she. That didn’t, however, mean she couldn’t tell him the truth.

“Got whacked in the side of the head with a two-by-four.”

He rolled his eyes. “Okay,
don’t
tell me.”

She chuckled. Hey, she’d tried, anyway.

As he worked, Max started telling her about his latest conquest, a girl he’d met at the supermarket. Ronnie barely listened, her thoughts going back to somebody else’s romantic exploits. Namely Leanne Carr’s. She just couldn’t stop thinking about the erotic relationship the woman had been having with the oh-so-young-and-innocent-looking Agent Bailey. He of the nine-inch schlong.

Okay, so maybe
that’s
why the relationship had continued.

Still, it was beyond frustrating to realize Bailey had been having sex with the victim and had been privy to every single bit of the investigation into her murder. She was, of course, incredibly suspicious of him, although she didn’t immediately like him as the killer. No, he hadn’t told anyone that he and Leanne were having sex. And yes, he’d stood right there by Leanne’s dismembered corpse and lied to Ronnie’s face about how well he had known the woman. But there was one thing that just didn’t fit. The killer had acted like he’d known about the O.E.P. device. And Bailey, she felt pretty sure, didn’t know about it.

First, there had been his confusion during the briefing. Then, of course, was the fact that he’d hidden their personal relationship. If he knew Leanne was an implantee, he’d have to have realized the authorities would have very blatant proof of their sexual relationship just as soon as they examined the downloads. Bailey could have made things a little less humiliating—and suspicious—for himself if he’d just come clean about it up front. Admitting the affair, he could have said they’d kept it secret because they’d hooked up on the job, and thrown himself on the investigators’ mercy.

He hadn’t done that. Instead, he’d lied, as if truly believing he wouldn’t get caught.So it was really doubtful he’d known about the device.

Meaning it was really doubtful he was the murderer.

Doubtful. Not impossible. He could just be very clever and manipulative.

“So, that guy I saw leaving late last night…” Max said, interrupting her thoughts.

“My partner.”

“Daniels, right?” Max said.
Snip snip
. “Is he the type you like—big, brawny, crude?”

“He’s the type I like for a partner,” she drawled back, knowing where Max was going. Just because he didn’t want to have sex with her himself didn’t mean he wasn’t constantly trying to push her to get laid by somebody else.

“Such a waste,” he informed her, tsking. “You’re too young to live like a nun, Ronnie. Your vagina’s gonna grow adhesions and close up one of these days.”

“And you’re too smart to live like a porn star. Your dick’s going to either fall off from some venereal disease or get chopped off by some woman you did wrong.”

He laughed. “Okay, okay, I’ll mind my own business.”

“Thank you.”

“So, you working on that White House murder?” he asked, changing the subject.

Ronnie stiffened. She hadn’t paid any attention to the news since she got out of the hospital and had no idea how much information had been leaked. “Yeah. What have you heard?”

“Just that some woman was killed there the other day.”

Whew.

“Plus a lot of nonsense that she was all chopped up and shit. Nobody really believes that.”

Double whew. “Good.”

“How’s the old place look?” he asked, sounding more interested in the construction project than in the case.

“Surprisingly far along,” she admitted, thinking about the hours she’d spent in the most famous house in the world. “It’s a lot better on the inside than the out. It was kind of strange walking down the corridors, going right into the Oval Office, imagining what it looked like five years ago. They’re rebuilding everything exactly as it was back then.”

Complete with one stupid tunnel the public isn’t supposed to know about.

His hands stopped moving. She didn’t have to look up to see he’d paused to reflect…to almost offer up a moment of silence, the way most everyone did when it came to that subject.

On a day when so many had died and an entire section of one of the greatest cities in the world had been wiped off the map, the assassination of the president sometimes almost got overlooked. President Turner’s death would always just be part of the awfulness of 10/20/17, not a monumental minute in history in and of itself, the way JFK’s or Lincoln’s murders had been. Probably because killing the president had merely been a little side bonus for the terrorists. They were happy it had happened, but the point hadn’t been to try to destabilize the government by wiping out any key players. Rather they’d just wanted the whole country so terrified they’d make a tectonic shift in political direction.

And oh, had they gotten what they’d wished for.

“One of my clients went to the dedication ceremony on Tuesday,” Max admitted, his tone suitably subdued. “She said it was like the old days—King’s speech or Obama’s inauguration.”

“Minus about nine-hundred-thousand people, maybe.”

“Yeah. But I guess the way everyone was kept in close, with nobody sprawling all the way up both sides of the old reflecting pool, it seemed more crowded.”

She considered asking Max if his client had happened to notice anybody splattered with blood or carrying a head cruising around the place, but figured that was probably a long shot.

“I wouldn’t have gone even if I’d won one of the lottery tickets,” he said as he snipped and tweaked. “I don’t care if that whole place was covered with cameras, I wouldn’t be in a big crowd in D.C. on a bet.”

Cameras. Covered with cameras.

It had been, of course. There had been news cameras and security cameras on the Army vehicles. Ronnie knew one of the other detectives had been assigned the task of going through them, looking for any activity near the White House. Now that she knew there was a tunnel that ended up near the Washington Monument, she made a mental note to have him tighten the scope of his search.

She also started thinking about something else. Each state had given out tickets by way of a lottery. Only a thousand per state.

It’s a long shot.
A really long shot.

Still, it was at least possible that one of those fifty-five thousand people at the event was an implantee. What if someone attending the Independence Day event had an O.E.P. device in his or her head? And what if they’d been anywhere near the maintenance building where that tunnel ended up?

Her heart beat a little faster. Long shot. But not impossible.

“Thanks, Max,” she said.

“For what?”

“You just gave me an idea.”

“Well, don’t thank me for that, honey. Thank me for
this
.”

He retrieved a large hand-mirror from his bag and held it in front of her so she could see the results of his labors. Ronnie stared for a minute, stunned into silence. Her jaw fell open; she could see the reflection of her own fillings, and quickly snapped it shut.

“Wow,” she said, shocked at how quickly he’d made a real hairstyle out of a hacked-up mess.

She’d kept her hair long out of laziness, assuming that, if she ever did get it styled, cut or layered, she’d have to deal with curling and blow-drying and all that nonsense for which she just didn’t have the time. But Max had done some serious magic with nothing but some scissors, hair gel and his own hands.

Her hair was short, but not at all boyish. It was still feminine, just very modern, sleek. Though short on the sides—especially where it had already been chopped off, Max had left her some length that he’d swept forward over her brow in jagged bangs. It was sexy, attention-getting and, she had to admit, pretty damned hot. She liked it. A lot.

“That looks amazing,” she said, meaning it. “Thank you so much.”

“Any time girlfriend. If I’d known it would just take a two-by-four upside your head to let me give you a fabulous look, I’d have hit you myself long ago.”

“Spoken like a true friend,” she said, laughing as she stood up and brushed the hair off her uniform.

Promising him a home-cooked meal and a bottle of tequila in the future as payment, she said goodbye and walked him to the door. The attack the other night had been painful and dangerous, but she had to admit, something good had come out of it. For a moment, at least, she’d been able to laugh with a friend. She greatly feared she wouldn’t be doing much more laughing until after this horrible case was solved.

-#-

Though Daniels had offered to pick her up for work that day, Ronnie had insisted on getting a patrol car to swing by and get her. Daniels lived in the opposite direction, and she hadn’t known how long it would take to make something decent out of the mess on her head. It was a testament to Max’s skill that, not only did she get to the precinct by nine, but she also got a lot of looks and catcalls when she walked through the squad. Including from Jeremy Sykes.

She’d asked him to meet her and Daniels here so he could be present when they talked to Agent Bailey. Daniels had contacted the Secret Service agent this morning, told him they had a few questions and asked him to come in to the precinct. He should be arriving shortly.