Razor Sharp (15 page)

Ninety minutes later, Lizzie managed to find a parking space directly in front of Jack’s house. She was surprised to see Jack standing in the open doorway waiting for her. He waved.

Good host that he was, Jack had takeout on the kitchen table. Lizzie waved it off and told him to go ahead and eat while she talked. Jack was finished with his chow mein and crunchy noodles by the time Lizzie brought him up-to-date.

Jack was about to attack one of the deep-fried sugar donuts the Pagoda Restaurant was known for when Lizzie dropped the vice president’s name. “I’m speechless, Lizzie. How the hell could that woman be so stupid?”

Lizzie shrugged. “Sometimes love is blind, Jack. As the girls pointed out to me, some women will go to any lengths and do anything to keep the men they’re in love with. The girls were talking about the Vegas madam at the time, but it would appear it also seems that the president is cut from the same mold. I hate it, Jack. Listen, I have to call her right now, try to wangle a meeting with her, then get to the airport to catch the red-eye back to Vegas.”

“Anything I can do?”

“You’re the first person I’d call if there was. Shhh,” she said, putting her finger to her lips as she pressed the digits of Martine Connor’s private number. She shrugged for Jack’s benefit to show she didn’t think the president would actually answer the phone. Her silvery eyebrows shot upward when she heard Connor’s voice.

“It’s Lizzie, Madam President. I’m calling to ask if I can take you up on your offer of a girl-to-girl visit. I have to tell you I’m on the red-eye back to Vegas so if you have some free time about now, I can be there in fifteen minutes. Did I say it’s crucial that we talk, Madam President?” Lizzie drummed her fingers on the table. The waiting was unnerving.

“I’ll have one of my agents meet you at the West Wing gate, and he’ll bring you to my quarters. This will be so nice, an old friend dropping by to stay in touch. I miss that. It’s a nice evening, perhaps we could take a stroll through the Rose Garden.”

“That would be very nice. I’ll see you in fifteen minutes, Madam President. Good-bye.”

“Jesus, just like that the president agreed to see you!”

“That’s because she wants something, and she thinks I can help her. Don’t be impressed, okay?” Lizzie belted her coat and gathered up her purse and briefcase. “If Maggie shows up, fill her in. She pretty much knows everything, but there are a few blanks. Tell her to call the mountain and talk to the girls.”

“Lizzie, what are you…are you sure…?”

“Jack, I’m going to lay it out for her. That’s all I can do.”

“Good luck. And congratulations again. Be happy, Lizzie. I mean that.”

“I know you do, Jack. Before you know it, I’ll be the one congratulating you and Nikki. Believe that, okay?”

“Sure.” Jack hugged her so tight she growled but with delight.

“I’ll call the minute I’m away from the White House.”

“Be careful, Lizzie.”

“Always, Jack. Always.”

Jack watched from the open door until her taillights were just tiny specks in the distance. He closed and locked the door, his gut churning. He should call Harry while he waited to see if Maggie was going to show up. Or, maybe he should just call Maggie to see what time she would be knocking on his door. If it was much later, he could hop in the car and drive over to Harry’s
dojo.
When Maggie didn’t answer her cell, and the call to Harry went straight to voice mail, Jack went back into the house and ate all six of the sugary donuts. He washed them down with a bottle of rice beer.

T
he Sisters were four hours into the planning stages of their mission, and the war room gave testament to that fact. File folders and stray papers were everywhere, some in midair. Murphy and Grady gracefully gave up their positions at Kathryn’s and Alexis’s feet and sauntered over to the doorway to get out of the way of the blizzard of paper that seemed to be sailing in every direction. However, they remained alert to these strange goings-on.

Myra looked around in dismay. “Now that we’ve created this mess, what have we come up with that will enable us to take on the vp and his cohorts?”

“We know a little more now than we did before we started,” Annie said cheerfully. “What I don’t understand is how Hunter Pryce got through the vetting process with nothing coming to light other than his romance with Martine Connor.”

“Puh-leeze!” Nikki said. “The media wanted another Camelot, and Connor and Pryce were Jack and Jackie. The country was in dire need of some good news. First female president. Would the president marry the vice president? The country couldn’t wait to find out. The photo ops were out of this world. Maggie doubled her circulation for months with all those photos. And then, bam, nothing!”

“None of us were able to track Pryce, and if it wasn’t for Little Fish, we would still be back at square one. The good news is Pryce thinks he’s safe. We’re going to puncture his little bubble of security as soon as Lizzie gets back to us,” Kathryn said.

“What if the president doesn’t confide in Lizzie, what happens then?” Yoko asked.

Annie made a very unladylike sound. “Girls, do you really think Lizzie will leave the White House empty-handed? Actually, she isn’t going to be holding anything in her hands. She’s going there to…to inform the president of the current situation. The Lizzie I know will leave the White House with exactly what she wants, in this case permission to sock it to Hunter Pryce.”

Myra looked dubious as she started to separate and stack the scattered papers on the table. “Let’s all be clear on our temporary plan. Lizzie will ask Martine Connor for the personal e-mail addresses of the men in question as well as their personal cell phone numbers. I don’t see the president withholding that information. Once Lizzie tells Martine everything there is to tell about Hunter Pryce, assuming, of course, that Martine doesn’t already know, she won’t have a choice. Once we have that information, we will make contact with the men and arrange a meeting, at which point we will do what we have to do.”

“I contacted Avery Snowden earlier,” Annie said. “He said he would have his people briefed and ready to go the moment we get back to him.” Annie looked down at the Mickey Mouse watch on her wrist, and said, “That was six hours ago, so he should have a plan in place by now.”

“Bert called in and said the FBI sketch artist had completed the picture of Lily Flowers, and the networks are flooding the airwaves. It went out over the Net at the same time,” Nikki said. “Since there are no actual pictures of Crystal Clark, the artist could only work with what he had by way of descriptions that were sketchy at best. Bert said there is no resemblance between Ms. Flowers and the sketch. If nothing goes awry, Bert should be pulling the plug in less than thirty-six hours, possibly sooner.”

“What exactly does that mean to us?” Alexis asked.

Annie did one of those
tsk-tsk
things with her tongue. “It means the madam is answering to a higher authority, and we don’t need to concern ourselves with her. We’re going to go after her clients to even up the score for her. According to Lizzie, Cosmo said Lily Flowers would have turned herself in if she were guaranteed to be treated legally the same way the clients were treated. She was willing to take her punishment. But it didn’t work out that way, they went gunning for her. I for one want to know if Pryce is the one who tipped her off so she could take it on the lam.”

“Who else could it have been?” Kathryn asked. “You don’t think for one minute he trusted her to keep quiet where he was concerned, regardless of her feelings for him? The man is in a rather exalted position right now and could at some point in the future be our next president if anything were to happen to Martine Connor. The first one who talks and shares is the one who gets to cut a deal. When you’re looking at prison time, it pays to try to cut one. Bottom line, he was covering his own butt, not hers. He just did what he felt he had to do. By the way, has anyone given any thought to the possibility this was a plan by the vp all along to destroy Martine Connor so he could step up to the presidency? He had everything buried so deep that it didn’t come to light when he was vetted. Another thing, do we know what Pryce’s net worth is?”

“Three hundred and eighty million plus railroad stock and a whole bunch of real estate,” Isabelle said.

“He’s got a yacht and a fleet of antique cars. I think you could safely say the guy is solvent,” Nikki said.

“Not shabby, Kathryn! What a brilliant deduction!” Annie chortled. “Think about it, girls! It does make sense. But would he risk killing Lily Flowers, or was her demise just a tragic accident? We should find out where he was at the time Ms. Flowers met with her accident. Even though it’s unlikely he would have done the deed himself.”

“Maybe it was all a ruse, the part about his alerting her and getting her out of town to someplace where she couldn’t be found. She would have thought…God knows what the poor woman thought, but she was getting out of town. I suppose she trusted the man,” Myra said.

Kathryn rifled through some loose papers in front of her. “Pryce’s relationship with the madam happened before he became involved in politics and way before he met Martine Connor. This is just my opinion, but I’d say his rich life was boring, so he was looking to go outside the box and do something that would kick up his adrenaline. Maybe he’s a sex junkie. Then he had to turn his life around and get squeaky clean so he could withstand the vetting process.” Kathryn shuffled more papers. “It doesn’t look like Pryce ever held a real job. I would surmise his spare time was spent clipping coupons and showing up at ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Maybe the soirees he arranged before and after the election were his swan song, so to speak. You know, one last fling on the seedy side of life. He knew he could count on the madam to keep quiet.”

Annie, who was an avid reader of all things printed, announced, “I read somewhere that Pryce is a great economist. And he’s up-to-the-minute on foreign affairs. Connor said she had to do some serious arm twisting to get him to agree to run with her on the ticket. I think that was just political spin. The party wanted him badly, and until this cropped up, he’d been working tirelessly for the administration. Pryce is not the kind of vice president who will just attend funerals for foreign heads of state and otherwise take a backseat. I think he’s got both feet into global warming, too. At least that’s what the media are saying. About two weeks ago he was on some Sunday talk show, and he said he absolutely refuses to discuss his private life. The talk show host let him off the hook and went on to other things. The media likes the guy.”

“Well,” said Nikki, “now we have a reason for him wanting to get rid of the madam, thanks to Kathryn for opening our eyes to that possibility. If Kathryn is right, and he has his sights on the presidency via the back door, he needs to make sure nothing comes back to bite him. I think he thinks he’s got it covered. We should be doing everything possible to find out if the madam truly had a freak accident or if she was murdered.”

“We aren’t going to go there, dear,” Myra said. “Bert will take care of that end of things. If Kathryn is right, and I think she well might be, our job now is to take care of the men involved and at the same time protect the president and the administration. We can’t fault her for their deeds.”

The Sisters turned when they heard the familiar pinging sound that meant there was an in-coming e-mail.

Nikki got up and raced to the bank of computers. “It’s from Bert. He wants us to send him a letter on White House stationery telling him to cease and desist in the case of the Vegas madam!”

“How are we going to do that since we don’t have any White House stationery?” Alexis grumbled.

“Well, Lizzie is in the right place to get that particular piece of paper, now, isn’t she?” Kathryn asked.

“I’ll text her right now,” Annie said.

The Sisters waited to see if there would be a return text. There wasn’t.

“I’m sure Lizzie is occupied at the moment. I doubt she’ll leave the White House without checking her text messages. Lizzie is very thorough, as we all know.”

“I don’t get it,” Nikki said. “Why does Bert want a letter like that? Everyone knows the White House can’t tell the FBI what to do. It’s the FBI that puts the fear of God into the White House.”

Kathryn turned defensive. “I’m sure Bert knows what he’s doing. He’s out there in Vegas and can see and get a feel for what is going on. He wouldn’t ask for something like that if he thought it would backfire in any way. The buck stops with him. By that I mean if his guy—what’s his name?—oh, yeah, Duncan Wright, wants to kick up a fuss, which it sounds like he does, and is making waves, that may be why Bert wants it. Then there’s that other agent that Bert likes, John Clawson. Clawson is not a hothead like Wright is.”

Seeing the blank expressions on her Sisters’ faces, Kathryn said, “I’m just saying that Charles always encouraged us to say whatever was on our mind, no matter how weird or bizarre it sounded.”

“I’m all for pillow talk,” Nikki quipped.

Kathryn’s face turned bright pink. And then she laughed. “One does come up for air from time to time, and one has to talk of…of other things.”

Annie looked confused. “Explain that,” she said fretfully.

“Annieeeee!” Myra, her own face flushed, said, “Use your imagination.”

It was Annie’s turn to flush the same rosy hue as Kathryn.

The girls were relentless as they pelted each other with scrunched-up paper balls and shouted romantic instructions for Annie’s benefit. If nothing else, it was a release of the mounting tension in the room.

President Martine Connor could hardly contain herself as she waited in the hallway. She peered through the French doors as one of her Secret Service agents escorted Lizzie to the impromptu meeting.

Lizzie’s first thought after she went through her security check was how drawn and haggard her friend looked. She thought she saw a few more gray hairs at Martine’s temples. The president was dressed casually in jeans and a pullover sweatshirt, with a logo of the presidential seal over her heart. Not that fashion counted after hours. The two women hugged and then linked arms as they walked away, the agent far enough behind that he couldn’t hear their whispered conversation.

“So this is where you hang out, huh?” Lizzie grinned. “Pretty impressive, Madam President.”

“It’s a nice place to visit, but I don’t think you’d like living here, Lizzie. I don’t think I’ve ever been so lonely in my entire life. In my other life, I at least had a life back then. Here, I’m a virtual prisoner. Sometimes I have this crazy desire to get in my car and go to the drugstore. I won’t bore you with what I would have to go through to do that. Enough about me. You absolutely
glow,
Lizzie. You must be very happy.”

“I’ve never been happier, Madam President. You said something about showing me the Rose Garden…”

“Yes, yes, just let me scoot upstairs to get a shawl. I’ll be right back.”

Lizzie took that moment to pull out her cell phone, which was vibrating. She looked down at the message and started after the president. “Madam President, can you wait a minute? I was wondering if you would…” Lizzie mouthed the rest of what she was going to say just as one of the president’s detail sauntered up to see if there was a problem.

Martine waved him off as she sprinted down the hall and around the corner. Lizzie stood still and smiled at the agent. She was still smiling when Martine returned, wearing a soft pink shawl.

“We’re going out to the Rose Garden, Agent Roberts. I would appreciate some privacy.”

The agent inclined his head slightly to show he understood. It was also clear that he would be within shouting distance but would give his boss the privacy she’d requested.

Five minutes later they were walking through the garden. “You didn’t come here to walk through the Rose Garden, Lizzie. Give it to me straight.”

Lizzie didn’t mince any words, she gave it to her straight. “The Vegas madam is dead. It’s on the books as an accident. I know better, and the FBI knows better, but it’s going to be put to sleep as an accident. Your people are not off the hook. In fact the hook has grown to encompass something that could take down your presidency.”

Lizzie could feel President Connor shiver underneath the pale pink shawl. Lizzie wondered if Martine knew what was coming. Suddenly, Lizzie felt sorry for her friend and reached out an arm to wrap around the shivering woman’s shoulders. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but I know in my gut you’d rather hear it from me than read about it in the papers or on the news.

“Hunter Pryce is the devil in the woodwork. He’s the one who put up the money for the Happy Day Camp in Vegas. He and the madam were…I’m not sure what they were exactly, but whatever it was had longevity. Someone alerted the madam that things were going to go down. On the face of it, you’d think he cared enough to get her safely out of the way, but then she had an accident and now she’s dead.

“Take that one step further, and ask yourself: if it all got out, wouldn’t you, too, be dead in the water, so to speak? Who then steps into your place? Hunter Pryce, that’s who. He thought he had it all buried really deep, but we found it.” Lizzie decided to stretch the truth a little, and said, “You can thank the Vigilantes.”

Lizzie thought her walking companion was stiff as a board.

“Are you sure, Lizzie?”

Lizzie hated the deep hurt she heard in the president’s voice. “I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t sure. The smartest thing you could have done was dump Pryce before you asked him to be your vp.”