Exclusive (48 page)

He's done it before.

Where had she heard those words? Or had she read them? Why had they popped into her head now? Why did they seem vitally important?

Then, in a blinding moment of clarity, she remembered where she'd read them, and she knew the answers to those questions, and the back of her neck began to itch.

"Barrie, are you all right?" Bill Yancey was crouched beside Gray, his concern evident.

"Say something, dammit!" Gray said.

"What's happening?" Daily sat up and scratched his scruffy head. "What's going on? What's the matter with her?"

Daily. God bless him, hadn't he told her a thousand times that a good reporter dug deep, that there was always another layer to unfold, that you should never discount anything, no matter how seemingly unimportant and valueless?

The best leads-the ones that made a story sensational, 430 Sandra Brown

that elevated a so-so story into one that rocked the worldwere the ones found in the most unlikely places, places you'd never think to look for them.

It had been there all the time. All the damn time! Among the scraps of paper and notes that she'd taken from her desk at WWE. She had checked out the lead, but only superficially. She hadn't dug deep enough.

She cautioned herself against getting too excited now. She could be wrong.

This could still prove to be a blind alley, but gut instinct was telling her otherwise. In any case, she had to find out.

Pushing the men aside, she surged to her feet. "I've gotta go."

"Go where?"

"I . . . I'd rather not say. Not until I know."

"You want to leave, but you don't know where you're going?"

"Of course I know where I'm going," she said impatiently. "I don't know what I'll find when I get there. Maybe nothing. Maybe something. But I've got to go."

Bill Yancey said, "Barrie, I can't let you walk out of here-"

"Please, Bill. Send someone with me. A U.S. marshal. Let him handcuff me, I don't care. Just, please, let me do this. It could bust this thing wide open."

"What could?"

"That's what I can't say."

"Why can't you tell me?"

"Because I don't want to look like a fool if I'm wrong!"

A long silence followed her shout.

Then: "Let her go."

It was Gray who'd spoken, and when Barrie turned to him with surprise, his eyes were on her, communicating a thousand things, not the least of which was absolute faith in her.

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In that instant, she knew she loved him. Dammit. She loved him very much.

"Let her go," he repeated, holding her stare. "She knows what she's doing."

"Could've knocked me over with a feather when you showed up with a letter of introduction from the attorney general."

Deputy Warden Foote Graham was as disarming as his name. He belied the bully stereotype portrayed in prison movies. He was mild-mannered, slender as a reed, and wore wire-rimmed glasses. He was sensitive enough not to express any curiosity about the soiled nurse's uniform she was wearing. She hadn't taken time to change.

Barrio thanked him for seeing her without an appointment. "I left Washington in such a hurry, there wasn't time to notify you that I was coming."

Bill Yancey had greased the skids. After agreeing to the trip to Mississippi, he'd placed a private jet at her disposal. At the Jackson airport, there'd been a car and escort waiting to drive her to the prison in Pearl. Foote Graham was in awe of his well-connected guest and had readily agreed to assist in any way he could.

"I assume your interview with Charlene Waiters is of an urgent nature?" he asked.

"I'm sorry, Warden Graham. That's confidential."

"I can't figure it," he said, shaking his head in bafflement. "But if you and Attorney General Yancey say it's a matter of national security, whom I to question it."

He ushered her through a door that was opened for them by a uniformed female guard. "She's waiting for you," the guard said. "And mad as a hornet to be pulled away from roc time."

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The prisoner was drinking a can of Dr. Pepper and did indeed look put out when Warden Graham and Barrie Travis approached her. Charlene Waiters was a tiny woman, with a bony, concave chest and spindly arms and legs. Her white, overpermed hair formed a frizzy halo around her small head. Her snapping black eyes and the quick, abrupt manner in which she moved reminded Barrie of a sparrow.

Giving Barrie a once-over, she snorted with disdain. "Well, it certainly took you long enough."

Barrie extended her right hand. "I'm pleased to meet you, Mrs. Waiters."

Crazy Charlene shook hands with her, then addressed the warden condescendingly. "We got private things to discuss. Do you mind?"

Although she had challenged his authority, Foote Graham smiled. "Of course not. I'll make myself scarce."

He joined the female guard who was standing at a discreet distance. Barrie and Charlene took chairs on either side of a small table. "I understand I'm interrupting your recreation time. I apologize."

"You got any cigarettes?"

Barrie dug into her satchel and produced the same pack she had offered to Vanessa Merritt a few weeks ago. Charlene shook one from the pack and placed it between her thin lips. Barrie lighted it for her, then asked if Charlene had any objections to her recording the interview.

"Not if you'll leave the cigarettes."

Barrie smiled in agreement. Once she'd checked the cassette recorder, she began. "You left several intriguing messages on my voice mail at WVUE."

"You thought I was a kook."

"Well, I-"

"Otherwise you would have called me back."

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Charlene was going to be an exacting dance partner who wouldn't tolerate a single misstep. Barrie took another tack. "You're absolutely right, Mrs.

Waiters. I thought you were a kook. In fact, I still think you might be."

Leaning forward, Charlene winked mischievously. "I got them believing I am. Loony, I mean. I found Jesus right after I got here, but it was getting crazy that worked miracles. Crazy people can get away with just about anything. You'd be amazed."

Charlene Waiters was crazy, all right. Crazy like a fox. "The first time you called me," Barrie said, "you left the messagèHe's done it before.'

To whom were you referring?"

"Well, who do you think, dimwit? The President, of course. David Malcomb Merritt." She stabbed the tabletop with a broken, yellow fingernail. "He killed that baby boy, that little Robert Rushton, sure as I'm sitting here."

"What makes you think so?"

"Are you dense, or what? Don't you listen? Like I told you, he's done it before. He killed another baby. Years ago."

This was the information Barrie had come to Mississippi to hear. "I'm afraid you'll have to be more specific than that."

Charlene exhaled a plume of smoke. "David Merritt was working for Senator Armbruster. Good-looking hotshot, he was. Had women by the dozens. One of

'em got knocked up. Her name was Becky Sturgis. She had a baby boy while Merritt was off in Washington. When he come back, she sprung the kid on him. He didn't cotton to the idea of being a daddy and husband. But Becky, she'd made up her mind to marry him and kept pestering him about it. "So one night, when her little baby was only a few weeks old, he went over to her trailer house to have it out with her. They got into one hell of a shouting match. The kid was squalling. He choked it to death.

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"Maybe he didn't intend to kill the kid. Maybe he just wanted to hush his crying. But since he had killed him, I guess he figured he ought not to leave any witnesses. He beat Becky Sturgis to a fare-thee-well."

Snorting her sinuses clean, Charlene twirled the cigarette like a miniature baton. "There's no excuse for that sorta violence against women.

None whatsoever. Even if I weren't a convicted felon, he wouldn't have got my vote, on account of it."

The tale was too much to absorb all at once, so Barrie cushioned her mind by thinking how interesting life was. The nation's history could very well be altered by this comically birdlike septuagenarian who was serving a life sentence for armed robbery and murder.

But who would ever believe it? Did she believe it? Charlene's credibility was as thin as rice paper. She could have invented this story to help fill her idle time. Robert Rushton Merritt's death had sparked her interest.

Barrie's SIDS series had fanned the flames of her imagination. She'd found a sucker who would listen, who had come all the way to Mississippi to speak with her. Making up this story could be the best entertainment Charlene had enjoyed in years.

Or it could be true.

Either way, Barrie decided to proceed with caution. This could be the story of the century. If she blew it, not only her future but the nation's would be sacrificed to her ineptitude.

"It all sounds very . . ."

"Unbelievable," Charlene said when Barrie faltered. "You don't have to believe me. Ask of Cletus Armbruster."

"The senator?"

Charlene screwed up her wizened features in disgust. "He's the crookedest politician ever to walk the face of the earth, and that's saying something."

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"He knows about Becky Sturgis?"

"Knows? Hell, girl, who do you think made the problem go away?" Charlene exclaimed. "Merritt went to him that very night. The senator took care of it."

"Senator Armbruster is a powerful man, but even he couldn't make two bodies disappear," Barrie argued. "Wasn't there a criminal investigation?"

"If you want to call it that," Charlene said with a contemptuous flick of her cigarette in the general direction of the ashtray. "Armbruster's pockets were crowded with city and state officials. He called in favors, is all. Becky and her little baby didn't mean shit to them good of boys down to the courthouse."

Barrie shook her head in disbelief. "Armbruster couldn't have been involved. He wouldn't have allowed Vanessa to marry David Merritt, knowing that he was capable of-"

"What planet you been living on? Course he would have allowed her to marry him. He fancied his daughter being First Lady." She hocked up a glob of phlegm and spat it on the floor. "Sons of bitches. All of 'em. They think they can do anything they want and get away with it. Folks like me and my old man, we had to pay for our crimes. But not people like Merritt and Armbruster."

"I'm afraid you're right," Barrie said. "If everything you've told me is true, it took place, what, twenty years ago? If Armbruster successfully covered a double murder, he would have covered his tracks equally as well.

There's no way to prove it ever happened."

Charlene slapped the tabletop, startling Barrie and causing her to jump.

"You're the stupidest gal the good Lord ever gave breath to. You think I'd spend my money calling you up there in Washington, D.C., and put my scrawny neck on the line if I didn't have no proof?"

Chapter

".7t's better than you deserve." Bill Yancey leaned over the table, placing his hands flat on its smooth surface. "Provide us with evidence that the President smothered Vanessa's baby and was attempting to kill her, and you'll be granted immunity from prosecution."

Spencer Martin maintained his silence. Throughout the interrogation, he'd been admirably stoic, staring straight ahead, remote as a statue, as though detached from the circumstances in which he found himself. The office was now cluttered with rubbish from several carryout meals and empty coffee cups. It was almost steamy with the tension generated during the long night and following day. Despite his protests, Daily had been taken to a hotel. Two FBI agents had accompanied him and were ordered to stay with him and see to his needs until further notice. William Yancey and Gray Bondurant had spent all day in that office, anxiously awaiting word from Barrie.

When she'd finally called from the Mississippi prison and recounted for them her conversation with Charlene Waiters, Yancey had said, "We can't proceed without some

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inside help, and Spencer Martin is as inside as you can get." He'd ordered that Spence be brought in for questioning. Spence had come peaceably but had not yet cooperated.

Gray, who was against Spence's getting immunity, was being vindicated by Spence's stubborn silence. He had warned the attorney general that he'd have better luck getting statements from a turnip, and he'd been right. "I told you this would be an exercise in futility," he said now. "That's why he declined your offer to call an attorney. He knew he wasn't going to say a goddamn word. You could torture him to death before he'd rat on David Merritt."

But Yancey wasn't yet ready to give up. "Mr. Martin, some of your former operatives are willing to testify against you to avoid prosecution themselves. You're implicated in several serious crimes, good for years in federal prison."

Nothing.

"Howard Fripp? That name strike a bell, Mr. Martin? It should. You're a suspect in his murder case."

Spencer didn't even flinch.

"He's not going to tell you a thing," Gray said. "He won't even tell you that I shot him and locked him in a root cellar. If he did, he would have to explain what he was doing out there. You're wasting your time." Yancey ran a hand over his balding head. "Very well, Mr. Martin. This offer is good only for the next thirty seconds. If you reject it, you'll be subjected to a congressional investigation the likes of which will be unrivaled in American history."

Spencer Martin came to his feet. "If you had evidence of any wrongdoing on my part, I'd be under arrest. Don't try to strong-arm me again, Bill. It doesn't dignify either of us."

Yancey grumbled a curse.

Spence gave him a smirking smile, then headed for the door.

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"Yancey, all right with you if I have a private word with him?"

It was clear that Yancey didn't like the idea, but he granted permission.

Gray followed Spence out into the hallway.