Indispensable Party (Sasha McCandless Legal Thriller No. 4) (24 page)

She tried to reach Gavin one
final time, calling his home, office, and cell phone numbers one after the
other. He didn’t answer any of the numbers. She left messages on all three of
his voicemail systems asking him to call her then tossed her cell phone into
her briefcase. She felt the beginnings of a headache developing. She was tired
from the long day and worried about Gavin. It was time to go back to Connelly’s,
curl up on his couch, and rest her head on his warm chest.

She shrugged into her coat. As
she picked up her bag, she knocked Tate’s desk blotter askew. She lunged to
catch it before it shoved a pile of papers to the floor.

As she was returning it to its
original spot, a hot pink post-it note caught her eye.

In precise block letters, someone—presumably
Tate—had printed “CELIA GERIG. NEW KEN DC. $12.50/HR”

Seeing Celia’s name served to
heighten her concern about Gavin. She replaced the blotter, covering the sticky
note, and wished she could bury her anxiety as easily.

She turned out Tate’s office
light and pulled the door shut behind her with a soft click.

The corridors were quiet and lit
only by the emergency lighting over the stairwells. The sprawling headquarters
felt deserted. Sasha walked quickly through the lobby, her boots clicking against
the marble. The security desk was unoccupied, although the blue glow of a
computer monitor suggested that the guard on duty had just left to use the
bathroom or get a drink. She scribbled her name on the visitor log and then hurried
through the inner doors.

As she crossed the foyer to exit
the building, a Hispanic man on his way into the building jogged to hold the
door open for her. He wore a navy blue uniform that identified him as a member
of the cleaning crew. A knit cap was pulled down over his brow.

“Thank you,” Sasha said as she
walked through the door into the howling wind.

“You’re welcome. Stay warm,” he
said in a pleasant, accented voice.

She smiled at him and turned her
collar up, before she hustled through the parking lot to Connelly’s Lexus.

Leo stirred the
chicken stew simmering and bubbling in his tall stockpot. The sound of a car
engine in the alley caught his attention.

He glanced out the kitchen window
and was surprised to see Sasha pulling his SUV into the garage almost a full
hour earlier than she said she’d be back. For the first year of their
relationship, her estimates of when she’d be finished working had only ever
been overly optimistic. The year had been strewn with canceled dinner
reservations, missed movies, and vacations cut short.

But she’d been trying to be more
realistic and balanced about her working hours in recent months. The turning
point had been the night she’d run out to handle a client matter while he was
trying to propose to her. All the anger and hurt that Leo’d ignored for months
had come to a head, and he’d accused her of valuing her work over her personal
relationships.

She’d worked hard since then to
break her old patterns, and she’d gotten quite good at leaving work as
promised. But, she’d never come home
early
before.

He pulled two beer bottles from
the refrigerator and twisted off the caps. He’d miss her tomorrow when she
returned to Pittsburgh, so he was grateful for the extra time tonight. The more
time they spent together, the more time he wanted to spend with her.

She ran from the garage through
the small yard and up the deck stairs to the kitchen door. As she stamped her
feet to remove the snow, he pulled the door open to greet her. She rushed in,
her cheeks red from the cold, and shivered. She dropped her briefcase on the
floor and stretched up to plant an icy kiss on his lips.

“It’s getting really cold out,”
she announced as she pulled off her gloves and unbuttoned her coat.

Leo rested the beers on the
counter and helped her out of the coat.

“I think I know how to warm you
up,” he told her. He tossed her coat over the back of a chair and wrapped his
arms around her. He thought he would never cease to be amazed by how tiny she
actually was.

She leaned into him and rested
her head on his chest.

He was just about to thank her
for coming home early when his cell phone rang.

“Don’t answer it,” she said.

He had to. He didn’t want to.
What he wanted to do was scoop her up and carry her into the bedroom, but he
had to. He was the chief security officer of a company that just learned an
employee had stolen over twenty-five hundred doses of a vaccine intended to
prevent a horrific virus from decimating the American population. He couldn’t
just let a phone call roll to voicemail because he wanted to ravish his
girlfriend. Even if she did look particularly ravishing at the moment.

The phone continued to ring.
Insistent.

“I’m sorry.” He gently removed
her arms from around his waist and reached for the phone.

She sighed and reached down to
unzip her boots. As she stepped out of them, she immediately shrunk four
inches.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Leo. It’s Hank.”

“Hi, Hank. What’s up?” Leo asked
as Sasha retrieved her beer from the counter and walked over to the stove to peek
into the pot of stew.

“I ran your name up the flagpole.
You sure burned some bridges on your way out the door,” Hank said with a
chuckle.

Leo had a different view of his
separation from the government, but he didn’t particularly feel like getting
into it with Hank. He’d rather have dinner with his girlfriend.

“I take it my involvement isn’t
welcome?” he asked.

He cradled the phone between his
ear and shoulder and reached into the cabinet to the left of the stove and
pulled down two bowls. Then he took two spoons from the utensil drawer.

“Well, officially, that’s the
case. But, I have a bit of a situation on my hands and I could use someone with
your background and connections to the pharmaceutical industry, so I’m going to
noodle on it for a day and see if I can’t come up with something,” Hank said.

“Suit yourself, Hank. You know, I’m
happy to help if I can.”

Leo ended the call and turned to
see Sasha frowning at him.

“Come on, let’s eat while it’s
hot,” he said.

She took the seat across from him
and searched his face through the plumes of steam that rose from their bowls.

“What did Hank want?”

“To tell me I’m persona non grata
as far as the various governmental agencies are concerned,” he said, trying to
keep the bitterness out of his voice.

“Good. You’re a private citizen.
They can save the country without your help,” she said.

“Sasha—” he began, but she cut
him off.

“Mmm, this is really good,” she
said around a mouthful of stew.

It
was
good, he had to
admit. Nicely seasoned, and the sort of filling comfort food that a cold, snowy
night demanded.

“Thanks, but, listen. Hank may
still come back to me. He said he’s going to see if he could work it out. And,
if he does … I might want to do it.”

He waited for her response.

She looked at him for a long
moment, then she relaxed her shoulders and took a sip of her beer. “You know
what, Connelly, I don’t want to argue. You’re going to do what you want to do
no matter what I say. I’d like to just have a nice dinner with you, since I’m
going home tomorrow.”

Yes, she was
, he realized
with a pang.

It had taken some time to adjust
to a day-to-day routine that didn’t include her. For the first several weeks,
he’d awoken in a state of mild panic to find his bed empty. And the four-day
stretch since Saturday had been the longest uninterrupted time they’d shared
since he’d moved. Notwithstanding the constant threat of near-certain death
from contracting a killer flu, it had been a very pleasant four days.

He drained his beer and smiled at
her. “In that case, why don’t we call it a night.”

She checked the time. “At nine forty-five?”

He just kept smiling until
understanding dawned in her eyes. Her cheeks flushed and her bow mouth curved
upward.

“I guess I’m finished here,” she
allowed in a soft voice.

Tuesday morning
dawned gray and cold. Colton pressed the button on the wall beside his
headboard. The heavy blackout curtains drew back and inched across the window. From
his bed, he could see that the city below was covered in a thick blanket of
snow.

He yawned and then rose from the
bed. Snow or not, he had to stay on schedule. His carefully placed phone call
couldn’t come from a number traceable to him. He needed to be at the filthy
corner bodega when it opened to buy a prepaid calling card—and a lottery
ticket, so he would fit in with the other patrons. Even though he already had
his lottery ticket; all that was left to do was cash it in.

He calculated the figures as he
walked into the master bathroom and adjusted the water temperature for his
shower. If the government purchased the same number of doses of AviEx as it had
committed to purchase of Serumceutical’s vaccine, ViraGene would gross in
excess of two hundred and twenty-five million dollars, just on the contract.

He stepped into the steamy shower
and continued his musing. That sum didn’t even account for the inevitable
skyrocketing stock price.

The twenty-five million dollar
bonus that the board had agreed to write into his contract—mainly because the
small-minded fools believed he could never attain the profit target to unlock
it—was within his grasp.

All he had left to do was make
one anonymous phone call to the authorities, reporting the shocking news that
Serumceutical’s Chief Security Officer had, in his top desk drawer, a deadly
biological weapon. Faced with the public relations disaster that the company
chosen to provide the vaccines intended to protect the American people from a
grim and certain death was harboring the very virus it was supposed to
eradicate, the government would have no choice but to approve and then purchase
AviEx. The public outcry would demand it in a panic and amid paranoid theories
about Serumceutical’s true intentions.

As the water pounded against his
back, Colton grinned. And, as if all that weren’t enough, the survivalist
brigade in Pennsylvania was probably this very moment whipping itself into a frenzy.
He’d recognized the true believer fervor in Bricker’s eyes. He’d do whatever it
took—including releasing the virus himself—to deliver the apocalypse he’d spent
over a decade predicting. By the end of the week, the American people would be dropping
dead in droves, the survivors would be clamoring for an antiviral medication,
and he was the only man who could deliver it.

If he’d been the type, he’d have
broken into song right there in the shower.

Sasha was humming
“Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” as she and Leo pulled onto the private
road that led to Serumceutical’s sprawling campus. She loved new snow, when it
was still pristine. After one rush hour, it would be dirty and slushy and
uninspiring, but right now, it made her feel like the frozen, crystalline world
was full of possibility.

Her almost-perfect mood was
marred only by the fact that she was leaving Connelly behind when she returned
to Pittsburgh. But she had too much work to do to stay in D.C. an extra day or
two. She had discovery deadlines, filing due dates, a mediation to prepare
for—the list was long.

Connelly turned to her and said, “Feeling
the Christmas spirit already?”

She never got the chance to
answer.

They rounded a curve, and
Connelly slowed. They were still several hundred yards from the main parking
lot, but the road was lined with cars. Irritated-looking people milled around
with their hands shoved in their pockets for warmth.

Farther down the road, a wooden
sawhorse sat in the center of the road. Behind it a cluster of black sedans,
some with dashboard-mounted lights still flashing sat at various angles across
the paved road. Three more sedans were strewn across the lawn that edged the
road. At the mouth of the parking lot, an ambulance and an SUV marked Fire
Chief sat nose to nose. And beyond them, two fire engines flanked the entrance
to the main building.

 “What the devil?” Sasha
murmured.

Connelly braked and the car came
to a stop. His face registered no reaction to the scene, but Sasha saw him
clench and release his fists.

He pulled his cell phone from his
coat pocket and checked the display. “I don’t have any missed calls or
messages.”

Sasha was about to suggest he
call Grace, when she saw a willowy blonde in a fitted leather trench coat
running past the ambulance and down the drive toward them.

“Here comes Grace,” she said,
nudging Connelly, who was staring down at his phone.

“Call Oliver,” he said as he
opened his car door and stepped outside.

She pressed the number for Tate’s
ski chalet and urged the phone to ring. On the third ring, a female voice
answered, formal and pleasant despite the very early hour.

“Tate residence.”

“Yes, I need to speak to Oliver.
It’s urgent.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, Mr. Tate left
yesterday evening,” the woman said.

“Left?”

“Yes, ma’am. He and the girls
decided to cut their trip short.”

“Why? Where did they go?”

The woman’s tone took on a sharp
edge. “I wouldn’t know. I take care of the property, not Mr. Tate’s social
calendar.”

“Of course. Sorry,” Sasha said,
rushing to hang up and dial Tate’s cell phone number.

It rang only once and then the
call rolled over to his voicemail, which announced in a tinny electronic voice
that his mailbox was full before disconnecting her.

She stared down at the phone in impotent
frustration for a few seconds. Then she shoved it in her bag and opened the
passenger door.