Authors: Daphna Edwards Ziman
Jake took a breath. “He never said anything to me, either.”
Suzanne’s eyes glazed and she turned toward the Maurers, holding a handkerchief to her face.
“You know, they say a wife always knows. But I didn’t. I had no fucking clue.” For a second Jake glimpsed, in the slight droop of her shoulders and hands, the vulnerability she’d had when the three of them had first met. Over the years she had hardened so much that Jake had been unable to remember what she was like in the first place—and why Porter had married her.
Suzanne patted her mouth with the handkerchief, leaving a ghostly imprint of her lips. “I don’t know why, but it helps to know that you were in the dark too,” she said sincerely.
Jake nodded. He knew what she meant but still didn’t want to become her new best friend—if that were even possible with her. He was, if anything, more loyal to Porter now than ever. Porter must have been shut out by her to even contemplate an affair in the middle of a campaign.
Suddenly Suzanne tacked again. “Say
something,
Jake. It sounds to me like you’re protecting someone. An adulterer? A liar? A bitch who knew he had a family?”
They were both silenced by the severity of her words, which hung in the room like a nuclear cloud. Suzanne was fishing; Jake knew that. But he didn’t even try to reassure her. He just sat and waited.
Finally she cleared her throat. “We’re going to do the service in LA. He was okay with that,” she said, somewhat defensively. “I wanted to ask if you would give the eulogy.”
“Of course.” There was another long silence.
“What’s with that fucking wig?” Suzanne spat out suddenly. “Was she a stripper? A hooker? Because I don’t know what’s worse …” Suzanne brought her hand to her mouth. Her shoulders convulsed once.
Stiffly, Jake put a hand on her arm. “No idea,” he said, honestly. But there it was again, the wig and a flash to the night before. The triumphant look in the singer’s eyes when she’d pulled off the crown of platinum blonde.
Abruptly, Suzanne stepped away. “I’m going back to LA tonight. I’ll call you before the service, make sure we’re on the same page.”
“Are Ian and Anna coming with you?”
“They’re meeting me at home.” She paused.
For lack of anything better to say, Jake mumbled, “It’s going to be okay.”
“Sure it is, Guv,” replied Suzanne, the sarcasm twisting her mouth. “Maybe when I’ve got a seat on the appropriations committee and every lobbyist in Washington is standing in line to kiss my ass, I’ll thank that hooker. But at the moment what it is”—she took a deep breath—“what it is, is humiliating and dirty and selfish.” Before she could see Jake’s reaction, she retreated to the bathroom, blotting her eyes.
On his way out, Jake closed the door as quietly as he could.
* * *
Jake had been in the meeting for only three minutes and already he knew it was going to end badly. Cooper was bad enough, with his
provincial thinking and hostility. Plus, Jake couldn’t imagine a dimmer pair of FBI agents than the ones assigned to Porter’s case.
Brewer was a beefy man with a chin that tapered to a rounded point like the end of a baseball bat. He had gone around the room handing out his business cards, flicking each one out of the stack like a magician, offering them with his first two fingers, cigarette-style.
Norris was a thin, weaselly man in a turtleneck and blazer, a style Jake loathed for its Gallic pretentiousness. He had a thin, bristly mustache and combed-back hair.
The two spent twenty minutes pissing around the corners of the investigation, alternately bullying and confusing Cooper as they tried to establish their dominance. Once Brewer, the more obvious bully, had that down, Norris took over as the talker.
“What we’re probably looking for is some kind of loner. Working alone. Probably a right-wing extremist. Possibly a white supremacist.”
Jake groaned. Everyone turned in his direction as he said, “You’ve gotta be shitting me. That’s what you’ve got? You’re here to tell us
that
?”
Brewer grunted. “Last I checked, you were an ambulance chaser with an important friend. Are you a detective now?”
“No,” Jake answered evenly. “It’s just that I was hoping this case, the murder of a member of the U.S. Congress, would be assigned to competent investigators. I wasn’t expecting Washington to send out Frick and Frack, waving invisible-ink pens and decoder rings.”
Cooper held up two pale hands. “Gentlemen, please. We’re on the same side.”
“Except we have badges and he doesn’t,” said Norris pointedly, his Adam’s apple bulging through his turtleneck.
Jake nearly threw the table over. “This investigation will go nowhere with these incompetent assholes involved!”
“Easy!” shouted Cooper.
Norris sneered. “And what is this bullshit about the wig? Garrett’s wife is claiming it’s hers?”
Jake was on his feet, leaning across the table. He spoke as calmly as he could. “Let me remind you that Mrs. Garrett is very likely going to become
Congresswoman
Garrett sometime in the next few weeks. You might want to think about who you’re pissing off.”
Norris actually stopped in his tracks, standing stock-still. The expression on his face said he hadn’t considered this possibility. He blinked at Brewer, who shrugged.
“So, he’s protected when the widow’s around,” said Brewer, not looking up.
“But you’re on your own when you’re not peeking around her skirt,” finished Norris triumphantly.
Jake lost it. “This is bullshit!” he roared.
Materializing as if by magic, Alana Sutter was suddenly at Jake’s side. She touched his arm.
“Hang on,” she whispered smoothly. “Let’s go outside. Just for a minute.”
Seething, Jake allowed Sutter to lead him into the hall.
“I’m not going to be squeezed out by a couple of fed pricks,” fumed Jake.
“Suzanne wants you involved, and you have my word, too,” reassured Sutter. “You won’t be shoved out. But you’ve been through a lot today. I know what Porter meant to you.” She looked at Jake intently. “He meant a lot to me, too.”
Jake didn’t want to get into it. He felt his temper flare again.
“And I know what you meant to him,” pressed Sutter. “He trusted you. Don’t worry. He’s not up there keeping score on what you’re doing now.”
Jake was still irritated, maybe even more so now. It killed him
that Sutter may have known about Porter’s affair, may have even been helping him cover it up.
“Seems you’ve gone from one campaign to another.”
Sutter had the decency to look chagrined. “She’ll carry on his agenda.”
“How could this have happened?” asked Jake, changing the subject.
“Porter asked for a light detail, and I told security to give it to him,” said Sutter. “That’s what I have to live with.”
“Did you know that … ? Did you know he was … ?”
“Did I know he had a woman on the side?”
Jake nodded. Sutter examined her fingers and then looked at him.
“I’m telling you this because I like you and to show you I mean it about keeping you in the loop—if you lay off those FBI agents. They’re annoying little pricks, but they have a job to do, and we need Washington’s help with this. Alright?”
Jake nodded again.
“Porter never said anything. But he had been asking for space more and more often lately. I didn’t see anything, but I had a feeling something else was going on. I’d also felt him distancing himself. Like … a pulling away.”
Jake silently exhaled. It sounded like Sutter was covering her ass.
She continued, “Like I said, he asked for a light detail last night, and I gave it to him. That was my mistake, my role in this. Once we get through this investigation, I’ll have to make my own amends with that. Until then, we’ve all got jobs to do.”
Jake nodded and returned to the meeting considerably quieter but no less agitated. He had never really liked Sutter, but had always found her accountable. Now he wasn’t so sure. Suzanne had always seemed disinterested in Porter’s career, yet here she was poised to take
it over. The case was being handled by bureaucrats who were trying to shut him out. His best friend had had a terrible secret that may have been what killed him. Jake was feeling as though he couldn’t trust anybody—not even the dead.
“MARCO!”
“Polo!”
“Marco!” yelled Kelly and Libby together.
“Polo!” shouted Kevin.
“Let’s get him!” cried Kelly, lunging toward Kevin with Libby on her back. Libby shrieked, and Kevin dove for the bottom of the pool. Kelly’s hand grazed his foot as he swam by.
“Gotcha!”
Kevin came up laughing in a spray of water droplets that arced through the air like a scattering of diamonds. Kelly watched as the drops seemed to freeze and turn in the sun against the blue sky. A perfect, unrepeatable, irreplaceable moment in time. She spent her life searching for these moments, these suspended instants of joy that shimmered among the despair, fear, hatred, and loneliness. She gazed at her kids, their faces bright with water and sunshine. They were her salvation, her hope, her entire reason for being.
It wasn’t an overstatement. If not for them, she would make any number of different choices right now. She would gladly risk her own life to serve the higher purpose of putting her husband in jail. But she would never do anything that would put her son and daughter at risk. And so that meant Plan B. Porter’s death—she couldn’t bring herself to admit it was murder—changed things in a big way. She had been working out an idea. But first she needed to get some information.
“Okay, kiddos, out of the pool,” sang Kelly, sliding out of the water and grabbing two towels. A glass door off the patio surrounding the pool opened directly into their motel room. Kelly showered the chlorine off the kids and set about helping them dress in clean clothes.
Kevin looked up from tying his shoes. “Where are we going, Mom?”
“Library, then dinner. You ready?”
The Nogales, Arizona, library had been recently remodeled with, it appeared, the bulk of the budget going toward a comfortable children’s section and computer terminals with Internet access. Kelly had no trouble installing Kevin and Libby on two fat purple pillows, a stack of books next to each of them. She found a computer in an adjacent area where she could watch the children while she searched. Sliding into the chair, she typed
Jake Brooks
in the Google search template.
First things first: Find out more about Jake Brooks, and understand why he was speaking on Porter’s behalf. She remembered Porter laughing joyfully when he spoke of Brooks. But she had to get to know him for herself. The first dozen results were transcripts of, and references to, TV appearances:
Entertainment Tonight
and
Larry King Live
, among others. Kelly clicked on one.
Announcer’s
voice-over
: Trouble in paradise tonight as the on-again, off-again relationship between British supermodel Alva Mayhill and attorney-to-the-stars Jake Brooks seems to be on the rocks again. The couple was spotted leaving in separate cars after an argument outside a Los Angeles restaurant.
The forty-two-year-old Brooks, who has been voted one of
People
magazine’s “Sexiest Men Alive,” was recently in the news for his gutsy defense of Julie Groton, the notorious textiles heiress accused of killing her brother. Brooks won the case, called “unwinnable” by many observers.
Mayhill and Brooks met last winter at the Aspen home of Randy Carlen, a Nevada billionaire. Friends say the pair have a fiery relationship but are very much in love.
Kelly checked the date. The transcript was two years old. She lingered on a still picture of Jake, noticing his intense eyes, high cheekbones, and salt-and-pepper hair. He was holding a door open for a beautiful woman who was flashing a dazzling smile at the camera. Jake’s expression was more serious than the model’s, but it was not shy. Kelly could tell he had a love/hate relationship with attention, but one thing was for sure: He knew his way around the front side of a camera lens.
She opened a dozen more links and scanned the articles. According to them, Jake’s mind was “brilliant,” “formidable,” “razor-sharp,” “photographic,” “prodigious.” He combined “the cunning of
a coyote, the guts of a Navy SEAL, the retention of a supercomputer, and the training of a rocket scientist.” His face was “rugged” and “handsome”; his eyes “bedroom” and “prescient”; his body “lanky” and “toned by running and riding horses”; and his hair “run-your-hands-through-it thick” and “calculatedly messy, as though he wants you to think he has just rescued a little old lady’s kitten from a tree.” His personality was described as “elusive,” “aloof,” and “lone-wolfish,” although the articles referred to his many friends and clients, and pictures showed him at parties and premieres and on private islands with beautiful women.
Kelly scrolled through a few more references, a pensive look on her face. Then she quit the search and returned to the Google template for the second search she needed to make: a bank. She typed
American Capital Investment Bank
into the prompt box. A corporate-looking website opened when Kelly clicked on it, a boring graphic making the introduction.
American Capital Investment Bank: We grow when your money grows.
For nearly two decades, ACIB has been the safe haven of choice for prudent investors in the United States. Our stellar team of financial advisors combines years of experience in money markets with skilled know-how and shrewd risk-taking. Our new corporate headquarters in Las Vegas’s burgeoning commercial center puts us in the heart of the fastest-growing population of investors in the country: the warm desert climates of the Southwest. With branches from Texas to California, and new branches planned for northern California, Oregon, and Washington, ACIB is fast becoming the dominant investment bank in the U.S.A.
The key to our success is our people. We hire only the best and brightest, the friendliest and the fastest-thinking. If you aren’t investing your money with us, then we aren’t doing our job.