Treadmill (15 page)

Cooper tried Laura’s number again and again, always hanging up just before her message machine picked up. In the mirror, he saw his own haggard, anxious face, the deep frown lines on his forehead. He seethed. A fist clenched his gut as he paced his small apartment. He suddenly felt the confinement, as if he were in a prison cell. Outside, it grew dark and the streetlights flashed on. Headlights glared. Finally, he found it impossible to stay inside, and he ran down the stairs, through the lobby and into the street. He just had to move, to
go
.

He chose the direction of Susan’s house. At first he jogged, then sprinted, his heart pumping furiously, his thoughts in many directions at once. Susan’s name rang repetitively in his mind. He was certain she would be there with outstretched arms, waiting.

But she wasn’t. There were no lights on in her apartment. Cooper stopped on the landing between her apartment and Parrish’s and caught his breath. A stitch of pain had begun in his right side, and he bent over at the waist to ease the pain.

Again, he felt the pressure of decisions. Should he wait? Should he go? To where? He waited on the top step of the landing. He remembered the pay phone at the entrance to the complex. He got to it, but discovered he had no change, only a five-dollar bill. He banged his fist against the metal box. There was a conspiracy all right—a conspiracy to thwart him from finding happiness, a carefully contrived plan to push him over the edge of despair.

The Silver Spring subway station was only a few blocks away. He purchased a fare card with his five-dollar bill, passed through the turnstile, and took the stairs two at a time, just making the next train.

He took his seat on the train moving smoothly along the track. The sounds of doors opening and closing, and the voice announcing the stations proved no distraction to his thoughts. For the moment, his plan centered on finding Laura.

He got off at the Dupont Circle station and came up impatiently onto the sidewalk from the longest escalator in the system. He bounded up, oblivious to the people he had to push out of the way. He found the building where Laura lived. It was an old apartment house, remodeled, with a buzzer security system not unlike his own, but without a reception desk.

She had written down her apartment number, but not the code for the security system. He pressed every button in turn, posing first as a deliveryman from UPS and then the cable TV technician. People worried more about their TV reception than their security, even in Washington. After three tries, someone buzzed him in.

Laura’s apartment was at the end of a long corridor. All that working out and weight training had finally revealed its true purpose to Cooper. He took a running leap towards her door and broke it open at the first try. A clean break, only the jamb had broken. He was in. Regaining his balance swiftly, he closed the door by putting his weight against it and looked through the peephole.

The sharp crack had stirred a couple of the tenants who opened their doors and looked up and down the corridors. They couldn’t have seen the break in the door from their point of view, and after a cursory inspection of the premises, they went back to their apartments. Cooper moved a chair against the door to keep it closed, and began to inspect Laura’s apartment. His anxiety was soothed by not finding what he had feared; Laura’s body sprawled on the floor or crumpled in a closet.

Her closets were almost empty. The refrigerator contained only a half filled carton of milk, and a nearly empty bottle of orange juice. A cabinet held only one box of Grape-Nuts cereal. It was a makeshift resting place on a longer journey. He could relate to that. He noticed the red blinking light of her answering machine. He pressed ‘play.’ The first message he heard was from Prentiss.

“It’s twelve thirty.” Prentiss said. “Where are you?” She repeated the time, then left her number.

There was another message from Prentiss, who marked the time as one thirty. Then another with no reference to time. And another, but this one arrested Cooper’s attention. It was a crisply efficient female voice.

“This is Jane Hartley of Vice President Haley’s office. The Vice President regrets that he will be unable to speak with you, either on the phone or in person.” The voice had an air of arrogance. “He is quite busy, as you must know. But he does promise to get back to you at his earliest convenience.” There was a long pause of uncertainty. “Oh, and Mrs. Chase…? He would also appreciate a total cessation of your phone calls. And he does send his fondest regards.”

A stonewall
, Cooper thought, with a flash of anger. So she had been working that aspect as well.

The running tape also revealed his messages, two of them. Then a series of beeps, presumably from him, with no message given. The last two messages were from Prentiss again.

“Where the fuck are you, woman?”

Cooper called Prentiss. A man answered.

“Just left. No, hold on. There she is. Who is this?”

“Cooper,” he said.

He heard his name repeated, then Prentiss came on the line.

“Prentiss,” her voice said.

“This is Cooper. Remember me?”

“I remember. Where is the lady? I’ve been trying to reach her all day.” She paused for a moment. “Weren’t you going to be here, too?”

“I’m here at her place.” Cooper did not feel compelled to explain how he had gained entry.

“So where the fuck is she?”

“I’ve been trying myself to reach her all day.”

“She didn’t tell you where she’d be?”

“No.”

“When she didn’t show, I called.”

“I know.”

“I don’t know where she is.” He paused, hesitated, and could hear Prentiss breathing, waiting. “There’s more here than meets the eye,” he said.

“No shit. Just a minute. I’m going to check something.”

He waited with growing alarm.

“Okay so far,” she said. “Except for the usual, no white female Caucasian in the morgue.”

Despite the callousness of her remark, he felt relieved.

“I’m not going to allow myself to think that,” he said.

“Won’t matter what you think,” she said, lowering her voice. “I got the pictures. I was ready to put it in the records if she confirmed.”

“If she’s right, she’s in danger,” he said.

“Right about what?” she snapped.

“About everything,” he answered sharply.

“I think we have to talk,” Prentiss whispered. The edge had gone out of her voice. “Shamrock okay? Say, twenty minutes.”

“I’ll be there.”

Cooper hung up, and noticed that his hands were shaking. He continued his search of the premises, struck by the irony of how violated he had felt when she had done it to him. He went through the drawers of her desk, her dresser, her closets. He could find no evidence, no notebooks, no papers, nothing written, no photos or anything that hinted at what she was doing. It was as if she, or someone else had taken great pains to eliminate any clues to her involvement. His heart lurched.

He let himself out of the apartment. The door held, but barely.

****

Prentiss, larger than life, was sitting in the same booth where they had met the evening before. She wore an attractive white blouse. Cooper noted that even as she sat, she seemed to command the room with her presence. In front of her was a vodka and tonic.

“Drink?” she asked.

“Tonight, I need one. Make it the same.”

Prentiss motioned for the waitress, and signaled to the drink and raised two fingers. The waitress nodded and slid her way through the crowd. The bar was as packed as it had been the night before.

“You must have clout to get this booth,” Cooper said by way of calming himself. He didn’t know where to begin.

“Not clout. Repetition,” she replied with a smirk, studying his face. She had the uncanny ability to focus her brown eyes with intimidating laser-like power on their subject, a perfect tool for her profession. It was, Cooper noted, a challenge to meet her gaze. He remembered, too, that she had rarely smiled, and when it came, it seemed forced.

“I have two questions for you, Cooper,” Prentiss said.

“Only two?”

“Don’t be a smart ass,” Prentiss said.

Her remark seemed perfectly in keeping with her personality. This was a lady angling for dominance. He had seen that quality in her in their prior meeting, and had seen Laura try to meet the challenge.

“I don’t think I can answer them to your satisfaction,” Cooper said.

“That’s my call,” she muttered.

“Fire away.”

“One. Are you her lover?”

“No.”

She studied his face, but gave him no sign of what she believed.

“Two. What the hell has all this to do with you?”

“The truth is that I’m in it only because Laura thinks I’m in it. Only, I’m not sure exactly where I fit in.”

“You were right, Cooper,” Prentiss said, lifting her drink to her lips. “It’s not to my satisfaction.”

“Or mine,” Cooper said.

“Then why are you here?”

“Because she’s disappeared. She missed your appointment. And she wasn’t at the club.”

“What club?”

“We work out at the same gym in Bethesda. She’s a regular. Every day. She wasn’t there today. Never showed up.”

The waitress came with their drinks. Cooper reached out and drained half his drink, noting that Prentiss was looking at his trembling hands.

“She held things back, right?” Prentiss asked. Cooper detected the nuance, the clever interrogator with a relentless attitude. Cooper decided to let her carry it along. Perhaps that would somehow absolve him from the guilt that he was about to violate Laura’s confidence, tell all he knew.

“Well, did she?” Prentiss insisted.

“Yes, she did,” Cooper said. He avoided meeting Prentiss’ gaze.

“The Filipino woman was not the only one involved in this thing,” he said.

“There are others?”

“It’s complicated,” he acknowledged.

“Then tell it your way. But for crying out loud, tell it without the bullshit.”

Cooper started with working out at the club next to Parrish for months, then explaining that suddenly the man simply stopped showing up, how he had searched for him and finally found where he had lived. He told her how Laura had zeroed in on him when he started making inquiries about Parrish, how he had believed that he was being followed, how he had abandoned that notion when Laura told him that she had followed him and searched his apartment, believing that he was in danger, but never telling him from what. Of course, he had skirted around Susan Haber’s peripheral part in all this. But he did tell her his theory about the Vice President being treated for something potentially life threatening.

Prentiss listened closely. She hadn’t touched her drink and did not reach for it throughout his narrative. When he finished, she sat back, blew out a breath of air, picked up her drink and drank it down in one gulp.

“Interesting,” Prentiss said.

“That’s all you can say?” Cooper asked, annoyed by her tepid reaction. He wondered how closely she had been listening.

“Suppositions abound,” she said. “Nothing connects. Especially you.”

“That’s what Laura was trying to do. Connect everything, including me. Find out what really happened to her husband. The whole point of identifying Anni Corazon and placing her at the Vice President’s house was to get the so-called authorities off their asses.”

“Well, I’m here, aren’t I? Off my big ass.”

“And maybe a little late,” Cooper muttered.

“Everybody’s a fucking detective,” Prentiss said.

Cooper felt confused and not a little foolish. “So, why have you been calling Laura all day?”

“I don’t like being muzzled,” Prentiss said. “It rouses my Irish. When you’re after big game, you either get it on the first shot, or it will charge you,” she added. “I think she’s got something big in her sights.”

“Let’s hope she’s still around to pull the trigger,” Cooper said.
All of us
, he thought.

Without comment, she reached for her shoulder bag on the bench beside her and pulled out an envelope.

“This is the shit I deal with daily, man,” she said, sliding out a sheaf of eight by ten color photos. “Is this the lady you worked out with?”

For a moment, he thought Prentiss was showing him pictures of Laura, bruised and broken. But when he allowed his eyes to wash over the pictures, he saw that it was Anni, a bloated sack of dead flesh, her lifeless eyes terrified even in death.

“Pretty, huh?” Prentiss said.

His eyes did not linger on the picture. The sight, along with the booze he had ingested, was making him nauseous. It had also instantly sobered him. Prentiss started to gather up the photos.

“Wait,” Cooper cried, reaching out. Something had registered on the deep recesses of his memory, as if the dead woman was screaming for attention. Prentiss again laid out the pictures on the table’s surface.

“There,” Cooper said, as he inspected the pictures, bringing them up to his eyes as far as his focus permitted. He punched his forefinger on a place below the dead woman’s neck.

Prentiss studied the picture concentrating on the spot to which Cooper had pointed.