Page 11 of The Night Of
Sobbing in Ramon’s arms on the hospital floor.
If there was any truth at all to what Jonathan was saying, if there was any possibility he was in danger… “I’m driving you everywhere. From the Observatory to the White House and back. If you have any outside events, cancel them. Stay buttoned up. Stay inside the White House, in public, if possible. Never be alone with anyone other than me. Don’t shut this office door, not for any reason.”
Jonathan nodded.
“I’ll find out what happened. I promise. I don’t know what I believe, or what I want to believe. If you’re right, then we have a major fucking problem on our hands.”
We stared at each other. A year earlier, he would have given me something: a look, a touch, a brush of his hand against mine, something tiny and meaningless but enough for me to know we had a connection, we had a secret world that no one else could ever penetrate. Now, there was a void between us, a chasm I couldn’t cross. Damn it, I knew Jonathan Sharp, and I lo—
Jonathan rose and walked past me, back to his desk. “Find out what happened to Steven, Sean,” he said. “Find out quickly, before we’re both dead.”
Three
Rain pummeledthe SUV as I made the drive back to Camp David. The wipers struggled to keep up, flinging sheets of water left and right and leaving the world fractured, like I was driving through a kaleidoscope. There was an apocalyptic quality to the morning, as if the next moment could bring the end of everything. Or maybe the end had already come and passed us by. Maybe the cliff edge was last night, and now we were all sailing through the sky, falling toward a broken ground that was rising faster than we could know.
I’d checked out the SUV from the Secret Service garage a couple of blocks from the White House. After running through the rain, I’d looked like a homeless person trying to shelter from the downpour, and three agents at the garage had tried to chase me out before I shoved my badge in their faces and told them to get a car for me while I changed. They had the last laugh. The SUV they gave me had a funky, dead-fish smell from too many rancid agents sweating inside it over the years, a sagging headliner, and a broken radio. No matter how much I spun the dial, the channel never changed. Not that it mattered. Every station on TV, cable, and over the radio was playing the same thing: President Baker. His life, his presidency, and now his death. The words were white noise, a hum beneath my consciousness as I listened to the fourteenth recitation of the official statement the White House had put out.President Steven Baker died early in the morning hours…
Occasionally, the radio played clips of Jonathan’s press conference. His voice always jolted me out of my reverie, ripped me back to the cold reality of the drive, the rain, and a heavy weight settling over everything. Was it my own sorrow, or had the world become infected with despair, a malaise that traveled like a poison into and through us all? I didn’t know about things like that. All I knew was that the world outside now matched the hollowness I’d been feeling for a year. And that fucking sucked.
I pulled off at the exit for Camp David. My tires splashed through standing water on the side of the road, and a heavy plume rose and fell over my windshield, blinding me and plunging me into a gray haze when the woods closed around the narrow forest road to Camp David.
Camp David looked like a refuge for the brokenhearted when I pulled up to the guard gate. The marines and shore patrol were out in force, but they let me pass their blockades when I flashed my badge. As I drove onto Camp David, lines of black SUVs and FBI cars were parked on both sides of the road. Agents in windbreakers and rain jackets walked with their heads down or huddled in groups on cabin porches, hiding from the deluge of rainwater overflowing the gutters. Mud ran in rivulets down the asphalt. Pine needles spun on currents in the middle of the road. The glares sent my way were hard and somber, the agents’ jaws set in tight lines.
I drove to Aspen and shut off the engine. Before I set foot on the ground, I had three FBI agents surrounding my car, waving at me to back the fuck up and turn around. One parked himself in front of my door, blocking me from getting out. He was a big guy, built like a brick shithouse, all solid muscle with the heft of middle age packed on his thick frame. He had a shaved head and what looked like a permanent scowl creasing his bulldog face.
I cracked my window. The sound of rain on the asphalt came at me with the echo of a million gunshots. Last night was in each, hitting me like I’d taken a bullet in the center of my chest. Moments frozen in time: Hearing the shot. Running across the lawn. Garcia on his knees as his hands fluttered over Baker’s body.
“Sir, this area is off limits. You’re going to have to leave. Now.”
Before I’d left his office, Jonathan had given me one more thing: a signed letter ordering anyone and everyone to render assistance and not impede my investigation in any way, and stating that if I was hindered in the slightest, the person responsible would be standing inside the White House within the hour and explaining themselves directly to the president. And then they would be packing their shit while their transfer papers for Montana were printed and signed by President Sharp himself. Montana, where federal agents went to wither. It was the punishment posting, and it was a one-way trip. I’d never met anyone who had come back from Montana.
I didn’t say anything to Mr. Clean. I unfolded Jonathan’s letter and pushed it against the inside of my window. He could squint and read it himself.
He did, three times, and then asked for my badge and credentials. I shoved those against the window as well. Snarling, he backed off, waving his backup dancers aside as I put Jonathan’s letter back in my coat and opened the door. The glare Mr. Clean gave me could have turned Medusa herself to stone. I ignored him. Another agent thrust a pair of gloves at me as I headed for the cabin. Okay, champ. My prints were all over the place anyway, but let’s glove up now.
Aspen had been sealed off, crime scene tape strung across the porch and the front door and an evidence seal secured along the doorjamb. Fingerprint powder clung in wet lumps to the frame and the knob. The FBI had been hard at work overnight, processing the scene like good little feds. I tried to imagine the showdown that had taken place between the FBI director and our director. The Secret Service never wanted to relinquish control over the president or the presidency, especially not to Hoover’s sniveling weenies. But the law gave the FBI jurisdiction over the deaths of federal officials, including the president. Fucking annoying having them bigfoot all over our job, coming in and playing Monday-morning quarterback. How much would you bet the feds were going to lay the blame for this squarely at the feet of the Secret Service, a fresh-baked shit pie just for us?
I cut the feds’ seal and walked in.
I’d been at a thousand crime scenes as a military policeman, had walked into death and blood and gore so many times I’d lost count. But something felt different here.
Someone had turned off the heat, probably to try to control the blooming miasma of death. It hadn’t worked. I tasted Baker’s blood at the back of my throat as I walked in, smelled the iron and sweet decay. Blood sugar breaks down. Iron sits heavy in thick, liquid pools. The odor of death gets into a place and stays. And this wasn’t just anyone’s death. This was the president’s.
Fingerprint powder was everywhere. They’d lifted prints from the doorknobs, the light switches, the counters and the windows. They’d find what they expected: Secret Service agents, President Baker, and the First Lady. A handful of aides who came into the president’s cabin.
I came around to the door I had burst through the night before. Plastic sheeting was taped over the open frame. Wood splinters still stuck out of the carpet. I stood in the same spot I had twelve hours earlier. My memories flooded in, last night and the present merging and mingling like a double exposure. Gray light painted the walls in shifting light as rain made the darkness come alive, shiver and twist into and out of focus. Bloody boot prints made a trail on the carpet coming out of the master bedroom. The feds had lifted impressions out of the stampede. Great, I’d need to turn over my boots. The ones still on my feet.
The rain on the windows cast hollow fractals over the remnants of Baker’s bedroom. We’d left a swath of destruction in our wake on our quest to save the man. The scene was totally destroyed. How the feds must have cursed us.
We’d barged in like elephants, tramping through Baker’s blood and moving his body every which way. In doing that, we’d become an inextricable part of the scene. There were the footprints of Garcia, and White, and there was Pitt. There was me, my boots, the tread outlined in rust and thick, still-tacky maroon ridges. There were a dozen other footprints, laid on top of each other and, unlike those in the hallway, totally unusable.
There was where our knees had lain, where our hands had flung blood drops as we grabbed the sheets and grabbed Baker. When we moved him, we’d smeared his blood in a wide, messy crescent.
The room was useless as a crime scene. The feds had tried, though, dusting for prints on the bedside tables and the light switches, leaving evidence markers behind after taking photos of every fucking thing. They’d searched for the bullet, too, but without trajectory lines, they’d just been hacking at the wood paneling. I closed my eyes. Tried to remember exactly where Baker had fallen and where he could have been when the shot was fired. Based on how he’d been lying, he must have been on his knees.
Fuck. I didn’t want to imagine it. The president, a man I knew, a man I truly liked, on his knees like that. I forced my brain to stop. Stop thinking, stop imagining. Stop putting two and two together. There are images you never need to see, and that was one. Sorrow filled me, deeper than on the drive, a leaden weight that made me want to fall to my own knees. I felt the infection of the whys, the hunger for answers. It didn’t have to be this way.
Focus. Trajectories. Angles. I’d fucked around in eighth-grade math and then barely managed passing grades every year after, convinced I would never need to know angles and ratios and cosine bullshit, not with the badass, macho career I was headed for. Imagine my shock and horror when calculations ended up being part of damn near every crime scene. Go fucking figure. Should be the motto of my life.
