Page 17 of The Night Of
I hadn’t, not after that night when I’d lost him. Even though Jonathan was still alive, he’d been gone to me, erased from my life. Jonathan and I may not have been the kind of best friends that he and Steven had been, but he’d meant everything to me in a different way, and I hadn’t even known that until I destroyed it all.
Right then, he looked soft in a way the public never saw. He was in an undershirt that stretched tight across his lean, sculpted chest and a pair of faded plaid pajama pants that brushed the tops of his bare feet. I’d dreamed of moments like this. Domestic moments, mornings where we’d share coffee and lounge at the kitchen island, losing ourselves in each other’s eyes. Mornings where we still tasted of each other, where maybe I was wearing his boxers and he was wearing my shirt. I didn’t think we’d finally be sharing coffee in his kitchen in a dismal predawn while he couldn’t even look at me.
I clutched the mug he’d given me, fished my keys out of my pocket, and headed for the garage. “Stay here,” I said over my shoulder. “I’ll come back as soon as the autopsy is finished. Stay locked up. Don’t let anyone in.”
I backed out of the garage and waved to the gate guards and the Secret Service outpost as I drove off the grounds. No one paid me any mind. I was doing my job, wasn’t I? What did anyone care why I was at the Naval Observatory? We could have done it. We could have sneaked nights together, made an attempt at the real thing, an honest-to-God relationship. How different would everything have been if we’d tried things the right way, if we’d had dinner together instead of pouring a bottle of Jack Daniel’s down our throats and hoping for the best?
I shoved Jonathan out of my mind as I turned onto Massachusetts Ave and headed northwest. I was going to bring Jonathan answers, so help me God. I was going to find the truth for him. I owed him nothing less.
Five
This wasn’tthe first presidential autopsy conducted at Bethesda.
I remembered reading in training about the Kennedy assassination. The photos they never showed the public. At the Secret Service academy, they wanted you to know—and see—the cost of your failure: a bullet through the president’s brain. It had been a long, silent hour as we watched the slides of JFK’s autopsy rotate on the overhead at Rowley. “This is what you prevent,” the instructor had growled at us. “Never again. Never again will there be a president with a bullet in his brain. Not while any of you are breathing.”
There I was, gowned and gloved and standing three feet back from the steel table in Bethesda’s morgue where President Baker—my president—lay, cold and naked and very, very dead, with a bullet through his brain.
Mr. Clean, my FBI buddy from Camp David, glowered at me from the other side of the table. He’d been there when I arrived, he and three other feds, acting like they owned the morgue and the president’s body and the entire fucking hospital. I was, once again, ordered to turn around and leave.
Of course, that wasn’t going to fly, and I threw my attitude at Mr. Clean until his backup dancers nearly had to separate us. “Do I need to call the president?” I’d shouted, getting up in his face. “You ready for fucking Montana, asshole?”
Mr. Clean had sneered at me, his coffee breath a hot, rancid wave. I’d been dramatic, waving his foulness away. “Fuck you,” Mr. Clean hissed. “You’re interfering in our investigation. We don’t have time to babysit bystanders. Not with this.”
“I’m not a fucking bystander. I’m here on the president’s orders.”
“What the fuck do you thinkyoucan do? You’re one man! We’re the FBI!”
I hadn’t replied. I hadn’t backed down.
“Stay out of our fucking way.” He’d shoved me back and ordered me to stay three feet away from the autopsy table or he’d throw my ass out and call the president himself to tell him I was being arrested for interfering in the feds’ investigation. Part of me wanted to deck him and get it over with. I was headed for destiny with him, and I might as well hurry that along.
There had always been a rawness inside me, a dark streak I couldn’t tame. I was, on some level, a wild man, and I had a dominant, possessive core. You have to have some of that to be a Secret Service agent. We don’t boss around the other federal agencies for nothing. Some of what made me a good agent came from the things I’d tried to keep under lock and key, hide and bury and wriggle away from. Some of those same things had scared away lovers in my past. Hiding that, burying that, left an itch under my skin I couldn’t scratch, a thirst inside me I couldn’t ever seem to quench.
I wanted, for the moment, to take Mr. Clean in my two hands and bring him to his goddamn knees.
Another part of me recoiled. I didn’t care what Mr. Clean, his backup dancers, or the feds thought of me, and I didn’t care if I made their heartburn act up. I was here for Jonathan. And that other part of me still cared what Jonathan thought. He couldn’t really think any fucking worse of me, not after what had happened, but… Did I need to go and confirm for him that I was the biggest asshole there was?
He already knew that.
Wanting to spare Jonathan the frustration of Mr. Clean’s phone call kept me in line. I backed off, silently taking up my spot. Mr. Clean, after a huddle with his people, became my minder, watching my every inhale and exhale as he measured the distance between the table and my feet. “Back up, asshole,” he growled. I slid one foot back a half inch.
Colonel Lacy Hendricks and her staff had waited, thoroughly unimpressed, while we did the dance of the biggest federal dick. “You gentlemen finished?” she asked, hitting us both with a stern glare, the kind that fixes body tissues without formalin. My guts clenched hard.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Colonel Hendricks was the chief medical examiner of the armed forces, and she was President Baker’s pathologist. She’d flown in from Germany in the back seat of an F-18, hopscotching from aircraft carrier to aircraft carrier across the North Atlantic. It was the fastest way I’d ever known a person to be moved from Europe to America. With her was her team, a photographer and radiologist and two techs down from Dover, along with Baker’s personal physician from the White House Medical Unit, Dr. Manny Fernandez. Then there was Mr. Clean, his three feds, and me.
Hendricks hit the remote that turned on the recorder, and the microphone hanging over Baker’s table beeped once. We were now hot. “Dr. Lacy Hendricks, Colonel, United States Army, presiding over the forensic postmortem of President Steven Baker. Time is oh-five-thirty-eight.” She recited the names of her team members, then let Mr. Clean announce himself along with the FBI agents present. She looked at me, silently asking if I wanted to be on the record. I shook my head. Mr. Clean snorted.
“Deceased is President Steven R. Baker, age forty-seven at time of death…” Her voice droned on as I focused on Baker, lying on the cold steel. I hadn’t looked, not really, before. I’d avoided it, picking a fight with Mr. Clean instead of turning my attention to the president.
I hadn’t wanted to see.
Now it was unavoidable.
I’d been in hundreds of autopsies in my time in the military. Hundreds of crime scenes, from on-base homicides to suspicious deaths off base to unattended deaths with no obvious cause. Even deaths in combat zones. I’d seen a lot of bodies cut up, a lot of organs pulled out of people and dropped into formalin and fixer. I’d heard the whiz and whine of the Stryker saw so much I could fall asleep to it. Not much got to me anymore when it came to bodies and scalpels and death.
But this was the president,mypresident, and I was still breathing while he was lying on cold steel in the morgue. Failure filled me. That night flashed in my mind again: Baker on the floor, blood pouring from his nose and mouth, a river of it gushing all over the floor and Garcia and me. Baker’s blood was still embedded in my fingernails, deep in the creases of my skin.
