At all costs Read online

  “Yes?”

  “Hello, Clay,” a voice said. “I see your light is on. Have you opened your mail yet?”

  Albricht scowled. Even at the Post, reporters had the decency to call him Senator. “Who is this?”

  “Why don’t you call me Wiggins,” the voice urged. “Impressive materials, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The senator stalled for time as he turned on the recorder.

  Wiggins chuckled. “Of course you don’t. Such shameful, horrible acts. I mean, really, Clay. Must you really turn to little boys for sexual relief?”

  Albricht’s hands trembled as he listened to this outrage, and he clenched his teeth tightly enough to cause pain. “I don’t know who you are, Wiggins,” he hissed, “but I’ve got a message for you to deliver back to Mr. Frankel. If he thinks that I can be blackmailed…”

  Wiggins continued to speak, without breaking cadence. “… I can’t imagine what the public reaction will be once the photographs are released.”

  The words jolted Albricht into silence; and though he recovered quickly, the damage was already done. He’d shown a moment of fear, and now his opponent knew who was stronger. “There can be no pictures of something that never happened,” he scoffed.

  Wiggins laughed again. “Oh, yeah? Well, I gotta tell you, Clay, they sure as hell look like you, with your pants down around your ankles. And that boy on his knees in front of you sure as hell isn’t old enough to shave…”

  Albricht sat down to avoid falling. As he saw the whole game played out before him, he knew right away that he had lost. The documents in the envelope proved Frankel’s talents as a forger. Even if the pictures Wiggins described didn’t yet exist, in these days of computer morphing-where any face could be put on any body-how difficult could it be? And once released, the pictures would scuttle his career.

  The Post would run a censored version of the photos, while the smut rags would doubtless run the uncensored ones, and the truth would become irrelevant. Even if he were miraculously to prove that the photos were the hoax that he knew them to be, he’d forever be the brunt of jokes in every comedy cafe in the world.

  His hands shook as Wiggins droned on, the condescending tone in his voice churning Albricht’s bowels.

  “… of course, I suppose those receipts in the envelope could be explained away pretty easily. You could always claim forgery. God knows there are a million ways to get a man’s credit card numbers.” Wiggins paused, as if to make sure he had Albricht’s full attention. “Are you with me, Clay?”

  “What do you want?” Albricht growled.

  “Just what’s best for you and your family. I’d just hate like hell for these pictures to end up on the networks. I’ll bet you’d have a hell of a time explaining them as forgeries. I mean, the media isn’t exactly your friend to begin with, and given the corroboration of those receipts, well, that’d be just one hell of a mess, don’t you think?”

  Albricht closed his eyes, wanting to reach through the telephone to kill this man but able only to listen.

  “Well, Clay, I’ve got to run. And listen, I’m sure you’ve recorded this call-maybe even traced it. You just say the word, buddy, and I’ll be happy to come forward. Maybe I can even have these things blown up to poster size for the news conference. That’d be a hoot, don’t you think?” Wiggins laughed one more time before the line went dead.

  Albricht stared at the telephone for a long time after hanging it up. It was over. Everything. Just like that. A noble career brought to a disgraceful end. He could already hear his colleagues’ conversations in the hallways: He may deny it, but I’ve seen the pictures…

  Washington was a town of images, and no force on earth was powerful enough to counteract the images just described. Even if he could prove them all to be forgeries, the damage to his career and to his reputation would last forever. The traditions of the Washington press corps were clear: speculation of guilt sold newspapers; innocence was something for the courts to prove. Once proved, the media might even report on the verdict-on an inside page, of course, unless the story ran as a sidebar to someone’s front-page insistence that the jury was wrong.

  “God damn you, Frankel,” he said aloud. The son of a bitch had warned him, hadn’t he? Even as the anger swelled, a part of him admired the simple brilliance of Frankel’s plan. It left him utterly defenseless. If Albricht declared the truth-that Frankel had created these documents to deflect attention from his own questionable past-the nation would collectively roll its eyes and dismiss him as paranoid. Meanwhile, insiders who knew Albricht well, and who knew exactly what was going on, would merely become an extension of the problem. They’d scramble like frightened rabbits to distance themselves from their wounded colleague, even as they extended a handshake toward the perpetrator of the lie. No one could know when they’d find themselves next on his list.

  It all crystallized for Albricht in an instant. Folding his arms on the table, he lowered his forehead onto his wrists and moaned.

  “I’m fucked.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Irene stood with her hands on her hips, mouth agape, as the manager of the U-Lockit Storage Company raised the door to unit 627. “I’ll say they were prepared,” she said.

  Paul Boersky was more concise: “Holy shit.”

  “Look what they did to my wall!” the manager yelled. It proved to be the opening salvo of a diatribe about the trash who lived in the community and about the lack of respect his customers showed toward a poor businessman who could barely make ends meet. After thirty breathless seconds, Paul had one of the uniformed officers escort the man back to his office.

  Finding this place had been a stroke of pure luck. Among the many tidbits collected from the Donovans’ trailer in Farm Meadows was a bill that had arrived that day from U-Lockit. Initially no more or less interesting than any of the other slips of paper they’d logged for follow-up, the bill gained special significance when Officer Jason Slavka mentioned in passing that the storage yard was just a few blocks from the hospital where no one had ever heard of Jake’s mother.

  Even as she congratulated herself for such a valuable find, Irene realized that they were back to square one. The Celica was here, and judging from the size and the emptiness of the shelves, the Donovans had been more than able to compensate for the supplies they’d left behind in the trailer.

  “You’re authorized to say you told me so,” Irene growled to Paul as they walked inside.

  Unable to read his boss’s mood so early in the morning, Paul said nothing as he strolled around the storage bay, surveying the scene.

  Zeroing in on the discarded license plates and identification, Irene stooped down to examine them. “Look here,” she said. “The Brightons are officially dead. And what do you bet they’re clever enough to kill off the Durflingers, too? These guys are smart, Paul. They’ve got a ton of cash, by all accounts, and they’re adept at changing identities. It’s almost like someone trained them.”

  Paul sighed and arched his eyebrows. “At least we’ve still got the van,” he said hopefully.

  She laughed. “Undoubtedly with new license plates. Care to guess how many white vans there are in the world?”

  As the crime scene technicians arrived with their cameras and their evidence bags and their fingerprint kits, Paul and Irene did their best to stay out of the way. By rights, Irene should have left Paul here to manage the scene himself, but truth be known, she didn’t have all that much to do. In the absence of leads, an investigator’s job was pretty damned boring.

  “So who do you think trained them?” Paul asked out of nowhere.

  “Come again?” She hadn’t been paying attention. Her mind had been reliving Peter Frankel’s third sputtering tirade in the last twenty-four hours.

  “To disappear,” Paul clarified. “Who do you think trained them?”

  She scowled. “You’re smirking. If you’ve got a theory, let’s hear it.”

  Suddenly
self-conscious of his expression, he made the smirk go away. “I was reading the Donovans’ file last night at the hotel,” he explained. “I didn’t realize that Harry Sinclair was their uncle.”

  Irene saw where he was headed and dismissed him with a shake of her head. “If you read it all, then you know that he was investigated back in ’83 and came up clean.”

  “No one with that much money is ever clean,” Paul snorted. “Seems like an awfully convenient resource to have when you’re on the run.”

  She considered that for a moment. “Sinclair would be crazy to get himself involved in something like this. Too much to lose.”

  Paul shrugged. “Hey, family’s family. I think we ought to check it out. It’s not like we’ve got a lot to lose. From where I stand, we’ve got a ton of evidence but not a single clue.”

  Irene weighed the idea. “Want to go for a phone tap?”

  “Why not? God knows we’ve got probable cause.”

  A slight nod served as his order to go ahead.

  “Great. I’ll call the U.S. Attorney’s Office.” He moved quickly toward the overhead door, dodging the sea of evidence technicians. “Oh, by the way, Irene,” he said, just short of the exit.

  She looked over, eyebrows high.

  “I told you so.”

  Carolyn screamed.

  Jake rocketed upright in his seat, ready to do battle. His mind registered that it was light again, but he couldn’t figure out what had happened to the dark. She was sitting up now, too, still in her seat, but barely. Her eyes were wild, unfocused. Her hands were poised in front of her, fingers spread, as if frozen in the midst of pushing something away. He knew then that she’d had The Dream.

  “Carolyn!” he said sharply. “Carolyn, you’re here. I’m here. Everything’s okay.” He wriggled as best he could across the center console and tried to pull her close. That’s when the crying started. That’s when the crying always started.

  “Oh, God,” she gasped, finally tuning into reality. “Oh, my God.” She let herself be rocked back and forth in her seat, but she remained stiff in his arms, hugging herself instead of her husband.

  “You gonna tell me about it this time?” he asked after a while.

  She shook her head against his jacket. “No. I can’t.”

  No, you won’t, he thought bitterly. He wished he were a better man, but this game she played of keeping her past hidden away had bugged him forever. They were husband and wife, dammit. Two lives, one person. Three lives, really. They faced a whole future together, after facing down a whole past, yet she guarded her childhood horrors as if they were nuclear launch codes. Unless she was willing to be a wife, how could he ever be a husband?

  He said none of this, of course, and right away he felt ashamed that he’d even thought such things. These were the times when she needed him most, weren’t they? And his job was simply to be there; to help her through the nightmare. He’d swallow his anger one more time, and a thousand times after that, probably. He kissed her hair and stroked it. She smelled horrible, a musky combination of dirt and sweat, but in some ways she was more beautiful right then than when she primped for a night out. This was Carolyn unveiled; the person she fought so hard to hide from everyone she knew.

  A few minutes passed before she pulled away from him. She looked away as she mopped her eyes and her nose with a shirttail. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “So am I.” He stroked her face with the back of his hand.

  Part of her still hadn’t returned to the present. Jake had seen the mood last for hours. Last time, they’d had a fight over it, prompting him to leave the house and catch a zillion-calorie breakfast at I-HOP. Nothing like a pound of pancakes in your belly to douse your fires.

  After a cold night in the van, he felt miserable. Shortly after they’d crossed into West Virginia last night, the skies had opened up, making the mountain passes slick and nearly unpassable. Rather than risk an accident, and the attention it would bring, he’d pulled into the parking lot of the Rebel Yell Motel outside White Sulphur Springs at about ten o’clock and declared it their home for the night.

  As a precaution, just in case the cops who stopped them at the school had finally made the connection, Jake had changed their plates, driver’s licenses, and registration one more time, transforming them into the Delaney family-James and Clarissa. Because Travis was a kid, and kids never carried ID, Jake decided to limit the boy’s trauma and keep his first name the same. For the time being, he’d just avoid using any last name at all.

  Using an Army-surplus entrenching tool off one of the shelves, Jake had buried the old plates and IDs out in the woods.

  He and Carolyn had discussed the possibility of checking into the motel but jointly vetoed the idea as something the police would be expecting them to do. They’d also thought about parking in a less-public place but decided in the end that a white van in a parking lot would draw far less suspicion on a rainy night than a white van pulled off into the woods.

  True to form, Travis had slept soundly through the whole night, while Jake and Carolyn took turns pretending to sleep and watching for trouble. The direness of their situation still hadn’t hit either one of them fully, although, as the hours stretched on, Jake found himself becoming progressively more bitter about the whole thing. What kind of warped individual could put another human being through this kind of torment? He berated himself for not having done something about it fourteen years ago, when all the evidence trails were still fresh, and when people might actually have believed as outlandish a story as the one they had to tell.

  Such thoughts were counterproductive, he knew, but at zero-dark-early, in the hills of West Virginia, when you’re sitting with a gun in your lap wondering if you’d actually have the guts to shoot someone to protect your family from harm, it was hard to keep your brain on track.

  Finally, as the sun rose above the horizon, he’d had enough of waiting and decided it was time to move on. Carolyn had fallen back to sleep, though, and as he turned the key, she jumped.

  “Sorry,” he said, trying not to laugh at the outrageous look on her face.

  It took her a second or two to figure out what was happening, and then she relaxed, bringing her hand to her chest. “Jesus, that scared me.” She stretched and yawned noisily.

  “Is Travis still asleep?” he asked, not wanting to turn all the way around to look.

  She pivoted in her seat. “I think so,” she said. “His eyes are closed, anyway.”

  They drove in silence for a long time after that, something clearly on Carolyn’s mind. Jake didn’t press, though. He knew she’d come out with it sooner or later. “You shouldn’t have told him everything,” she said at last. “Why get him so involved?”

  “He’s got to be aware of the danger.”

  “The poor boy must be scared to death.”

  Ah, the guilt card, Jake thought. No one plays that one better than Carolyn. “He needs to know enough to be careful. And that the stakes are huge.”

  “But you told him too much.”

  Here we go. “So you want me to un tell him somehow?” God, he was sick of feeling defensive.

  Jake possessed an arsenal of facial expressions, any one of which could launch Carolyn’s temper into the stratosphere. It was this one, though-the smug, know-it-all smirk-that propelled her into orbit. “No,” she snapped. “I want you to remember that he’s only thirteen years old. He’s just a boy.”

  “Got it,” Jake said. “Thirteen years old. I’ve been wondering about that all morning. Thanks for the reminder.”

  She opened her mouth for another round, but then shut it again. She’d said her piece, and he’d said his. Getting along was important now. She let it go. Or tried to, anyway.

  As the terrain became steadily more vertical, the roads shrank from four lanes to two; winding ribbons of black, snaking through endless miles of switchbacks and meandering curves. Jake hadn’t been down this road in well over a year, and it was bad then. Now the worn, po
tholed roadbed bounced them like they were on a trampoline. Between the weight of the vehicle, its rear-wheel drive, and the hazardous road conditions, he found himself wondering if perhaps this ride wasn’t the most hazardous aspect of their entire plan. Thank God for seat belts. Otherwise, they’d have been bounced through the ceiling by now.

  Miraculously, Travis slept through it all.

  Soon enough, the ride went from treacherous to positively boring. They’d skimped on engine size when they purchased the van, forgoing the optional V-8 in favor of the standard V-6, and now they were paying the price. The additional weight of the family, combined with the load of supplies, completely maxed out the vehicle’s capabilities going uphill. Currently, Jake found himself trapped behind a tractor-trailer loaded with telephone poles, doing twenty miles an hour, with no hope of pulling past.

  “Did you ever really think it would come to this?” Carolyn asked. Her voice carried an emotion that Jake didn’t quite recognize. Sadness maybe, but not quite.

  He answered her softly, not entirely sure what she hoped to hear. “I used to,” he said. “You know, back at the beginning. In the last couple of years, though, I’d talked myself out of it. I let myself believe we’d made it. I let my guard down. I’m sorry.”

  She let his answer just hang in the air for a while, not saying anything. Then she ran her fingers into her hair and made a growling sound. “I’m not doing as well as I thought I would,” she confessed.

  He smiled. “I’ll let you in on a little secret, if you promise not to make a scene.”

  He saw her head turn in his peripheral vision.

  “Neither am I. In fact, I’m scared as hell.” As more silence filled the van, he couldn’t let pessimism prevail. “We’ll make it, though. I promise you, we’ll get out of this somehow.”

  For another full minute, they each pondered worries too awful to articulate. Carolyn broke first. “So what’s next?”