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.