Edge of Black

Temple swiveled the computer screen around to face Fletcher.

“Who hasn’t he pissed off? My God, we get five thousand emails a day, and I’d say a solid ninety percent are upset about something. Take, take, take, blame, blame, blame. That’s all these people know.”

“Mr. Temple. Please. I’m talking about something a little more private than constituents with a burning desire for a new road.”

Temple shook his head but wouldn’t meet Fletcher’s eye.

“Truly, don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“There are rumors...”

Temple laughed. “This is D.C., Detective. If there isn’t a rumor about you, you’re doing something wrong.”

* * *

It was a good story, as far as stories went. Temple looked like a hero, he’d done everything he could think of to save his boss. The interviews with the three other staffers corroborated his story. Either they were all telling the truth, or they had decided on the story before Fletcher got there.

Not a single one was willing to breathe a bad word against their boss.

This was going nowhere, fast.

Fletcher got a crime scene tech to come to the office and take exclusionary fingerprint samples. That took fifteen minutes, and while it was going on, Temple arranged for the service detail who’d been with the congressman this morning to meet them in the office. Fletcher dismissed Temple and talked to them—a man and a woman, Mac and Sally—grizzled old hats who’d been assigned to the congressman for several months. Nothing in the routine this morning was different from any other day. They didn’t know where his briefcase was. Neither were feeling ill. Both were going for stoic, but Fletcher could see they were genuinely distressed over the news.

He pushed them on the rumors, too, but they clammed up. He took their statements, assured them he’d let them know what was happening, and let them leave, feeling vaguely uneasy.

They gave him a list of the people who’d been in the office over the past few days, and this morning. The official congressional photographer would send over the photos from the morning’s meet and greet. Otherwise, it seemed there was nothing here.

Someone was lying to him. He just didn’t know who. Or why.

Chapter 9

Washington, D.C.

Dr. Samantha Owens

Sam waited for Fletcher in Nocek’s office, watching the late-breaking news story that had finally leaked its way into the media. The anchors looked shaken; even though they’d known for at least an hour, the media had kindly waited for the wife to land in D.C. and get to her husband’s side before they broke the news.

Congressman Peter Leighton, Democrat from Indiana, was dead, a suspected victim of the morning’s attack.

Sam was always amazed at how thorough the media could be when they wanted. Granted, Leighton was a public figure, and as such, packages were built in the event of an untimely death. But considering he was just one of four hundred and thirty-five serving members, there was quite a bit of material that had been collected on him.

The minute the news was out, the attack itself became secondary. Every station was giving their own eulogies of the congressman.

Leighton had been a classic dove for most of his career, using his own service record as an example of why the United States should stay out of foreign domains. He’d flip-flopped about a year prior, started fighting for the troops, for them to get more money, better equipment and better services when they mustered out, damaged and broken. A seismic shift, brought about by the death of his son, Peter Leighton, Junior, a battalion commander in the Army who’d gone to Afghanistan and been decimated by a roadside IED.

Grief changes you. Sam understood that. It mutates your soul, your emotions, your thoughts. Green becomes yellow, the sun disappears from the sky, and your lifelong convictions no longer seem to matter. As she watched the multitude of clips of the congressman defending his change of heart, she understood completely. He hadn’t done enough to keep his own child secure and protected, so he’d launched a campaign to keep the remainder of the soldiers on the ground and in the air safe. Too bad he hadn’t been fighting for them earlier. It might have meant a different outcome for his own son, not to mention countless others.

At least the media didn’t have the text message yet. Once that slipped out, the wolves would circle and all bets would be off. The congressman would stop being lauded and start being blamed.

And maybe he should. If the text was real, authored by the perpetrator behind the attacks, there was something to be discovered in the congressman’s very publicly private world.

Sam muted the television. The message was unmistakably clear. What she was trying to ascertain was why, if the attack was directed at him, had so many others been included.

Two hundred sick, some clinging to life. Two other deaths, random, people wholly unrelated to the congressman. She felt bad that their deaths were being overshadowed by the demise of someone more famous.

Even one death is too much.

Planes were flying overhead, the high-pitched roaring whine of the F/A-18s unmistakable. Helicopters chattered. There was talk of shutting down the bridges. There was a curfew in place, yet there were still news stories about chaos and absolute fear reigning in some neighborhoods. There’d even been a couple of reports of looting, down near Anacostia. But the congressman’s face was taking up ninety percent of the airtime.

And they still didn’t know what had caused the turmoil.

There were hundreds of people working on figuring out what the substance was. She knew that. But it was disturbing that nearly twelve hours after the event, they still had nothing more than speculations to go on.

That told her something unique was happening.

Sam shut the television off and went over her notes again. Fletcher had called to tell her that, yes, the congressman had been on the Metro this morning. But in looking at the maps, he was on the Blue Line, and it had been confirmed that the other two casualties had taken the Orange Line right through Foggy Bottom early this morning.

It made sense that people who were immunosuppressed would have a more severe reaction. The congressman was an asthmatic, so any irritant could trigger an attack. Without the proper medication to arrest the attack, he could very easily die, as he had.

The other two deaths weren’t as cut-and-dried. She had notes on them from the initial investigation Fletcher and his team had done when they’d come into the morgue. The only thing they had in common was the fact that they were smokers.

Different parts of the city, different ages, different worlds, all affected by a single event. D.C. was a giant ecosystem, with thousands of moving parts, and each world was unique unto itself. Like species that couldn’t intermingle and breed, the people of D.C. found their comfort zones and rarely, if ever, deviated from course. Debutantes hung out with debutantes, jocks with jocks, politicos with politicos, lawyers with lawyers, lobbyists with lobbyists, teachers with teachers. There might be a Sadie Hawkins Day every once in a while, and a debutante would get it on with a politico, but that generally ended up in The Washingtonian, disguised as a society wedding, and the aftermath was full of fireworks and lawyers and mistresses and front-page news.

Sam pulled the charts of the two other victims and flipped through the pages. She had nothing better to do.

The first was a forty-year-old woman named Loa Ledbetter. She owned a market research firm on L Street, lived in the Watergate. She rarely used the Metro to go to work—she made off-site calls to clients, so she normally drove—but her car was in the shop.

The second was a nineteen-year-old junior from American University, Marc Conlon. He lived in Falls Church, and took the Metro into town for school daily. He’d switch from the Orange Line to the Red at Metro Center and scoot out to the Tenleytown/AU stop, then take the shuttle bus onto the AU campus. On Tuesdays, he had an 8:00 a.m. history class, so he made sure to get into town extra early, to have a coffee and beat the crowds.

Sam said a little prayer for her own student, Brooke Wasserstrom, who at last check was holding steady in the intensive care unit. Sam hoped that her quick actions meant Brooke had a decent chance of survival, but without knowledge of what they were dealing with, all they could do was treat, and pray.

A congressman, a student and a market researcher.

Three strangers, brought together at the hand of a madman. What had they done to deserve death as a punishment?

Now, Sam, you know that this isn’t a healthy line of thinking. Random things happened. There aren’t always answers as to why people have to die. Why their number has suddenly come up. They were obviously in the wrong place at the wrong time. She could fully comprehend that. She knew that they weren’t connected in any way law enforcement could use their deaths to track their killer. A terrorist attack is a random event.

Random. Chosen without method or conscious decision.

She hadn’t chosen for her family to die. That had been random, too.

She shook them away, the voices of her dead, and refocused.

A random act.

Then why did someone send a text to Congressman Leighton blaming the morning’s events on him?

The only real evidence they had was the text. It could be the key. Leighton could be the key.

Not Dr. Loa Ledbetter, a small brilliant redheaded beauty with a gaping slit in her chest, nor Marc Conlon, too young to even have grown fully into his bones, his sagittal suture not entirely fused.

Quit personalizing, Sam.

What Sam was interested in was why those three, out of all the people exposed and the two hundred exhibiting symptoms, were the only ones who died.

Ledbetter was dead on arrival at GW, after being found collapsed on the floor of the ladies’ room at her office by one of her staffers.

Conlon died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. He’d gone into cardiac arrest at the top of the stairs of the Tenleytown Metro.

Neither had a history of lung disease; that was reserved for the congressman. Neither exhibited signs of illness, their initial blood work had been normal, and neither had a history of ill health.

Their families could give more information. Sam was itching to talk to them.

But this wasn’t her investigation. She’d been brought in to do a task, used for her discretion and talent, not to run off trying to explain the unexplainable.

Except she knew every puzzle had a solution.

Someone wanted Leighton to feel responsible, yes, but dead? Perhaps that was just chance. Perhaps that was a fluke. And there was absolutely nothing that said the text-sender was the same person who’d indiscriminately put a foreign substance into the air ducts at the Foggy Bottom Metro and made so many people ill. It could just be a pissed-off constituent who wrongly blamed the congressman for a completely random event.

There she was, back to the arbitrary again.

Fletcher had brought her into this investigation when he asked her to post Leighton. He wasn’t dumb; he knew she’d press for more information, for a chance to help. She wasn’t constricted by the rule of law here. She was a private citizen. She’d sworn a different kind of oath, one that she believed in, one that bound her to care for the sick, to have special obligations to the public she served. She could do whatever she chose, so long as she worked within the bounds of her ethics and didn’t break the law.

She was starting to feel a bit tingly.

She debated for exactly ten seconds before writing down the addresses of the other victims, folding the paper into halves, then quarters, and stashing it in the pocket of her trousers.

It was damn good timing, too, because she’d barely raised her palm from the linen when Dr. Nocek came into the room, followed by Fletcher.

“You ready, Doc?” Fletcher asked. He looked worried and rumpled and tired. His beard was just starting to make its appearance, and lent him a vaguely menacing air. Next to the taller, more collected Nocek, he looked a bit like a brawl just waiting to happen.

Sam gathered her bag and sweater. “I’m ready. How are things on the Hill?”

“Fucked.”

That’s all she got. Nocek raised an eyebrow in her direction, and she responded by giving him a warm hug. “I’ll see you soon. We’ll have dinner.”

“I would like that very much,” he said, and she sensed the sadness in him. Nocek was a widower, not fully used to going home alone in the evenings. On a day like today, after all the hoopla, the fear and adrenaline, having only ghosts to talk to could be hard.

She squeezed his arm and said, “Call me if you need anything,” then followed a glowering Fletcher from the room.

The longest day she’d had since she left Nashville was finally drawing to a close.

Chapter 10

The streets were still eerily deserted, the dark skies interrupted by the scream of jets. Fletcher was silent until they hit M Street. Sam knew better than to try and drag information out of him; he’d share when he was ready. They got stuck at the light at Wisconsin, and he finally started talking.

“Leighton’s chief of staff is giving me the runaround,” he grumbled.

Sam smiled. “Isn’t that his job?”

Fletcher glanced at her, saw the amusement etched on her face. It provoked a smile of his own, and he relaxed a bit.

“Yeah, I suppose it is. Fingerprints on the inhaler belong to him. That matches his statement that when he came into the office and saw the congressman down, he retrieved the inhaler and gave it to his boss.”

“Okay. So where’s the issue?”

He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, then ran his hands through his hair. “I don’t know. I’m tired as hell. I’m getting put on the Joint Terrorism Task Force.”

“That’s good, right? You’ll be able to see this through to the end.”

“Maybe. We’ll see. They might have me running around town with my dick in my hand.”

She cleared her throat, trying to hide the laugh.

“Sorry, Sam. That was crude of me.”

“You’re fine, Fletch. The image was priceless.”

He laughed with her then, and the light turned. He took a right, then a left, and she was at her door a moment later. There was a pause, awkward and three beats too long. He looked like he wanted to say something important, but refrained. Instead, he shook it off and said, “Get some sleep. You did good today.”

“Thanks, Fletch. You, too. Call me if you need anything else, okay? And if they get the results back on the toxin, let me know.”

“Will do. Last round of calls got it down to two or three, with ricin still leading the pack.”

“If that’s true, we’re damn lucky there are only three people dead.”

“You said it, sister.”

He watched her go up the stairs, waited until the door was unlocked to drive away.

She caught the blue glow of the clock on the microwave. It was nearly two in the morning.

Exhaustion suddenly paraded through her body, and she sagged a bit. She wanted a shower and bed. She took the stairs carefully, quietly.

She found Xander crashed out cold on top of the covers. Just the sight of him caused a little thrum in her stomach. She stopped in the doorway and watched him, marveling at the fact that he belonged to her.

With a soldier’s unerring ability to sense a threat, he opened his eyes, and she saw he already had one hand tucked under his pillow, where she knew he kept a loaded weapon. Only one of many stashed throughout the house.

“It’s me,” she whispered. “Go back to sleep.”

He rolled up in one smooth motion, both hands free.

“I’m glad you’re home. We need to talk.”

* * *

He gave her fifteen minutes to S-cubed—military jargon for shit, shower and shave—and met her in the kitchen with a fresh pot of coffee and her laptop glowing on the table. She took one look at him and went to the liquor cabinet, fetched a bottle of Lagavulin. She splashed some in both their cups, then tucked her damp hair behind her ears and settled in, recognizing Xander in full operational mode. He might as well have had his uniform on and a rifle strapped to his chest.

Loaded for bear.

He sat across from her, took a deep drink from his cup. Xander made seriously good tea, but he was a first-class coffee maker. A connoisseur. Sam was amused when the first thing he did was buy her a Bunn, claiming it was one of the finest coffeemakers in the world. She found that ironic, considering he often made his coffee by throwing the grounds in a pan of water and heating it over the fire. He took personal affront at Starbucks and the like, instead preferred to grind his own beans, which he imported from a friend in Colombia. She wasn’t entirely sure that was legal, but she could hardly complain—the coffee it made was out of this world.

“There’s a message from GW on the answering machine. I heard them leave it. School’s closed for the rest of the week.”

“Not surprising. I assume they are going to have people combing that Metro stop and the surrounds for a few days to make sure things are safe.”

They sipped their coffee. Finally, Xander set down his cup.

“Aren’t you going to ask?”

She stared into his eyes, best described as a deep chocolate-espresso—eyes that were so like the dark, intense brews he favored—and sighed.

“Fine. You were here in D.C. at least an hour before you should have been if you’d heard about the attacks on the news. Which means you fibbed to me this morning about your fishing date gone wrong.”

He smirked. “I didn’t fib. My guy didn’t show, and I did go to the café to check things out.”

She knew the café he mentioned was the Mountain City Coffeehouse in Frostburg, Maryland—the closest internet café to Xander’s cabin that had decent food and coffee. She had to admit, it was a quaint, charming place, perfect for him to stay under the radar. He liked the window by the fireplace; he was able to see the rest of the room, the entrance and exits. Once a soldier, always a soldier. The cabin didn’t have internet access, so Xander made it a routine to head to Frostburg a couple of times a month to check his mail, set up his appointments as a fishing guide, and generally check up on the world. She was tempted to buy him an iPad so he could save himself the trip, but she knew it was more than that. He shed his humanity in the woods—like his daily piano practice, the bimonthly sojourns were his way of keeping himself engaged. He didn’t want more than that, and his psyche couldn’t stand less. Without some sort of socialization, he might truly get lost.

Then he dropped his bomb.

“But that was all yesterday.”

All sorts of words rushed to mind, but all she managed was, “What?”

He flipped the laptop around so it was facing her.

“See this?”

She looked at the screen. It was a message board of some kind. “What’s this?”

“One of the groups I sometimes look in on. It’s comprised of people...like me.”

He rose to fill his cup again, leaving her to wonder exactly what that meant. She wasn’t able to focus properly.

“Soldiers?”

“Some. Some want to be. Some could have been, but chose a different path.”

Sam felt the edge begin, the panic, like an annoying little mosquito buzzing around her head. She pulled her hair back into a chignon, stuck a chopstick through the knot to hold it in place. She closed her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. In four counts, hold four, out four, wait four. Then, the urge to wash her hands dispatched, she addressed her lover.

“Xander, honey. It’s late. I’ve been up for twenty hours, been in the middle of a terrorist attack, did an autopsy on a congressman, and have my own little anxiety disorder brewing. Would you mind cutting to the chase?”

“Survivalists, Sam. I don’t think this was a terror attack. I think it was one of our own.”

Chapter 11

Sam’s expression moved from confusion to incredulity in a matter of seconds.

“You’ve got to be kidding. Are you talking like...what, a militia?”

“No. Well, sure, some of them. It’s like any group of people, there’re bad seeds mixed in with the good and innocent. There are militias spread all across the country, homegrown groups who like to think they’re the law, parade around in uniforms, ragtag batches of locals who spew nonsense and are basically harmless. But there are groups who are dead serious, people you wouldn’t want to cross. The government keeps a damn close eye on them. And some of them are idiots, people who are just wrong in the head and can’t be fixed. Skinheads, those kinds of yahoos.”

“Ruby Ridge?”

“Right. But the people I’m talking about—no, they’re not militia. Just concerned private citizens who have shared their knowledge of survival to help like-minded individuals prepare in case there’s a catastrophic event. Anything from a nuclear bomb to economic collapse to a tornado.”

She noticed he didn’t say flood, though that would certainly qualify.

“They’re good people, just trying to figure out where we’re headed, and what to do in case something awful happens.”

Sam raised an eyebrow. Sometimes she forgot that they came from very, very different worlds. She was a debutante from Nashville, a good little Southern girl, raised on manners and money and all things genteel, and he was a soldier who’d been raised by hippies, seen too much and had a healthy mistrust of the government.

He must have caught her thought, because he continued. “Okay, this isn’t something that you and I have talked a lot about. It’s hard to understand, but there are people out there who think things are going to hell in a handbasket, and are trying to make preparations in case it does. They’re harmless, and smart. They’re like pioneers, able to grow food and build shelter and live off the land and, most importantly, defend themselves if it’s needed.”

“Like you.”

He smiled.

“Like me. Many of them are ex-military, of all generations. You know many of us don’t fit back into the world anymore, Sam. What we’ve seen, what we’ve done, civilians can’t necessarily comprehend. It’s only natural that some of us fall back on our training, and want to be prepared. Just in case, you know? When, or if, the shit hits the fan, you’re going to want us on your side, if you get my drift.”

“I follow.”

“Okay. So this one group that I check in on from time to time lit up last night. Like they knew something was about to go down. Chatter.”

“And the feds didn’t see it?”

“Trust me, there are no feds in this group. It is very private.”

“There’s no privacy online. You’ve told me that a million times.”

“And that’s true. But even if they do know about it, they can’t get in.”

“My God, Xander, if these friends of yours were talking about an imminent attack, why didn’t you do anything? Say anything?”

She’d said the wrong thing. He closed up tight as a drum. Slammed the laptop closed and stalked from the room. He went to the bedroom, started gathering his things.

She followed. “Xander, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. This isn’t your fault. None of it is your fault.”

He kept his back turned. “You don’t get it. I’m not mad at you, I’m mad at myself. I should have said something. Maybe if I had, it wouldn’t have happened. Instead, I couldn’t sleep, and finally ended up leaving Thor with Bryan at the Forest Ranger station and heading down to the city. I must have just missed you this morning, but by then it was too late. The attack had already occurred.”

She took the bag and his semi-folded shirt from his hands and set them gently on the bed.

“Hey. I’m sorry. I’m exhausted, and that came out wrong.”

He was silent for a moment, then shrugged. “Accepted. There was nothing specific anyway, just a couple of guys talking about this dude they knew who had recently joined up, and was flapping his gums. It just felt...wrong to me.”