Swerve Page 5

  Most everyone within her circle of influence, businessmen, senators, congressmen, live their lives on their phones, their laptops, their iPads. She wonders if they ever really considered the digital picture they’ve painted of themselves with every call, every text, every Google search. She’d asked a few along the way why they were so willing to trust in the privacy supposedly afforded them by such devices. Most answers involved some blustery rejection of suspicion. “The best minds in the world are working on cybersecurity. And what do I possibly have to hide?”

  Quite a lot, actually, in most cases.

  Her glance lands on the oil painting gracing the wall across from her desk. Behind it is a safe. Inside the safe is enough dirt to bury every single customer to walk through the doors of the Hotel California.

  She often wonders what her father would say about her enterprise if he were still living. If he would approve of the direction she had taken with his desire to pass along his love of the hunt.

  Maybe. Maybe not.

  In all fairness, she considered her version a more compassionate take on it. At least there was some enjoyment to be had on the part of the victim. Blasting a hole through the heart of a deer was hardly a comparison.

  She does enjoy meeting the newly trapped though. Witnessing the hope in their eyes when they see that she is a woman, certain that she’s there to free them. She likes to toy with them a bit, enlarge that hope so that when it finally comes crashing down, she can actually feel its explosion, like the mushroom cloud after a nuclear blast.

  The money is nice, but this single facet of her business would not have been enough to justify its continuing existence. It is like reliving that morning with her father over and over again, pulling the trigger, watching the surprise drown in the wake of instant death.

  And too, there is the satisfaction found in the luring of men so powerful they think they are insulated from accountability. Now and then, she enjoys proving them wrong. Setting another kind of trap when one of them starts to outgrow his usefulness. And if they visit Hotel California often enough, it eventually happens, that sense of entitlement, refusal to continue paying the admittedly exorbitant price of spending an evening there.

  Most retreat with a warning, a glimpse of one or two items from the wall safe behind the oil painting. More than once, she has witnessed, via hidden camera, the shock on their faces when they pull the photographs from their envelope. It is as if they are looking at someone they don’t know.

  A stranger.

  Only it isn’t a stranger.

  It is that side of themselves they only let out of the cage under the most guarded of circumstances. So infrequently, perhaps, that between outings they let themselves believe it hadn’t really happened, or at most, was a one-time thing, never to be repeated.

  Of course, she provides them with proof to the contrary. So far, they have all stepped back in line with the warning.

  But then what other choice is there?

  Exposure would not only decimate their worlds, but also that of their wives and children as well. And their public image, that most of all, they would go to any lengths to protect.

  All in all, the system works for everyone. In some ways, those who visit Hotel California need to be protected from themselves, whether they realize it or not. She sees her role not only as that of proprietor, but protector also. Letting some of the country’s most powerful indulge their deepest fantasies without handing them rope to hang themselves.

  How many people would be capable of maintaining such a delicate balance?

  Few.

  And that is what makes her unique. One of a kind. Omnipotent, even. Yes, that is the word. All-powerful. The proprietor.

  Mia

  “Those who want peace should prepare for war and be strong.”

  —Avigdor Lieberman

  Three Years Ago

  SOMETIMES, IT WAS no picnic, being raised by your sister.

  Mia had often wondered how her childhood would have been different had her parents been the ones to teach her the things they thought she needed to know.

  Would they have been as overprotective as Emory? Would they have insisted on this stupid self-defense class that was currently taking up the Saturday morning she would have preferred spending with Grace at her lake house?

  She didn’t think so.

  For one thing, Mia remembered how much her father had enjoyed letting her have her way. As the youngest child in the family, she knew her parents had a tendency to spoil her. But who the heck didn’t like being spoiled?

  If there was one thing Emory was never going to emulate in their parents, it was their tendency to overindulge their youngest daughter. No, if anything, Emory was determined to make Mia grow up as fast as possible by stuffing her full of all the protective wisdom she could manage to glean from books and the internet. She took her job as guardian as the role of her life.

  Mia stands with her arms folded across her chest now in mute rebellion. The class instructor studies each participant, his confident gaze assessing, concluding.

  “I know each of you has your own personal reasons for being here this morning, some of you obviously willing, others of you not so much. But however you arrived here, let’s make the most of our three hours together. What you get from this today could save your life down the road. Or not.”

  Mia feels Emory’s glance and its unconcealed frustration for her attitude. “Mia, please,” she says.

  “Can anyone tell me what a predator looks for in a victim?” the instructor asks, his piercing eyes landing on Mia as if he’s identified her as the participant most likely to know the answer. She doesn’t. And indicates so with a shrug.

  He dismisses her response, and asks another girl around her age. She doesn’t know either.

  “Any of you moms have a guess?”

  “Body language?” Emory throws out on a question.

  “You’re not a mother,” Mia says under her breath.

  “Good,” he says with a nod at Emory who stiffens at Mia’s jab.

  “Did you know,” he continues, “that for every victim who actually gets attacked, many, many are dismissed as not worth the risk by the predator?”

  The group gives a collective no.

  “So what differentiates a good victim,” he says, putting the two words in air quotes, “from a not-worth-it victim?”

  Again, in air quotes.

  No one answers.

  He trains his gaze directly on Mia. She glances away, even as he goes on, “In seconds, a predator figures out who is a worthy target and who isn’t. A predator wants his conquest to be easy. He’s looking for a woman or girl who won’t fight back. Who has an air of submissiveness. He doesn’t want someone who’s going to put up resistance. That increases the risk of someone noticing or of him actually getting hurt. He wants someone he can control. Can any of you give me some ideas on what might make you look like someone he could control?”

  “Walking with your shoulders hunched.” The answer comes from the thirteen-year old girl who still thinks her mom hung the moon. Mia noticed it earlier, the way she rested her chin on her mother’s shoulder, smiled whenever she looked at her and said something. She recognized her own jealousy. Knew it made her a not very nice person.

  “Excellent, Addison,” the instructor said.

  “Someone give me another example.”

  “Looking like you don’t know where you’re going,” Mia said.

  “Good, Mia,” he said, giving her a look of approval. “Confidence in your walk. How about awareness of your surroundings?”

  Several murmurs of agreement went up.

  “All right then, are we starting to see that there’s an entire picture here that we need to affect? I’m going to teach you some lifesaving moves here today. But I’m hoping the most important thing I teach you is how to take yourself out of the potential victim category altogether. Are you with me?”

  It would prove to be the one lesson in her entire education of lif
e that Mia would eventually wish she had paid better attention to.

  Knox

  “Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die.”

  —Alfred Lord Tennyson

  HE’D BEEN WARNED it was a hazard of the profession.

  Apathy.

  Burnout.

  Indifference.

  Watching the sun rise from the balcony of a downtown, D.C. condominium on his forty-first birthday, he recognizes himself as the cliché he is. Apathetic. Burned-out. Indifferent Metropolitan police detective.

  Shirtless, he notes the chill in the early May air, but he isn’t sure what happened to that particular item of clothing last night and doesn’t relish the thought of groping around the darkened apartment looking for it. Then again, he can hardly leave without it.

  The sliding glass door behind him slips open, and he looks over his shoulder to see Senator Tom Hagan’s wife holding out his shirt with an indulgent smile on her face.

  “Missing something?” she asks, walking over to join him at the rail.

  He takes the shirt from her, slips it on, but before he can button it, she slides a hand up his chest and says, “Or I could just warm you up.”

  He studies her almost too-perfect face for a moment, searching for an answer that won’t offend. “Gotta get to work,” he says with a deliberate infusion of regret.

  “But it’s your birthday,” she says, slipping her hands around his neck and pressing her silk-covered breasts against him.

  Had he told her as much last night? He supposes so because there’s no other way she could know. “Still have to work,” he says.

  She tips her head to the side, a pout replacing her smile. “Can’t you be late?”

  “Duty calls.”

  She gives him a long look, as if considering whether he’s being truthful or not. “I actually knew who you were before we met last night,” she says.

  “Yeah?”

  “There was an event a few months ago. That dinner at Senator Donovan’s. You were working security. I wanted to know who you were. So I asked.”

  He raises an eyebrow. “Did you ask your husband?”

  She laughs a short laugh. “Hardly. Senator Donovan’s wife, Alicia, gave me the lowdown. Let’s see if I can recall. Born to parents who were both doctors. Friends in high school called you the ‘caretaker’ because you were always defending the underdogs. You went to VMI and originally intended to go to med school, but opted for SEAL mentoring sessions at the United States Merchant Marine Academy instead. Which led you to later take a commission in the Navy where you would head for California for SEAL training. And that’s how you ended up in Afghanistan fighting in the Global War on Terrorism.”

  “Looks like you did your homework,” he says with little effort to conceal the sarcasm underlining his next words. “All your lovers get such thorough vetting?”

  “Is that what you are?” she asks softly, kissing the side of his mouth. “My lover?”

  He regrets the words as he places his hands on her shoulders to gently but deliberately push her away. “That would indicate something lasting beyond this morning, and believe me, you don’t want me past this morning.”

  She considers the assertion, and then says, “Well, then. At least let me give you your birthday present.” She unties her robe and begins to slide it from her shoulders.

  “Hey,” he says, walking her backwards to the open door. “I don’t think either one of us needs that kind of publicity.”

  “Maybe not,” she says softly, one hand on either shirt lapel as she pulls him inside the condo’s master bedroom. “But I do need you. One more time. Because I have a feeling once I let you out the door this morning, I’m never going to see you again.”

  He doesn’t bother to deny it. What would be the point? Right now, what they’d done could be called a lapse in judgment. No point in moving it into the category of an actual mistake.

  She drops the robe fully then, standing before him with the complete awareness that few men had it in them to turn her down. He did have it in him. He understood all the risks associated with making the decision to go home with a senator’s wife.

  But then when you’d watched people you cared about get blown into pieces too small to identify on their way out of country, well, risk became a relative term. And besides, any good plan of self-destruction required risk to end up even being worth the effort.

  Emory

  “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I … I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

  — Robert Frost

  HOW MANY TV shows have I watched where someone’s loved one goes missing? How many books have I read about unsolved cases where a missing person is never found, or if they are eventually found, they have been dead for a long time?

  Sitting here in the parking lot of Johns Hopkins Hospital, I feel as if the lightbulb of reality has been turned off, and I am now trying to function in a universe I have absolutely no understanding of.

  How can I go in to work? Act as if all is normal when a trap door has opened in the center of my life and everything, everything, that matters has fallen right through.

  Mia is all I have.

  Both of our parents had been only children. Our grandparents all gone before them. Any relatives we have left are so distant that calling them would be the same as calling a stranger.

  The utter unfairness of this hits me center in the chest, and a sob, painful and raw, tears from my throat. I lean forward, dropping my forehead against the steering wheel and cry as I have not cried since the night two policemen knocked at our front door and broke the news that our mother and father wouldn’t be coming home, thanks to the drunk driver who had hit them head-on as they were exiting I-66 on the way back from a medical seminar.

  Then, I’d had no idea how to go on, how I would possibly raise my sister who was ten years my junior. I had just started college and she was still in elementary school. My parents had left me financially capable of taking care of her, and it was that and only that, which allowed me to move back home, but still continue going to college.

  There have been times, looking back on it, when I have no idea how I managed to raise her, finish college and go on to medical school. But the years passed, with her now a senior in high school, me a resident, and now, how do I go on, not knowing where she is, if she’s safe, if I will ever see her again?

  Rain pelts at my windshield, and I am grateful for its temporary curtain of protection against the curious glances of doctors and nurses heading in for their shifts.

  “Go about your life, Dr. Benson,” Detective Early had said when she left the station. “We’ll contact you the moment we have anything at all promising.”

  Go about my life? How? I wonder now what he meant by promising. Does that mean they’ll only call me if they think they’ve found her? What if they never do? What if they can’t come up with a single lead? Will I spend the rest of my life waiting for my phone to ring?

  Fresh tears slide down my face. I think of the people I see every day in the enormous hospital before me. Of the utter hopelessness many of them have expressed to me. And how I’ve acted as if I understood. As if I could put myself in their place and predict that things would eventually be better. Hope would bloom as predictably as the daffodils in the spring. Just hold on. Don’t do anything rash. Time heals. It always does.

  But does it?

  Aren’t there some wounds that will never have the capacity to heal?

  Have I been lying to every single patient I’ve ever tried to help with comforting words?

  It is raining harder now, as if the clouds have increased their tears for me.

  I cannot make myself leave the car. Go about my life. Somehow, in doing so, I will be conceding to the fact that life must go on without Mia. It’s not a concession I can make.

  I have to do something. I have no idea what.

  And then my phone rings.

  Knox

  “We forge the
chains we wear in life.”

  —Charles Dickens

  WITHOUT QUESTION, he knows why this task has been assigned to him.

  It isn’t a task any of the other detectives want to take on. Questioning the sister of a teenage girl who has vanished with no apparent trace. Pretending to be sympathetic without letting her know she’s under suspicion.

  But he doesn’t mind.

  If she had anything to do with it, he is happy to help nail her.

  They’d spoken on the phone for a minute or less, agreeing to meet at her house. He’s waiting at the front door when she pulls into the driveway. The seen-better-days BMW sedan is a surprise given the neighborhood and the house.

  He gets out of his black Jeep, noting the startled look on her face when she spots him. He pulls his badge from his shirt pocket, holding it up so that she can see it through the window of her car.

  She gets out, relief etched in the lines of fatigue around her eyes.

  He walks over and sticks out his hand. “Detective Helmer with the Metropolitan Police Department,” he says. “I have a few more questions about your sister, if you don’t mind.”

  “Yes,” she says, “of course. Would you like to come inside?”

  “Sure,” he says, noting the white coat she’s wearing, the scrubs beneath. “You’re a doctor?”

  She leads him toward the front door. “Second-year psych resident at Johns Hopkins,” she says. “I tried to go into work this morning, but couldn’t get any farther than the parking lot. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to go back to normal as if my sister isn’t missing.”

  She unlocks the door, swings it open and waves him in. An enormous yellow cat greets them in the foyer, its meow tinged with outrage.

  “That’s Pounce,” she says. “Mia’s cat. He’s upset that she hasn’t come home.” Her voice breaks on the last word, belying the casual way in which she has imparted the information.