Terminal Secret Page 13

  Amy shook her head.

  “The good-faith money is here in the back seat, on the floor on the driver’s side. Count to one hundred before you move. Once that is done and I’m gone, it’s all yours.”

  The man got out of the car without warning and vanished into the stairwell near the corner of the parking garage. Amy did as she was told and counted to one hundred. Sweat dripped from her hairline as she tried to focus on the numbers in her head.

  At a hundred, Amy got out of the car and looked around the parking garage. She walked to the stairwell door the man had disappeared through and pulled on the knob. The door was locked.

  She looked around the garage and then returned to her vehicle. She opened the back door, reached down, and grabbed a brown paper bag. She sat back down in the driver’s seat and felt the weight of the bag in her hand. She tore the staple off the top of the bag and peaked inside. She reached in and pulled out a small stack of cash neatly wrapped in rubber bands.

  And then she wept, followed by an ear-to-ear grin.

  Chapter 20

  Spying on his only client wasn’t Dan’s preferred investigative method. Yet on a beautiful autumn weekday, Dan watched as Sherry left her house and crossed the street in the direction of the park. At a distance of almost a hundred yards, Dan blended into the scenery on a public bench with a cell phone pressed to his ear and a half-folded newspaper secured in his other hand. Dan dipped the edge of the newspaper and watched Sherry as she bisected a portion of the park, crossed the street again, and disappeared around the corner. Dan stood, glanced back in the direction of the Wellington residence, and then turned his attention to the rest of the neighborhood, eyes surveying his surroundings.

  For a target, if she was indeed one, Sherry Wellington was easy pickings. She followed virtually the same path to work and home, leaving and returning at roughly the same time. She walked through the corner of a park, and traveled down streets with multi-story townhouses and apartment buildings offering myriad perches and advantageous positions for a possible sniper. Alleyways provided additional pop-out-and-kill alternatives. English basements offered ground level access to the sidewalk. The only thing working in Sherry’s favor was the pure wealth of the neighborhood. Even the old apartment Dan was bunking in was next door to a townhouse that had recently sold for two and a half million. And the swanky neighbors who bought it had plenty of company. Security systems were standard on most doors and first floor windows.

  Dan followed Sherry at a distance until she reached Born Again. With the shop open for business, Dan stopped and touched his toes. By the time he hit Wisconsin Avenue, he had discarded his newspaper and was finding his stride among the morning foot traffic. He increased his pace as he reached the river and finished his five-mile run thirty-five minutes later with an uphill sprint that terminated near The Exorcist stairs in Georgetown.

  As the lunch hour began, Dan was sitting at a café on Wisconsin Avenue, a hundred yards away from Born Again. For the last three days, Sherry Wellington had had lunch delivered to her store. Thai, Vietnamese, and Indian. Dan was curious as to the day’s lunch selection and considered how easy it would be for someone to eliminate his client while disguised as a delivery person.

  As Dan considered the perils of Sherry Wellington’s daily routine, his client deviated from her standard operating procedure. At five minutes after noon, Sherry Wellington stepped from the front of Born Again, shut the door behind her, and slipped her key into the lock. Dan placed ten dollars on the table and put the salt shaker on the folded cash so the wind wouldn’t take it.

  Dan followed Sherry Wellington to the bottom of the hill and watched from a distance as she entered the courtyard of the Georgetown Waterfront. Dan slipped into the ice cream shop with a corner view and observed as Sherry waved to her lunch date. Sitting on a chair under an umbrella, facing the Potomac, Carla the waitress stood and smiled. As Sherry approached, Carla opened her arms and the two women embraced. Dan watched for several minutes as Carla and Sherry laughed, smiled, and ordered lunch.

  Don’t know each other, my ass, Dan thought.

  Chapter 21

  Dan sat in his favorite location in Volta Park and looked down the half block in the direction of the Wellington’s residence. At nine thirty p.m., a dark four-door executive sedan pulled to the curb in front of the house. The driver’s door opened and a man in a chauffeur’s coat stepped from the vehicle. The driver took a cursory glance at his surroundings and opened the rear door. Congressman Wellington exited the car with a slight wobble in his step. He nodded to his driver, entered through the wrought iron fence that surrounded the small front yard, and headed for the front door. Security lights on the outer corners of the townhouse illuminated the front steps. A moment later the congressman vanished into the residence.

  At precisely ten o’clock, a light in the room on the upper left corner of the townhouse came on. The white curtains screened two silhouettes in the room, masking bedtime preparations otherwise visible to the world outside. Twenty minutes later the room was cast into darkness. Sitting on the bench just outside the perimeter of the park, Dan checked his watch. He stood, walked slowly up the opposite side of the street, crossed at the corner, and then headed to the far side of the residence.

  A congressman and a woman hiding something that could bring him down. A perfect union. He thought.

  Dan walked and considered the options regarding the case. At the top of the list of potential solutions was returning to Born Again in the morning and plunking down the unused portion of the cash Sherry had fronted him. Return the money and wash his hands of her. Move on to the next client. Dan had a little black book with hundreds of possibilities. And while most clients sought out his assistance, there were occasions when clients employed his services on a less voluntary basis.

  Dan wrestled with his dilemma and forced himself to focus on his own rules. Regardless of whether Sherry Wellington was lying, he was being paid to find who killed Marcus Losh. The fact that the client refused to embrace honesty, or the danger she could be in, was irrelevant to what he’d been hired to do. Dan pushed aside his distaste at seeing Sherry and Carla together. The taste of betrayal watered down by the fact that he had just met them both. Emotionally, he wasn’t invested in either of them. Yet. And beyond the betrayal, Dan didn’t want to get caught up in the morals of it all. Sherry had a past. There was no question about it. And she wanted to keep that past hidden.

  But so did Dan.

  For five years of Dan’s life, he had disappeared. Completely off the reservation. Unrecorded and unfound. It was something he didn’t want anyone poking around in. Everyone has secrets. And everyone has a past. Sherry’s past was potentially deadly.

  So was Dan’s.

  The previous year had seen a bomb tear through the building where his office was located. That unpleasantness was followed by the equally enjoyable experience of being drugged, bound, and abducted. His past had teeth, and they kept multiplying. In addition to the joys of being kidnapped and tortured, he had also been arrested and beaten, before being summarily kneed in the balls by a sitting assistant district attorney.

  Sherry Wellington had a secret. Dan had a storage facility full. Do your job. Find who killed Marcus.

  Dan checked his watch and then headed down the hill into Georgetown proper. He was on the clock. And nighttime offered a completely different surveillance environment.

  *

  Carla threw her white apron in the large canvas basket in the back corner of the kitchen. Moments later she parted the sea between the post-shift cooks sitting on the cinderblock wall behind the restaurant, smoking and chatting.

  “Good night, Carla,” the head cook said, the end of his cigarette burning orange.

  “Good night. See you tomorrow.”

  *

  Dan stood on the opposite side of M Street, the sole of his shoe on the brick wall, his eyes down. He plugged the D6 Metrobus route Carla had mentioned the night before into his smart phone
and the blip on the map was followed by a text telling Dan that Carla’s bus was ten minutes out. He watched as Carla approached M Street from the rear of the restaurant, appearing from a different location than she had exited the night before.

  Curious, Dan thought. A different door than yesterday. But with only a single data point, there was no way for him to know if the rear entrance was the door she usually used, or if yesterday’s departure through the front door was the norm. Tomorrow would be the tiebreaker.

  Carla’s bus stop was two blocks up, where the foot traffic was heaviest and the old brick and cobblestone sidewalk narrowed. Dan shadowed Carla from the other side of M street, five lanes of thick traffic between them. On the sidewalk, Dan weaved between students, drunks, think tankers, tourists, and lawyers. Cars, taxis, and buses jockeyed for position on the street, racing twenty yards at a time to fill any opening, honking and gesturing vulgarities as necessary.

  Dan grabbed a freebie newspaper of apartment listings from a stack near a storefront, and then found a seat on the wall outside the Old Stone House, a Georgetown landmark.

  From his position on the wall, Dan was situated in the middle of the block with a view of the opposite side of the street. With the Old Stone House to his right, he looked straight through the traffic as Carla fell into the queue at the bus stop. Over the next few minutes, a dozen fellow restaurant and shop workers joined her in the lineup near the curb. He watched as Carla put earplugs in her ears, the wire to the source of music disappearing into the front of her jacket. Dan shook his head. Very mugger friendly, he thought. It’s hard to be aware of your surroundings when you cut off one of your major senses.

  Dan’s plan was simple. Wait for Carla to get on her bus home and follow her at a safe distance in a cab. Just routine surveillance to see if there was anything suspicious in her life. Something that didn’t make sense. Anything that would explain why she met with Sherry Wellington after explicitly stating they weren’t friends.

  Dan stared at Carla in the bus queue and planned his surveillance route. Once the Metrobus stopped and Carla boarded, he would cross the street and catch a cab on the far side of traffic, heading in the same direction as the bus. There was no hurry. The bus would make a multitude of stops as it dissected the city. The promise of a fat tip would be sufficient for commandeering a cab driver for an hour of investigative services.

  Crowded sidewalks and five full lanes of traffic meant the chances were slim that Carla would spot Dan watching her as she stood in line for her bus. Not taking any chances, Dan dipped his head, kept his eyes up, and flipped through the pages of the apartment locator paper he wasn’t actually reading.

  A moment later he checked his phone, the screen below chin level. He casually looked up and scanned the street and sidewalks. It was an unbreakable habit. Observation at all times.

  Dan noted the streetlight nearest the bus stop on the other side of the street was out. He glanced down the road in each direction and confirmed all the other lights were functioning. He filed away the void in illumination and scanned the people in line waiting for the bus, pausing again to marvel at Carla, isolated from the noise of the outside world. He registered nothing but tired, overworked souls looking forward to a ride home and sleep so they could do it again when the sun came up.

  Dan’s eyes moved from the bus stop queue to the moving masses on the sidewalk. When Dan’s eyes returned to the corner near the bus line, his focus was drawn to the illumination of a cell phone screen in the darkened stoop of a closed bookstore. Dan squinted at the figure on the top step of the stoop. He watched as the woman on the stoop alternated glances between the screen on her phone and the direction of Carla in the bus queue, ten feet away.

  Dan stood still and watched as the woman in the darkened stoop stepped down two stairs and moved closer to the bus queue. Dan checked his watch and then counted the number of times the girl on the stoop checked her phone and subsequently stared at Carla in line. Twelve times in less than a minute.

  Dan’s natural paranoia switched on and he consumed the details of the person on the stoop. A young woman in a dark sweatshirt, hoodie bunched around her neck. In lieu of pulling the hoodie over her head, the woman wore a winter ski hat, tugged low, hugging her eyebrows and running horizontally over the top of her ears. Blonde hair rolled from the edge of the hat onto her shoulders, disappearing into the folds of the hood on the sweatshirt. She appeared to have something in her mouth. She was currently standing directly under the out-of-commission streetlight, but had moved three steps down the stoop in steady progression. She was holding her position on the second or third step.

  Just a young woman waiting for the bus, trying to stay out of the foot traffic, Dan considered, trying to convince himself his gut was sending a false warning.

  As Dan tried to dismiss the young woman in the hoodie, the subject took another slow, measured step down the stoop, like a cat closing in on its prey. On the bottom step of the stoop, she paused and stared directly at Carla.

  Carla, earphones still in, turned in the direction of the young woman as if an extra sense told her she was being observed. The young woman in the hoodie looked down and away, stepping backwards up the stoop and melting into the relative darkness from whence she had just emerged.

  I think Carla is about to become the victim of a pickpocket, Dan thought.

  Dan began processing the threat level of the potential criminal in the infancy of a crime. Sex: female—usually not a violent threat. Stature: smaller than average. Attire: hooded sweatshirt and a winter hat. Location: given the broken streetlight above, the location of the bus queue was a concern. Behavior: considerably suspicious, which could mean a multitude of things ranging from a physical ailment to drugs or alcohol consumption.

  Dan moved from his seated position on the stone wall to a leaning position against a lamppost. He was five feet closer to the street and squinted through the traffic for a more detailed assessment of the situation. Again the girl on the stoop checked her phone and then looked down at Carla. She started her second cat-like descent from the stoop and Dan prepared himself to chase down a pickpocket. He checked his smartphone, and the Metrobus application indicated that Carla’s ride home was still three minutes out.

  Dan watched as the young woman on the stoop took a final glance of her phone before it disappeared from view. Then she looked up the street in the direction of oncoming traffic and Dan followed the direction of her glance. A red Circulator bus lurched down the street and Dan felt a drop of adrenaline hit his system.

  Dan’s feet starting moving as the girl in the hoodie descended the last step and disappeared into a large group of tourists mulling over their drinking options on the sidewalk. With the red Circulator bus closing in, the girl in the hoodie reappeared from the group of tourist and stepped in the direction of Carla.

  Dan yelled to warn Carla, his voice cutting through the din of traffic noise as he started to run towards the corner. Dan kept his eyes glued to the far side of the street, trying to anticipate which direction the pickpocket would run. Shocked, Dan watched helplessly as Carla’s body fell from the curb and was met with a sickening thud. The red Circulator bus had just made an unscheduled stop and Carla’s body was now under the vehicle.

  Dan winced at the growing cacophony of screams from across the street. Squealing brakes echoed through the chaos. Dan stepped from the curb, the bus blocking his view of the sidewalk as he jumped into traffic. He dodged a still-moving Mini Cooper and slapped the roof of a taxi in the third lane as traffic ground to a standstill. Dan two-stepped it across the double yellow line and then finished his run across the last two lanes of traffic. He hit the sidewalk, pushed through the crowd, peaked under the bus, and pointed to crisis-stricken couple in matching dark wool jackets. “Call 911 guys—911.”

  Standing up, Dan pushed his way through the crowd and jumped to the top of the step of the nearest doorway. He scanned both directions and then stepped down from his perch and raced to the nearest corne
r. The side street was silent. He turned around, veered into the first lane of dead-stopped traffic, and sprinted the fifty yards to the end of the next block. As Dan turned the corner, his foot pressed down on the woven winter hat he had just seen on the head of the young woman with the hoodie.

  Dan paused, swiped the hat into his hand, and looked down the street in the direction of the Potomac River three blocks away. He scanned the darkness and heard feet pounding the ground straight ahead. Dan returned to a full sprint down the sidewalk. At the next corner, now moving away from M Street and the accident scene, he stopped and picked up a yellow wad of fake hair. What the hell?

  He turned at the corner of the brick building and was now on the crushed stone alleyway running parallel to M Street, one block to the rear of the accident. Is she going around the block? Dan thought as he spotted a discarded hooded sweatshirt. In the distance he heard feet pound up a flight of metal stairs. He grabbed the discarded hoodie and ran in the direction of the sound, arms flapping, a wig and hat in one hand and the black hoodie in the other.

  Approaching the next street, Dan glanced up as the shape of a woman zipped across the small bridge that traversed the canal a block off M Street. Dan hit the metal stairs, taking them two at a time. No chance, Dan thought. No way. I did five miles this morning before you were awake.

  But Dan also realized he was going to have to hurry to catch her in the next few blocks. In another quarter-mile the young woman would reach the crowded Waterfront where she could disappear into a ton of evening customers. Buses. Taxis. Hell, she could take a boat to Old Town.

  At the top of the metal stairs, with the figure of the woman now heading down the hill in the direction of the river, Dan pushed his legs for the final rundown.

  Then all he saw was blackness.

  Chapter 22

  Detectives Wallace and Fields handed off the report on the stolen Lexus SUV to police forensics. The car had been dumped hastily two blocks from the National Cathedral and was now being pulled onto a flatbed truck as a result of four flat tires.