The John Milton Series: Books 1-3 (93 page)

Beau drove along Daniels Avenue until he found number 225. Hank had given him the address, and Beau had had it checked with an investigator they sometimes used when they had runners in Northern California. It was a small, two-storey house painted eggshell blue. There was a line of red brick steps that led up from a carport to the first-floor entrance. The brick wall was topped with imitation lanterns on the corners, the garden was overgrown and scruffy, and the car in the driveway was up on bricks. It was down-at-heel, the worst house on the street, and tonight, it looked like it was hosting a party. A couple of men in thick warm-up coats were smoking in the garden, and loud music was coming from inside.

“That the place?”

“It is.” Beau drove on and parked out of sight.

“A busy place, drink, maybe drugs? That’ll make things more difficult.”

“I know.”

“Still want to do it?”

“I’m picking him up come hell or high water. You don’t ride your horse into a canyon you ain’t willing to walk out of.”

“How do you want to play it?”

Beau looked at the house, assessing it. “You got a preference?”

Milton looked at him with a smile. “Old man like you?” he said. “You go around the back, and get ready if he runs. I’ll go in and flush him out.”

“All right,” he said. “You know what he looks like?”

Smith had studied Beau’s photograph on the drive north from San Francisco. “Big. Nasty looking. I’ll recognise him.”

“Goes by the name of Ordell,” Beau reminded him.

“Don’t worry. I got it.”

Beau held up the cosh. “Want this?”

“Keep it. I’ll give you ten minutes to get yourself around the back, and then I’ll go in.”

Beau rolled the car around the block until he found an access road that ran between the back gardens of Daniels Avenue. It was a narrow street that climbed a hill with broken fencing on both sides, wooden garages that were barely standing, and unkempt trees that spread their boughs overhead. A row of cars, covered over with tarps, was parked along one side of the road. He recognised number 225 from the peeling blue paint and settled into place to wait behind the wing of a battered old Ford Taurus.

He had barely been there a minute when he heard the sound of raised voices and then crashing furniture.

He rose up quickly.

The back door exploded outwards, the limp body of a man tumbling through the splintered shards.

He took a step forward just in time to intercept the big, angry-looking man who was barrelling out of the shattered doorway. He looked madder than a wet hen. He held one hand to his nose, trying unsuccessfully to stem the flow of blood that was running down his lip, into his mouth and across his chin.

Beau stepped into his path.

“Oh shit,” Ordell Leonard said.

Beau swung the cosh and caught him flush on the side of the head. He went jelly-legged and tripped, Beau snagging the lapels of his shirt as he went stumbling past him, heaving his unsupported weight and lowering him down to the road.

He was out cold before his chin hit the asphalt.

Smith came out of the house, shaking the sting out of his right fist.

“That was easy,” he said.

ARLEN CRAWFORD was working on the preparation for the next debate. They were in Oakland, another anonymous hotel that was the same as all the others. They were all high-end, all luxury. All the same, one after another after another, a never-ending line of them. The sheets on the bed were always fine Egyptian cotton, the bathrooms were always Italian marble, the carpets were always luxuriously deep. They were all interchangeable. It was easy to forget where you were.

He put down his pen and leaned back in his chair. He thought of John Smith and his threats. That certainly was a problem, and if it had been left to metastasise, it would have grown into something much, much worse. But Crawford had it under control. He had been with Robinson when he reported his connection to the girl to the police. They had done it yesterday evening. He had called in a whole series of favours to arrange for a friendly detective to take the statement. The detective had come to them to avoid any whiff of it getting to the press. There would be no shots of the governor on the steps of a police precinct house. The process of the interview looked official, just as it should, but the statement would never see the light of day. It would never be transcribed, and the tapes onto which it had been recorded had already been shredded.

The detective had reassured Robinson that there was little chance that his liaison with Madison had anything to do with her disappearance. He went further, just as Crawford had suggested, saying that there was no evidence to suggest she had anything to do with the dead girls. The governor’s conscience was salved, and now they would be able to get back to the business of winning an election.

Some things were just too important to be derailed.

There was Smith himself, of course. He would need to be dealt with, but that was already in hand. The background checks had turned up very little. He wasn’t registered to vote. He didn’t appear to pay any taxes. A shitty place in an SRO in the Mission District. He worked nights as a taxi driver and worked days hauling blocks of ice. He was a nobody. Practically a vagrant. They had two good men on his case now. Good men, solid tails, both with surveillance experience, the sort who could drift in and out of a crowd without being spotted. They had already got some good stuff. The man went to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. That was useful to know. There was no family, but it looked like there was a girl.

That, too, might be helpful.

Leverage.

He turned his attention back to his work. Crawford had just been emailed the latest polling numbers, and the news was good. They were tracking nicely ahead of the pack, and the last debate ought to be enough to nail the lead down. They had blocked out the weekend for preparation. Crawford was going to be playing the role of Robinson’s most likely rival, and he was putting together a list of questions that he knew would be difficult if they came up. Forewarned was forearmed, and all that. Fail to prepare, prepare to fail. Crawford knew all the questions, drilled them into the rest of the team, drilled them into the governor. That was a difficult proposition given his propensity to shy away from preparation and rely upon his instinct. Crawford preferred a balance, but…

There was a fierce knocking on the door of his hotel room.

He put his pen down. “What is it?” he called.

“Arlen!”

The banging resumed, louder.

He padded across the carpet and opened the door.

It was Robinson.

“Have you seen the news?”

He looked terrible; his face was deathly pale.

“No,” Crawford said. “I’ve been working on the debate.”

“Put it on. CNN.”

Crawford rescued the remote from the debris on the desk and flipped channels to CNN. It was an outside broadcast. The presenter was standing on the margin of a road with scrub and trees. It was heavy with fog, a heavy grey curtain that closed everything in. The ticker at the bottom of the screen announced that the police had finally identified all three sets of remains that had been found at Headlands Lookout.

“Turn it up,” Robinson demanded.

Crawford did as he was told.

“… the bodies of three women found near Headlands Lookout, just behind me here. The victims are twenty-one-year old Tabitha Wilson of Palo Alto, twenty-five-year old Megan Gabert of San Francisco and twenty-one-year old Miley Van Dyken of Vallejo. A police official has revealed to me that there were substantial similarities in how the women died but declined to reveal their causes of death. The same source suggested that the police believe that the three women were killed at a different location, but then their bodies were dumped here. Lorraine Young, Tabitha’s mother, has said that police forensic tests, including DNA, have confirmed that one of the bodies belonged to her daughter. The bodies were found within fifty feet of each other in this stretch of rocky grasslands, hidden by overgrown shrubbery and sea grass.”

Crawford felt his knees buckle, just a little.

“What the fuck, Arlen? What the fuck?”

Crawford muted the TV.

The muscles in his jaw bunched as he considered all the possible next moves.

None of them were any good.

“Arlen! Don’t play dumb with me.” He stabbed a finger at the screen. “What the fuck!”

“Calm down, sir.”

“Calm down? Are you kidding? Seriously? Those girls—you know who they are. Jesus Christ, Arlen, you remember, I know you do.”

Yes
, he thought bitterly,
I do remember
. There were no next moves now. Check and mate. End of the line. The situation was all the way out of control, and it could only get worse before it got better. He had been managing it, carefully and diligently, nudging events in the best direction and very discreetly burying all of this so deep that it would never be disturbed. That, at least, had been his intention. The girls were never supposed to be seen again.

“I do remember,” he said.

And then came the recrimination. He should have seen to this himself rather than trusting others; that was his fault, and now he would have to live with it. He had been naïve to think that those dumbass rednecks could be expected to handle something so sensitive the way it needed to be handled. The brakes were off now, and momentum was gathering. There was little to be done, and knowing that, Crawford almost felt able to relax. The sense of fatalism was strangely comforting. He had, he realised, been so intent on keeping a lid on events that he had neglected to notice the pressure that was building inside him. The stress and the constant worry. The campaign, twice-daily polling numbers, the places they were strong and the places they were weak, the governor’s appeal across different demographics, how was he playing with the party, how would the Democrats go after him?

His erratic behaviour.

The suicidal appetite that he couldn’t sate.

Time bombs.

He had done his best for as long as he could, but it was too much for one man to handle.

And he didn’t have to handle it anymore.

Maybe this had always been inevitable.

Robinson gaped as if the enormity of what he was discovering had struck him dumb. “And—I—”

“Yes, Governor. That’s right.”

“I—”

“You were seeing them all.”

“But—”

“That’ll have to come out now, of course. There will be something that ties them to you, something we couldn’t clean up: a text message, a diary entry, anything, really. Nothing we can do about that, not now. That boat has sailed.”

The governor put a hand down against the mattress to steady himself. He looked as if he was just about ready to swoon. “What happened?”

“You don’t recall?”

“What’s going on, Arlen?”

“You had your way with them for as long as it suited you, and then you put them aside, moved on to whoever you wanted next. The same way you always do. They all came to me. They were hurt and angry, and they wanted revenge. They threatened to go to the press. They asked for money. The problem with that, though, is that you can’t ever be sure that they won’t come back for more. They get their snouts in the trough, they’re going to think that it’s always going to be there. It’s not hard to see why they might think that, is it? I would. They still have the story to sell. We can’t run a campaign with that hanging over us, let alone a presidency.”

“
You
did this?”

“I arranged for things to be sorted.”

“‘Sorted?’”

“That’s right.”

“You
murdered
them?” Robinson slumped.

“No, sir. You did.”

“Don’t be—”

“I arranged for things to be sorted. What else could I have done?”

“And Madison?”

He shrugged. “I shouldn’t think it’ll be long until she turns up.”

“Oh, Jesus…”

“It’s a bit late for that.”

“Who did it?”

“Friends who share our cause. It doesn’t matter who they are. There are some things that are more important than others, Governor. Country, for one. I love this country, sir. But I look at it, and I can see everything that’s wrong with it. Immigration out of control, drugs, a government with its hand in everything, the way standards have been allowed to fall, weak foreign policy, the Chinese and the Russians making us look like fools at every turn. That’s not what this country was founded to be. We haven’t lived up to our potential for years. Decades. You were the best chance of making this country great again. You are… no”—he corrected himself, a bitter laugh—“you were… very electable. We would have won, Governor. The nomination, the presidency and then whatever we wanted after that. We could’ve started the work that needs to be done.”

He was hardly even listening to him. “You killed them.”

There was no anger there, not yet, although that would come. He had been stunned into a stupor. The life had been sucked from him. It was a depressing thing to see; the sight of him on a stage, in full flow, railing against the state of the world and promising that he would make things right—that, Crawford thought,
that
was something special. Something to experience. But it was also a mirage. The man was a fraud. No sense pretending otherwise. A snake-oil salesman. Joseph Jack Robinson II, the most inspirational politician that Arlen Crawford had ever seen, was just another man selling moonshine.

He went over to his suitcase and opened it.

“Why did you do it, Arlen?”

“What happened was necessary for the greater good, sir. It’s regrettable, of course, but what were they? Four prostitutes and an intern. They were expendable.”

“An intern? Karly?”

“That’s in hand.”

Robinson jacknifed over the edge of the bed and, suddenly and explosively, voided his guts. He straightened up, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth.

“It’s all over now, sir. You had everything. The charisma, the way you command a room, the good sense to know when to listen and adopt the right ideas. You would have been perfect. Perfect, Governor, if it wasn’t for the fact that you’re weak. No discipline. I should have realised that months ago. There was always only ever going to be so much that I could do for you, and now, after this”—he pointed to the TV—“we’ve gone past the limit. The only thing we can do now is try to limit the damage.”