Tail Spin ft-12 Read online

  Tail Spin

  ( FBI Thriller - 12 )

  Catherine Coulter

  TailSpin

  CATHERINE COULTER

  To my crackerjack spouse, Anton. You are beloved.

  C.C.

  To my nephew, David Steffens, M.D., MHS, Professor of Psychiatry and Medicine at

  Duke University Medical Center.

  Thank you for the compelling suggestion.

  I hope I dealt well with it.

  ONE

  Black Rock Lake Oranack, Maryland

  Friday night

  She thought she swallowed because her throat burned hot, as if splashed with sharp acid, but she wasn’t sure because she couldn’t think clearly. Her mind felt dark, as heavy and thick as chains, and she knew to her soul there was violence just beyond it. She smelled something rancid, oil with a layer of rot and decay. What was that smell? What did it mean? Her brain wasn’t clear enough yet to figure it out. But she knew she had to, had to fight it or—what? I’ll die, that’s what. I’ve got to get myself together, I’ve got to wake up, or I’ll die.

  The smell grew stronger, and she wanted to vomit. She knew she had to be awake or she’d choke to death. She had to move, to wake up.

  She swallowed again, nearly heaved when the acid in her throat mixed with that rancid smell. She tried to breathe lightly, concentrated all her energy on opening her eyes, on feeling her body on tearing herself out of the black shroud where she was unable to move or speak. Her head felt heavy, her throat burned, and her mind—where was her mind? There, gnawing at the edges of her brain, were sharp hits of pain and fear, sweeping away the confusion, coming closer, breaking through the numbness.

  She heard voices. Mr. Cullifer’s voice? She didn’t think so; his voice was very distinctive, like wet gravel underfoot. But she couldn’t make out who they were or what they were saying, if they were male or female. But she knew that what the voices were saying was bad. For her.

  The smell was so strong it burned her eyes and her nose. Suck it in, suck it in, get yourself together. She breathed in deeply, ignored the nausea, and at last she felt her brain jitter, felt edges of consciousness spear up, tear through the black.

  It was dead fish she smelled, overwhelming now, and the smell of boats, of diesel fumes overlaying wet.

  They were picking her up—who were they?—carrying her, her feet, her arms, and she breathed in the fetid odor. Keep breathing, keep breathing. She heard wooden planks creak, heard night sounds— crickets, an owl, the lapping of water.

  Her eyes flew open when she went airborne. She hit the water hard on her back. The slap of pain snapped her back into her brain and her body. Instinct made her draw in a big breath before the water splashed over her face, closed over her head, before she was slowly dragged to the bottom. Move, move. But she couldn’t. Though her hands weren’t tied, a rope was wrapped around her chest to hold her arms at her sides. Her feet were tied and tethered to something heavy—a block of cement, she knew that instinctively. Too many Mafia movies. They didn’t just want her to drown, they wanted her to disappear forever, like she’d never existed, never come into their lives.

  She didn’t want to die. I’m not going to die.

  She was tied to the cement with the same thick rope that bound her ankles tightly together. She could do this, she could. She quickly shimmied away the rope around her chest, then her fingers went to work. They were clumsy, but it didn’t matter, she didn’t want to die, and she worked frantically. Surprisingly, she could see in the water, knew it wasn’t all that deep because she sensed the moonlight above, and it was enough. She dug her fingernails under the knot and patiently, so patiently, worked it loose. Her chest began to burn. She ignored it, concentrated on the knots.

  Because she’d been the captain of her swim team in college, because she knew how to control her breathing to maximum effect, she knew her time was running out. The drug she’d ingested hadn’t helped. She knew she couldn’t last much longer. It was so hard to keep her mouth shut, to keep from breathing. Her eyes were blurring, the water shimmering, the pressure in her chest building and building until it nearly burst her open.

  I’m going to drown, I’m going to drown. The knot came loose. She kicked off the cement block and shot to the surface. When her head cleared, she wanted to haul in a huge gulp of air, but forced herself to take short, quiet breaths through her nose. She had to hold very still, trying not to ripple the water for fear they were still there, staring down at where they’d thrown her in, watching for bubbles, waiting, waiting until they knew she couldn’t still be alive. They’d wait, oh yes, they’d wait to make sure they’d erased her.

  Her brain was in full gear again. She heard the light lapping of water against the pilings of a wooden pier. They’d walked out onto the pier and thrown her out into the water, believing it deep enough. She eased back under the water and swam under the pier to hide behind the pilings.

  She surfaced very slowly, very quietly, wanting to suck in so much air she’d never run out again, but she only let her face clear the surface. She forced herself to take calm, light breaths. She was alive. Slowly, her breaths became deeper and deeper. She filled her lungs. It felt wonderful.

  She heard voices again, but couldn’t understand any words because they were moving away now. Men? Women? She couldn’t tell, she only knew there were two of them. She heard feet clomping on the wooden pier, heard a car engine, heard the car drive away. She swam out from under the pier and saw the taillights of a car in the distance.

  Good. They thought they’d killed her.

  How had they drugged her? For a moment she couldn’t think, couldn’t remember, couldn’t picture what she’d eaten or drunk earlier. She’d eaten dinner by herself, in the kitchen. The wine, she thought, the bottle of red on the table that she’d opened. Where had it come from? She didn’t know, hadn’t paid any attention.

  She smiled. What none of them had realized was that she’d drunk only a bit of the wine. Any more and she’d be lying dead at the bottom of this lake. No one would know where she was. She’d just be gone. Forever.

  She pulled herself out of the water, shivered as she slapped her hands against her arms and looked around. There were no houses, no lakeside cottages with narrow docks and tethered boats, only a skinny two-lane road winding off into the distant darkness. She shuddered with cold and shock, but it didn’t matter. She was alive.

  She came upon a sign: BLACK ROCK LAKE. Where was Black Rock Lake?

  It didn’t matter. She had two legs that worked fairly well. She began to walk in the same direction as the car.

  It seemed like forever, but it was maybe only fifteen minutes when she saw the lights of a small town—ORANACK, MARYLAND, according to the small black-and-white sign.

  It was late. She didn’t know exactly how late because her watch had died in the water. She walked through the deserted town, her eyes on a neon sign that beamed out in bright orange—mel’s diner— all glass so you could see back to the swinging door to the kitchen. Two people sat in a booth next to the glass, a limp waitress standing beside them, a pen poised over her pad. She saw a taxi sitting outside the diner, saw the cabbie at the counter drinking coffee and she smiled.

  When the cab pulled into Jimmy’s driveway, she asked the driver to wait and prayed they hadn’t taken her purse. The alarm wasn’t set, thank God, and the window in her bedroom was still cracked open. She found her purse downstairs on the kitchen counter, where she’d left it earlier that night. Was it really only three, four hours ago? It seemed a lifetime.

  Thirty minutes later, she took one final look at Jimmy’s big redbrick Georgian house, built in the thirties, the centerpiece of this well-tended neighborhood, nestled among huge oak trees on Pinchon
Lane. She’d never had the chance to think of him as her father, to call him Father; she wondered now if he would remain Jimmy forever.

  She’d had only six weeks with him.

  She drove her white Charger through the quiet streets until she reached the Beltway. She knew where she was going and also knew she’d be crazy to try to drive through the night, because she was so exhausted she was shaking. But she had no choice. She ate two candy bars, felt a brief spurt of energy. She had to think, had to plan. She had to hide. She forced herself to drive through the night, surviving on hot black coffee and a half dozen more candy bars and, at eight a.m., stopped at the Cozy Boy Motel off the highway in Richmond.

  She awoke fourteen hours later, groggy at first, every muscle in her bodyprotesting, but her strength was surging back. Fear, she thought, an excellent energizer.

  She wasn’t about to go to her mother’s house. She wasn’t even going to call her. No way would she put them in that kind of danger. She realized with a sort of depressed relief that she had no close friends to call, to tell them not to worry about her. She hadn’t kept up with friends she’d made in Richmond. As far as she could think, there was no one to even wonder where she was. Mrs. Riffin, Jimmy’s longtime housekeeper, was even gone now, having retired the week after Jimmy’s death. No one, she thought, no one to worry, to wonder. Jimmy’s lawyer might wonder in a sort of intellectual way where she was, but she doubted he’d press it. As for Jimmy’s siblings, if they believed she was tied to a concrete block at the bottom of a lake, they certainly wouldn’t say anything.

  Could Quincy and Laurel have been involved? Jimmy’s brother and sister—unbelievably, her uncle and aunt—hated her, wanted her gone—but murder? Yes, she thought, they were capable of anything. Maybe there were others who didn’t want her around, but murder? She always came back to Quincy and Laurel.

  She meandered along back roads in Virginia until she ended up the following morning at a small motel in Waynesboro. She knew where she was going, but then what? She watched local TV news, listened to the local radio, and thought. She heard a retrospective of Jimmy’s political life on PBS. Even though he hadn’t been a liberal, they’d been mostly positive in their assessment of him. They probably hadn’t meant to, but Jimmy came across as a larger-than-life figure, charismatic, dedicated to public service. If only they knew, she thought, Jimmy had been so much more. And there was the other thing. No, she wouldn’t think about that right now. She couldn’t. It would wait.

  She listened to the vice president speak of Jimmy’s ex-wife, his two daughters, but nothing about her, nothing about his other daughter, the one he hadn’t known existed until six weeks before he died. She leaned down to rub her ankle where the rope had been bound so tightly, and for an instant, she couldn’t breathe. She smacked her palm against the steering wheel, got herself together. She looked out over the dark Virginia fields, the line of trees, unmoving black sentinels in the night, and thought, If you two maniacs tried to kill me, then I hope you’re happy, I hope you’re making toasts to each other on my removal, the one person who can make your lives very unpleasant. Yes, drink up.

  Until she was ready to take them down. TWO

  Georgetown, Washington, D.C.

  Monday morning

  Sherlock took Jimmy Maitland’s call at 7:32 while she was pouring Cheerios into Sean’s Transformers cereal bowl, Astro sitting beside his chair, tongue and tail wagging, ready for his share. The terrier loved Cheerios.

  “It’s about Jackson Crowne,” Maitland said. “And it isn’t good Sherlock.”

  “What is it, sir?”

  Sherlock began shaking her head, her face going pale. Savich’s head snapped up. He poured milk over the Cheerios and talked to Sean to distract him, but he was aware of every expression on his wife’s face. He gave Astro a handful of Cheerios in his dog bowl.

  “But you don’t know for certain, sir?” she asked, her voice thread thin.

  Maitland said, “No, not for sure, but it doesn’t look good, Sherlock. Add Dr. MacLean to the mix—well, you can imagine how worried everyone is. A helicopter is waiting for you and Savich at Quantico. Get there as soon as you can. We’re not sending out Search and Rescue right now, that would lead directly to the media and that would mean too much information about Dr. MacLean getting out to thewrong people. If you don’t locate him, we have no choice but to call in Search and Rescue. Funny thing is, Jack’s piloting a Cessna search-and-rescue plane. I know you understand. I’m counting on you two.”

  Sherlock understood all too well, but she didn’t like it. She would have damned the media, said to hell with concerns for Dr. MacLean’s safety, and launched a full-bore Search and Rescue in ten minutes. But Mr. Maitland could be right—if this wasn’t a malfunction — an accident—then that meant sabotage. As she carefully laid down the kitchen phone, watching Sean studiously plowing through his cereal, she got herself together, said calmly, “It’s Jack. His plane went down in southeast Kentucky, his may day was near a small town called Parlow in the Appalachians, an hour from the Virginia border. As you know, Jack’s got Dr. MacLean with him. Mr. Maitland wants us there as soon as possible, find out what’s going on. No Search and Rescue right now. It doesn’t sound ...” She swallowed, looked again at Sean when her voice cracked.

  Sean’s spoon stopped halfway to his mouth, and his head came up, his father’s eyes staring at her. “Mama, what’s wrong?”

  “It’s one of our agents, Sean, he could be in some trouble. Your papa and I are going to go find him and bring him home.”

  Sean nodded. “All right then. You find him, Mama. Bring him over, maybe he can play Pajama Sam with me.”

  “I will, sweetie,” Sherlock said, and gave him a loud kiss, then ran her hand through his black hair, his father’s hair. She couldn’t help herself and kissed him again, this time even louder. Sean smacked his lips back at her. Astro barked. “Astro, too, Mama,” Sean shouted. Sherlock let Astro lick the powder off her cheek.

  “Maybe your mama will let me ride shotgun,” Savich said, and hugged and kissed his son, then nodded to Gabriella, Sean’s nanny. “We’ll call you, Gabby, when we find out what’s going on.”

  Ten minutes later Gabrielle walked them to the front door. She laid her hand lightly on Sherlock’s arm. “I met Jack Crowne once,” she said, “when I brought some papers to your office. He asked me if I liked to throw a football as much as Sean did, and I told him my spiral rivals Tom Brady’s. He laughed. I hope you find him. This other man, this Dr. MacLean, is he all that important?”

  “I’d call him more a lightning rod,” Sherlock said. “We’ll find Jack, I promise,” but she knew it didn’t look good, for either Jack or his passenger. THREE

  Monday morning

  Rachael stared at the sign, at the bright red script letters against the white background: parlow, home of the red wolves.

  Almost home, Rachael thought, and laughed at that thought. Home? Parlow, Kentucky, a place she hadn’t seen since she was a stick-skinny twelve-year-old, with braces on her teeth and hair down to her butt because Uncle Gillette hadn’t wanted her ever to cut it. Her visits had been to Uncle Gillette’s now-magnificent home in Slipper Hollow, a stretch of land five miles northeast of Parlow, well off the beaten track, unknown even to many locals. Uncle Gillette liked his privacy, especially since returning home from the Gulf War in the early nineties. Maybe too much.

  It looked like she was going to have to walk the last mile. Rachael didn’t kick her Dodge Charger; it had gotten her this far, after all. It sat on the side of the road, dirty white with a muddied-up license plate, deader than a doornail, whatever that was.

  She was closing in on the back end of nowhere, and that was a wonderful thing. She had only one ancient duffel bag stuffed with clothes she’d flung into it the night she drove away from Jimmy’s house in Chevy Chase. She’d driven again all through the night and now, at seven fifteen in the morning, she was getting tired. As far as she could tell, no one had followed her on
her slow nighttime drives across Virginia. She looked bat k again at her faithful Charger, which hadn’t given her a single problem since she’d bought it three years before—until now.

  Calm down, you’re nearly there —to Slipper Hollow, where Uncle Gillette lived, protected by the densely forested mountains ranging as far as you could see. Their peaks were wreathed in early morning fog, blanketing the light dusting of snow until the sun melted it away. They were comforting, those mountains, when, as a child, she’d hidden among the thick green leaves on a branch of an ancient oak tree, staring at that immense stretch of mountains and hillocks and towering boulders, wondering what was beyond. Only giants, she’d believed at age four, and maybe, if she was lucky, some dogs and cats.

  She clearly remembered that summer day when her mother told her, It’s time we were on our own. That was it. She’d helped her mother and a reluctant Uncle Gillette pack their old Chrysler with their most prized belongings, and they’d headed out at sunrise. She’d missed Slipper Hollow and Uncle Gillette to her bones, counted off days between visits, and there’d been a lot of them in the early days.

  But it had been almost a year since she’d last seen Uncle Gillette. At least she knew he’d be there. Uncle Gillette never left Slipper Hollow.

  Time to get a move on. She wanted to be there before noon—if she could get her car fixed that fast. Her stomach growled, and in her mind Rachael saw Mrs. Jersey, the best cook in Kentucky, according to her mother, and the owner of Monk’s Cafe, and wondered if she was still there. She’d seemed ancient to a twelve-year-old. Ah, but those hot blueberry scones she made, Rachael could still remember the taste, and those hot blueberries burning her tongue. Monk’s Cafe opened early back then, for truckers, and maybe it still did. If Mrs. Jersey was still there, Rachael prayed she wouldn’t recognize her, prayed no one in Parlow would recognize the twelve-year-old girl in the woman, and hoped she’d let Rachael use the landline since cells didn’t work out here in the boondocks, and tell her who the best mechanic was in Parlow. She wasn’t going to call Uncle Gillette; she was careful now, very careful. She had no intention of leaving any trail, no matter that they believed her dead, no matter that as faras she knew, they’d never heard of Parlow, Kentucky, or Slipper Hollow.