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  “No, not these,” I said, unable to hide my frustration. “It’s 1972 we’re interested in. These letters are from the fifties.” I started to hand them back, but Lisa took them from me instead.

  “Of course, we’ll look at them,” she told Grandma. Don’t be such a prick, I was pretty sure she was saying to me.

  Lisa pulled the letters out of the envelopes and began to go through them, nodding and smiling like just another family member enjoying the memories. I cleared my throat softly, then harder, until she glared at me. I turned to walk away but her voice stopped me.

  “Maybe you’d like to take a look at this, Puller.”

  I took the letter from her hand. A note on plain tablet paper, I saw, the kind schoolchildren use, written in neat but childish handwriting. Something about school, I read, skimming quickly until I got to the end, until my eyes stuck fast to the printed signature. I held the letter up to Prudence Williams.

  “This isn’t from your granddaughter, ma’am. Not Brenda, anyway. See the signature? That isn’t her name at the bottom.”

  She took the letter, squinted at it, moved it away slightly, adjusted it into focus. Then she laughed, a sudden yelp that straightened me up in my chair.

  “That child!” she said. “I bought lots of storybooks for her in those days. One of them had that story about Aladdin.” She peered over the top of the letter at me. “The boy and his magic lamp?” I nodded. “There was a princess in the story, too … Princess Jasmine. The boy fell in love with her and so did my little Brenda. ‘I’m going to be just like Princess Jasmine someday,’ she used to tell me. ‘You just wait and see if I don’t.’” Prudence Williams stared again at the signature, then at me. “And she is, don’t you know? She damn well is.”

  FOURTEEN

  Princess Jasmine. Jasmine Granger.

  Outside in the bucar, we didn’t waste time talking about the connection before going to work on it.

  Assistant United States Attorney Jim Franklin and I had done a lot of good work together in the days before my promotion to supervisor took me away from the criminal side of the house, and we still got together for lunch often enough to keep our friendship up to date. I reached for my cell phone, punched the number for his private line at the United States Attorney’s office in D.C. He answered the first ring.

  I told him what I needed, a subpoena duces tecum for all Cobb County Hospital records under the name Jasmine Granger.

  “Shouldn’t be a problem,” Jim said, “but verbal authorization doesn’t work too well outside D.C. You got your laptop?” I told him I did. “Send me an e-mail,” he continued, “along with a brief outline of your probable cause, and what you hope to find in the records. I’ll send an electronic duces tecum to your e-mail address. Show it to the hospital administrator. Any problems, call me back here at the office. I’ll be here most of the evening.”

  I told Lisa what he’d said. She looked at the dashboard clock. “After five already, Puller. We’re running out of day.”

  “Hospitals never close.”

  “But Faydeux isn’t there. He took the day off, remember?”

  “He’ll be there. Our subpoena will order him to produce his records. He’ll have a choice. Give them to us in Brookston tonight, or haul them to federal court in Washington tomorrow. Take a wild guess which one he chooses. I’ll call his office right now; they’ll call him. My guess is he’ll get there before we do.”

  I grinned at the prospect. It was beneath me to gloat, but what the hell. I’d eaten enough crow over the years to rejoice when the feathers were in somebody else’s mouth.

  “Grab my laptop,” I told Lisa. “Type up the subpoena and e-mail it. You’ll find Jim Franklin in my address book.”

  She got to work. Thirty-five minutes later we had our subpoena, and not long after that we were handing it to Priestley Faydeux in his office. He was every bit as mad as I’d hoped he’d be.

  “I was on my way to dinner with my wife,” he said when he read it. “Can’t this wait until tomorrow?”

  “Of course,” I told him. “If it’s inconvenient, we’ll go back to Washington. You can bring the records up there tomorrow.” I shook my head regretfully. “Court’s awful busy these days. No way to know exactly when the judge would be able to see you, but you’d be back in less than a week for sure.”

  Lisa and I turned together toward the door leading out of the administrator’s office, but he didn’t let us get that far.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake! Let’s just do it now.” He jumped up from his desk and stormed toward the door into the hallway. “You people are all alike,” he muttered on his way by us.

  We followed Faydeux out the door and down to where the records were kept.

  “Ms. Evans has gone home,” he said when we got there. “I’ll have to look for the damned things myself.”

  He sat at Helena Evans’s desk and whacked at the keyboard on her computer, stared at the screen and scribbled something on a pad of paper near his elbow, took the pad with him back into the stacks. Two minutes later he came back out with a single yellow folder, removed three loose pages from it, then stepped over to the copy machine and made copies for us. I took them, nodded at Lisa, and we turned to leave. I could still hear the administrator muttering halfway down the corridor to the front door.

  We returned to the café at the Brookston Inn, but this time decided to take the food with us back to my room. We had business to discuss, and didn’t want to have to be careful about who might be listening. Inside the room, we stared for a moment at the bed before Lisa grabbed a chair from next to the window and pulled it up close to the bed.

  “You take the bed,” she told me. “Sit back and make yourself comfortable.”

  She went to the window and drew the drape to give us more privacy. I fumbled for the switch at the base of the lamp on the nightstand, turned it on. The soft glow made Lisa all the more beautiful, and it didn’t do me any harm either I set our sack of food on the nightstand, shrugged out of my suit coat and tossed it across the foot of the bed, loosened my tie and kicked off my shoes, then reached for the bedspread and pulled it far enough away to prop up the pillows to use as a backrest. Lisa sat in her chair and we ate our hamburgers in silence. When we finished, she looked at me.

  “I’m sick of Diet Coke,” she said. “Did you bring any serious drink with you? Other than gin, I mean. Gin keeps me up all night.”

  Didn’t sound all that bad to me, but I didn’t say so, and there was a bottle of Scotch in my overnight bag, of course. No veteran FBI agent goes on the road without a bottle of something, especially to a town small enough to risk having to go without.

  “Glenfiddich,” I told her. “In my overnight bag. Closet next to the bathroom. Glasses in the bathroom, still wrapped in plastic.”

  I heard her rummaging in the closet, then in the bathroom unwrapping glasses.

  “No ice for me,” I called, “but if you bring the plastic bucket, I’ll go get you some.”

  “Ice? And ruin good Scotch?” She came out of the bathroom with two glasses, an inch or so of whisky in each one. “Water in yours?” she asked. I shook my head and she grinned. “You’re a pretty cheap date, aren’t you, boss?”

  “The cheapest.”

  She came over and sat in her chair again, handed me a glass, took a good long pull at her own. I did the same, then sighed. Single malt was hideously expensive, but it only costs a hundred percent more to go first class. I looked at Lisa. Obviously she felt the same way. Her head was back, her eyes closed. She brought her glass up a second time to finish it off.

  “Okay,” she said. “All better now.” She waggled her fingers for my glass, rose out of the chair. “Freshen yours while I’m at it?”

  “Why don’t you just bring the bottle.”

  I watched her hips as she headed back to the bathroom. Her straight skirt had bunched up a little when she sat, and the hem had ascended to midthigh. Now it sank slowly as she walked. I watched it closely in case i
t rode back up, even more closely when she came back with the bottle. She set it on the table just as I reached for it. Our fingers touched and I felt a very pleasant jolt. Relax, I warned myself. Do not get started down that road.

  She kicked her shoes off, sat in her chair, and tucked her legs beneath her. She sipped her whisky for a moment, then rose to her feet. A moment later she’d come around the bed and joined me on top of the spread.

  “God,” she said with a sigh. “This is so much better than that chair.”

  She fluffed up her pillow, sat back, and sipped her Scotch. We stayed like that for a while, like old army buddies, the Scotch doing what Scotch was supposed to do. I started feeling manly and noticed her body language turning feline. Graceful, languid … eyes even softer now … thick dark hair just tousled enough to make me want to touch it.

  I took a hefty slug of single malt, forced myself to think twice about what seemed to be going on here. Then I closed my eyes and decided to lighten up. Lisa Sands might work for me, but there wasn’t a reason in hell we couldn’t be friends tonight, just another pair of tired employees enjoying a drink at the end of the day.

  “D and C’s don’t have to be related to pregnancy,” she said, pretty much destroying the mood I was starting to feel. “Matter of fact, they ordinarily don’t.”

  “For some reason I’ve always put the two of them together.”

  “Pelvic bleeding, that’s all it takes to get one.”

  I reached over the edge of the bed for my briefcase, retrieved the three-page medical record we’d just brought back from the hospital. A skimpy record: one procedure and a couple of administrative pages. I pulled it close and read aloud from the surgeon’s typewritten notes.

  “‘Jasmine Granger admitted July 2, 1972. Presented with pelvic bleeding following spontaneous abortion. Dilatation and curettage indicated. Procedure removed fetal and placental tissue. Patient cleared for release July 3, 1972.’” I looked at Lisa. “Miscarriage, right? That’s what spontaneous abortion means?”

  She nodded. “But I have my doubts about how spontaneous it might have been. Nobody gets murdered for a thirty-year-old miscarriage.”

  “I wouldn’t think so, either, but there’s the record.”

  “Doesn’t mean much. Pre-Roe v. Wade, a lot of hospitals preferred to go along with the fantasy that botched back-alley abortions were nothing more than simple miscarriages. They didn’t want any records the cops might see, didn’t want to do anything to bring the law down on mostly poor girls with nowhere else to go.”

  We sipped whisky in silence for a while.

  “One thing I really don’t understand,” Lisa said a few moments later. “Brenda Thompson was and is a brilliant woman. Why would she make up a name at the hospital, then use her true date and place of birth?”

  “What first-year law student would foresee a nomination to the Supreme Court? She couldn’t possibly have known in 1972 that she’d be in the position she’s in today.” I swallowed what was left in my glass, reached for the bottle. “She knew better than to use her real name, but just didn’t see any point in lying about the rest of it.”

  “Still leaves Aunt Sarah. Why tell me a story about the real Sarah Kendall, knowing how easy it would be to disprove? Why not just make up a name? After thirty years we wouldn’t have come up with a damned thing.”

  “Think about it. When you found the gap in her residence history, the missing three weeks, what did you do?”

  “Called her up, asked for an explanation.”

  “In your official FBI voice?”

  She grinned. “I guess I can sound pretty official at times.”

  “More like scary, but we all do that. It’s the heart and soul of the myth, and lose the myth, we got nothing.” I readjusted my pillows, sank against them once again. “My point is you surprised Thompson. Didn’t make an appointment to see her, didn’t give her time to prepare. Standard operating procedure when you suspect that lying might be involved.”

  “But she’s still a federal judge. You’re telling me I intimidated her right out of her senses?”

  “Because she’s a federal judge, you did. She might be bent, but she’s not a professional liar. You do the same thing to a con man—walk in on him like that—and he’ll come back with the most perfect story you ever heard. Not a word of truth, not a word you can prove is a lie.”

  She poured another half inch into her glass, settled back. “The preacher’s lying, too. Now that we’ve got the Jasmine Granger name and the medical record to go with it, we’ve got some leverage.”

  “Except that we’re here to get information, not give it. He may very well know that a woman called Jasmine Granger had an abortion, but not that Granger was actually Brenda Thompson. If we go to him he’ll make the connection—after we already asked him about Thompson—and we can’t have that. Not with something this volatile about a nominee for the Supreme Court.” I shook my head. “Best to leave him out of this, at least for now.”

  We fell silent. I found myself peeking at my partner. Again at her hair, but now at her breasts and her legs as well. I tried to tell myself that the tension in my thighs, the thickening in my groin, were the direct result of her equally tantalizing brain, but who was I kidding. I could enjoy her brain anytime I wanted to, but it shouldn’t make me want to paw the carpet.

  Lisa turned toward me just as I was leaning toward her, then swung her legs off the bed and got to her feet.

  “I’m tired, boss,” she said, “and a little too cocktailed to stay here any longer.”

  I watched her gather her clothing and start for the door. Suddenly I didn’t want her to go. Wanted to hear her say she was already where she wanted to be, that my bed would work just fine for the both of us. But she didn’t, and in the next moment she was gone.

  FIFTEEN

  Back in Assistant Director Kevin Finnerty’s office at WMFO the next morning—closer to noon, actually—Lisa and I sat together on his big couch as the ADIC expressed his satisfaction with our work.

  “What you came up with down in Brookston doesn’t look good for Judge Thompson,” he told us from behind his desk, “but that’s not our concern. The White House isn’t going to like what you’ve discovered, but the president will understand. After what happened with Josephine Grady, he’ll be especially grateful for what we’ve done on this case.”

  He smiled briefly and I realized this was the part where we were supposed to thank him and return to our hut at the edge of the universe, but I just couldn’t make myself do that.

  “We’re not finished, boss,” I said. “The Jasmine Granger connection is compelling, but it’s not enough, nowhere near the standard we’d need for evidence. It’s not likely Brenda and Jasmine are two different people, but I think we better find out for sure.”

  “Can you produce something evidentiary? Good enough for a court of law?”

  “No way to know until we try.”

  I told him about Reverend Johnson, but he hit me with my own argument about reinterviewing the preacher.

  “You’d have to tell him why you’re asking,” the ADIC said, “and you know better than that.”

  Finnerty turned his head to the side. I followed his gaze to the mandatory portrait of J. Edgar Hoover, the black-and-white version showing the old bulldog in his heyday. Hoover’s eyes seemed to follow both of us as the assistant director turned back to me.

  “You did your job,” he said. “We’ve done our job. The White House doesn’t care about proof. The president will call Thompson into the Oval Office and ask her. If she had an abortion she’s history, but either way we’re out of it.”

  “What about the Abahd killing?” I decided it was time to bring up Robert Bennett and the diary, but before I could, Finnerty cut me off.

  “We’re on that already. Legal just got a Prince George’s County subpoena for your testimony. We’ll work it out with them, let you know when you’ll be needed.”

  “Work it out with them? I don’t think�
��”

  “Relax, Monk. There’s a bigger picture here, a whole lot bigger than the death of another defense lawyer. Prepare your report, include everything up to and including the point where you went back to see the judge. Attach an administrative section detailing what happened at Jabalah Abahd’s home, along with what you discovered in Brookston and Williamsburg. Have it on my desk by tomorrow morning.”

  I sent Lisa back to her desk to assemble the Thompson report, then called Gerard Ziff to confirm our regular afternoon meeting at the tennis club.

  “I was just about to call you,” he said. “I can’t play tennis today. I’ve got to drop my embassy car off for new tires, but I’ve got a better deal for you than tennis. You pick me up at the gas station, I buy you lunch at La Maison.”

  I smiled. A meal at the tres expensive French restaurant on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown was more than a good deal, it was a great deal.

  “You got it, Gerard. Tell me where and when.”

  “Twelve-fifteen. The 4200 block of Connecticut Avenue. Best Price, the place is called. I’ll be waiting out by the curb.”

  “I’ll be the hungry man picking you up.”

  “A bientôt,” he said, or that’s what it sounded like.

  But he wasn’t at the curb when I got there an hour later. Gerard was still inside, I could see him through the plate glass window.

  I pulled into the lot, past the huge inflatable display out front, a smiling ten-foot-tall balloon man with a tire under one arm and a sign on his cap that read Best Price—Everything for Less!

  A minute later Gerard was in the car with me.

  “You people get your tires here?” I asked him. “Surely you can do better than a gas station. And it can’t be for convenience, either. There’s got to be something closer to your embassy.”

  “Tell me about it. Some empty suit in Paris cut a deal with Best Price for tires and batteries. The gas station chain buys the tires directly from Michelin in France, charge us for putting them on the cars.”