Quantico Rules Read online

  “Do I really have to respond to that?” he demanded.

  I stared directly into his gray eyes. I turned away and looked out the window to my left. A family ran past as they tried to escape the downpour, but the two little boys went out of their way to stomp every puddle, their parents laughing too hard to scold them. Such simple lives, I thought. No Kevin Finnerty for them to worry about. No matter if I stopped the ADIC or died in the attempt, these people would never know the difference.

  “It could be a few days,” I said to the sheriff. “Maybe longer before we get the whole mess cleaned up.”

  “We still using the Hilton?”

  “It’s only money.”

  “Where do I meet you in the morning?”

  “I don’t know yet. Lisa and I have to talk to Brenda Thompson first. We need to clear up one or two things before we’re ready to start.”

  THIRTY

  It was almost five o’clock when Lisa and I flashed our creds at the armed courthouse guards and went into Judge Thompson’s chambers. We strode past Thompson’s clerk before he had a chance to react, tapped on the judge’s chamber door, and walked in on her. She looked up from her desk, her eyes wide.

  “Agent Monk,” she said. “Did we have an appointment?”

  We didn’t, I told her, then introduced Lisa. “You spoke with Agent Sands the other day on the phone.”

  The judge nodded, but I could see she wasn’t pleased to see my partner up close and personal. We sat in the matching leather chairs in front of her desk. I gave her a moment to relax, then went straight to the point.

  “You’ve been lying, Judge. To the president, and to the bureau in the form of your personal security questionnaire. To Special Agent Sands when she called you on it. To me when I came to see you.”

  Her mouth opened to interrupt, but I held up my hand.

  “Sarah Kendall wasn’t your aunt. She wasn’t terminally ill in 1972. She didn’t die until twenty years after you said she did.”

  “I didn’t say she was my—”

  “Please, Judge. Stop embarrassing yourself.”

  She swallowed hard. It was likely she’d seldom been spoken to like this, certainly never in these chambers, and never in her life by an FBI agent.

  “You were pregnant,” I said. “You went to Brookston to have an abortion.” I had nothing to lose by pretending I had admissible evidence of that. “You got butchered by someone in a back alley, had to go to the hospital. You used the name Jasmine Granger to get yourself patched up.” I paused. “And you’ve been lying about it ever since.”

  The judge began to rise from her chair, her eyes furious, but in the next instant she slumped backward. She exhaled, the sound like air coming out of a balloon, then stared at me with nothing left in her eyes but failure. She tried to look away, but I locked onto her eyes and wouldn’t let go.

  “You can’t imagine how much it shames me to admit this,” she said after a long moment, “but everything you say is true. I’ve been lying for a long time. I hoped to keep on getting away with it forever.”

  She stopped talking to stare at me.

  “How did you find out?” she continued. “How did you ever come up with the name?”

  “You wrote letters to your grandmother. You signed one of them ‘Princess Jasmine.’”

  “Princess Jasmine.” She shook her head. “I had a big imagination back then, but that was when I was a girl. Believe me, I was no princess down in Brookston. Just a terrified young woman who’d run out of choices.”

  “Jasmine Granger. Where’d the Granger part come from?”

  “From the church where I found Sarah Kendall and the work she was doing for girls like me. From a flyer on Reverend Johnson’s desk, announcing a monthly supper at the grange hall next door.”

  “Reverend Johnson and Sarah Kendall, that’s how you found the doctor.”

  Her shoulders lifted, her voice suddenly stronger. “I didn’t know what else to do.” She paused. “What else could I have done?” The question wasn’t meant to be answered.

  “I shouldn’t have had to find out this way, your honor.”

  “I wish you’d stop calling me that. I don’t feel very honorable just now.”

  “It’s time for the truth now.”

  Her eyes darted over my shoulder, as though she were hoping to get past me somehow and away from what I was digging for. Then the most famous district court judge in America exhaled slowly and sank back into her chair. She fiddled with her hair, at the scarf around her throat, and finally leaned forward and began to speak.

  “It happened,” she said, “a week before the end of my senior year at Berkeley.”

  She stared at a spot over my head and her voice leveled into a monotone.

  “It was a fund-raising party in San Francisco, at the Mark Hopkins Hotel. I’d worked as a political volunteer for two years, ringing doorbells, stuffing envelopes. My reward was an invitation to the party.”

  She closed her eyes, looked like a woman watching an old film in her brain. A movie she’d seen a million times.

  “Halfway into the evening I was introduced to a congressman, a great-looking man who acted like I was the most important woman he’d ever met. We had a couple of glasses of wine together, and the next thing I knew he had invited me upstairs to his room. I should have known better than to go. I was young, but not that young. I’d grown up with guys hitting on me, but it never entered my mind he would be like that.”

  Suddenly her eyes were wet, as she continued in a lower voice.

  “There was nobody else in his room, of course. They’d be along soon, the congressman told me, but I knew better. We had another drink, then another. After the second one he wanted a kiss. He came to my chair, pulled me up into his arms. I know how stupid it sounds now, but I kissed him back. I wanted to kiss him, and I did, over and over. My head was reeling with booze and lust, but I knew damned well I didn’t want what happened next.”

  The judge’s body appeared to shrink as she wiped at the tears on her cheeks.

  “He wrestled me toward the bed. I sobered up in a hurry, then yelled at him to stop, but he was much too strong. I started to scream but he clamped a hand over my mouth and nose, a hand so big I could no longer breathe. He used his other hand to tear my dress off, then used both hands on my underwear. He was crazy, in a trance almost, and I was afraid he might kill me.”

  Her words began to stumble, as though she couldn’t make herself say them.

  “He started behind me … my face in the pillow.… I never felt pain like that before.… I screamed with relief when he finally rolled me over, but he wasn’t through with me yet.…”

  Her breathing was ragged now, as though she were right back in that room with him.

  “I have no idea how long he took, but he did whatever he wanted to me for what seemed like hours, then got up and pulled his pants back on. Tightened his belt. Left the room without a single word.

  “I sat there on the bed for God knows how long, so stunned with shock I couldn’t even cry. I raged at myself for letting it happen, shouted into the mirror that I’d encouraged it to happen. I went home and showered until my skin burned, but I could still smell the son of a bitch on me three days later.”

  “What did the cops say?”

  She looked at me like I was crazy.

  “This was 1972, Agent Monk, thirty years before any semblance of equal justice. I was a college student, a black girl”—there was no mistaking the fire in that word—“and he was a member of the House of Representatives. I knew how it would go. His denials, the press conference that would focus on his good works and my obvious motive for extorting him.”

  Her voice was hoarse now.

  “I wouldn’t have had a chance! He’d go on to his next victim, I’d be labeled for life. He’d already raped me once, no way was he going to destroy the rest of my life as well.” She glared at me. “But he has, hasn’t he? He has ruined me. And you’re here to make sure of it!”

>   “You got pregnant?” I didn’t bother to hide the skepticism in my face. “He raped you and you got pregnant?”

  “I couldn’t believe it either, wouldn’t have known so quickly if I hadn’t been consumed by the possibility. But there was no denying what the doctor told me a month or so later. I fell apart, couldn’t stand the thought of waiting for commencement day, so I went home to Washington.

  “I went to my church here in D.C., the same one I’d been going to since I was a kid. I told Reverend Lewis—he died fifteen years ago—that I’d been raped, that I was carrying the rapist’s baby and I couldn’t live with that. He told me about Brookston, about the black church down there, and the unlicensed doctor who would help me. During the procedure I began to hemorrhage. Sarah Kendall took me straight to the local hospital.” Brenda Thompson looked at me. “And you know the rest.”

  Fresh tears rolled down her cheeks.

  “There isn’t a day goes by I don’t mourn what happened. That I don’t want to cry out at the injustice … my impotence in the face of that miserable bastard’s power. At his absolute certainty I’d never do a thing about it.” She glanced around her chambers. “And I keep fighting every day … doing what I can to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to somebody else.”

  “You said he was a congressman, Judge Thompson, but not who he was … who he is.”

  Her features hardened. “No, Agent Monk, not now, not ever. You people can no longer keep secrets … and you know what will happen when it comes out. I have no proof, nothing to hold up as evidence.”

  Now her words were as defiant as the look in her eyes.

  “I want to be on the Supreme Court more than you can imagine, but if the cost is ripping those wounds wide open for the public to gawk at, I won’t pay it. What happened to me has nothing to do with my qualifications. I’d rather keep the job I have than give that monster another shot at me.”

  “I can’t force you.”

  She stared over my head. Her shoulders sagged, and when she continued, her voice was barely louder than a whisper.

  “But it’s still the end, isn’t it? No matter what I tell you or don’t tell you, your report is going to end my nomination.”

  “The president already has our report of what we found in Brookston, not including what you just told me, of course. But you claim he’s said nothing to you about it. And your confirmation hearings couldn’t be going better. Unless something happens in the next two days, you could be home free.”

  “Home maybe, but not free. I’ll never be free.”

  “Another question. Why did you make it so easy for us? Why did you tell Agent Sands a story she could check out so quickly, discover your lie so easily? Why not make up something we could never uncover?”

  “Because you’re the FBI, that’s why.” She turned to Lisa. “For all I knew you already had what you needed to destroy my nomination. For all I knew, you were trying to trap me in a lie. End my nomination that way.”

  Still talking to Lisa, she said, “I was stunned to hear about what happened to you in Brookston, to you and Reverend Johnson. There hasn’t been a black church shooting in years. It makes me sick to think of it happening again.”

  Lisa nodded. I searched Brenda Thompson’s face for duplicity, for a sign of the same hopeless lying she’d done throughout our first interview, but saw nothing to indicate as much.

  “Even after what happened to your old roommate?” I asked her.

  “I’m not following you. Dalia Hernandez? You found Dalia after all?”

  She didn’t know. I could see it in her eyes. So I told her what had happened in Cheverly.

  “Dear God,” she said. “Dalia was murdered, too? How could I have missed that? How could I not have seen it somewhere?”

  I told her why she hadn’t. The name Jabalah Abahd wouldn’t have meant anything to her. She sat back, her eyes closed, then opened them and leaned toward me.

  “I know what you’re thinking. I agree the coincidence is clearly unlikely. But your conclusion is preposterous. You can’t be saying people are getting murdered because of me.” She sat straight up. Her eyes widened as she made the next leap. “Dear God, you’re thinking I did it … that I hired the killer!”

  I described Vincent Wax, the man in black who’d killed Abahd and Reverend Johnson. Who’d tried to murder Lisa as well.

  She sat back, shaking her head.

  “You know my record. How can you suggest I’d commit murder for a seat on the Supreme Court?”

  “Kevin Finnerty, our assistant director at WMFO. Do you know him?”

  “Of course. He runs your office, for God’s sake. How could I not know him?”

  “When’s the last time you saw him, or spoke to him?”

  “I don’t know … a few months ago, I think, maybe longer. Why? What’s Kevin Finnerty got to do with this?”

  I looked at her. She knew better than to think I was here to answer questions.

  “Other bureau officials, then. How much contact do you have with the Hoover Building?”

  “I have friends over there. The director called personally to congratulate me on my nomination.”

  “What about Robert Bennett? Rob Bennett.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Vincent Wax?”

  She shook her head.

  “What about Jerry Crown?”

  “Same answer. The name means nothing to me.”

  “You’re lying again, Judge. You do know Jerry Crown. He called you here at your chambers a week ago.”

  “Lots of people call my chambers, but I’m not the only one here, you know. I don’t speak to everyone who calls.”

  “You talked for nearly two minutes.”

  “I did not speak to anyone who identified himself as Jerry Crown.”

  Again I searched her face, her eyes. Again I saw no indication she was lying.

  “Maybe,” she said, “this would be easier if you just tell me what’s going on.”

  “Who else knows about what happened to you with the congressman? What you did down in Brookston.”

  “Nobody. Sarah Kendall, of course, before she died. My minister here in Washington, Reverend Johnson in Brookston, but they’re both dead, too. And the church doctor who did the abortion. I guess you’d have to include the doctor and nurses at the hospital who patched me up afterward.”

  “Your husband?”

  “What would have been the point of that?” She closed her eyes for a long moment, opened them again to look at me. “So what now? What am I supposed to do while you decide my future?”

  “I wouldn’t presume to say, your honor. All I do is report what I find. Whatever it means for you we’ll just have to see.”

  Back out in the Caprice and on our way over to WMFO, neither of us said a word until we were halfway there. Lisa was the first to break the silence.

  “I want you to promise me something, Puller. That we’ll find that congressman, the bastard who raped her. Not now, of course, but when this is all over.”

  I nodded. It would be interesting to see how macho he was with a pair of Vice-Grips around his nuts. My face flushed with anger as I thought about what the congressman had done, when I considered what Kevin Finnerty had in mind for continuing Brenda Thompson’s ordeal.

  I would need a second pair of Vice-Grips, I decided. There should be a few pairs of them in our tech room at WMFO. We could pick them up right now, when we stopped at the field office for the rest of what we’d need in the morning.

  THIRTY-ONE

  I made Lisa wait in the underground garage at WMFO while I went upstairs. I couldn’t allow her to be seen with me, and she’d be just as safe in the car. Even Kevin Finnerty knew better than to have Vincent Wax kill her in the FBI’s basement.

  Upstairs, I considered my first problem. I had a shopping list to fill, but it was only a quarter after six. Like every other field office in the FBI the place was still humming. Word of our suspension had to be the talk of the buildi
ng, and Finnerty’s order for us to stay away would have been made just as clear to our fellow agents as it had been to us. I didn’t have to go to my office on the third floor, which took some of the pressure off, but it still wasn’t going to be easy.

  I started at the tech room on the second floor. Not much danger getting busted down there where the techies lived. They never got the word about anything. Gordon Shanklin grinned as I came through the door.

  “Puller? What is this? A second visit so soon?”

  I went past him without a word, to a shelf against the nearest wall. I grabbed my radio code-changing unit and hurried toward another shelf farther down the way, where I selected a handful of miniature TV camera/radio transmitter assemblies and a single tiny microphone attached to a ten-foot length of black electrical cable. I selected a leather satchel from a collection of them on another shelf close by, stuffed the gear into it, and headed back out the door.

  “Sorry to be rude,” I told Gordon on my way by. “But you know how it is at the top.”

  I heard him snort as I started for my next stop.

  There was no doubt in my mind that Finnerty’s Mercury Marquis would be in the garage in the basement. The ADIC never went home before nine o’clock. And the car was there, I discovered when I stepped out of the elevator and into the garage. I didn’t bother to check on Lisa, sitting in my Caprice down the row. She couldn’t be anywhere safer.

  Code-changer in hand, I went through the motions of opening the trunks of three supervisors’ cars and pretending to test their codes, then moved to the ADIC’s Mercury next to the elevator. I went around to the driver’s door, opened it to get the keys to the trunk, but saw they weren’t hanging in the ignition. I scanned the seat, looked behind the visor, went through the glove compartment and the console between the front seats. Finally, I searched the floor of the car itself, but they were gone.

  I walked down the length of the garage to the car maintenance area, a large space that looked like a gas station without the pumps. Freddy Vitek was the night man this week. He crawled out from under a Ford convertible when I called his name, wiped his hand on a red shop rag as I told him what I needed. He stepped inside his tiny office, opened a wall-mounted case, and plucked a set of keys from the hundreds hanging on the hooks inside, then handed them to me without a word and went back to his Ford.