Mary said, “Patty, I’m thankful for you being there. What’s his temperature?” Her expression darkened further. “Well, no matter what happens, he has to take his meds. Okay? Tell him his dad and I will call again later.”
She hung up, angry. “Jesse refused two doses of his medicine, and he’s running a steady low-grade fever because of it.”
Potter felt himself tighten, and then he sighed.
“Look at it from his perspective. He’s a fifteen-year-old who’s been told he’s going to die unless he can get access to an insanely expensive treatment his government doesn’t believe in and won’t pay for. He’s trying to get some control over his life, and refusing meds is his answer.”
Mary tried to stay angry, but then she let it go, appearing more sad than convinced. “I don’t like being away from him like this. Every moment, it’s...”
“Did we have a choice?”
“No,” she said, and her expression hardened. “We didn’t. We don’t. It’s no use wishing we had the money any other way. How’s my doll looking?”
He went to the gun and flipped on the laser sticking out of the barrel. A glowing red dot appeared on the chart three inches above the printed crosshairs.
“Perfect,” he said. “You’re three high at a hundred meters, dead on to three hundred. Two turret clicks and you’re zero at five hundred.”
“I do like precision.”
“It’s everything,” he said, taking her rifle from the vise and setting it aside.
Potter picked up his own rifle. Green custom stock with a nice grip, the gun was also chambered in 6.5mm Creedmoor, but it carried a Leica sniper scope with an illuminated reticle.
When properly sighted in, Potter’s rifle was more than capable of handling a five-hundred-yard shot. He just wanted to make sure it would when the time—
The sat phone blinked and beeped before he could start testing the rifle.
It was a number he recognized, and he answered.
“Peter here,” said a male voice with a slight British accent. “How was the drive?”
“Just beat that storm coming.”
“Any trouble entering the country?”
“None.”
“I told you the passports and veterinarian papers were solid.”
“We didn’t even need them. You going to give us our assignment?”
“It’s all there, in the closet in the back bedroom. Everything you’ll need.”
Mary left the kitchen, heading toward the back bedroom.
Potter stayed where he was. “You’ll deposit the down payment?”
“As soon as you tell me you’re taking the job.”
“We’re here, aren’t we?”
“Just the same.”
Mary came back into the kitchen carrying a thick manila envelope. She’d lost several shades of color.
“I’ll call you back,” Potter said, and he clicked off. “What’s the matter?”
“Jesus Christ, Dana,” she said, handing him the envelope. “What the hell are we into now?”
Chapter 24
Handcuffed and wearing an orange prisoner jumpsuit, the only surviving member of Romero’s crew glared at the tabletop as Bree followed Ned Mahoney into an interrogation room at the federal detention facility in Alexandria, Virginia.
I was in an observation booth with U.S. Secret Service agent Lance Reamer and Capitol Police lieutenant Sheldon Lee.
“She still hasn’t said anything?” Special Agent Reamer asked.
“She’s asked for an attorney,” I said.
“Course she did,” Lieutenant Lee said bitterly.
Mahoney and Bree took seats opposite her. She raised her head, saw Bree, and acted as if she’d sniffed something foul. She had spiderweb tattoos on both hands and another climbing the left side of her neck.
“Your prints came up,” Mahoney said, sliding a piece of paper in front of her. “Lupe Morales. Multiple arrests as a juvenile. Four as an adult, for solicitation, drug dealing twice, and abetting an armed robbery. Looks like you did three years in the California Institution for Women at Lompoc for that one.”
“Eighteen months,” Lupe said, and she yawned. “I’ve asked for a lawyer. Twice now.”
“The federal defender’s office has been notified,” Bree said. “In the meantime, you can do yourself a whole lot of good by talking to us.”
She sniffed. “I’ve heard that one before.”
Bree showed no reaction. “The U.S. attorney is preparing to charge you with four counts of kidnapping, three counts of attempted murder, and two counts of firing on police officers in the course of duty. Oh, and co-conspirator in the plot to murder a sitting U.S. senator. I’m thinking life without parole times two, maybe more.”
“If not the federal death penalty,” Mahoney said. “The new administration’s big on taking that road whenever possible. Or hadn’t you heard?”
Lupe sat forward, her upper lip curled. “I’m guilty of nothing but being stupid and going along for a ride I shouldn’t never have been on. Know what I’m saying?”
“No, actually,” Bree said.
“Spell it out,” Mahoney said.
“Check my gun,” she said. “That little Glock? No bullets, and not because I ran out. It’s clean because I’ve never shot it. I didn’t shoot at no one. Never have. Never will. And especially no senator.”
In the booth, I put a call in to the FBI lab at Quantico and asked a tech to check her assertion about her gun. He put me on hold. As I waited for an answer, I heard Lupe denying knowing exactly why Fernando Romero had decided to drive across country from Oakland to Washington, DC.
“Only thing I knew is he said he was gonna set some things straight and make a pile of Benjamins doing it,” Lupe said. “I was just along for the ride.”
“Armed to the teeth?” Mahoney said.
“Not me. Like I said, that piece was all show.”
“Tell us about Senator Walker,” Bree said.
She shrugged. “Fernando hated her.”
“Enough to kill her?”
Lupe thought about that and then nodded. “But he’d have to have been seriously messed up on meth and Jim Beam and have her, like, show up at the door when he was all hating the world and shit.”
Mahoney said, “C’mon, Ms. Morales. Romero or his other man or you shot Senator Walker early yesterday morning from an empty town house in Georgetown.”
“The hell I did,” Lupe said, sitting up, indignant. “Fernando didn’t either, or Chewy. We might’ve hated Walker, but we sure didn’t kill her.”
“Romero confessed,” Bree said. “I heard him. So did two other police officers.”
“No way!”
“Way,” Bree said. “When you were out on the porch with the girls, when Romero and I were negotiating for time, he told me we had ten minutes and after that he didn’t give a damn, that little girls and Mommy were going to start dying, quote, ‘just like that bitch Betsy Walker did.’”
“So?” Lupe said. “That’s no confession. He was just, like, comparing it.”
“That’s not the way I heard it.”
“You hear it any way you want, that don’t make it so. Was Fernando happy Walker was dead? Totally. He went out into the damned snow and did a dance when he heard. But he did not kill Betsy Walker. None of us did. Early yesterday morning? When she was shot? We were stuck in a shithole motel ’cause of that ice storm. The Deer Jump Lodge or something in, like, Roanoke. You go on and check. We gotta be on security cams there. People can’t be two places at once.”
Bree started to say something but Mahoney beat her to it.
“We will check, Ms. Morales. But again, if you weren’t here to kill Senator Walker, why did you and Mr. Romero and this Chewy come to Washington in the first place? And armed to the teeth?”