She said nothing, just stared blankly at the side wall of the ambulance. A single tragic tear fell from her left eye. “My dad is dead.”
And when I saw the brokenness and rage in her eyes, I had a chilling thought.
Maybe Sevren had been right.
Maybe he had won after all.
109
Eight days later
Tessa and I were staying in the spare bedroom in Ralph and Brineesha’s basement so we wouldn’t have to be near the house where Sevren Adkins and Paul Lansing had died.
Right now Ralph was following up on a lead that Lebreau might be in the DC area, and Brineesha was shopping with their son Tony, so Tessa and I had the house to ourselves.
I checked my watch: 1:22 p.m.
Cheyenne had come home from the hospital at 1:00 and we were leaving in ten minutes to see her.
Tessa was downstairs getting ready.
This would be the first time they were going to see each other since the shooting.
I’d visited Cheyenne every day except for the two days Tessa and I were in Wyoming. Even though Cheyenne had invited Tessa to the hospital and had sent half a dozen notes telling her how sorry she was about her father, my stepdaughter had declined to see her and instead simply requested that I ask Cheyenne to read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
I assumed it was Tessa’s way of telling Cheyenne that she was some kind of monster, a female Hyde, and it seemed vindictive to me, but Cheyenne readily agreed to read it. “Anything I can do to help,” she’d said. So, two days ago, after I’d read the story myself to understand the context of what was going on with Tessa, I delivered the book to Cheyenne.
It’d taken some time to piece together what happened that night, and there were still some gaps, but here’s what we knew: after hacking into Lansing’s lawyers’ website and getting Paul’s phone number, Sevren had lured him to the scene by sending a number of distress text messages that supposedly came from Tessa’s phone claiming she was in danger, that the killers from this week had her, and NOT to call the cops or her dad, but to please come help her!
It’s not easy to mask the origin of text messages but Sevren was smart and had done it well.
Considering that Paul was an ex-Secret Service agent, it wasn’t surprising to me that he’d come armed and ready to save his daughter.
It still wasn’t exactly clear who’d fired the first shot-Sevren or Paul, but Sevren had orchestrated the shootout, no doubt knowing that it was likely either Paul would kill Cheyenne or she would kill him-or Sevren might have planned to kill them both. Either way, it would have devastated both me and Tessa. And I couldn’t help but think that if Cheyenne had not been there, the shootout would have been between Tessa’s father and me.
After Paul’s death, Vice President Fischer sent Tessa a personal note expressing his condolences and explaining that indeed Paul had been the one to save him six years ago. For security reasons Paul had been told never to share that information, and the VP asked Tessa not to blame her dad for misleading her, and from what I could see, she had taken that to heart.
Despite my early suspicions, Paul had only wanted what was best for his daughter and had fought to protect her every chance he had-first when she was a baby, and now when she was a young woman. Knowing that he really had cared for her seemed, more than anything else, to be helping Tessa deal with his death.
Lien-hua, in her evaluative profile, postulated that Sevren had been telling the truth when he claimed that he hadn’t come to the house to kill Tessa. “He wanted you to tell her that Paul was dead as a way of controlling you, of hurting you both,” Lien-hua explained. “Killing Tessa would have only ended her suffering. Even though in the end you cornered him and it looks like he resorted to suicide, I don’t think that was his original plan.”
“What was his original plan?” I asked, though I anticipated her answer.
“We’ll probably never know.”
If it had been to end his life, as it turned out, my bullet had helped him along.
So.
Now.
Tessa still hadn’t come up from the basement. I decided to give her five more minutes.
While I waited, I spent my time trying to think of specific things I could say that might encourage her, that might help quiet some of the malice she was harboring toward Cheyenne.
Margaret Wellington hadn’t gotten over what she’d seen in the DVD that had been left in the trunk of her car eight days ago.
It wasn’t footage of her dog Lewis being slaughtered as she’d feared, in fact, after Sevren’s death, the task force had found Lewis in the backseat of Sevren’s car, drugged but okay.
Thankfully.
Thankfully.
Lewis was okay.
But still, the videotaped images had been ghastly and disturbing.
The DVD had contained videos of seven of Sevren’s victims: Twana Summie screaming as the two chimpanzees attacked her, Mollie Fischer lying unconscious in the back of the van, Chelsea Traye struggling to escape a shallow grave in the body farm. And four other victims who still remained unidentified.
But to Margaret, some of the most unsettling footage was at the end of the DVD. It wasn’t video of another victim but of her lying asleep in her own bed. The video had been recorded from inside her bedroom.
He’d been there, in her room, watching her. Standing over her as she slept.
He’d even leaned close, filming only inches from her face, and she’d never known, never even suspected a thing.
It shook her deeply. The man had violated the one place she felt most safe and he had stained it with his presence, leaving her feeling powerless and vulnerable-most likely exactly what he’d wanted.
She parked in the underground garage across the street from the Capitol building, picked up her briefcase containing the documents she was going to give to Congressman Fischer, and left the car.
But she couldn’t shake her thoughts of the DVD.
Why her?
Why had he snuck into her house?
She could only guess that it was because they had a history together-she’d been the agent in charge of the task force in North Carolina that had been tracking him when he drove off the cliff. He’d left a body in her trunk then, and now, through the DVD videos, had left a trunk full of figurative bodies.
All an elaborate, twisted way of showing off.
How many nights was he there? Standing by your bed, watching you sleep?
She strode down the hallway of the Capitol toward House Minority Leader Fischer’s office and assured herself that Sevren was dead and he was not coming back. It was over.
But as she walked, she tried not to think about the one remaining fact that no one was talking about: there was no actual proof Sevren was the one who’d taken the video of her lying asleep in her bed.
Tessa was finishing with her eyeliner and thinking about what she was going to say to Detective Warren, when Patrick tapped on the bathroom door.
“Raven, it’s me,” he called. “Almost ready?”
She could tell he was speaking loudly and she was thankful. She still had hearing loss in her left ear. The doctors weren’t sure whether or not it would be permanent.
But that was the least of her worries.
“Just a sec,” she said.
Too much had happened in the last two weeks, just way too much to deal with-the crime spree, the custody case, her dad’s death.
The day after Paul was killed, Patrick had tried contacting people who might have known him, but not even his lawyers had a list of his relatives or emergency contacts. In the end, Patrick had arranged for Paul’s body to be flown back to Wyoming and he and Tessa had flown out as well. They buried her dad in a small cemetery near his cabin in the mountains with only a few local townspeople in attendance.
“Tessa?” Patrick urged from outside the bathroom door. “I told her we’d be there by 2:00.”