“Just take it easy from now on.”
She rewarded them with another smile and let Mercer lead her away. Out of earshot she said, “We don’t have a car and you have no idea where the hospital is. I’ve stuck with you this far, but I am not kidding when I say my arm is really hurting.”
“Trust me,” Mercer said. “We’ll be on our way in no time.”
News vans were starting to pull onto the campus but were being held back behind a second police cordon. Mercer and Jordan passed through this one without being questioned and were soon in another parking lot where students were aimlessly milling around. He approached one kid sitting in a parked car with its engine running. The door was open while he listened to a live news broadcast from a radio reporter standing about twenty feet away.
“How would you like to be a hero?” Mercer asked when he was within speaking distance.
The student looked up at them. “Huh?”
“A friend of ours was just taken to the hospital, but we weren’t allowed to ride in the ambulance with her and we’re hoping you can give us a ride.”
“Where’d they take her? Presbyterian?” the kid asked. He was clean-shaven and dressed in an expensive overcoat, although his jeans were ratty and his shirt was wrinkled. Mercer guessed the coat was a recent Christmas gift. The white late-model BMW station wagon was likely a hand-me-down from his mom.
Mercer shook his head. “No, they mentioned another hospital. I’m sorry, we’re not from around here.”
“Presbyterian is the closest, but there’s also St. Agnes about ten miles farther east.”
“That’s the one!” Mercer crowed. “St. Agnes. That’s where they took her. The ambulance guys said something about an orthopedic specialist on staff there.”
“Please,” Jordan said, giving him a pout with promise.
Any doubt the kid had vanished in her liquid dark eyes. “Sure,” he said. “Um, hold it a second, I need to clean up a little.” He shoved used takeout wrappers and water bottles from the front seat into a plastic FoodLand bag and tossed it into the back cargo area. Mercer helped situate Jordan in the front seat and got her belted, explaining to the kid, who said his name was Alex, that she hurt her arm in the stampede outside the science building.
A minute later they pulled out through Hardt College’s main gate, and thirty minutes after that Jordan was explaining to an emergency room doctor at St. Agnes Hospital that she had slipped on some ice in her driveway and she thought she had broken her arm. When the subject of the attack on the local school came up, she and Mercer pled ignorance. Two hours later, Mercer delivered Jordan, in a fresh white sling, into a newly rented Hertz SUV he had ordered sent to the hospital parking lot.
She was on enough painkillers that she didn’t respond when he asked her if she wanted to get anything out of her car. He figured she shouldn’t be alone for the next couple of days, but Mercer wasn’t about to hang around Kellenburg, Ohio, playing nursemaid, so he just let her sleep and turned the Chevy in the direction of his home near Washington, D.C. When she was up to it, he’d get her back to pick up her car somehow.
He placed a mental wager that by the time he arrived at his brownstone, the FBI would have made the connection between the parallel attacks by running the registration for the vehicle he’d abandoned on the campus pond.
He made a call to an old friend, hopefully to forestall a trip to the Hoover Building. Being proactive, rather than reactive, was a philosophy that had always served him well.
8
By a quirk of fate, Philip Mercer still lived just outside of Washington, D.C., in the urbanized suburb of Arlington. He’d been there since soon after earning his PhD in geology from Penn State and accepting a job with the U.S. Geological Survey. That particular bit of employment hadn’t lasted long. He was too independent-minded for government work and soon branched out as a consulting geologist for private mining concerns. His first major contract netted him more money than he’d ever thought possible. He liked money as much as the next guy, but it had never been his prime motivator. Mercer thrived on the challenge rather than the reward, which explains why he had left the USGS so quickly. Not knowing what to do with his newfound wealth, he’d listened to the landlord in the brownstone where he rented a one-bedroom apartment. The man had convinced him that real estate was the only true measure of long-term wealth, and had sold Mercer the six-unit building at what truly was a very good price.
What the previous owner had failed to mention was that being a landlord, even to just five other families, was as thankless a job as a Mumbai sewer shoveler. His first 1:00 a.m. call about a leaky faucet convinced him to hire a management company, even though they sopped up 20 percent of the building’s revenue. It mattered little. The other tenants knew he owned the brownstone, which somehow gave them the right to bother him at all hours of the day or night, for repairs both big and small.
After six months of near-constant pestering, Mercer had finally had enough¸ and he converted the brownstone into a single-family dwelling, of which he was the sole occupant. His life had taken some wild turns since then, but the brownstone had remained his one safe harbor, and he had kept to a vow made all those years ago that he’d sleep on the streets before ever becoming a landlord again.
He steered the rental onto one of the few remaining original residential streets in Arlington, right across the Potomac from the nation’s capital. Mercer smiled when he saw the car parked in his customary spot at the end of the block. He’d just taken delivery of it the day before heading out west to teach the class in mine rescue techniques. It was a Jaguar F-type hard top in black with black interior and the hottest wheels he could find. This was the V8-powered S version with an eight-speed automatic transmission that could smoke any manual off the line and had the added bonus of not deadening a driver’s clutch leg in D.C.’s notorious traffic. He had been toying with a replacement for his venerable XJS for a while, testing Porsches, Maseratis, and some of the slinkier BMWs, before settling on another of England’s premier sports cars. This particular model was as sleek and beautiful as its namesake South American jungle cat and was a fitting tribute to its ancestor, the E-Type Jag, which set the standard in the 1960s for all supercars that followed.
Jordan Weismann had awoken several hours earlier but had been quiet, her head resting against her window, her gaze fixed on the nothing they had passed. Mercer could tell her pain was back and that she was resisting taking anything for it. Though he himself would have done the exact same thing, he thought her stubbornness especially pointless. There was no shame in taking a couple of painkillers.
“We’re here,” he announced. It was after rush hour, so the the block was relatively quiet. He found a spot for the rental behind an incongruously parked school bus.
What gave Mercer even more joy than the beautiful sports car was the three-story brownstone. It was a sanctuary from the world, a space he had created where outside pressures did not exist. Usually once he passed through the front door and into the towering foyer he could forget everything but finding his center once again. With Abe’s death so fresh on his mind and the questions swirling about the motive for his murder and the identity of the people behind it, he knew he would find little solace here — but it still felt good to be back.
He stepped out from the truck. The air in Washington was twenty degrees warmer than it had been in Ohio, and there wasn’t a bit of snow on the ground. Despite the proximity to the city and the high-rises that surrounded the little residential enclave, the evening smelled like spring. He helped Jordan from the SUV. Her mood, if anything, had soured further. It seemed as if it wasn’t just the physical pain of her broken bone, but the emotional toll of losing Abe as well as the adrenaline hangover of nearly being killed. Mercer predicted from his own experiences that she would not eat tonight and would sleep for the next twelve hours, but then wake up as ravenous as a bear coming out of hibernation.