"Is this a robbery?"
"No."
"Who are you? All the money's in the bank."
"I told you it wasn't a robbery."
"Then what do you want?"
Holliday sighed. Back to square one.
"We want to know what went on at the town hall meeting."
"Can I sit down?"
"Certainly," Holliday said with a nod.
Jefferson's living room was a slum. Newspapers were everywhere, Chinese take-out containers and pizza boxes were scattered around on tables and chairs, and the long, gold-colored couch had crumpled clothes draped over the back. He popped the empty shell of the Pizza Pop into his mouth, licked most of the goop off his hand and arm, then wiped off the rest with an old shirt hanging over the couch. He sat down. The television, a huge flat-screen on the opposite wall with equally massive speakers, blared out the Brain's most famous expression: "Are you pondering what I'm pondering, Pinky?"
"Turn it off," said Holliday, raising his voice over the sinister musings of the hairless mouse. Jefferson manipulated the remote and the Brain cut off in midponder.
"The town hall meeting," prompted Holliday.
"The senator got shot. The shot made him vice president. He got lucky; I got lucky."
"How many pictures did you take?"
"Lots."
"What does that mean?"
"Maybe two hundred or so. It's easy with digital."
"What camera?" Peggy asked.
"Nikon D90."
"How were you shooting? Single-frame or video?" The D90, Peggy knew, was one of the very few single-lens-reflex cameras capable of shooting something as complex as a full-length feature film. It had already been used to shoot more than one television commercial.
"I was shooting single frames in the beginning. Establishing stuff-you know, crowds, a few local big guys 'cause they want to feel important. You know. For the speech I went to video. That's how I caught the shot so well, the one of the senator and his mom. I just isolated that single frame and sold it."
"Where's the rest?"
"On my computer."
"Get it," Holliday said.
The computer turned out to be a Sony Vaio Z with a gigantic 358-gigabyte hard drive. Peggy gingerly picked up the assorted garbage on the coffee table in front of the couch and carried it to the kitchen. She came back a moment later with a stricken look on her face.
"It's a war zone in there," she whispered to Holliday. "There are things growing in the sink and there's a nest of little spiders in the cutlery drawer."
"Fruit flies, too," said Jefferson, overhearing her comment. "I got a real problem with them, as well. I don't know where all the damn bugs come from." He frowned. "Maybe I should call an exterminator or something."
"Buy some Venus flytraps," muttered Peggy
"Show me the pictures," said Holliday.
Jefferson brought up a file and opened it. He began running through the pictures he'd taken. The first several dozen were taken from somewhere in the town hall parking lot and showed various individuals arriving. There was nothing of particular interest until Jefferson took up a position along with several other photographers in what had once been the orchestra pit. From that position he took a series of panoramic shots of the audience and then turned his attention up to the stage as Senator Sinclair appeared and took his place behind the podium.
"Go back," said Peggy, looking over Jefferson's shoulder. "Five frames or so."
"Sure." Jefferson clicked back through the pictures.
"There," said Peggy, "there's your man." The photograph showed a man in his early thirties, blank-faced, white and beardless. He was dressed in chinos and a red nylon, quilted ski jacket, and was sitting on the far right of a middle aisle. He didn't look anything like the classic, wild-eyed jihadist. He looked like he worked as a checker at a Piggly Wiggly store and Peggy said so.
"Just the kind of freak the senator's been talking about," said Jefferson. "He was right enough about that."
"Run the pictures ahead," said Holliday.
Jefferson did as he was told. Twenty frames further on Holliday stopped him. "This is the moment he gets hit." In the photograph Sinclair was halfway through a clockwise pirouette, thrown backward away from the podium, almost pushed to the floor by the impact. The camera swerved, searching through the audience for the shooter, then went back to the prostrate senator, sprawled on the floor, left hand clutching his right shoulder.
"Back, slowly," Holliday instructed.
Jefferson went back through the shots, back to the moment when Sinclair began to spin and fall.
"Stop."
Jefferson stopped.
"There's the problem," said Holliday. "Our friend the Dutch Arab is sitting to the right of the stage. With Sinclair facing the audience he should have been hit on the left, not the right. And if he was shot from the right the force of the impact would have turned him counterclockwise, not clockwise. Not to mention the fact that this man Aknikh was sitting below the senator. The bullet's trajectory would have been up, not down. He would have been pushed off his feet and backward by the shot, not straight down."
"Sounds like a lot of Kennedy-conspiracy gobbledygook," snorted Jefferson.
"A lot of that gobbledygook, as you call it, still hasn't been logically answered," Holliday said.
"So he wasn't shot by Aknikh?" Peggy asked.
"He couldn't have been," answered Holliday. "He was definitely shot from above and from the left."
"The balcony," said Jefferson.
"What balcony?"
"There's a balcony in the town hall. It's used for storage now."
"Then he wasn't the shooter," Peggy said. "The whole thing was a setup."
"It looks that way." Holliday nodded. He turned to Jefferson. "Who else has seen these photographs?"
"A guy from the FBI came around and said he had a warrant to impound them all as material evidence. He asked me if I had copies but I said no."
"You lied?" Peggy asked.
"They're my pictures, aren't they?" Jefferson huffed.
"They may be your death warrant," said Holliday. "If I were you I'd hop in that new Porsche of yours and get the hell out of town."
"Why? I haven't done anything wrong. I have my rights."
"Maybe they'll put that on your tombstone," said Holliday. "The fact is, people in high places are laying in a cover-up and you and your pictures are a loose end. These people snip off loose ends without even thinking about it."
"Take his advice," said Peggy. "Pack your bags and run like hell."
"Kate Sinclair had a script all along," said Holliday as they drove away. "First the Pope, which gets the vice president to travel to Rome, then the VP gets killed and then her son plays the wounded martyr."
"And now he's the VP," said Peggy.
"I've met Kate Sinclair," said Holliday, his tone grim. "She'd never go to all this trouble to wind up settling for second-best. The script doesn't have an ending… yet."
They were less than a mile out of town when they were pulled over by a red-and-gold West Virginia State Police cruiser. Holliday waited for the inevitable; he had only his own identification and no papers for the old pickup truck. When they ran his name through the computers, all hell was going to break loose.
As the trooper approached, bundled up in his uniform parka, Holliday rolled down his window. The trooper bent down and looked inside the car. The man had a hard, lean face, his eyes hidden behind aviator-style mirrored sunglasses.
"Afternoon," said the trooper. Out of the corner of his good eye Holliday saw the cop's partner approaching Peggy's side. A woman. The female trooper rapped on Peggy's window with the knuckle of her index finger. Peggy rolled down the window.
"What's the problem?" Holliday asked.
"No problem, Colonel Holliday." He lifted up his hand and shot Holliday in the chest with an X3 Taser. In the passenger's seat Peggy was already going into convulsions. Within twenty seconds they were both unconscious.
PART THREE