CHAPTER 21
After the shoot-out at Justice, the press began to look at the sordid mini-dramas that led up to it. Someone was leaking information to reporters and most of it was accurate. Although Warfield disliked leaks and the fact that nothing could ever be kept private in Washington, he was not unhappy about this one. To Washington Post reporter Bob Roberts, Quinn became a personal crusade. He began his research as far back as Quinn’s work on the New Jersey gambling legislation and his political success that followed. He reconstructed the evening of Quinn’s roast and Karly Amarson’s murder, only some of which was speculation on his part.
When Roberts reported the deal Fullwood made with Senator Abercrombie the Senate launched an investigation, and by the time it got under way, the General Services Administration notified Abercrombie’s real estate firm, as landlord for the FBI office in Taylorville, that it was terminating the lease.
The GSA fired its man who had conspired with Abercrombie and the FBI arrested him. Abercrombie received the bad news about the lease cancellation from his sister, who called him at his office in Washington late one afternoon. She also told him the banks were initiating foreclosure proceedings. Abercrombie’s staffers found him dead in his office the next morning. There was no note. At first it was reported as a heart attack but the autopsy revealed an extreme overdose of Seconal.
Fullwood continued his denials right up to the beginning of the Senate hearing, when he was asked whether he and Abercrombie ever had a conversation in which the Senate’s termination of Lone Elm and the FBI’s leasing of office space from Abercrombie were linked in any way.
“Hell, no!” Fullwood yelled.
Then the committee attorney played a video which an FBI agent identified as one found in Abercrombie’s office after his death. The conversation between Fullwood and Abercrombie was played for the committee, and for the world on C-SPAN.
Fullwood’s lawyer requested a recess. Before the hearing resumed the next morning, the lawyer met with the committee chairman and counsel and told them Fullwood was going to submit his resignation to President Cross that day. But if Fullwood thought that would end it he was mistaken. He left Washington in disgrace and returned to his home state, where the next Wednesday federal marshals arrested him at noon at his home. When they marched him out the front door, remote-broadcast trucks from the national and local networks lined the street. A federal grand jury indicted him a week later.
Warfield arranged a memorial service for Leroy Mitchell, the plumbing contractor for whose death he felt responsible. Reporter Roberts was there. He drew on the irony of Leroy’s wife’s attempt to comfort Warfield in his anguish over Leroy’s death. Warfield put an envelope in her hand when he left the service that day. When Mona opened it, the crinkled photo Warfield had taken from Leroy’s truck was inside with a heartfelt letter from Warfield.
Congress soon after passed legislation that recognized Leroy Mitchell for his service to the United States and awarded his widow one million dollars.
Within a couple of months after Austin Quinn shot himself, the cable news shows removed the sensational Breaking News graphics that had used up the lower third of the screen, but even then the 24/7 interviews showed no signs of slacking off. News anchors created endless phrasings of the same questions and the Pentagon brass, politicians, nuclear scientists and psychologists appearing with them looked for different ways to answer. It was as if the two groups, the questioners and the answerers, existed for the sole purpose of supporting each other.
Ana tried to shut it all out — the endless rhetoric, the re-living of it all, the if-onlys — but she wasn’t there yet. She had run the emotional gamut from denial to grief to acceptance of her fate. Now she was free again and in the process of reclaiming her life. She needed the closure that only facing Quinn could bring. She’d asked Warfield to go with her.
“You can see him now,” the desk attendant said. As she and Warfield followed the white-haired assistant down the echoing hallway, Ana thought of the hospital where she had her tonsils out when she was ten — the plaster walls, the white fish-bowl light globes hanging by a wire from the high ceilings, the small once-white tile hexagons that covered the floor. But there the similarities ended. In this place was a potpourri of odors that was more of death than of life. The air was still. The few staff people around didn’t seem to have anything to do next.
The hall widened into a circular sitting area that was vacant except for a man in a wheelchair. A black and white television mounted on the wall ran an old Seinfeld show, its contemporary flavor in stark contrast to the place. The man in the wheelchair gave no indication he knew anyone had joined him. Or that the television was on.
“We told him you were coming but you never know what he understands. You all want me to roll his chair out into the yard?” the attendant asked.
Ana and Warfield glanced at each other as they came to realize this was the man they had come to see. Ana touched the fingers of her right hand to her lips and drew an audible breath. She wanted to excuse herself. There’s been a mistake. Please forgive me. But there was enough left of the man she’d known, even with this white hair, the black-ringed eye-sockets, that she couldn’t deny him. She couldn’t just walk away.
“Yes. Yes, please.”
In the courtyard, Warfield remained standing and Ana sat at the lawn table across from Quinn’s wheelchair. The vacant eyes that rose to meet hers may have flickered recognition but she couldn’t be sure. His hair didn’t completely hide the scars and pink flesh left from the gunshot wound and surgery. A thread of drool had stained the white tunic he wore. His left hand, knotted into a misshapen fist, lay still, dead, as if an attendant had brought it out and placed it there. Quinn’s eyes drifted to the hand, perhaps, Ana thought, to question why it failed to reach out as he willed it to. Ana had to force herself to look at this once-proud man who had been her lover; who only a short time ago sat at the table with the world’s most powerful.
Sooner than she had planned to leave, Ana knew she could stay no longer. There had been so many victims, so much waste since that black day in Atlantic City when it all began, long before she even knew Quinn. Now here she sat before the man responsible. He had betrayed everything precious and loved and held sacred by those who believed in him. She looked once again into the empty eyes and wondered whether the bullet spared any of the brain cells that accounted for memory.
She rose and squeezed his hand in hers, and after a few moments nodded to Warfield. As they walked away she knew she would never return. Warfield glanced back at Quinn as they left, and was almost certain he’d seen Quinn looking directly at him before turning his eyes away.
Months after Seth’s capture, in the spring when cherry blossoms defined the Washington landscape, Warfield watched from the front row of the courtroom with Joe Morgan as Seth stood before the United States District Judge James Piller for sentencing, a ragged scar on Seth’s neck showing above his shirt collar. The jury had earlier found him guilty on all of the many counts against him and found for the death penalty. The judge could elect to reduce the sentence to life without parole and Seth’s attorneys had fervently pleaded for that.
The court had appointed lawyers of Middle Eastern heritage for Seth to avoid any appearance of prejudice by his attorneys. Warfield figured they had coached Seth on respectful behavior before the court, especially now at sentencing.