Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(3)

He heard and saw nothing: nobody on the hillside. The truck that had hit them had vanished.

He whispered, “CeeCee. CeeCee, can you hear me?”

No answer.

One headlight was still glowing from the SUV, and he dug out his cell phone and called the local sheriff’s department—he had them on his contact list. He identified himself, told the dispatcher what had happened and that the incident might well have been a deliberate attack.

The dispatcher said deputies would be there in five minutes. “Be sure the emergency flashers are on,” Smalls told the dispatcher. “I’m not coming out of the weeds until I’m sure I’m talking to the right guys. We’ll need an ambulance; my friend’s hurt bad.”

When he got off the phone, he cradled Whitehead on his lap. The ambulance, he thought, wouldn’t be in time: it was, in fact, already too late for Cecily Whitehead.



* * *



—

THE COPS CAME, and an ambulance, and when Smalls was sure of who he was dealing with, he called to them from the hiding place in the weeds. They told him what he already knew: Whitehead was dead, had sustained a killing blow to the left side of her head, probably a tree branch coming through the driver’s-side window.

Smalls retrieved his government paper from the Cadillac as the cops and the EMTs took Whitehead up the hill in a black plastic body bag. Whitehead was put in the ambulance, but Smalls said he didn’t need one. “A bloody nose, nothing worse. Give me something to wash my face.”

The lead deputy asked who’d been driving, and Smalls said, “CeeCee was.”

“We need to give you a quick Breathalyzer anyway,” the deputy said.

“Yes, fine,” Smalls said. “I had a glass of wine before we left my cabin, CeeCee didn’t have anything at all.”

The test took two minutes. Smalls blew a 0.02, well below the drunk-driving limit of 0.08, although Smalls was an older man, and older men were hit harder by alcohol than younger men.

“Be sure that’s all recorded,” Smalls told the cop. “I want this nailed down.”

“Don’t need to worry,” the deputy said. “We’ll get it right for you, Senator. Now . . . did you see the truck?”

Smalls shook his head. “He had his high beams on, and they were burning right through the back window of my Caddy. It was like getting caught in a searchlight. I couldn’t see anything . . . And he hit us.”

The deputy looked down the hill. “She did a heck of a job driving. Another twenty, thirty feet, and you’d have gone over the edge and hit that gravel bar like you’d jumped out of a five-story building. Makes me kind of nervous even standing here.”



* * *



—

THE AMBULANCE LEFT for the Winchester Medical Center, Smalls following in a state police car. Whitehead’s death was confirmed, and Smalls was treated for the impact on his nose. It had continued to bleed, but a doc used what he called a chemical cautery on it, which stopped the bleeding immediately. The doctor gave him some pain pills. Smalls said, “I don’t need the pills.”

“Not yet,” the doc said. “You will.”

When he was released, the deputies took him aside for an extended statement, and told him that the Cadillac would be left where it had landed until a state accident investigator could get to the scene.

When he was done with the interview, Smalls called chief of staff Kitten Carter and arranged to have her drive to the hospital to pick him up. She said she would notify Whitehead’s mother and father of her death.

And when there was nothing left to do, Smalls asked to be taken to the hospital’s chapel. The police left him there, and Smalls, a lifelong Episcopalian, knelt and prayed for Cecily Whitehead’s soul. Less charitably, he had a word with the Lord about finding the people who’d murdered her. Then he cried. He finally pulled himself together after a while and began thinking seriously about the accident.

It had been no accident.

It had been an assassination attempt, and he thought he knew who was behind it. Justice, if not in a court of law, would come.

He said it aloud, to Whitehead: “I swear, CeeCee, I will get them. I’ll get every one of those motherfuckers.”

Whitehead hadn’t been particularly delicate, nor particularly forgiving: if she were already experiencing the afterlife, he had no doubt that she would be looking forward to any revenge—and the colder, the better.



* * *



—

KITTEN CARTER arrived at the hospital. She’d been on her cell phone for three hours by the time she got there. The first news of the accident would be leaked to reporters who owed her favors and who would put the most sympathetic spin to the night’s events.

“. . . good friends and political allies who’d gone to the cabin to plot strategy for the summer clashes over the health care proposals . . .”



* * *



—

THE LOCAL DEPUTIES turned the crash investigation over to the West Virginia State Police. The second day after the accident, an investigator interviewed Smalls, in his Senate office, with Carter sitting in. Smalls, with two black eyes and a broad white bandage over his nose, and dressed in a blue-striped seersucker suit with a navy blue knit tie, immediately understood that something was wrong.