Deadly Cross (Alex Cross #28)(73)

We accepted the offer. Price glanced at his watch; Breit was looking at his phone. I checked the time, saw it was 7:23.

Claudette Barnes, the vice president’s chief of staff, entered the room carrying files and looking harried. She greeted us, shook our hands, and thanked us for coming.

Vice President J. Walter Willingham strode into the room a few moments later wearing black wingtip shoes, navy-blue suit pants, and a crisply starched white shirt with the collar open. At almost the same time, Graciela poked her head out of the back room and he nodded to her.

“Good of you to come, Dr. Cross,” Willingham said, shaking my hand, holding my forearm, and smiling in that mesmerizing way he had.

“Thank you, Mr. Vice President,” I said. “We just wanted to keep you abreast of the investigation. As you requested.”

“I did indeed,” he said.

Willingham went to Ned next, shook his hand, and said, “Do you have him, Special Agent Mahoney? Kay’s killer?”

“No, sir. Not yet. But we stumbled onto a few irregularities in Alabama having to do with Kay’s estate that we thought you should know about.”

“Irregularities in Alabama?” he said with mild surprise as Graciela entered and set his usual breakfast before him.

“Montgomery, sir,” I said. “Evidence of fraud and coercion going back years, maybe decades.”

Barnes said, “Fraud on whom? And by whom?”

“On your late wife by her second cousin Robert Carson Jr. and others.”

The chief of staff’s jaw dropped at the same time the vice president set his fork down. Then they both said, “Bobby Carson?”

Willingham looked at Barnes. “I told you Bobby was bad news and you wouldn’t listen. Not like his old man at all. I told you that fifteen years ago.” Then he shifted his gaze to us. “I worked with Bobby at Carson and Knight in Montgomery for about six months after I left the district attorney’s office and was getting ready to run for governor. I was not impressed by him, but Claudette worked with him longer.”

“Six years,” Willingham’s chief of staff said, still shocked by the news.

Mahoney said, “Carson was abetted by the head of West Briar and Kay’s psychiatrists there.”

The vice president gently pounded his fist on the table, looking at his chief of staff and his Secret Service agents. “I knew that too! There was something shifty about those two. Didn’t I always say so?” Agent Breit nodded, said, “The entire time Kay was down there, sir.”

Agent Price and Barnes agreed.

Vice President Willingham told us that after the divorce, Kay’s mother’s death, her most recent nervous breakdown, and her commitment to West Briar, every time he made inquiries about her health and well-being, he was stonewalled by her doctors.

“I wasn’t asking for particulars, just concerned, you know, having been through it with her before,” Willingham said. “The old doctors at West Briar would always share information and ask me questions. Those two would not tell me a thing. I mean, where is the benefit of being me these days?”

He glanced at his chief of staff, then sighed and shook his head. “Tell me what they did to her, Bobby Carson and those mental snake-oil salesmen.”

We laid it all out. When we finished, Willingham said, “My God, Bobby Carson found it in himself to use Kay so he could destroy that beautiful land to make a buck.”

Barnes said, “I imagine it was a lot of bucks, JW.”

“With those quacks doping her out of her mind to do it,” the vice president said, peering at me and Mahoney. “Explain how you figured all this out.”

His chief of staff looked at her phone. “You have an eight-fifteen meeting, sir, with the White House counsel.”

“Who will make me sit and stew, Claudette,” he said brusquely. “Please continue, gentlemen. How exactly did you figure this out?”

Mahoney said, “Part of it was luck, sir, and Dr. Cross’s sense that there was something not quite right about Bobby Carson and Kay’s psychiatrists.” Willingham looked over at me. “Good for you. Great minds think alike.”

“Thank you, Mr. Vice President,” I replied. “But the real credit goes to Kay’s childhood friend Althea Lincoln.”

Willingham suddenly grew wary. So did Barnes, who stopped scribbling notes as she said, “You talked to Althea Lincoln?”

“We did.”

“She actually talked to you?” the vice president asked with his eyebrows raised. “Because as far as I know, that woman has not uttered a word in years.”

“Except to your late wife, evidently,” I said.

“And us,” Mahoney said.





CHAPTER 84





DEMPSEY’S ALL-NIGHT DINER SERVED breakfast around the clock and was something of an institution in Anacostia, historically the blackest and poorest neighborhood in Washington, DC.

Calvin Dempsey opened the place shortly after returning from World War II, and it had not been closed since except for three hours on the night of Dempsey’s wake in 2004 and three hours on the morning of the late owner’s funeral.

Dempsey had a brother who served time for armed robbery, and he’d had a soft spot for ex-cons, often offering them their first jobs out of prison. During his time, the food had been uniformly excellent. Since then, the tradition of hiring men and women on parole had continued, but the quality of the cooking had ebbed and flowed, and so had the diner’s fortunes.