The Fixer (The Fixer #1)(52)

“Vivvie—”

“Or what if my dad told someone he was worried about getting caught? What if he got freaked out that the phone was missing, and he told someone? Pierce, or . . . or . . .”

Or whoever else was involved.

It had been easy for me to believe that Vivvie’s father had killed himself. With the phone missing, he had to have known things were unraveling. He’d lost his job at the White House. Maybe he even hated himself for hurting Vivvie.

What I hadn’t thought about was the fact that Vivvie’s father wasn’t the only one who stood to lose something if he got caught. I hadn’t thought about the fact that he might have been able to identify the other people involved.

He put a bullet in his own head, William Keyes had said, staring straight at me. And maybe Vivvie’s father had.

But now that Vivvie had raised the issue, I couldn’t help thinking that maybe—maybe—he hadn’t.





CHAPTER 40

I got to school late. In English, I could feel Henry’s eyes on me across the room. In physics, he sat down at my lab table. The day’s experiment was on centripetal force.

“You asked if I could find out where my grandfather was the night before his heart attack.” Henry’s attention seemed one hundred percent focused on the knot he was tying around a tennis ball. His expression gave nothing away: the very portrait of the dedicated student. “He was at a fund-raiser for the Keyes Foundation.”

Keyes. As in William Keyes. Adam’s words echoed in my head. The president is rarely the most powerful person in Washington.

“There were over four hundred attendees,” Henry said, testing the security of his knot. “Not to mention the waitstaff. It wouldn’t have been that difficult to slip something in my grandfather’s drink.”

Poison the justice. Send him to the hospital. Have the White House physician declare it a heart attack. Have him operate. Twice. By the time the justice died, the poison would have been out of his bloodstream.

The perfect murder.

In my mind, I could still hear Vivvie telling me that she needed having gone to Ivy with her suspicions about her father to have made a difference. To mean something.

“Any idea who those four hundred attendees were?” I asked Henry, my eyes locked on the instructions for our lab.

“My mother got me a list.” Henry’s eyes flickered toward mine, only for a second. “She doesn’t know why I requested it.”

He won’t tell her, I thought, reading his expression. Not until he knows more. In his position, I probably would have done the same thing.

There were times when I thought Henry and I were a lot alike.

Glancing up to make sure that we hadn’t attracted the attention of the teacher—or anyone else—I reached into my bag and pulled out my copy of the photograph from Raleigh’s office. After a moment’s hesitation, I slid it across the table to Henry.

Ivy had told me to stay out of it. But Ivy had told me a lot of things over the years.

Henry had a right to know.

Across from me, he unfolded the picture and studied it for a few seconds, then set it aside and returned his attention to our project.

“Any idea where it was taken?” he asked.

“No. I can identify five of the men.” I indicated which five.

Henry weighed the tennis ball and made a mark in his notebook. “The one next to the president is John Thomas Wilcox’s father.”

That made six.

“And how many of those men are on the list you got from your mother?” I asked Henry. How many of them might have had the opportunity to poison Theo Marquette?

Henry didn’t have to consult his list. He held up two fingers.

I considered the men in the photograph, setting aside Vivvie’s dad and Pierce. The Hardwicke headmaster. The minority whip. The president. The man behind the scenes.

“Which two?” I asked.

Henry arched an eyebrow at me, and I answered my own question. Looking down at the photograph, I pointed first to one man, then the other.

William Keyes. That was easy. Given that we were talking about a Keyes Foundation gala, that went without saying.

My heart beat viciously in my chest as I slowly moved my finger to my second guess. Not the headmaster. Not John Thomas’s father. My finger hovered over the president’s face-you-could-trust. After a long moment, I pressed my finger down.

I wanted Henry to tell me that I was wrong.

He didn’t.





CHAPTER 41

At lunch, Henry was nowhere to be seen. He wasn’t at his usual table. Asher hadn’t seen him. Even my short acquaintance with Henry Marquette was enough for me to know that he operated according to a series of predictable algorithms. He did what he was supposed to do. He was reliable. Responsible.

Missing.

I found him in the computer lab. The door closed behind me seconds after I stepped into the room. Henry barely glanced away from the screen.

“I’m trying to narrow down a time frame on the photograph,” he told me. “Look at this.” He pulled up two digital images. “Congressman Wilcox shaved his mustache off last spring, so wherever the picture you found was taken, it’s recent. Six months ago or less.”

I processed that. Six months ago or less, Judge Pierce and Vivvie’s father had been in the same place at the same time.