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Chapter 9

Washington, D.C.

Dr. Samantha Owens

Sam waited for Fletcher in Nocek’s office, watching the late-breaking news story that had finally leaked its way into the media. The anchors looked shaken; even though they’d known for at least an hour, the media had kindly waited for the wife to land in D.C. and get to her husband’s side before they broke the news.

Congressman Peter Leighton, Democrat from Indiana, was dead, a suspected victim of the morning’s attack.

Sam was always amazed at how thorough the media could be when they wanted. Granted, Leighton was a public figure, and as such, packages were built in the event of an untimely death. But considering he was just one of four hundred and thirty-five serving members, there was quite a bit of material that had been collected on him.

The minute the news was out, the attack itself became secondary. Every station was giving their own eulogies of the congressman.

Leighton had been a classic dove for most of his career, using his own service record as an example of why the United States should stay out of foreign domains. He’d flip-flopped about a year prior, started fighting for the troops, for them to get more money, better equipment and better services when they mustered out, damaged and broken. A seismic shift, brought about by the death of his son, Peter Leighton, Junior, a battalion commander in the Army who’d gone to Afghanistan and been decimated by a roadside IED.

Grief changes you. Sam understood that. It mutates your soul, your emotions, your thoughts. Green becomes yellow, the sun disappears from the sky, and your lifelong convictions no longer seem to matter. As she watched the multitude of clips of the congressman defending his change of heart, she understood completely. He hadn’t done enough to keep his own child secure and protected, so he’d launched a campaign to keep the remainder of the soldiers on the ground and in the air safe. Too bad he hadn’t been fighting for them earlier. It might have meant a different outcome for his own son, not to mention countless others.

At least the media didn’t have the text message yet. Once that slipped out, the wolves would circle and all bets would be off. The congressman would stop being lauded and start being blamed.

And maybe he should. If the text was real, authored by the perpetrator behind the attacks, there was something to be discovered in the congressman’s very publicly private world.

Sam muted the television. The message was unmistakably clear. What she was trying to ascertain was why, if the attack was directed at him, had so many others been included.

Two hundred sick, some clinging to life. Two other deaths, random, people wholly unrelated to the congressman. She felt bad that their deaths were being overshadowed by the demise of someone more famous.

Even one death is too much.

Planes were flying overhead, the high-pitched roaring whine of the F/A-18s unmistakable. Helicopters chattered. There was talk of shutting down the bridges. There was a curfew in place, yet there were still news stories about chaos and absolute fear reigning in some neighborhoods. There’d even been a couple of reports of looting, down near Anacostia. But the congressman’s face was taking up ninety percent of the airtime.

And they still didn’t know what had caused the turmoil.

There were hundreds of people working on figuring out what the substance was. She knew that. But it was disturbing that nearly twelve hours after the event, they still had nothing more than speculations to go on.

That told her something unique was happening.

Sam shut the television off and went over her notes again. Fletcher had called to tell her that, yes, the congressman had been on the Metro this morning. But in looking at the maps, he was on the Blue Line, and it had been confirmed that the other two casualties had taken the Orange Line right through Foggy Bottom early this morning.

It made sense that people who were immunosuppressed would have a more severe reaction. The congressman was an asthmatic, so any irritant could trigger an attack. Without the proper medication to arrest the attack, he could very easily die, as he had.

The other two deaths weren’t as cut-and-dried. She had notes on them from the initial investigation Fletcher and his team had done when they’d come into the morgue. The only thing they had in common was the fact that they were smokers.

Different parts of the city, different ages, different worlds, all affected by a single event. D.C. was a giant ecosystem, with thousands of moving parts, and each world was unique unto itself. Like species that couldn’t intermingle and breed, the people of D.C. found their comfort zones and rarely, if ever, deviated from course. Debutantes hung out with debutantes, jocks with jocks, politicos with politicos, lawyers with lawyers, lobbyists with lobbyists, teachers with teachers. There might be a Sadie Hawkins Day every once in a while, and a debutante would get it on with a politico, but that generally ended up in The Washingtonian, disguised as a society wedding, and the aftermath was full of fireworks and lawyers and mistresses and front-page news.

Sam pulled the charts of the two other victims and flipped through the pages. She had nothing better to do.

The first was a forty-year-old woman named Loa Ledbetter. She owned a market research firm on L Street, lived in the Watergate. She rarely used the Metro to go to work—she made off-site calls to clients, so she normally drove—but her car was in the shop.

The second was a nineteen-year-old junior from American University, Marc Conlon. He lived in Falls Church, and took the Metro into town for school daily. He’d switch from the Orange Line to the Red at Metro Center and scoot out to the Tenleytown/AU stop, then take the shuttle bus onto the AU campus. On Tuesdays, he had an 8:00 a.m. history class, so he made sure to get into town extra early, to have a coffee and beat the crowds.

Sam said a little prayer for her own student, Brooke Wasserstrom, who at last check was holding steady in the intensive care unit. Sam hoped that her quick actions meant Brooke had a decent chance of survival, but without knowledge of what they were dealing with, all they could do was treat, and pray.

A congressman, a student and a market researcher.

Three strangers, brought together at the hand of a madman. What had they done to deserve death as a punishment?

Now, Sam, you know that this isn’t a healthy line of thinking. Random things happened. There aren’t always answers as to why people have to die. Why their number has suddenly come up. They were obviously in the wrong place at the wrong time. She could fully comprehend that. She knew that they weren’t connected in any way law enforcement could use their deaths to track their killer. A terrorist attack is a random event.

Random. Chosen without method or conscious decision.

She hadn’t chosen for her family to die. That had been random, too.

She shook them away, the voices of her dead, and refocused.

A random act.

Then why did someone send a text to Congressman Leighton blaming the morning’s events on him?

The only real evidence they had was the text. It could be the key. Leighton could be the key.

Not Dr. Loa Ledbetter, a small brilliant redheaded beauty with a gaping slit in her chest, nor Marc Conlon, too young to even have grown fully into his bones, his sagittal suture not entirely fused.

Quit personalizing, Sam.

What Sam was interested in was why those three, out of all the people exposed and the two hundred exhibiting symptoms, were the only ones who died.

Ledbetter was dead on arrival at GW, after being found collapsed on the floor of the ladies’ room at her office by one of her staffers.

Conlon died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. He’d gone into cardiac arrest at the top of the stairs of the Tenleytown Metro.

Neither had a history of lung disease; that was reserved for the congressman. Neither exhibited signs of illness, their initial blood work had been normal, and neither had a history of ill health.

Their families could give more information. Sam was itching to talk to them.

But this wasn’t her investigation. She’d been brought in to do a task, used for her discretion and talent, not to run off trying to explain the unexplainable.

Except she knew every puzzle had a solution.

Someone wanted Leighton to feel responsible, yes, but dead? Perhaps that was just chance. Perhaps that was a fluke. And there was absolutely nothing that said the text-sender was the same person who’d indiscriminately put a foreign substance into the air ducts at the Foggy Bottom Metro and made so many people ill. It could just be a pissed-off constituent who wrongly blamed the congressman for a completely random event.

There she was, back to the arbitrary again.

Fletcher had brought her into this investigation when he asked her to post Leighton. He wasn’t dumb; he knew she’d press for more information, for a chance to help. She wasn’t constricted by the rule of law here. She was a private citizen. She’d sworn a different kind of oath, one that she believed in, one that bound her to care for the sick, to have special obligations to the public she served. She could do whatever she chose, so long as she worked within the bounds of her ethics and didn’t break the law.

She was starting to feel a bit tingly.

She debated for exactly ten seconds before writing down the addresses of the other victims, folding the paper into halves, then quarters, and stashing it in the pocket of her trousers.

It was damn good timing, too, because she’d barely raised her palm from the linen when Dr. Nocek came into the room, followed by Fletcher.

“You ready, Doc?” Fletcher asked. He looked worried and rumpled and tired. His beard was just starting to make its appearance, and lent him a vaguely menacing air. Next to the taller, more collected Nocek, he looked a bit like a brawl just waiting to happen.

Sam gathered her bag and sweater. “I’m ready. How are things on the Hill?”

“Fucked.”

That’s all she got. Nocek raised an eyebrow in her direction, and she responded by giving him a warm hug. “I’ll see you soon. We’ll have dinner.”

“I would like that very much,” he said, and she sensed the sadness in him. Nocek was a widower, not fully used to going home alone in the evenings. On a day like today, after all the hoopla, the fear and adrenaline, having only ghosts to talk to could be hard.

She squeezed his arm and said, “Call me if you need anything,” then followed a glowering Fletcher from the room.

The longest day she’d had since she left Nashville was finally drawing to a close.