Alex Kava Bundle - Alex Kava [412]
However, when he glanced at Dr. Patterson’s face, she was watching him and not Morrelli.
CHAPTER 47
West Potomac Park
Washington, D.C.
Maggie stopped at the drinking fountain and took long, slow gulps. The afternoon had turned unseasonably warm for November. She hadn’t been far into her run when she peeled off her sweatshirt and knotted it around her waist.
Now she pulled the sweatshirt loose and wiped the dripping sweat from her forehead and the water from her chin as she scanned the surroundings. She looked up and down the Mall, watching for the woman she had talked to earlier, who had given her a long list of instructions but failed to include a single description of what she looked like.
Maggie found the wooden bench on the grassy knoll overlooking the Vietnam Wall, exactly where the woman told her it would be. Then she put a foot up on the bench’s back rail and began her leg stretches, something she seldom did after running, always feeling like she didn’t have time. But this, too, had been requested, as well as the strict instructions to wear nothing that would give her away as a law enforcement officer: no FBI T-shirts, no bulging holsters, guns or badges, no navy-blue. Not even a baseball cap or sunglasses.
Maggie wondered—and not for the first time—what good it would do to talk to someone so paranoid. Chances were, she’d get some delusional perspective, some skewed vision of reality. Yet she felt fortunate that Cunningham and Senator Brier had found someone willing to talk. An aid in Senator Brier’s office had tracked the woman down, and although she had agreed to meet Maggie, she had insisted on remaining anonymous. The cloak-and-dagger game didn’t bother Maggie. As long as this woman, an ex-member of Everett’s church, could provide a view of Everett that Maggie knew she’d never find in any FBI file. And certainly a view she’d never get from her mother.
High school kids outnumbered tourists, scattered all along the sidewalks, hiking up the Lincoln Memorial steps and winding around the bronze sculptures of the Korean Veterans and Vietnam Women’s Memorials. More field trips. Wasn’t that why Emma Tully had been at the monuments the other day? November must be prime time for school field trips, though the educational significance seemed to be lost on most of them. Yes, other than the students there were very few tourists.
Then Maggie saw her. The woman wore faded blue jeans, too loose for her tall, thin frame, a long-sleeved chambray shirt and dark aviator sunglasses. Her long brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and Maggie could see that she wore little, if any, makeup. A camera hung from her neck and a backpack from her shoulder while she stopped and reached with paper and pencil to do a rubbing against the Wall.
She looked like any other tourist, a family member completing her journey and paying homage to a loved one, a fallen soldier. The woman took three rubbings before she came over and sat on the bench next to Maggie. She started pulling out of her backpack a sandwich wrapped in wax paper, a bag of Doritos and a bottled water. Without a word, she began eating, looking out over the park and watching. For a minute, Maggie wondered if she had been wrong about this being her mysterious contact. She took another look at the tourists at the Wall. Was it possible the woman had changed her mind and not come?
“Do you know anyone on the wall?” the woman asked without looking at Maggie while she sipped her water.
“Yes,” Maggie answered, expecting the question. “My uncle, my father’s brother.”
“What was his name?”
The exchange was casual, an everyday occurrence between two complete strangers sitting on a park bench in front of the one monument that seemed to touch every American’s life somehow. An everyday exchange and yet so very clever. No way to mistake the details of this question.
“His name was Patrick O’Dell.”
The woman seemed neither pleased nor especially interested and picked up her sandwich again. “And so you are Maggie,” she said with a slight nod, taking a bite and keeping her eyes