The Inner Circle - Brad Meltzer [122]
“What, Beecher? You gave Nico the sheet?”
“Of course not. In the rush… we were so excited… I think I left it.”
“You didn’t leave it, Beecher. He took it. Didn’t you see Silence of the Lambs? He absolutely took it—which means in your quest to figure out who’s messing with the President, you gave the full story to the mental patient who once tried to assassinate one!”
I try to tell myself that Nico doesn’t know that the note was for Wallace, but it’s drowned out by the fact that there are only two types of people who ever come to see Nico: fellow crazies and desperate reporters.
“You better pray he doesn’t have access to copiers or scanners,” Dallas says, reminding me exactly what’ll happen if Nico puts that sheet of paper in the hands of either of those two groups.
I look downhill, checking for Clementine. She’s gone. In her place, all I see is Nico and the calm, measured way he said thank you when I left. He definitely took it.
“Don’t tell me you’re going back to St. Elizabeths,” Dallas calls out, though he already knows the answer.
“I have to,” I tell him as I pick up speed. “I need to get back what Nico took from us.”
84
It was something that the one with the ungroomed beard—Dallas—it was something Dallas had said.
Squinting through the front windshield as the morning sun pinged off the piles of soot-capped snow, the barber couldn’t help but notice the sudden increase in the number of the neighborhood’s liquor stores and laundromats. Of course, there was a barbershop. There was always a barbershop, he knew, spying the hand-painted sign with the words Fades To Braids in big red letters.
Kicking the brakes as he approached a red light, he didn’t regret holding back at the cemetery. He was ready. He’d made his peace. But when he heard those words leave Dallas’s lips, he knew there was still one box that needed to be checked.
Twenty-six years ago, he’d acted in haste. Looking back at it, though, he didn’t regret that either. He did the best he could in the moment.
Just as he was doing now.
As the light winked green, he twisted the wheel into a sharp left turn, fishtailing for a split second in a mass of gray slush. As the car found traction, Laurent knew he was close.
This was it.
He knew it from the moment he saw the building in the distance.
He knew it as he felt the straight-edge razor that still called to him from his pocket.
He knew it as he saw—parked at the top of the hill—the silver car that Beecher had been driving.
And he knew it when he spotted, just next to the main gate, the thin black letters that spelled out those same two words that had left Dallas’s lips back in the cemetery.
St. Elizabeths.
The greater good would finally be served.
85
It takes me nineteen minutes to drop Dallas at the Archives, eleven minutes to drive his silver Toyota back to St. Elizabeths, and a full forty seconds for me to stand outside, working on my story, before I push open the front door of Nico’s building.
“I… hi… sorry… I think I left my notebook upstairs,” I say to the guard, feigning idiocy and holding up the temporary ID sticker that she gave me a little over an hour ago.
The guard with the bad Dutch-boy hair rolls her eyes.
“Just make it quick,” she says as a loud tunk opens the steel door, and I take my second trip of the day through the metal detector.
“Don’t worry,” I tell her. “I’ll be lightning.”
Trying hard to stand still, I fight my body as it follows the rhythmic sway of the rising elevator.
An hour ago, when I was standing here, I was holding Clementine’s hand. Right now, I lean hard on that thought, though it does nothing to calm me.
As the doors rumble open and I step out, the same black woman with the same big key ring is waiting for me.
“Forgot your notebook, huh?” she asks with a laugh. “Hope there’s no phone numbers in there. You don’t want Nico calling your relatives.”
I pretend to laugh along as she again opens the metal door and leads me down the hallway, back to the day room.
“Christopher, can you help him