LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

hairline also wore glasses with heavy, black frames, the glasses being the main thing that distinguished him from his companion. For some reason, Emma could imagine these two at a hockey game, their faces painted, screaming in delight whenever a player was body-checked into the glass.

      The policewoman patted them down one-handed, her other hand on her sidearm while she did, then looked inside the car but didn’t search it. While she was inspecting the interior of their vehicle, the men slouched against the hood of their car, arms crossed over their chests, disgusted looks on their faces. After a brief discussion—and a lot of pissed-off body language—the men handed the officer their driver’s licenses. She ordered them back into their car and returned to her vehicle. Emma saw the man with the glasses slam his hand down on the steering wheel in frustration. Ten minutes later, a long time to do a simple check on outstanding warrants, the officer left her patrol car and returned the men’s driver’s licenses. As the Buick departed, the driver stuck his arm out the window and gave the cop the finger.

      The officer remained standing outside her patrol car until Emma drove up next to her. Emma powered down the passenger-side window of her car, exchanged a few words with the other woman, and the officer handed Emma the memory card from a digital camera.

      Emma wasn’t a particularly sociable person but she had friends everywhere.

      

      The shuttle from Reagan National to LaGuardia arrived at ten-thirty, and by eleven-thirty DeMarco was standing in the hallway outside Janet Tyler’s apartment. He rang the doorbell, and from inside the apartment, he could hear the commotion caused by a couple of kids responding to the bell and their mother telling them to settle down. He saw the peephole darken and then the door opened.

      A woman he assumed was Janet Tyler was holding a little girl in one arm, the girl about two years old. Clutching the woman’s knees was another little girl with big brown eyes and curly dark hair, and she was cuter than Shirley Temple. Tyler herself was slim and short, five-two or five-three, but unlike her dark-haired, brown-eyed daughters, she had blue eyes and blond hair. Her hair was tied back in a careless ponytail and there were food stains on her pink T-shirt. She had the frazzled appearance of a mother with two high-energy children born close to a year apart.

      “Ms. Tyler?” DeMarco said.

      “Yes.”

      DeMarco held up his identification and introduced himself.

      “Congress?” Tyler said.

      “Yes, ma’am. May I come in? I need to ask you a few questions about Senator Paul Morelli.”

      Tyler inhaled sharply, and DeMarco recalled that he’d gotten an almost identical reaction from Marcia Davenport. These women were afraid of Morelli.

      “I…I don’t have anything to say about the senator,” Tyler said. “I only met him once.”

      “You worked for him when he was the mayor. I’d just like to know—”

      “I’m sorry, but I can’t talk right now. I have to get my daughter to the doctor’s office.”

      The woman was a terrible liar. DeMarco was a good one.

      “Ms. Tyler,” he said, “if you don’t talk to me today, you’re going to be subpoenaed to testify before a congressional committee. You’re going to have to fly to Washington and you may be there for several days, at your own expense, until the committee gets around to hearing your testimony. If you want to avoid all that, I’d suggest you talk to me.”

      Tyler struck him as a timid person, not all that sure of herself, and he felt like a heel bullying her. But he needed answers.

      She closed her eyes briefly then said, “I have to get a neighbor to watch my girls. There’s a café across the street. I’ll meet you there in twenty minutes.”

      

      “These guys are connected somehow to the CIA,” Mary Tollier told Emma.

      When the U.S. Capitol police officer had taken the driver’s licenses from the two men in the Buick she had photographed the licenses, then dusted them with fingerprint powder and photographed them again. Emma then took the memory chip from the cop’s camera to a woman named Mary Tollier who worked at the DIA. Tollier had once worked for Emma, and thanks to Emma’s influence, she had ascended the bureaucratic ladder, coming ever closer to that shatter-proof glass ceiling. Mary Tollier owed Emma.

      “What!” Emma said. “Who are they and what do they do?”

      “The answer to both questions,” Mary said, “is I don’t know. The names on the licenses are phony. I ran their fingerprints, got nothing from any of the databases, but half an hour later I got a call from a very rude man at Langley asking why I was running those particular fingerprints. We traded insults and hung up.”

      “Thanks, Mary. Oh, Mary, I just thought of something. You’re a music lover. I have a friend in a quartet, and tomorrow they’re playing some stuff by this marvelous new Swedish composer. I can’t make it, and I was wondering if you’d like to have my ticket.”

      Emma would tell Christine that she had to use the ticket to bribe Mary to get information.

      Emma knew she deserved to go to hell for what she’d just done.

      

      Janet Tyler entered the café twenty minutes later as promised, and saw DeMarco sitting in a corner booth. She had changed out of the Gerber-stained T-shirt and combed her hair and put on some lipstick. She was a pretty, young mom—and a very nervous one.

      She took a seat across from DeMarco. “What’s this all about?” she said.

      “Would you like some coffee?” DeMarco said.

      “No.”

      “Okay. I know you worked for Paul Morelli in 1999. You were involved in some kind of zoning study, but you quit after only two months. I want to know why you quit.”

      “I didn’t like the job,” Tyler said.

       Terrible liar.

      “I don’t believe you,” DeMarco said.

      “I’m telling you the truth. I just didn’t—”

      “Did Paul Morelli attack you, Janet? Did he rape you?”

      Tyler’s eyes widened in shock but DeMarco couldn’t tell if she was shocked because he’d made an outrageous, untrue accusation against Morelli or if it was because he knew what Morelli had done to her.

      “No,” she said. “He never did anything to me. I just didn’t like the job and I quit. Why are you asking these questions?”

      Lydia Morelli had said something about Tyler’s fiancé, something to the effect that her fiancé had been used to silence her. That had been eight years ago and Tyler had kids, so DeMarco assumed that by now she had married the guy.

      “Who’s your husband, Janet?” DeMarco asked.

      “I’m not married.”

      “Then who’s the father of your children?”

      “That’s none of your business.”

      “Janet, I work for the federal government. How long do you think it’s going to take me to find out what I want to know?”

      “You bastards,” she said. “Why can’t you just leave us alone? What are you going to do? Take my children from me? Deport their father?”

      “Jesus, no,” DeMarco said. And what was she talking about?

      Tyler put her head in her hands and started sobbing, which made DeMarco feel even worse than he already felt.

      “Janet,” he said, “I’m not going to do anything to you or your kids. I just want to know—”

      “My fiancé’s name is Hussein Halas. He’s a Jordanian national and we’re

Скачать книгу