True Allegiance

“Because the president has a vendetta against my husband, Mr. Blatch. You may be a lousy bastard and a vile little rodent, but you’ll at least do your research before you smack him.”

“And what do you want in return for this tip?”

“I want to know twenty-four hours before you run with anything. Mostly, I want to know about his phone records.”

Blatch guffawed. “And how would I get those, exactly?”

“I figure you have your ways. You had to track down Dianna Kelly somehow. And those reports of yours on the call times were quite detailed, as I recall.”

“Clever, clever, Mrs. Hawthorne. Or may I call you Ellen?”

“No, you most certainly cannot. Do we have a deal?”

“Only if you give me the exclusive reaction.”

She nodded curtly. “You have my promise.”

He laughed. “And I assume it’s worth more than his?”

“That’s what I’m asking you to find out,” she answered, getting up from the table.

Blatch came through. Within five hours, he’d tracked down Brett’s cell phone number and call log. Most of the calls went to Ellen, he said—a revelation that made her uncomfortable, given that with his access to the logs, he could presumably track her calls, too. But there were a few that looked out of order. He was still tracking them down. The last phone call, aside from his call to Ellen, went to an apartment in Washington Heights. He’d gone over there and knocked on the door, but nobody had answered.

She asked him the address; she typed it into her cell phone as he dictated.

“Oh, and one other thing,” he said. “The phone isn’t totally dead. It’s going straight to voice mail because nobody’s picking up, but the phone company tells me that the phone is on. That means I can track location.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s moving around. The last time I checked, he seemed to be up by the bombing site.”

“Thanks,” she said. “Keep me updated.”

“I will,” Blatch said. “Got my best guys on it. If he’s with some floozy, you’ll be the second to know.”

As soon as Blatch hung up, Ellen grabbed her coat and headed to the door. Blatch may have been stopped by a closed door. But Ellen Hawthorne had had enough.

The apartment in Washington Heights did seem to be empty. At least nobody answered Ellen’s knock. She didn’t have the brute strength of her husband—she wasn’t about to go around knocking down doors, not with her increased media profile since the Border Battle, as everyone in the press seemed to be calling it. Instead, she knocked on the building manager’s door and told him she smelled the gas on in the apartment. Thankfully, Ellen noticed, he was drunk. He looked her up and down, decided she wasn’t a criminal, and handed her the key. “Come back when yur done,” he slurred. She nodded childishly and headed for the stairs.

When Ellen entered the apartment, she was surprised at the pictures: a slim, middle-aged black man wearing the taquiyeh. How did Brett know this guy?

Someone had searched the place—books were strewn haphazardly all over the floor, and the bookshelves had been flipped over, torn down to the ground. It wasn’t until she searched the bathroom that she found Hassan.

He was facedown in the bathtub. Someone had stuffed towels under the doorway to prevent the smell of decomposition from alerting the neighbors to his death. His face was blue, bloated, swollen, white-edged. His eyes were open, staring at the drain. The water was red with his blood. His throat had been slashed.

She noted her own reaction to the body—she wasn’t even fazed by it. El Paso had done something for her reactions to brutality, she thought grimly.

She knew enough not to touch him—the police would be suspicious enough about the situation, and the last thing she needed was to leave forensic evidence all over the crime scene. But she did notice that the blood in the bathroom wasn’t relegated to the bathtub. They’d slaughtered him like a pig, all right, but the blood trail began at the bathtub, then made its way up toward the mirror. He apparently tried to get to something at the mirror even as he bled out, then slipped and fell back into the already-full bathtub.

Ellen stepped carefully over the puddle of thick, greasy blood and, using a piece of Kleenex, carefully opened the mirror cabinet. At first, she noticed nothing out of the ordinary: bottles of aspirin, ibuprofen, vitamins. But something had led this small, wiry man to spend his last moment on the planet stretching for what was inside.

She began opening the bottles one by one. When she got to the aspirin, she paused—a bloody thumbprint marked the top. She tilted it over. Out poured a dozen pills… and a thumb drive.

On the way out of the building, she slipped the key under the manager’s door. Then she called the police and left them a tip about the body of a black Muslim man in Washington Heights.