SITTING AT THE VANITY OF her apartment bathroom, Ariadne Stupenagel looked in the mirror and hesitated with her signature red lipstick next to her mouth. She knew how to apply a good foundation to hide the little lines around her eyes and lips; that the proper application of blush covered the tiny veins on her cheeks and nose, and a revolving account at Privé hair salon in the Soho Grand Hotel “kept the gray at bay.”
Still, she knew what was beneath the hair color and makeup, just as she knew that under the formfitting blue dress she’d decided on for court, the underwire bra and support girdle belied the fact that gravity and time were taking their inevitable toll. “Ah, Sam, look what the years did to me,” she muttered in a low voice.
“What was that, honey?”
Her fiancé, Gilbert Murrow, poked his head out from the walk-in closet, peering at her curiously through his round, John Lennon–style glasses. He was trying to grow a Vandyke, complete with soul patch, to look “more hip,” but such transformations were generally beyond him, especially when he was also wearing his standard office attire, which featured a plaid vest, suspenders, and a bow tie.
“Nothing, baby, just talking to myself,” she replied with a smile.
Gilbert looked as if he was about to say something, or was trying to think of what he should say under the circumstances, but then gave up and disappeared back into the closet. She bit her lip. Nerd or not, she loved him. Maybe more so because, while he sometimes fretted that his over-the-top girlfriend would wake up and discover he was, in his words, “a boring old pencil pusher in the District Attorney’s Office,” she’d never met a less pretentious or more intelligent man. She didn’t think he was boring at all; he shared her love of early punk rock music, foreign films, seedy jazz clubs, and smoky blues bars. And what he lacked in experience in bed, he more than made up for in enthusiasm. However, she knew he was feeling a little insecure or confused about what he should be doing in regard to her grief over Sam Allen.
After the meeting at the White Horse Tavern, she’d gone home and told Gilbert what Sam had said about Chechnya and the upcoming congressional hearing. She’d left out the part about being former lovers. But whether he caught something in her voice or look, or he was so in tune with her, he guessed there was more than what she’d said. “How did you and Allen meet?” he’d asked quietly. He tried to sound offhand, but she knew he was steeling himself against yet another revelation about some former flame.
Ever since they met, Stupenagel had not tried to hide her hedonistic past from him. It would have been difficult anyway, because a couple of her conquests, including sybaritic assistant district attorney Ray Guma, worked in the DAO. When he’d declared his love for her, Gilbert said that he didn’t care about her past; whether this was true or not, she’d still been upfront with him. But for some reason this time, the truth was reluctant to come out. “We were friends a long time ago.”
“Friends?”
The question angered her, but she quickly realized that her reaction was probably because she was feeling guilty. She told him the truth. “We were lovers, but like I said it was a long, long time ago. He’s been married for more than twenty years, and I haven’t heard from him in at least that long. He came to me because I’m a journalist; there was nothing else to it.”
Gilbert blinked, but then just nodded. “Okay. Um, it’s always good to see an old friend . . . even if it’s just business.”
As usual, Stupenagel’s heart melted whenever her “little man” tried to be brave and hide his jealousies. In fact, his insecurities were sort of a turn-on, which was what she was thinking when she wrapped her arms around him and looked down into his light-blue eyes. “It’s just business, Murry Wurry. Sam and I were mostly friends who occasionally romped around in the hay, but you’re the only man I want in my bed and in my life. Okay?”
Gilbert had winced. “Okay, but did you have to say ‘romped around in the hay’? I’ve got a bad visual.” Then they’d both laughed and gone to bed, where she’d done her best to allay any fears that he was not her one and only.
Well, except that one brief moment in mid-romp when you flashed back to Nairobi and the lean, hard body of Captain Allen, she thought as she faced herself in the mirror.
Three days later, everything changed. She’d been writing a story about underage sex trafficking–related murders in Manhattan when she got the call from a friend who worked at the Casablanca: Sam Allen was dead. “I overheard the room service manager say it was suicide.”
Stunned, she’d thanked her friend and hung up before bursting into tears. But as she regained her composure, Sam Allen’s earnest face and voice took over.
“These aren’t just any blackmailers. . . . I’ve been told in no uncertain terms to let it go until after the election. . . . If something were to happen to me, I’d want someone to look in on Jenna. . . . These are pretty nasty people, but they’re counting on their scheme to keep me quiet . . . who knows, maybe I’ll get run over by a bus on my way to the Capitol.”
She scowled. His words weren’t those of a man contemplating suicide. He was worried about what his family would be put through if the blackmailers made good on their threats, but mostly he was angry. She knew the man, even after twenty years; he’d been fighting mad, not one who was giving up.
Then her own response had come back at her sounding like prophecy. “I don’t like it, Sam, anybody willing to blackmail the acting director of the CIA would probably stoop to just about anything.” And so they had; they’d stooped to murder. She’d shoved her sorrow back into her heart and replaced it in her brain with fury and a lust for revenge. They weren’t going to get away with it; not on the pages of her newspaper, and not with the justice system. She’d hurried out of the apartment, calling Marlene on the way, and then stormed into Karp’s office, only to find that he was already on the trail of the killers.
On the way to Orvin that afternoon, she had not been able to shake the feeling that Sam had known what was coming. That’s why he’d made sure to remind her about the cabin on Loon Lake and asked her to look after Jenna Blair. His prescience had saved the life of the woman he loved, though it had cost Stupenagel a bullet in the shoulder that still caused her a lot of pain. Typing with one hand while she healed, she’d transferred her anger into her stories and fought with her emotions to be a journalist, not the friend and ex-lover.
Still, sometimes, in the dark of night, with Gilbert gently snoring next to her, she would get up and wander out onto the apartment balcony to cry. She wept because a great man had been sacrificed for the evil desires of lesser men. She cried for Sam’s wife and sons, and for Jenna Blair. Then she sobbed for a young journalist and a brave soldier who’d shared more than a bed . . . and for all the years that had passed since.
For eight months she’d alternated between tears and anger. Just the night before, she’d cried again. Thinking about what she expected to happen in the courtroom that morning, she relived the times she’d spent with Sam, then thought about how he had died and broke down. This time, however, Gilbert awoke and found her on the balcony. She expected him to fumble around in his insecurity for what to say, but he just came up and held her close. Then he took her by the hand and led her back to their bed. “Everything is going to be okay in the end, and if it’s not okay . . .” he said as she lay her head on his shoulder and let her tears drip down onto his chest.
“. . . it’s not the end,” she finished. They both loved the Brazilian poet Paulo Coelho and she found that particular line of his comforting as she drifted off to sleep. In the morning she’d awakened thankful for having loved and been loved by such fine men as Sam Allen and Gilbert Murrow.
Looking back at the mirror, Stupenagel scowled at herself. Sam Allen was in the grave, and she was worried about the fine line between just enough foundation and eyeliner, and trying not to look like an aging woman covering up the passage of time. She expertly applied the lipstick and used a tissue to blot the excess. Looking down at the perfect crimson image of her lips on the paper, she sighed, and then neatly folded it and placed it and the lipstick in her purse.
Standing, Stupenagel walked into the living room, where she saw that the morning’s New York Times was still on the coffee table where she’d left it. Her eyes went to the main headline, FORMER HOSTAGE TELLS JURY WHITE HOUSE LIED ABOUT CHECHNYA, and the subhead below it, DA admits female hostage his daughter.
Although not allowed to attend the trial because she was a witness, Stupenagel had heard about the previous day’s testimony from Marlene over a glass of wine at the Epistrophy wine bar on Mott Street in SoHo. A big day for the prosecution, and yet she knew that Huff’s appearance on the stand almost didn’t happen. Butch knew he was going to have difficulty getting the events overseas into evidence if he didn’t have a witness to testify to them. He couldn’t call Lucy to the stand, and the only person who knew the whole story—even more than Lucy—was David Huff. But he’d been unwilling to talk to Karp, or anybody else outside of his State Department bosses, after returning from Dagestan.
However, Lucy, knowing her father’s predicament, asked Jaxon to get her a number for Huff, and she called from the ranch in Taos. “He didn’t want to get involved,” Marlene told Stupenagel. “But she got pissed and reminded him that people had died protecting him, and that maybe they deserved more than his silence. He thought about it for a day, then called her back and said to give Butch his cell number.”
So her husband called the diplomat and asked if he’d agree to be interviewed. “He still wasn’t sure,” Marlene recalled. “He told Butch that testifying would finish him at the State Department. It’s an old boys’ club and he told Butch it doesn’t matter who’s in the White House, you don’t throw the boss under the bus. Apparently, the department has a lot of different factions in it and there’s an unwritten rule that ‘if you don’t support my guy when he gets into trouble now, I’m sure as hell not going to support your guy later.’ Huff told Butch that if he cooperated he would be breaking that rule and get kicked out of the club.”
After court recessed for the day, the media descended on the beleaguered White House, demanding a response to Huff’s allegations. Rosemary Hilb had wearily denied that the president was aware of the events in Chechnya as they transpired, but she conceded that “we may not have been told everything, or been given an accurate account.” She said there would be no further word until after the trial. “The president doesn’t want to compromise the defendants’ rights to a fair trial or the district attorney’s duty to seek justice. The president’s prayers are with General Allen’s family and friends, the jurors, and of course the American people.”
So much was made of Huff’s testimony in the press, including gloating analyses of what it would mean to the already reeling administration, that the media hardly took notice of the last prosecution witness of the day, Constable Tom Spooner. The Times only published a related sidebar story about his testimony on an inside page, but Stupenagel knew that the actual case against Fauhomme and Lindsey relied as much on what he had to say as it did on Huff.
It just wasn’t as easy to see what Karp was setting up with Spooner as it was to seize on Huff’s dramatic allegations as the story of the day. Unless you were Ariadne Stupenagel and had watched Karp operate in his methodical, precise way dozens of times before.
According to what she gathered from both Marlene and the newspaper account, Spooner had begun his testimony by relating how two women had arrived in the town of Orvin, where he was constable. “They said they were looking for Sam Allen’s cabin. My wife recognized one of them, Miss Stupenagel, as a former girlfriend of the general. They seemed nice enough so I pointed them in the right direction.”
Marlene said that at that point her husband had turned to face her in the gallery and pointed. “Was the other woman my wife, Marlene Ciampi, who is sitting in the back row to my right? Hold your hand up if you would please, Marlene.”
“Butch told me he was going to do that,” Marlene said over the second glass of a Hess Select Cabernet Sauvignon. “One way or the other the defense will be making a big deal out of my part in this, so he’s beating them to the punch to show he has nothing to hide. So I raised my hand and Tom said, ‘Yep, that’s Marlene.’ ”
Spooner went on to talk about the appearance of two men claiming to be federal agents. “One of them bamboozled our town librarian and resident busybody, Gertie Malcom, into believing they were legit,” he testified. “I saw her down at our local watering hole, the Lucky Duck, where she was telling everybody who’d listen about the ‘hunk with the Marine Corps tattoo’ who’d been flirting with her. I wasn’t paying much attention until I heard her say that they’d showed her a photograph of a young woman who she’d seen down at the library earlier that day using the internet. And then she told them the girl might be staying out at Sam Allen’s place on Loon Lake.”
Marlene shook her head, thinking about what might have happened. “Talk about providence. He said that’s when he got a bad feeling and was driving to Loon Lake when he saw me parked on the side of the road. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been back to the cabin in time. My best friend would be dead, and those bastards would have gotten away with killing a lot of good men, Sam Allen included.”
As dramatic as the Loon Lake events were, it was Spooner’s recorded conversation with Lindsey after the shootings that had been the most damaging. “Just identifying Ray Baum as one of his men was incriminating,” Marlene said. “But he also asked about Jenna Blair’s computer and told Tom that it contained classified information that no one was to view, which shows that he was aware of what it contained. Butch will have to put it all together for the jury during summations but it was pretty damaging to the defense.”
At the end of the evening, the two women had toasted to friendship. “And to love,” Stupenagel had added with tears in her eyes. Then she’d gone home and ravaged Gilbert Murrow until he’d sued for mercy and fallen into an exhausted sleep. She was surprised when he recovered enough to come find her crying on the balcony.
She walked over to peer out the apartment window at the sidewalk below. This trial is far from over, and there are a lot of dots that have to be linked. The defense has its own version of what happened. Bullshit, of course, but in some ways to a gullible juror it could sound plausible. She mentally shrugged; it was up to Karp to connect the dots; she was just one of many.
“Is he out there?”
For the second time that morning, Gilbert’s voice startled her as he walked up and put an arm around her waist. Letting out a deep breath, she leaned against her fiancé. “No, I haven’t seen him since the evening before last, when I tried to catch him.”
“Him” was a young man, clean-cut and muscular, who had appeared in their Village neighborhood around the time the trial started. They first noticed him loitering across the street, occasionally looking up in what seemed to be solely the direction of the fourth-floor loft of the small walkup they’d moved into a year before. There was nothing extraordinary, or sinister, about the way he looked. He wasn’t dressed like a bum or a street drug dealer, nor was he in a suit; just jeans and T-shirt, sometimes a ballcap. Nothing to draw attention to himself among all the other pedestrians who walked past their building every day and night, except that he was obviously watching and didn’t care if they saw him. And that was unnerving.
After writing her stories about the events in Chechnya and Dagestan, Stupenagel received dozens of death threats on her office phone and work email. Some had obviously come from partisan apologists who believed that the president could do no wrong no matter what the evidence said. She figured they were just blowing off steam and their threats were for the most part empty. She and Murrow invested in a state-of-the-art security system, and she carried an electric stun device capable of dropping a bull, much less a man, to the ground like a twitching bag of goo.
But some of the threats had a different tone and feel to them. The callers or writers didn’t try to explain why they were angry or felt she needed to be taught the error of her ways with ham-handed intimidation. They were simple warnings: to “keep your mouth shut,” “find a reason not to testify . . . leave the country if you want to stay alive,” or, “I’m watching you, bitch.” Even then she wasn’t too worried until she received several similar messages on her private cell phone. She only gave that number to maybe a half-dozen close friends, and they knew not to give it out.
When Gilbert, who could be a bit naïve, wondered aloud how the caller got her number, she’d rolled her eyes. “Who do you think has the power to get into phone records?” she said.
Wide-eyed, he’d nodded. “The government.”
Then, right around the time jury selection for the trial began, the young man appeared. She told Marlene about it, who then told Butch, who’d sent Detective Clay Fulton to look into it. The detective thought it was worrisome enough that he suggested posting an officer on the block, but the watcher seemed to know better than to show up. Thinking he might have been scared off, the officer had been withdrawn, only for the stalker to start appearing again. Fulton had actually then tried to catch him, but again he seemed to stay one step ahead.
When no one else but her and Gilbert had seen the young man, Stupenagel started to worry that Fulton and his men thought she was just being paranoid and assigning evil intent to passersby. So she stopped reporting sightings.
Then the evening before last, she went out on the balcony and happened to look down and there he was, standing under a streetlight, staring back up at her. He didn’t turn his face as if he’d been caught. Instead, he slowly raised his right hand and made a shooting motion, then turned and walked away.
Enraged to have been threatened in her own neighborhood, Stupenagel had rushed from her apartment, down four flights of stairs, and out onto the street to confront the man with the stun device in her hand. He’d disappeared, so she ran in the direction she last saw him and rounded a corner just in time to see a black sedan pulling away from the curb. “I didn’t catch the license number,” she later told Gilbert, “but I’m sure it was a government plate.”
“Well, maybe he’s given up now that you’re going to testify this morning,” Gilbert said hopefully.
Stupenagel nodded. “Yeah, you’re probably right. But there is one thing from last night . . . it was probably nothing . . .”
“What was nothing?”
“Well, when I was out here . . .”
“. . . crying . . .”
“Yes, crying. Or I had stopped and was catching my breath, when I thought I heard some scuffling in the shadows across the street. I was worried that he was back and getting ready to come do something to us. But then the noise stopped as suddenly as it started.”
“Did you see anything?”
Stupenagel looked troubled as she thought about it. “Nothing I can be sure of . . . just shadows within shadows. But you know what the funny part is? Seeing that guy had me twisted in knots. But after the noises stopped, the fear was gone. I don’t know why, but I’d forgotten about it by the time you got up.”
Gilbert turned to kiss her and then pointed out the window. “Looks like our cab is here. Are you ready?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” she said, and then smiled. “As long as I’m with you, I’m ready for anything.”
They had started to walk toward the door when she stopped and began digging in her purse. “I almost forgot,” she said. “I made this for you this morning.” She handed him the tissue with the bright red imprint of her lips on it.
Gilbert held it carefully, as if examining a delicate piece of art. “You know you’ve given me about a hundred of these,” he said with a chuckle.
Stupenagel laughed but then pouted. “Are you saying you’re tired of my little lipstick love messages?”
The little man with the scraggly Vandyke, wearing a nerdish vest and bow tie and peering out of owlish glasses, shook his head. “I have every single one you ever gave me. I keep them safe in a shoebox,” he said. “Does that answer your question?”
The tough, brassy journalist reached out to touch his face tenderly. “If I didn’t have a date with your boss, I’d drag you back into bed and devour you, Gilbert Murrow!”
Gilbert pushed his glasses up on his nose and grinned. “There’s always tonight, my love. There will always be tonight.”