When she finally got back to her hotel room, the first thing she did was check that the hair she’d left in the doorjamb was still intact. It was. No one had come in while she was gone. She was surprised; they’d had time to toss her room if they wanted. Then she called Paul Kelly and filled him in. She could hear the fury in his voice. She assured him she was okay and would be back that night.
After a long, hot shower she examined herself in the mirror. Her face was purple and yellow, and a shiner around her left eye was prominent. She carefully applied makeup, but the black eye was still conspicuous. She would pick up a pair of sunglasses. She didn’t have her jacket – she’d left it at Carl Baldwin’s house. Her Glock too. She dressed in jeans and a tank top.
She had one more thing to do in Washington. She called the number she had for Vic Summerfield. It went to voice mail. She looked up his address. A neighborhood called Glover Park. It wasn’t far from the hotel. She called an Uber.
Vic Summerfield’s condo was in a large apartment building at the bottom of a hill. The building was equipped with a uniformed doorman and a pair of glass doors through which Georgia could see two huge chandeliers hanging from the lobby ceiling. She told the driver to park on a semicircular driveway, which prompted the doorman to head over, his finger wagging.
“You can’t park there,” he said through the passenger window. “There are spaces on the street.”
“I don’t plan on being here long,” Georgia piped up from the back seat. “Could you ring Vic Summerfield and ask him to come down?”
The doorman looked her up and down. “Mr. Summerfield isn’t here.”
“Did he go to work this morning?”
The doorman sniffed. “I have no idea, and even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.”
Georgia climbed out of the Uber, fished out her PI license and a twenty-dollar bill, and handed both to the man. “I’m investigating a case that involves him. I would appreciate your cooperation.”
The doorman pocketed the cash smoothly and returned her license. “I don’t know where he is, but he left here this morning with a large suitcase.”
DC’s Reagan Airport, just across the Potomac River from the city, wasn’t very large. But that was the point. It had originally been built for the government’s convenience and no one else. With only a quick—and cheap—cab ride from Capitol Hill, politicians and bureaucrats could get out of town in ten minutes. Georgia Ubered to the terminal. She was stiff, bruised, and hungry. She wanted her own bed. She checked for flights from DC to Rapid City, South Dakota. Several airlines flew the route, but they all required changing planes in Chicago. But only one flight left within a two-hour window of the time Summerfield left his apartment. Not only was it in the same terminal as her flight, but it was boarding now.
She wasn’t sanguine about intercepting him but hurried to the gate anyway. She scanned the passengers. Most were impatient to board. She never understood why. Who would want to be trapped in a metal tube that would take them vast distances? What if something went wrong in that tube? Would they regret their eagerness to rush into certain doom?
She waited while travelers boarded the flight. Vic Summerfield wasn’t among them. At one point she thought she saw him, head down, interacting with his cell. But when she approached, she realized it wasn’t him. She continued to wait until the airline employees closed the door to the access ramp. Vic was a no-show. An uneasy feeling climbed up her back.
She limped outside to the taxi stand, slid into a cab, and told the driver to take her to the Kalorama house. It was mid-morning, and for some miraculous reason, traffic wasn’t congested.
“Going home, are we?” The cabbie wanted to chat.
“Not exactly.”
He tried to make eye contact with her in his rearview, but Georgia refused to look at him. He got the message, and they drove the rest of the twenty-minute trip in silence.
Once she was at Baldwin’s home and she was sure the cabbie was gone, she dug out her lockpicks and walked around to the side door. She peered through the glass insets into the kitchen. Nothing looked out of order. She inserted the pick, but she was rusty and had to work longer than she expected to unlock the door. She quietly let herself in.
The odor was unmistakable. It had only been a few hours since Vic’s doorman claimed he’d left with his suitcase, but the stench of death was already fouling the air. Georgia swallowed and covered her nose with a kitchen towel. She stayed in the kitchen, frozen in place, until she was sure there was no movement or sounds from the other downstairs rooms. Then she took a few tentative steps across the kitchen floor. When nothing happened, she took a few more. And a few more, until she was outside Vic Summerfield’s office.
Despite her years as a cop, and an all-too-intimate familiarity with dead bodies, what she saw inside Vic’s office made her retch. Vic was slumped at his desk. His suitcase lay on the floor. Most of the right side of his head had been blown away, leaving a mess of brain matter, shards of bone, and hair matted with blood. From the blood oozing out of his middle, it looked like he’d also been shot in the gut.
But what shocked her the most was that her khaki bag—the bag she’d brought from Chicago and into which she’d dropped her Glock when she first entered the Kalorama house—lay on the floor next to the suitcase. She went over, grabbed it, and rummaged inside. Change of clothes, toiletries, extra burner phone she kept for emergencies. Her jacket still there, too. But no Glock. Which meant she knew whose gun had been used to murder Vic Summerfield. And who the cops would be looking for once the forensics were analyzed.
She took a breath through her mouth, willing her fear away. They had been thorough. But they hadn’t expected her to discover Vic’s body. For once she had an edge. She debated what to do next. She didn’t want to, but her cop DNA forced her. She powered on the burner, called 911, and reported Vic’s body. Anonymously. Then she picked up her jacket and bag, retraced her steps through the kitchen, and hurried back outside. She had a plane to catch.