Now both of the killers were down in Fort Madison for a long, long time. The First National Bank of NishWap had foreclosed on the auto loan and repossessed the station wagon, and it had sat in their lot ever since, an object of morbid fascination to school boys who made lengthy detours to ride past it everyday on the way home from school, but not very inviting to anyone else.
Except Clyde. Jack Harbison came out and gave the Celica a wary test drive, consulted his blue book, put his glasses up on his forehead, and rubbed his eyes. “Done,” he said resignedly, and within minutes Clyde was headed for home behind the wheel of the Murder Car.
Chapter Nine
After the meeting at the Agriculture Department, Howard King followed Betsy Vandeventer all the way out of the building, insisting that she ride back to the Castleman Building in his car. She tried to avoid him by taking the stairs, but he plunged in after her, shouting at her like a furious schoolmaster. “Betsy! Stop where you are immediately and listen to me!”
She surprised herself by overriding her instincts and continuing down the stairs. King stood his ground until she was almost down to the ground floor, then pounded down after her, his comb-over and his necktie flapping. It wasn’t that Betsy had somehow broken free of the need to be a good girl. It was that something had changed since this morning. Howard King no longer had any authority. Spector’s orders had hinted at it, Millikan’s keelhauling had made it obvious, and now King’s own desperation served as proof.
He followed her halfway to the metro stop, hot in the spring sunshine, failed hair transplants dotting his sweat-beaded scalp. Once, twice, he almost reached out to grab her. Both times he controlled the urge, inhibited by the strolling office workers all around them, the tour groups piling out of the buses. She turned her back on him one last time and headed down into the metro.
When she arrived on the seventh floor of the Castleman, she stopped to chat with the security person on duty by the elevators, an ex-cop. “Morning, Miss Vandeventer,” he said.
“Morning, Martin,” she said. “Too nice a day to be locked up in a vault.”
“That’s true,” he chuckled.
“Has Mr. King come in yet?”
The look that came over Martin’s face when she mentioned Mr. King was the final and conclusive proof, if she wanted any, that something bad was about to happen to her boss. “Oh, yes, ma’am,” he said. “Mr. King came in early this morning.”
“I mean recently—within the last half hour.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Well, he’ll be coming in soon,” Betsy said, “and I think he may be very… emotional.”
Martin nodded reassuringly. “I understand.”
She went into the vault, said hello to a few colleagues in other cubicles, accepted congratulations from a couple of them who hadn’t been around yesterday for her five-year polygraph celebration. She settled into her own cubicle and signed on to her workstation to find an urgent memo waiting for her: it came from DCI, the Director of Central Intelligence, and it was an invitation for her to attend a Deputies Committee meeting several days hence, to discuss the intelligence community’s views on Iraq. There was a number she was to call on secure line number two.
The DCI’s executive assistant took the call and confirmed the invitation. “Let me know if you have any questions.”
Through the vault door Betsy could hear a commotion coming down the hall. “I have one question already.”
King punched a wrong code into the lock, cursed, did it again, and shoved the door open.
“Shoot,” said the DCI’s assistant. “Have you cleared this with my branch chief?”
“Cleared what?” King demanded. Behind him Martin prevented the door from closing and stepped quietly into the vault, his gaze fixed on the back of King’s head.
“There’s no need,” said the assistant. “But to cover you, there is an advisory to him on his computer mail. Tell him to read that.”
“Cleared what?” King demanded, stepping threateningly close to Betsy.
“The DCI’s executive assistant said you should check your computer mail,” Betsy said.
The mention of the DCI forced him to moderate his tone. He spun on his heel and went into his office, cursing under his breath. He logged on, pulled up his mail, and exploded. He stormed out and said, “You big cunt!” then stopped in his tracks as Martin interposed himself between him and Betsy.
“Mr. King, I sure was hoping to make it through the day without having to file any incident reports with my superiors,” Martin said.