Funny to be back on a private jet. It had started this way, the jet returning from San Antonio, where he’d followed Alex Vasquez. Alex Vasquez, who had told him a war was coming. He’d had no idea how right she’d been. He wondered, idly, if she had.
Cooper yawned. The seat was comfortable, and the last days had been long. The few hours of sleep he’d gotten had been on the cold ground, and not much good.
Okay, so figure it out. This is what you do.
Only, as always, his gift was something he couldn’t control. Sometimes it made a wild intuitive leap that he knew was true before he had proof. Sometimes it just lay coiled and quiet, processing at its own speed.
Still, he had a sense that he was close, that he had the data he needed, he just needed to look at it from the right vantage point.
Tell you what, self. Figure this out, and you can go to sleep.
Peters’s insurance would be geographically close. It would be somewhere he could get to it night or day. Somewhere that no one would stumble on it, ever; where the risk of that was essentially zero. It would not be in his name, or anywhere someone would think to look. Getting to it wouldn’t require the help of another person.
What kind of place was essentially unchanging, always available, perfectly secure, and close at hand?
Cooper smiled.
Two minutes later, he was sound asleep.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Full circle. Funny how life had a way of doing that.
He wasn’t just back in DC; he was back in Georgetown, a couple of blocks from his old apartment, on his old jogging route. Cooper could picture that version of himself, a faded army tee clinging to his soaked chest as he rounded this stretch of R Street. This had been his favorite part of the run, a particularly scenic corner of intensely scenic Georgetown. The black wrought-iron fence on his right, the thick shade of old trees, the tidy, expensive row-house mansions on the south side of the street…and the elegant grace of Oak Hill Cemetery along the north.
He’d wandered through it a few times back then, read the pamphlet. It was old, dating to something like 1850. A gorgeously landscaped spread of gentle hills and quiet paths along the Potomac, dotted with old marble, monuments, and headstones for the gentry of two centuries past. Congressmen, Civil War generals, captains of industry…and bankers.
It was perfect. A brief walk from Drew Peters’s house, completely unchanging, always accessible. The grounds might close, but Cooper doubted that meant more than an elderly watchman drawing a chain across the iron gate. Easiest thing in the world to find a patch of darkness and climb over. Kids probably did it all the time.
There was a map on a signpost near the entrance, with sections laid out in muted color: Joyce, Henry Crescent, Chapel Hill. The chapel was one of the cemetery’s main destinations, and he remembered it being lovely, draped in ivy like a Romantic daydream. The map also marked some of the more famous dead.
Including Edward Eaton, “financier and attorney, under-secretary of the treasury to Abraham Lincoln.”
Cooper started walking. The stonework and paths were marked by age, dignified like a worn patrician. He’d never really put much thought into where he’d be buried—had some loose notion of being cremated—but he could see the appeal in laying a loved one to rest here. It would be a pleasant place to imagine them.
Most of the grave sites were simple monuments, weathered stones with names and dates and often military rank. But here and there stone mausoleums nestled into the side of a hill or beneath a spread of branches. The one with EATON carved across the top had a stolid, bunkerish look. No elaborate statues or intricate carvings, just a pair of pillars flanking the door and a couple of small stained-glass windows. It spoke of stability and eternity, no doubt what Edward Eaton had in mind when he bought this house for the bodies of great-grandchildren whose parents hadn’t even been conceived.
Cooper stood outside, his hands in his pockets. He wondered how often Drew Peters had come here, if he’d stood in the same place. Staring at the mausoleum where his wife lay.