Act of Darkness(7)

Of course, Dan had had an ulterior motive. Even then, he’d been setting Stephen up to run for the presidency, finding Stephen a cause, giving Stephen an identity. All three of them had known, all the way back there in college, that Stephen was their best shot at producing a media celebrity. Dan looked too foreign, even though he wasn’t, and too much like the popular conception of Machiavelli. Kevin himself was just too damn conventional.

Still, Kevin thought now, Dan was not only a genius but a loyal genius. He believed in sticking by his friends. First he’d gotten Stephen elected to the U.S. Senate—and right out of the Hartford statehouse, too—and then he’d gotten Kevin down to Washington and shown him how to play the game. In no time at all, Kevin had gone from being a reasonably successful physician to the country’s most popular expert on mental retardation in children, His clinic had grown from five small rooms on Avenue C to this great white marble palace in the hills of McLean, Virginia. He had a staff of 250, a client list well over a thousand names long, and a reputation a saint would have envied. From the things he read about himself in the papers, he might have been Mother Teresa turned Protestant and dressed up in drag.

It was the sainthood business that bothered him. It was a position he would never have chosen for himself—even though, in a way, he did consider himself a saint, on his own terms. His terms were not the ones the papers were using, or the delegations of parents’ groups who gave banquets in his honor, or the universities who awarded him honorary degrees. His own terms were understood by only three people in the world: Dan Chester, Stephen Fox, and himself.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and he had been sitting at his desk for an hour, doing what he thought of as “not thinking.” Mostly, what he was not thinking about was the death of Maren Kent, down on the second floor, who had been brought in as an emergency patient three days ago and never had much chance to grow up human anyway. He wouldn’t have been not thinking about it, except that someone had done it again—left a vial of succinylcholine lying on the floor. Of course, succinylcholine was what you used in an emergency like that. A vial of it wouldn’t be misinterpreted. Still, it wouldn’t be good to get a reputation for carelessness, and he’d already lost a vial of succinylcholine last month. It had been taken right out of the medical bag he had parked in the cloakroom of the Old Washington Hotel during Victoria Harte’s birthday party.

He reached across his desk, picked up his phone—a piece of plastic the thickness of a golf visor—and buzzed for his secretary. Her voice, a beautiful North Carolina drawl, slid back at him with a soft seductiveness that made him think of warm molasses.

“Could you get Dan Chester for me, please? He’ll be at Stephen Fox’s office in the SOB. The new office.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

Kevin sat back, expecting to have to wait a long time. Dan might be in the SOB, or he might be somewhere else. Dan was often somewhere else, nobody knew where.

The buzzer on his phone went off, and Kevin was surprised to hear the North Carolina drawl saying, “Mr. Chester on three, Doctor. He says he was just thinking of calling you.”

Kevin punched the button for three and said, “Dan?”

“Kevin. I’m losing my mind over here. These offices are very pretty, but they’re not what I call efficient.”

“Stephen should be happy to get one.”

“He is. He’d be happier to get one in the Capitol itself. I mean, he has one in the Capitol itself—”

“But it’s totally inadequate. I know, Dan. You’ve told me.”

“The way things are going, maybe we won’t have to put up with it for very long. I’ve been treating myself to daydreams all morning. What about you? Are you all right?”

Kevin looked down at the top of his desk. Except for the phone, it was empty. It was always empty. He knew he did a lot of work, but he sometimes wondered when and where he did it. On Dan’s orders, his office was perpetually devoid of official paperwork, except in the direst emergency. Even the drawers of his desk held nothing more vulgarly laborlike than a collection of Mark Cross twenty-four-carat gold monogram pens.

“Kevin?” Dan said.

“I’m here,” Kevin told him. “I’m sorry. I’m a little tired today. I saw the piece in the Post.”

“Yeah. Good piece, too. With any luck, Stephen wasn’t lying to me this morning, and Janet was told beforehand. As long as she was, we’re off and running.”

“Janet,” Kevin said. “Right.”

“I wouldn’t worry about Janet, Kevin. Janet is a trooper. It’s just that Stephen doesn’t know how to treat his troopers.”