Trevelle shrugged. “Might take a while.”
Reznick stared long and hard at him. “You want to warn her, right?”
Trevelle nodded.
“Then here’s the deal: if you manage to locate Rosalind Dyer, and if we manage to speak to her, and if we somehow convince her that what we know is correct and she is fully aware of the impending threat, then you speak with the Feds? That’s the deal.”
Trevelle hesitated for a moment, then nodded. “Deal.”
Eight
Thirty miles west of Washington, DC, in the affluent town of Fairfax, Virginia, Rosalind Dyer was kneeling at a gravesite. She felt the late-afternoon sun warm her skin as it bathed the granite and alabaster headstones all around her in a golden glow. She carefully arranged the bunch of white lilies she had brought in the brass vase. Then she touched the name newly carved into the grave marker and bowed her head.
She said a silent prayer for a man she had never met. A man who’d died three weeks earlier. His name was Andrew Boyd. He was an accountant. And the latest in a string of strange, seemingly accidental deaths. They were part of what she’d become increasingly certain was a cover-up on a grand scale. And she was the only one who’d made the connection: these were murders made to look like accidents. Andrew Boyd had been the seventh person to die under suspicious circumstances.
The more she thought about it, the more she believed it was inevitable that she would be next. It wasn’t a matter of if, but when. She had only confided in her husband how she felt. She warned him of the consequences of her actions. He reassured her to put her trust in God and the laws of the land. But she knew they would come for her. They would get to her.
Rosalind’s mind flashed back to the day of Andrew Boyd’s funeral. She had watched from the back of the crowd of mourners as the rain poured down incessantly. Like the heavens had opened up and were spilling their tears for all to see. The man’s eldest son had stood sobbing as he held one of the cords, lowering his father’s coffin in the newly dug grave.
Andrew’s widow, Catherine, had not cried. She had just stood and stared, holding her other children’s hands, as if in mortal shock. It was a crushing blow for Catherine. But she had stood, head held high, as the red soil became sodden beneath her feet.
Rosalind closed her eyes now, one hand on the headstone in front of her. She wondered how Catherine Boyd was going to cope with bringing up their four children alone. Her husband and the family’s main breadwinner snatched from them. Rosalind knew they lived in a comfortable old Colonial less than a mile from the cemetery. Andrew had almost certainly provided for them after his death. But Rosalind couldn’t help thinking of the void that would be left in their lives without him. The sports practices he would miss; the homework he wouldn’t be there to help with; the hikes, like those they’d taken on the numerous beautiful trails in rural Virginia—the ones he’d had pictures of hanging in his office—that would never happen again.
Rosalind had read every newspaper report of the drowning accident. They said he had died of a heart attack in the water. But no one could understand it. Andrew had aced all his physicals. Perfect health. He ran. He went to the gym. Everyone was shocked. Everyone, that is, apart from Rosalind.
Andrew Boyd knew too much. As did the other six who were now dead.
Rosalind wondered how she would die. She prayed it wouldn’t be painful. She wanted it to be quick.
Lost in her thoughts, she had the sudden sensation that she wasn’t alone. She turned around, looking out over the vast cemetery. But there was no one there.
Rosalind drove back to DC, her thoughts scrambled after the visit to Andrew’s grave. She headed to her favorite coffee shop and got a latte and a granola bar. She let herself relax and enjoy the sustenance and the familiar suburban chatter. She noticed most of the other patrons were women with their kids. She looked like them in many ways. She was forty-eight years old and happily married to a lovely man, Travis. She attended church and once a year met up with other women who had served in the Army Reserve twenty years earlier. She had fallen in love with Travis when he transferred to her high school. He hadn’t shown off, like a lot of the boys in her class. He was steady, dependable. And she liked that about him. Her gaze wandered around to the other women in the coffee shop. How she envied them. Their humdrum existence was something she craved. But she knew that was no longer an option.
She wasn’t seeing nearly enough of her three teenage children. Her two daughters were fifteen, identical twins. Her son, Edward, was a nervous seventeen-year-old with a penchant for wearing black. Edward, in particular, needed his mother. He was more sensitive than his opinionated and self-confident sisters. Quieter and a bit of a loner. And she knew he liked to confide in her about his school, about his lack of friends, about why his sisters laughed at his taste in music, why they thought he was so “lame” still being on Facebook and a million other things. And she needed to be there to listen to her daughters when they talked about boyfriends or girl stuff. Instead she had become engulfed in her investigation and the voluminous background research she had undertaken. And of course, thinking about the closed-door hearing.
Seventy-two hours away.
She was scheduled to appear before Congress as a government whistle-blower. Technically she had protection under the law. But she was under no illusions as to the enormity of what she was doing or facing. For decades, the Department of Defense had managed to sidetrack investigations into its systemic financial mismanagement. Audits that had taken thirty years to come to fruition were, time and time again, caught up in accounting black holes. Fraud, overruns, misappropriation, kickbacks, the list went on and on.
There had been endless accountants and auditors who had come and gone over the years. All had been broken down by the system. Pensioned off. Bought off. But she was going to bring the truth to light—alone, if she had to.
Rosalind couldn’t envision exactly how events would unfold. She wondered if they would get to her first, before she appeared at the committee hearing. Or maybe the threat was all in her head.
But she didn’t think so. She had heard numerous stories about whistle-blowers who had testified before congressional committees and been accused of being everything from vindictive crazies to unhinged troublemakers. She would have to be measured in what she said. If she were only planning to tell them about the systemic problem of mismanagement of budgets, spiraling costs, and kickbacks on billion-dollar defense contracts, she didn’t think anyone would bother assassinating her.
But there was something else.
The secret investigation she had begun in the last few weeks. The seven accidental deaths.
Rosalind’s gaze was drawn to a woman watching Fox News on her iPad. The station was airing a committee hearing in the same building she’d be in soon. The man speaking was wearing a uniform. The name on the screen was unmistakable. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Franklin Ross. The most senior figure at the Pentagon. The man she had ascertained was taking the biggest kickbacks. She’d uncovered two secret accounts. One in his wife’s name, one in his. One was in Switzerland, the other in the Caymans.
Rosalind turned away as her mood began to dip. She felt alone and isolated. She was the only one who knew that every accountant who’d gone before her, who’d learned what she knew, was now dead. She hadn’t even confided in her lawyer. She felt bad for not letting him know. But she figured that he had enough to worry about with everything that had happened in the main investigation over the last eighteen months.