Split Second (Sean King & Michelle Maxwell 1)

THE WORST DAY of Sean King’s life had been September 26, 1996, the day Clyde Ritter died while then Secret Service agent King was focusing on something else. Unfortunately the second worst day of his life happened to be right now. His office had been filled with police, federal agents and technical crews asking lots of questions and not getting lots of answers. Amid all this forensic foraging they’d taken fingerprint samples from King, Phil Baxter and their secretary; for elimination purposes, they said. That could cut both ways, King well knew.

The local press had arrived too. Fortunately he knew them personally and gave vague answers that they accepted with little comment. The national press would be coming very soon, because there was something extremely newsworthy about the murdered man. King had suspected it, and those suspicions were confirmed when a contingent of folks from the U.S. Marshals Service showed up on his doorstep.

The dead man, Howard Jennings, had been employed at King’s law practice as a title searcher, proofreader, overseer of trust account records and a gofer, sort of a jack-of-all-trades. His office was on the lower level of the law building. He was quiet, hardworking, and kept to himself. There was nothing whatsoever remarkable about what the man did for a living. However, he was very special in one respect.

Jennings was a member of WITSEC, the program more popularly known as witness protection. Forty-eight years old with a degree in accounting, Jennings (that, of course, wasn’t his real name) had once been gainfully employed as a bean counter for a criminal organization operating in the Midwest. These folks specialized in racketeering, extortion and money laundering and used arson, beatings, disfigurements and the occasional homicide to get their point across. The matter had attracted great national attention because of the lethality of the organization’s methods and the complexities of the case.

Jennings had quickly seen the light and helped send a slew of very dangerous folks to penitentiaries. Yet some of the most deadly had escaped the federal net; hence his enrollment in WITSEC.

Now he was a corpse and King’s headache was just beginning. As a former federal agent with high-level clearances, King had dealt with WITSEC in some joint efforts between the Secret Service and the U.S. Marshals. When Jennings interviewed with him, his background check and other due diligence made King suspect that Jennings was in the program. He didn’t know for certain, of course; it wasn’t like the Marshals Service would confide in him about the identity of one of its people, but he had his suspicions, suspicions that he’d never shared with anyone. It had to do with Jennings’s paucity of references and work background, something that would occur when one has wiped out his former life.

King was not a suspect in Jennings’s murder, he was told, which, of course, meant that he was probably near the top of the list. If he informed the investigators that he believed Jennings was WITSEC, he might very well find himself in front of a grand jury. He decided to play dumb for now.

He spent the rest of the day calming down his partner. Baxter was a big, burly former UVA football player who’d spent a couple of years in the NFL riding the bench before going on to become an aggressive and highly competent trial lawyer. However, the ex-jock was not used to corpses in his office. That was a form of “sudden death” he wasn’t very comfortable with. King, on the other hand, had spent years at the Secret Service working counterfeiting and fraud involving very dangerous gangs. And he’d killed men as well. Thus he was better equipped to deal with a murder than his partner was.

King had sent his receptionist, Mona Hall, home for the day. Mona was a frail, nervous type, so the sight of blood and body would not have set well with her. However, she was also a confirmed and accomplished gossip, and King had no doubt that the local phone exchange was being burned up with wild speculation about the homicidal goings-on at the offices of King & Baxter. In a quiet community such as Wrightsburg, that could lead the topics of conversation for months if not years to come.

With the building now shut down by the feds and under around-the-clock security, King & Baxter had to move its legal operations temporarily to its partners’ homes. That evening the two lawyers carried out boxes, files and other work to their cars. As beefy Phil Baxter drove off in his equally large SUV, King leaned against the hood of his car and stared up at his office. With lights ablaze, the investigators were still going hard and heavy in there, scrutinizing the place for any clue as to who had put a bullet into the chest of Howard Jennings. King took in the mountain vistas behind the building. Up there was his home, a place he’d built out of the ruin of one life. It had been good therapy for him. Now?

He drove home, wondering what the next morning would bring. He ate a bowl of soup in the kitchen while he watched the local news. There were pictures of him on the screen, references to his career at the Secret Service, including his disgraced exit, his law career in Wrightsburg and assorted speculation about the dead Howard Jennings. He switched off the television and tried to focus on some work he’d brought home. However, his attention kept wandering, and he finally just sat in his den surrounded by his world of lawbooks and boring documents and stared into space. With a jolt he came out of his musings.

He changed into shorts and a sweater, grabbed a bottle of red wine and a plastic glass and went down to the covered dock behind his house. There he boarded the twenty-foot jet boat he kept there along with a fourteen-foot sailboat and a Sea-Doo personal watercraft or PWC, which was akin to a motorcycle on water, plus a kayak and a canoe. About a half mile across at its widest point, and perhaps eight miles long with numerous coves and inlets, the lake was very popular with recreational boaters and fishermen; stripers, bluegill and catfish filled the deep, clear waters. The summer was over now, the renters and seasonal residents gone.

His vessels were on power lifts, and he lowered the jet boat into the water, fired it up and turned on the running lights. He hit the throttle and went out about two miles, breathing in the brisk air, letting it wash over him. He entered an uninhabited cove, cut the engine, dropped anchor, poured a glass of wine and contemplated his no

w grim-looking future.

When news spread that a person in the WITSEC program had been murdered in his law office, King would once more be in the national spotlight, something he was dreading. The last time, one tabloid went off the deep end, running a story actually claiming he’d been bribed by a violent, radical political group to look the other way while Clyde Ritter was gunned down. Well, the libel laws were still alive and well in the United States, and he’d sued and won a large settlement. He’d used this “windfall” to build his house and start life anew. Yet the cash hadn’t come close to erasing what had happened. How could it?

He sat up on the boat’s gunwale, kicked off his shoes, stripped off his clothes and dove into the dark water, stayed under for a bit and then came up sucking oxygen. The lake was actually warmer than the outside air.

His career as a Secret Service agent really came crashing down when a video of the assassination, taken by a local TV news crew covering the Ritter event, was released to the public. It clearly showed him looking away from Ritter far longer than he should have. It showed the assassin drawing his gun, pointing it, firing, killing Ritter, and all the while King had been staring off, as though in a trance. The clip even showed children in the crowd reacting to the gun before King realized what was going on.

The media had chosen to excoriate King, no doubt fueled by the outcry of Ritter’s people and not wanting to appear biased against an unpopular candidate.

He could recall most of the headlines: “Agent Lets Eyes Wander While Candidate Dies”; “Veteran Agent Blows It”; “Asleep at His Post.” Or the one that read, “So That’s Why They Wear the Shades,” which under different circumstances might have actually made him chuckle. Worst of all, though, he’d been largely shunned by his fellow agents.

His marriage had fallen apart under the strain. Actually it had started to fall apart long before that. King had been gone far more than he was home, sometimes leaving on an hour’s notice, with no fixed return date. Under those pressing circumstances he’d forgiven his wife’s first affair and even the second. The third time, however, they separated. And when she quickly agreed to a divorce after his world fell in, well, he couldn’t say he’d spent a lot of time crying about it.

And yet he’d survived it all and rebuilt his life. And now?

He slowly climbed back on board the jet boat, wrapped a towel he kept in the boat around his middle and drove back. Instead of going to his dock, he cut the engine and running lights and pulled into a small cove a few hundred yards down from his place. King quietly dropped the small mushroom anchor in the water to keep his boat from drifting into the muddy bank. Up near the rear of his house a beam of light was arcing back and forth. He had visitors. Perhaps it was the media sniffing around. Or perhaps, he thought, Howard Jennings’s killer had come looking for another score.

CHAPTER

11

KING QUIETLY WADED to shore, put his clothes back on and was now squatting in the darkness behind some bushes. The light still swung back and forth as someone moved through the area that ringed the eastern perimeter of his property. King made his way toward the front of his house shielded by a wall of trees. There was a blue BMW convertible parked in the driveway that he didn’t recognize. He was about to go over to it when he decided the best course of action was to get some hardware. With a nice big pistol in hand, he’d feel a lot better about things.

He slipped inside the dark house, got the gun and went back out a side door. The arc of light had disappeared now, and that had him worried. He knelt down and listened. The sharp crack of a fallen branch reached his ears. It had come from his right, barely ten feet away; then came a footstep and then another. He braced himself, his pistol ready, safety off.

He launched himself, hitting the person low and hard and landing on top of him, King’s pistol right in his face.

Only it wasn’t a him. It was a her! And she had a pistol out too. It was pointed at him, the barrels of the two guns almost touching.

“What in the hell are you doing here?” he said angrily when he saw who it was.

“If you’d get off me, I might have the breath to tell you,” she snapped.