Blood Trust Read Free Page A

yours?”
    “Of course I deny it.”
    “So it’s your claim that you didn’t drug your roommate?”
    “What the what? Why on earth would I?”
    “Please keep your voices down,” Commander Fellows interrupted.
    “Ms. Carson,” the detective said in a steely voice, “I must insist you come with us now.”
    She looked around. “Just let me find my cell phone.”
    “The academy is in lockdown. You know the rules.” The commander gestured to the doorway. “This way, Ms. Carson.”
    She knew better than to argue further with Fellows. He ran Fearington like an Army boot camp, and talking back would only get her into deeper trouble. Fearington was one of only a couple of elite academies that fed the government secret services. Like its brethren in other regions of the country, Fearington was a closely guarded secret. Its cadets were the cream of the crop, exhaustively vetted and tested before being chosen to fill its ranks. The courses were rigorous, both physically and intellectually. It had taken all of Jack’s skills to get Alli accepted into the examination phase; following Jack’s intensive tutelage, she had done the rest. But from the very first day, she had been acutely aware of the fact that she didn’t fit the traditional Fearington mold.
    As she was marched down the hallway and out onto the grounds, she wondered dazedly why she was in trouble. Her legs were shaking and the core of her felt cold. Nevertheless, she had no choice but to take her first step into the nightmare.
    *   *   *
    “G ENTLEMEN , WHAT a surprise finding you here.”
    This was how Henry Holt Carson, oldest brother of the late president, announced himself as he walked through the door into his sister-in-law’s room. Immensely wealthy and influential, he wore a silk-and-cashmere made-to-measure suit that Jack estimated must have cost at least five thousand dollars. On his feet were John Lobb shoes, mirror-shined, but not, Jack was certain, by Carson himself. His cold blue eyes, huge as an owl’s, studied them both, but failed, Jack noted, to even glance at Lyn’s corpse. But then, she was dead, Jack thought, and of no use to him.
    “Interlopers to the end, I see.” His lopsided smile failed to blunt the barb of his remark.
    He was in every way his brother’s polar opposite. A hard-nosed businessman, he distrusted and detested politicians, especially the ones he couldn’t buy off. He owned mining interests in the Midwest, for which he was forever buying pollution credits so he could continue pulling ore out of the ground and refining it. More recently, he had bought up a number of regional banks at bargain basement prices, merging them into one, InterPublic Bancorp. He had been married and divorced four times that Jack knew of. He had children, but, according to Edward, could neither remember their names nor what they looked like. He was an empire builder through and through. But, somehow, possibly because of his affection for all things familial, Edward had forgiven his brother his peccadillos and loved him as one ought to love a brother. It was anyone’s guess how the elder Carson felt about Edward. A rock might reveal more of its personal nature.
    He moved into the apex of the triangle with them; he was the kind of man who was continually conscious of his power vis-à-vis those around him, perhaps out of a deep-seated sense of inferiority. After being expelled from high school for defecating on the principal’s chair, retaliation for some slight, imagined or real, he had toiled fifteen-hour days in an iron smelter’s, working his way up to foreman, then day manager, from which position he had obtained a bank loan in order to buy the company. From that moment on, the path of his life was set.
    “We all had a deep and abiding fondness for Lyn,” Jack said.
    “My brother’s wife has passed to her final reward, McClure.” Henry Holt Carson’s head, as round as a medicine ball and almost as large, swiveled in his