She didn’t wait for the full answer—just long enough to borrow a minute of normalcy, to give the watchers something else to interpret.Then she drifted toward the building again, disappearing through a side door and out the other end, where a service lane ran behind a row of trees.
She walked fast, not running.Running was a confession.Past the maintenance fence, she found a small access road and kept to its edge until she reached a lit intersection where an all-night diner glowed like a lantern.
From a payphone beside the door—one of the last, miraculously intact—she called for a cab and gave the address of a motel ten miles south.When she hung up, she wiped the receiver with her sleeve out of habit, then laughed once, quietly, at how habits pretended to be control.
The cab smelled like old coffee and peppermint air freshener.Marilyn sat behind the driver and kept her tote bag on her lap, hands wrapped around it as if it were a life vest.Each time the cab stopped at a light, she checked the mirrors for the dark sedan.She saw pickup trucks, a delivery van, a state trooper cruising the other direction.No sedan.That didn’t mean she was clear.
At the motel she paid cash, signed a name that wasn’t hers, and took a room near the stairwell.The lock clicked behind her with a finality she didn’t trust.She pushed a chair under the handle anyway.Then she opened the tote bag on the bedspread and laid out what she’d stolen from her own life: the laptops, the cash, the cards, the jewelry that still held the faint scent of perfume. She plugged in neither computer.Turning them on felt like lighting a flare.
Cain Hampton had never called her his daughter.In public, she’d been a “staffer,” a “family friend,” a convenient face at fundraisers when he needed to look warm.In private, she’d been a problem to manage—an indiscretion given a stipend, then a job, then a quiet apartment in a building with doormen who asked no questions.
When they’d become partners, after he discovered her unparalleled skills, they became partners.Then casual enemies.His laundered threats often turned into accidents and erased inconvenient people from the edges of stories, like all her half-siblings.She’d stopped being manageable.She’d become a liability with a pulse and Cain was no longer her partner.
She needed distance, and she needed noise—cities where a woman could disappear into crowds, highways where a car was just another taillight.She chose a route that angled toward the Carolinas and then farther down, a long slide toward warmer air and unfamiliar faces.
In the morning, she would go back for the Lincoln and if it were still there, she would take it and abandon it in a parking deck and take a bus south under a different name.Not because she trusted buses, but because Legacy’s men were trained to watch for private airports, rental counters, and black SUVs—not a tired woman holding a tote bag and staring out a smeared window.
When the time was right, she would open the laptops, sell what she had to the highest bidder and disappear forever.But not before killing the one man who knew all her secrets.
Cain Hampton.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“Senator Hampton, thank you for seeing us,” said Ben.
Kiel and Wyatt stepped through the door, already knowing what AJ, Tanner, and Hiro had found.The repeated IP addresses led to one office and one office only.Senator Cain Hampton of the state of Kentucky.
“My pleasure, gentlemen,” he said in the syrupy sweet voice.“You people, your daddies and granddaddies have always been a friend of this nation.You’re appreciated.”
“Thank you for saying that, sir.But that brings us to a bit of a conundrum,” said Ben.“Do you know a woman by the name of Marilyn Sanders?”
“Marilyn Sanders,” he repeated with a questioning gaze.“Marilyn.Hmmm.Does she work in government?There are so many of us it would be hard for me to remember everyone I’ve met.”Kiel grinned as he turned his phone toward the senator.The face of Marilyn Sanders staring back at him.
“Look familiar?” he asked.
“I’m sorry, boys.She just looks like every other woman working in Washington.”
“We didn’t say she worked in Washington.You did,” said Ben.The Senator looked at his watch and started to fidget with papers.“Don’t even think about brushing us off, senator.See, if you know us, you know how good we really are.Marilyn Sanders is your daughter.Want to know how we know that?”
The senator said nothing, just staring at the men as he plopped back in his big leather chair.
“I’ll tell you anyway,” said Ben.“Ellen Sanders was the babysitter for your children.Your legitimate children.At seventeen, she admitted herself to a small clinic outside of Richmond and delivered a beautiful baby girl.She sent a letter to you, of which she kept a copy.That copy was scanned and saved to a computer owned by Marilyn Sanders.”
He still said nothing but his lip trembled from fear and anger, the sweat on his brow a sure sign that he was about to hear something he didn’t want to hear.
“That little girl grew up in a one-bedroom apartment with her mother.Now, we thought that was interesting since deposits were made into her account every month for more than five-thousand dollars.It seems Ellen was good with money.No extravagant lifestyle for her.
“Then one day she’s found dead by the river.Her daughter, thankfully was grown and off to college.You being the kind-hearted senator that you are, stepped in and offered to pay for her continued education.Of course, that was after you discovered she was dean’s list at UVA and was thought to be one of the most brilliant technical minds they’d ever seen.”
“This can all be explained,” he said in a shaky voice.
“Yes, how do you explain raping a seventeen-year-old girl and then leaving her to raise a child?”
“I supported her,” he said shaking his fist.“I didn’t abandon my daughter.I did the right thing even after her mother tried to bilk me for more money.”
“She never did any such thing,” said Kiel.“All she ever asked from you was that you make her legitimate and help her to obtain a loan for a house of her own.Tell the world that she was yours so she would have a name.You couldn’t even do that.And all the other young women that you forced to abort your children, what did they receive?Nothing.Too afraid to speak, too afraid to come forward and tell the world they’d been raped by an old man.”
He started to speak and Wyatt held his hand up, holding a sheet of paper with more than twenty names on it.
