First Daughter

Jack walked straight down the center of the room, peered out and down through the windows. They were on the third floor, it was a straight drop down to a blue-gray gravel drive, no trees around, no hedges to break a fall, no wisteria trunk to climb up or down. He turned around, stared straight ahead.

Garner pulled ruminatively on the lobe of his ear. "So far, what? See anything we missed, hotshot?"

Soft eyes be damned. While Jack's dyslexia robbed him of his ability to see verbally, he received something valuable in return. His multisensory mode of seeing the world tapped into the deepest intuition, an area closed off to most human beings. This same strange quirk of the brain caused Einstein to fail at schoolwork yet become one of the greatest mathematical minds of his century. It was also what allowed Leonardo da Vinci to conceive of airplanes and submarines three hundred years before they were invented. These great leaps of intuition were possible because the geniuses who conceived of them were dyslexic; they weren't tied down to the plodding logic of the verbal mind. The verbal mind thinks at a speed of approximately 150 words a minute. Jack's mind worked at a thousand times that rate. No wonder certain things disoriented him, while he could see through the surfaces of others. Take the crime scene, for instance.

Alli had slept here last night until just after three; then something happened. Had she been surprised, driven out of sleep by a callused hand clamped over her mouth, a cord biting into her wrists? Or had she heard a strange sound, had she been awake when the door opened and the predatory shadow fell on her? Did she have any time before being overpowered, before she was gagged, bound, and spirited out across the black lawn under the black sky? Alli was a smart girl, Jack knew. Even better for her, she was clever. Maybe Emma had been secretly envious of her roommate's ingenuity. The thought saddened him, but wasn't everyone envious of someone, wasn't everyone unhappy with who they were? His parents certainly were, his brother was, up until the moment the bomb took him apart on a preindustrial Iraqi highway, somewhere in the back of beyond. After the explosion and the fire, there wasn't enough left to make a proper ID, so he remained where he died, staring endlessly into the hellish yellow sky that seemed to burn day and night.

These disparate thoughts might have confused a normal mind, but not Jack's. He saw the room in a way that neither Garner nor any of the forensic experts could. To him what he was processing was a series of still frames, three-dimensional images that interlinked into a whole from which his heightened intuition made rapid-fire choices.

"There was only one perp," he said.

"Really?" Garner didn't bother to stifle a laugh. "One man to infiltrate the campus, soundlessly murder two trained Secret Service agents, abduct a twenty-year-old girl, manhandle her back across the campus, and vanish into thin air? You're out of your mind, McClure."

"Nevertheless," Jack said slowly and deliberately, "that's precisely what happened."

Garner could not keep the skepticism off his face. "Okay, assuming for a moment that there's even a remote possibility you're right, how would you know just from looking at the room when a dozen of the best forensic scientists in the country have been over this with a fine-tooth comb without being able to come to that conclusion?"

"First of all, the forensic photos of the Secret Service men showed that they were both killed by a single wound," Jack said, "and that wound was identical on both of them. The chances of two men doing that simultaneously are so remote as to be virtually impossible. Second, unless you're mounting an assault on a drug lord's compound, you're not about to use a squad of people. This is a small campus, but it's guarded by security perso

Garner shook his head. "I asked you for evidence, and this is what you come up with?"

"I'm telling you-"

"Enough, McClure. I know you're desperately trying to justify your presence here, but this bullshit just won't cut it. What you're describing is Spider-Man, not a flesh-and-blood perp." Garner, folding his arms across his chest, assumed a superior attitude. "I graduated second in my class at Yale. Where did you go to school, McClure, West Armpit College?"

Jack said nothing. He was on his hands and knees, mini-flashlight on, looking under Alli's bed-

"I've been Homeland Security since the begi

– not at the carpet, which he saw had been vacuumed by the forensics perso

"What is it exactly you ATF people do again? Handcuff moonshiners? Prosecute cigarette smugglers?"

Jack kept his tone level. "You ever dismantle a bomb made of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil set in the basement of a high school, or defuse a half pound of C-four in a drug smuggler's lab while the trapped coke-cutter is trying to set it off?"

Garner's cell phone buzzed and he put it to one ear.

"You ever run down a psycho whose lonely pleasure is trapping girls and beating the piss out of them?" Jack continued.

"At least I can read without contorting my brain into a pretzel." Garner turned on his heel, walked out of the room, talking urgently to whoever was on the other end of the line.

Jack felt the heat flame up from his core, move to his cheeks, his extremities, until his hands began to tremble. So Garner knew. Somehow he'd burrowed back into Jack's past to discover the truth. He wanted to lash out, bury his fist in Garner's smug face. It was times like this when his disability made him feel small, helpless. He was a freak; he'd always be a freak. He was trapped inside this fucked-up brain of his with no chance of escape. Ever.

Something glimmered briefly as he shone the tiny beam of the mini-flash into the hole. Reaching in, he felt around, extracting a small metal vial with a screw top. Opening it, he saw that it was half-filled with a white powder. Tasting a tiny bit on his fingertip, he confirmed his suspicion. Cocaine.

SEVEN

NINA MILLER lit a clove cigarette, stared at the burning tip for a moment, and gave a small laugh. "Reminds me of my college days. I never lost my taste." She inhaled as slowly, as deeply as if she were drawing in weed, then let the smoke out of her lungs in a soft hiss. Behind her, the sun was going down over the low hills. A dog was barking, but the sound was high-pitched, from an adjoining property, not one of the K-9 sniffers.

She was standing outside of the west dorm, where Alli's room was, leaning against the whitewashed brick, her slim left hip slightly canted. Her right elbow was perched on the top of her left wrist, the left arm hugging her waist. The slow light placed her in the elongated shadow of the roofline.

"Find anything of interest?" she inquired.

"Possibly," Jack said.

"I saw Garner storming out. You got to him, didn't you?"

Jack told her about his single-perp theory.

She frowned. "It does sound hard to believe."

"Thanks so very much."

Her eyes slid toward his face. "Like Garner, I was trained to follow the forensic evidence. The difference between us, however, is that I won't simply dismiss your theory. It's just that I never had an intuition of how to unravel a case. I don't think real life works like that."

Jack felt sorry for her. It was a peculiarly familiar feeling, and then, with a start, he realized it was how he had felt toward Sharon most of the time they were married.