Political Abuse

“Senator Pender? Douglas Pender? You think he’s one of the masterminds of this? He wasn’t when I was involved, I don’t think. He was just another senator who liked doing young men. Senate pages were in their jobs because they were special; they were so in awe of where they were that they were easy pickings for senators. I don’t know if he’s involved now. I wouldn’t think so. Jim was always saying he didn’t trust Pender not to call the whistle on them. They helped him get male pussy and invited him to some of their orgies, but I don’t think they let him know how extensive and organized their pimping operation was. No, when I was a congressional page, Senator Bainbridge—Gerald Bainbridge—was the main backer. There were other senators, but Jim didn’t give me their names. But Bainbridge is dead now.”

Hardesty and Jeremy Brand had finally settled down to talk at Hardesty’s desk at police headquarters. Hardesty hadn’t known of a better or safer place to take the former congressional page and rent-boy on the Capitol ring to interview and try to pull names from him. All he’d known was that he needed to get Jeremy Brand away from Justine’s as fast as possible. They hadn’t gone into particulars on the ride over to the police department.

Most of the ride was Jeremy talking about Hardesty’s relationship with Justine’s and pouting about how Hardesty hadn’t called on Jeremy’s services yet. The pouty part was one of the reasons, Hardesty could have told him. Jeremy wasn’t his physical type for starters—he was average size, dark headed, and effeminate. Hardesty went for small blonds and, although he’d do a guy who was girlie, he wouldn’t go out of his way to do so, and the guy would have to keep his mouth shut during sex. He had no attraction to Jeremy Brand in a sexual way. He certainly hoped to squeeze information out of him—and to keep him alive long enough to testify in court.

“Pender hosted a rent-boy party at his vacation place on the Chesapeake last weekend,” Hardesty said. “We think it was a gathering of this Capitol men’s club,” Hardesty said.

“Like I said, Pender could be involved now, now that Jim Zeller is gone, but Jim and he didn’t get along at all, and Jim spoke of Pender like he wouldn’t have a thing to do with him.”

“But the only name of senators involved Zeller gave you was Bainbridge?”

“Yes, I’m sure there were others, but that’s all Jim told me about.”

“And you and Jim were close?”

“He’s the one who brought me into it. I was the only one of young guys he slept with himself. He had a secret office in the Capitol building. He ran the rent-boy operation out of that office. If there was a name list of the sponsors or clients that he kept, it would be in that office.”

“We found the office—and the safe behind the painting of the naval battle off Norfolk. But there wasn’t anything we were looking for in the safe.”

Brand laughed.

“What?” Hardesty asked.

“That was a dummy safe. Jim was very careful. Did you find the false back wall to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom off the office? That’s where Jim would have kept anything he wanted to keep secret.”

Just then, Lieutenant Crane walked up to the desk. “We’re going to Zeller’s office in the Capitol building to see if we might have missed something, Hardesty. You want to come along and bring Mr. Brand here. He might see something we didn’t.”

“You bet I do,” Hardesty answered. “For starters, he’s told me about another safe we haven’t found.”

And, indeed, they found lists of names tucked away in a compartment behind the medicine chest at Zeller’s office. But they found something more interesting than that. Hardesty found a familiar jacket hanging on the back of a side chair.

“I know this jacket,” he said. “I wore this jacket on Ted Colver’s TV show the other night. This was loaned to me to wear by his research assistant, Doug Quillen.”

“Doug Quillen?” Brand asked. “He’s one of the guys who worked with Jim on the rent-boy operation. That’s probably why his coat was here.”

“It had to have been here after I wore it on the TV show. It had to have been left here sometime after Zach Taylor came here looking for information and winding up dead later that night. And that was after I’d worn the jacket on the TV program. And Doug Quillen works for Ted Colver on the TV program now.”

“He worked for Ted Colver when Colver was a U.S. senator too,” Brand said. “I did some couriering for his office when I was a page. And now that his name has come up, I might have heard Jim mentioning him. Can I see that list you guys found behind the medicine cabinet?”

Lieutenant Crane, who had been perusing the list, which consisted of first names and last initials, handed it over to Brand, who scanned down the list.

“There. Ted C. He’s on this list of members. And there, just below his name, Clay H. That would probably be Senator Hughes. Those two senators were thick as thieves. Now that I think about it, I think I serviced Hughes myself once back when I was a page. Jim didn’t tell me the senator was a club member, but maybe he was. Doug Quillen was on his staff once too, and I sure knew Quillen was connected with the club. He fucked me several times too. Made it clear he owned me.”

Hardesty gave Brand a sharp look. It was much too convenient that the young man was belatedly remembering what he claimed not to have known before. In turn Brand gave Hardesty a look that clearly conveyed, “If you’d paid me some attention, I would have told you more from the beginning.” Hardesty was about to say something when a voice interrupted them.

“Lieutenant,” a cop said, coming up to where Crane, Hardesty, and Brand were standing. “Chris is on the line from headquarters. He says they traced the license plate of the car that Hardesty’s neighbor got pulling away from his house when Adrian Mills disappeared from there. It belongs to a Senator Clayton Hughes.”

“Thanks, Ned,” Crane answered. “Tell Chris that was good work. We’re focusing in now, I think.”

“Ned,” Hardesty said. “can you also ask Chris to do a rundown on all of the properties Ted Colver and Clayton Hughes own in this area? I think we need to check them out pronto.”

“Right,” Crane agreed.

* * * *

The raid on Ted Colver’s home on MacArthur Boulevard on the Potomac Palisades west of the Georgetown and the center of the capital netted little, at least at first. The house was deserted. They’d come with a search warrant and the front door wasn’t locked, so there was no issue about getting in. Once in, though, they found that no one was there.

There was plenty of evidence that there had been someone there not long before, though. There were dirty dishes and empty beer bottles in the kitchen and the smell of stale cigarette smoke.

“He’s got a trophy room back here,” one searcher said, coming to where Crane and Hardesty were starting up the stairs to the bedroom level. “The guy’s a hunter. There’s a gun case, but it’s open and, if there were any rifles in it, they’re gone.”

“Yeah, I remember him saying something about being a hunter and having a friend with a hunting lodge in the mountains not far from D.C.,” Hardesty said, as he and his lieutenant continued on up the stairs. “Maybe that’s where he’s gone.”

Most of the recent activity on the second floor centered on the master bedroom. Someone had been sleeping in the bed in another room, where the bed was unmade, but obviously there had been something more taxing going on in the master bedroom. The bed clothes looked like there had been a wrestling match, and restraints were hanging down on all four sides. A slicked-up tarp was still laid out on the floor at the foot of the bed.

“There have been some rough sex games going on here, and recently,” Crane said, surveying the scene. He went around the sides of the bed, checking everything out.

“So, Ted Colver is one of the kinky ones,” Hardesty said. “From what Jeremy Brand eventually came out with, Colver must have been one of the original sponsors of the Capitol prostitution club. When I did his TV show earlier in the week, Jacob Goldstein told him he had more to reveal on the ring. I’ll bet that telling Colver that is what got Goldstein killed.”

Hardesty was still worried about Toby too. Now he was more sure than ever that Toby had somehow become involved in all of this. Hardesty had forced the escort agency to reveal that Toby had been at Pender’s weekend party, where the Capitol club members had been active whether Pender was a member of the club or not. Somehow Toby had become one of the rent-boys supplemented for the usual Senate pages and young staffers the club members were using. And Hardesty hadn’t been able to connect with Toby today. He’d contacted the escort agency—the first time he’d ever done that—and pulled rank on them, making it clear that he was in a position to close them down if they didn’t tell him where Toby had gone, but until they could contact his scheduler, all the agency could tell him about Toby’s current whereabouts was that he was out on an assignment. Hardesty tried calling him again on the cell phone, without response.

“Hello, I wonder what this is.”

“What?” Hardesty said, looking over to the side of the bed, where Crane was coming up from his knees.

“This. It looks like an old coin.”

“Let me see that,” Hardesty said, reaching out for the coin. “Shit. This is Toby’s. It’s his good-luck charm. Toby’s been here. Fuck. We’ve got to track these guys down.”

“Colver doesn’t have any country property listed,” Lieutenant Crane said when he came upstairs. “But Senator Hughes does, and he’s up to his neck in this with Colver. He has a hunting lodge on top of Blue Mountain. Down off 66 near Front Royal. The Linden exit off 66,” Crane continued. “About an hour’s drive away.”

* * * *

“Here’s where the lodge is,” said Tom Sinclair, the Warren County sheriff, as the authorities from multiple jurisdictions gathered around the map spread out on the hood of the sheriff’s car—there were far too many cops from too many jurisdictions for Hardesty’s liking. Both he and Lieutenant Crane were relegated to the second rank. The D.C. deputy police commissioner was there, in front of them, and standing next to him was the chief of the Capitol police. There were some feds and state policemen belly up to the hood of the car as well. Even the Fauquier County sheriff was there, as that county’s border was just across Fire Trail Road from Hughes’s hunting lodge. It was Warren County to the west of the road and the Richard Thompson State Wildlife Reserve in Fauquier County to the east.

Somehow the word had gotten out and the word had included a group of U.S. senators, representatives, and judges and a gaggle of major lobbyists being involved in a sex scandal and gathered at a U.S. senator’s hunting lodge now, and every police unit that could argue jurisdiction was gathering at the Linden, Virginia, post office parking lot at the base of the southern end of Blue Mountain on Route 55.

The question in Hardesty’s mind was how many of them were there to be in on a juicy scandal and how many were there to cover everything up for politicians?

Hardesty leaned over between the D.C. deputy police commission and the chief of the Capitol police and made a stab at a line on the map running parallel to Fire Trail Road, which was a dirt and gravel track running off the main road up the spine of the mountain.

“What’s this?” he growled.

“That’s the Appalachian Trail,” Tom Sinclair said, but then he went on to refereeing a discussion among all the police brass there how they were going to approach the house. “Remember who these guys are,” he said. “Get an ID and carefully section off the senators and judges from the rest.” This set off an argument between the feds and the Capitol Police chief on what they’d do with the senators and judges.

“Fuck this,” Hardesty as he backed away from the car.

“Fuck what?” a female voice asked from behind him. He turned to see, with surprise, that his partner, Carrie Evans, who he thought was on vacation in Florida, was coming up behind him. She was dressed out in her “serious business” attire, firepower and all.

“Carrie!” he exclaimed. “This isn’t Florida.”

“And Florida wasn’t near the fun that the guys in the office told me you were having here.”

“Here. You can have my spot in this fuck fest,” Hardesty said. “I don’t have time for this shit.”

“What’s the hurry?” Carrie asked.

“Gotta go. I think they’ve got Toby up there at the lodge, and they aren’t nice guys. I don’t have time to stand in line for these clowns to get their shit together. Thanks for coming back, though.” Stepping away from her as she moved into the position where he’d been, Hardesty ran to the car he and Crane had come to Linden in, jumped in, saw that the keys were in the ignition, and took off, making the two cops guarding the turnoff onto Fire Trail Road jump aside as they vainly trying to wave him to a stop. Keeping the map in mind, which had shown the parking areas into the wildlife reserve, he drove over the deep-rutted trail to the last parking area before he would reach the hunting lodge. He parked there and plunged away from the road down the path leading to the Appalachian Trail. He made a couple of too early cuts back to the main road before he was parallel to where the hunting lodge was, but he followed the sound of gunfire, which worried him more than a bit, and eventually came out on the road right across from the hunting lodge property.

The gunfire was coming from behind and downslope of the rambling log lodge. Hardesty skirted around in the trees until he could see what that was all about. A bunch of guys, mostly middle-aged or older, were engaged in target practice with rifles. Hardesty recognized a couple of men—Ted Colver and Clayton Hughes, who seemed to be in charge—and Judge Morton standing off to the side and looking none too happy. He couldn’t see Senator Pender among the men, and, more important, he didn’t see Toby.

He worked his way back around the house. As he moved to climb up on the front porch, Doug Quillen came out of the front door, firing. His gunfire merged into the sound of the shots behind the lodge. The first bullet sent wood chips off the column next to Hardesty’s head. The second shot was from Hardesty, and Quillen went down. Hardesty didn’t stop to check on Quillen, who was moaning, so still alive, but picked up Quillen’s pistol and continued into the house. He went straight through the house to a dining room with a large picture window looking over the back yard. As far as he could tell, Quillen’s and his shots at the front of the house hadn’t been marked from the back, where there was considerable shooting, although Ted Colver seemed to have his head up and was looking around.

Hardesty rushed up to the second level to find most of the bedrooms deserted, except for one, where a wide-eyed Jay, who had been resting on a bed, gave Hardesty a wild look. Hardesty waved his hand, yelled, “Take cover,” and Jay sank to the floor on the other side of the bed. There was no way the young man was going to raise an alarm, Hardesty knew.

“Where’s Toby Drake? Do you know Toby?” Hardesty asked in a stage whisper. “I’m looking for him. The police are on their way. Stay here and you should be safe.”

“I haven’t seen Toby. I’ve just been in a bedroom downstairs with one man and then up here, upstairs, with another,” the young Senate page and rent-boy whispered back.

Where would they stash Toby if not here, Hardesty wondered—if Toby still was alive. He shuddered at the possibilities. Someone could be buried in the forest downslope from the house or across the road in the wildlife preserve and never be found again. Maybe the guys taking target practice had been using other guys as targets?

If Toby was still alive and not bound in one of the bedrooms, then maybe they had a sex playground somewhere with heavy equipment. Most likely in the basement. He stumbled down the stairs to the first floor and found the door to the basement stairs. As he descended, he heard the sirens from police cars and ambulances coming up Fire Trail Road. Anyone here at the lodge was stuck here with the police cars coming in from the main road. Fire Trail ended in a dead end. Anyone with a car out front would be traceable even if they fled into the woods on foot.

But in the next few seconds, all hell would be breaking out here, with Colver’s and Hughes’s high-powered guests trying not to be caught up in the net. And they had rifles. Who knew if they’d try to make a stand here? If so, they had completely misjudged the firepower of the authorities. Hardesty could hear a helicopter overhead too—maybe more than one.

In the basement, he immediately saw Toby hanging on the X-frame, but looking not so great. He was alive and aware, though. Hardesty rushed to him, laid his pistol and the one he’d taken off of Quillen on the floor, and started working on the restraints binding Toby to the X-frame.

“God, it’s good to see you,” Toby said. “But Adrian first. I hope he isn’t dead. He’s over there. Take care of him first.”

“You!” The exclamation came from the doorway to the room. “What in the hell?” Ted Colver had his rifle raised and pointed at Hardesty. “Leave him!” he commanded.

Hardesty looked at Colver and then down at the pistols he’d put on the floor. Getting to them would be hopeless. He moved to stand between Toby and Colver’s rifle. He watched Colver’s finger stroke the trigger of his rifle, heard the explosion of a gun, and watched Colver crumple and fall on the floor at the door.

Hardesty’s eyes narrowed as he saw Carrie Evans come through the door, her service revolver smoking.

“What’s happening? You’re standing in my way,” Toby called out.

“You followed me,” Hardesty said, accusingly to his partner.

“Sure I did,” Carrie said. “You thanked me for coming back from Florida. You’re only polite to me when you need help. That meant I had to follow up to see that you didn’t hurt yourself.”

A half hour later, Crane had pulled them off to the side. “This is a mess for others to clean up and cover over now,” the lieutenant said after medics had put an unconscious, but still alive, Adrian Mills in an ambulance and Hardesty and Carrie had given their versions of Quillen being shot, Colver being dead, and Hughes having been tracked down in the forest, stories that corroborated each other and would keep both out of trouble. Toby and Jay had been quickly dressed and were sitting in the back of Crane’s cruiser in that parking area in the wildlife reserve where Hardesty had parked it. Crane had had Carrie take them there down the Appalachian Trail as soon as he’d shown up.

Two helicopters had settled down in the backyard of the hunting lodge and men—Colver’s and Hughes’s guests—were being loaded into them. The cars of the guests were being driven by cops from various jurisdictions farther up Fire Trail—not out toward the main road.

“Carting them off to jail,” Carrie commented, “but why are the cops moving their cars away from the scene?”

“Really? You don’t know?” Hardesty said, with a laugh.

“We didn’t see any of this just like the other cops here haven’t seen Toby or the other young guy,” Crane said. “Those on the helicopter are being whisked away so they were never here. Their cars are a problem, because the press is already settled at the entrance to Fire Trail. So, the cars have to sit on ice until they can be spirited away. The press could trace the license plate numbers.”

“So, this is being covered up?” Carrie asked.

“It’s being quietly handled,” Crane said. “The main problem would have been Ted Colver, and you took care of that problem yourself.”

“So, how about dinner tonight?” Carrie asked Hardesty when Crane walked off to continue containing his own unit’s involvement in all of this. “I’m starved. You can pick up the tab, seein’ as how I came back from a nice Florida vacation just to save your ass.”

“How about tomorrow, Carrie?” Hardesty asked. “I need to get Toby home and into bed.”

“After what he’s been through, I wouldn’t mess around with him tonight,” Carrie said. The partners didn’t mince words with each other. “And you should make another pass at tellin’ him his idea of a job is too much a danger to his health.”

Hardesty gave a laugh, but it was a dry one. “I tell him that almost daily, Carrie, but you should know from your own relationship with Sophie that telling him what to do or trying to fence him in would be the quickest way to not having him anymore.”

“But I know you,” she said. “This has put you in a rush. I know what you need now.”

“As a matter of fact, I already have that in mind. After I’ve tucked Toby away, I have a little training mission to go on.”

“Training. Yeah, right,” Carrie said.

But it was a continuation of training he’d been interrupted in giving that Hardesty had in mind. He was thinking of that new, deliciously small and blond, rent-boy, Curtis, at Justine’s he had in the plow belt earlier.

- Fini -