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She felt him kiss her neck. The stubble on his chin startled her. She forced herself to laugh despite feeling terrified, and tried to lift her hand to push him away. The muscles of her arms, however, were too weak to fend him off. She tried again, with the same result, and felt like she was in a dream she couldn’t wake from. She swallowed hard as the guy continued to kiss her neck, then her lips. He thrust his tongue into her mouth and all she wanted to do was get away from him. Then she felt him press her shoulders backward. She tried to resist as he pushed her onto the couch.
* * *
She woke on the floor, the matted carpet clawing at her cheek. When she opened her eyes she was stunned by photophobia and a headache that emanated from behind her eyes and ached deep into her brain. The first thing she noticed, as the light sensitivity dulled, was that she was not wearing pants. Disoriented and mortified, she sat up and covered herself with her hands. Her bra was still on, but her tank top was pulled up over her breasts. Her jeans were in a heap next to her, and her underwear was wrapped around her left ankle.
She reached down quickly to pull them up, fighting a second wave of aching in her head before noticing the stabbing pain between her legs. Adrenaline allowed her to ignore the discomfort while she scrambled for her jeans and pulled them on. She looked around and tried to figure out where she was. Snippets of memory came back to her from the previous night. The party. The fraternity house. Her friends on the dance floor, drinking and having fun. But then her memory ended. It didn’t fade out or have segments missing; it was gone entirely. She couldn’t remember a thing after the dance floor. Not about her friends, or about how she ended up here—on the floor next to a couch in, what looked like, a room inside the fraternity house.
Getting to her feet was difficult due to both the headache and the pain between her legs. Something was wrong, and she feared the worst. She looked for her shoes but abandoned the search to attend to the urgency she felt to get out of the house. She walked to the door and opened it to find a hallway that led to a staircase. She took the stairs gingerly, placing one hand on the railing and the other over her abdomen as she descended. When she opened the door at the bottom of the landing, brilliant morning sunlight assaulted her eyes with a searing agony that pierced through her head. Her ears rang. Outside, she gained her bearings, realizing she had exited the fraternity house into the back parking lot. Her apartment was two blocks away, and she carefully made her way there. When she reached the parking lot of her apartment complex, she fumbled her car keys out of the pocket of her jeans, held the key fob over her head, and pressed the button several times until she heard the chirping horn of her car. Squinting against the sunlight, she stumbled to her vehicle, opened the door, and fell into the driver’s seat.
Ten minutes later she walked into the emergency room and approached the reception desk. She was happy to see a woman behind the counter. She suddenly and inexplicably worried less about her disheveled appearance—wild hair, smeared makeup, and no shoes—than if a man had greeted her.
“Hi,” the woman said with concern. “How can we help you, sweetie?”
“I’m a student at McCormack University. . . .” The girl swallowed hard as tears filled her eyes and ran down her cheeks. “I think I was raped last night.”
CHAPTER 24
Washington, D.C. Monday, March 6, 2023 9:10 a.m.
LARRY CHADWICK HAD BEEN ANOINTED. ALTHOUGH NOT BECKONED by God Himself, the Honorable Lawrence P. Chadwick of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia had been summoned by the president of the United States, and that was damn close. Rumors came and went over the years about Larry’s name being added to the short list of potential nominees for the Supreme Court whenever the next vacancy came around, but Larry had seen too many of his colleagues place too much hope on such unlikely odds. So much, in fact, that when they were passed over for the appointment, the regret derailed their careers. Larry’s objective had never wavered: Do the job, do it well, and do it honestly. And when honesty was not possible—and there were many instances when it was not—cover your tracks well enough so that whatever oversight committee decided to take a look would find nothing.
As he ascended up through the courts, Larry had been aware that the eyes of the country’s elite and powerful were watching his every move, evaluating his character, and charting his rulings in some unseen database that weighed the pros and cons of his opinions, positions, and politics. He played the part and acted unconcerned with those keeping score. He stuck to his plan, believing that someday, perhaps, his name would come up. That day had finally arrived.
Larry had been short-listed to fill the most recent Supreme Court vacancy, which opened when Jonathan Miller died the previous month. Justice Miller’s death was not a surprise. Eighty-eight years old and obese, the man had battled diabetes his entire adult life. Not even a pancreatic cancer diagnosis could entice the man to step down. A stubborn old-school southerner, he battled through two years of chemotherapy without missing a day of work before he died in his sleep.
Justice Miller’s ailing health had long been a political talking point, and the new administration had come into office with a list of potential nominees to replace him. Twelve nominees made up the list, but most were just for show. The candidates were diversified and distinguished and offered hope to just about every voting demographic. When the list was boiled down, however, only a couple of nominees rose to the top. Lawrence P. Chadwick was one of them.
Larry cleared his schedule for the afternoon and now stood outside his DC office wearing a crisp charcoal suit and navy tie. The black SUV with tinted windows pulled to the curb and Annette Packard, the FBI special agent assigned to scouring through his life, climbed from the passenger seat.
“Larry,” Annette said as she walked toward him with an outstretched hand. “Good to see you again.”
Larry shook the woman’s hand. “You too, Annette.”
They shared the fakest of fake relationships. They pretended to like each other, when in fact they each had a vested interest in seeing the other fail. Annette Packard was the gatekeeper to his spot on the Supreme Court. Her job was to pick through Larry’s life and find any and all transgressions that might make him a poor choice as the president’s nominee. Larry’s job was to make sure she found nothing.
“I’ll brief you on the way over,” Annette said, opening the back door of the government SUV for Larry to climb in.
Larry took his spot next to a serious-looking man in a buy-one-get-one Brooks Brothers suit. The driver in the front seat appeared to be wearing an identical suit.
“Sir,” the man said with a slight head nod as Larry settled in.
Larry offered an awkward smile as the SUV pulled from the curb. Annette turned so she could speak to Larry over the front seat.
“The president is in a meeting with the foreign intelligence committee. He’s due to finish at ten-ten. He’s set aside thirty minutes to speak with you.”
This would be Larry’s third meeting with the president. Third, and final, if the rumors were true. If all went well during the next month, the next time he met with the leader of the free world after today would be during a public meet-and-greet in the Rose Garden in front of the entire press crew. It would be then that the country would know for certain that Lawrence P. Chadwick was the president’s choice to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court.
For the past three months Larry had met with members of the Secret Service and FBI, Annette Packard being the point person and overseeing the process. She poked around Larry’s past—formally termed the debriefing and vetting process—looking for red flags that could hurt his chances of making it through the grueling nomination process. More than that, Annette looked for things that would prove embarrassing for the president. This vetting process was a forensic examination of a candidate’s life, and Larry had learned through his own research that Annette Packard excelled at it. She’d vetted senators, congressmen and congresswomen, vice presidential candidates, and governors. Larry Chadwick was her first Supreme Court vet.
Starting with his high school days, Annette Packard had methodically picked her way through Larry’s life, sniffing at anything she found suspicious and turning over any rocks she believed might be hiding secrets. Annette did this from his teenage years to present day. She was searching, Larry knew, for transgressions, embarrassing gaffes, stupid mistakes, cover-ups, crimes, or anything unsavory that might cast him, and therefore the president, in a bad light during the confirmation hearings.
“Trust me,” Annette had told Larry during an initial meeting. “If you did it, we’ll find it.”
They could look, but Larry was confident they would find nothing. Early on he’d set his life on the correct trajectory. The son of a navy commander turned prominent businessman, Larry grew up sailing in Connecticut and attending private school. The worst thing he’d done in high school was break Renee Beckham’s heart when he’d dumped her for a cheerleader. But even this minor transgression, Larry believed, had been atoned. He married Renee five years later when he was a first-year law student. That their marriage had survived twenty-five years and produced three children was evidence that Renee had forgiven him. The extracurriculars since then were well buried, and Larry was confident Annette Packard would not dig deep enough to find them.
If Larry’s high school experience had been benign, his college days had been anemic. At Yale he’d never fallen under the myth of secret societies, had rejected the lure of fraternity life, and had spent most of his time in the library. His three years of law school at Duke had been crowded with books, work, and internships. Larry Chadwick had simply never found time to get into trouble.
So, Annette Packard and her team of FBI agents and the Secret Service goons who were picking through his life could look all they wanted. There was nothing to find. At least, nothing they would find easily.
