Tail Spin

died. There’s never much traffic there, even this time of day.”
    “Yes, that’s good. Let Brady help,” Laurel said.
    Quincy said, “Brady must have slipped out, the shitty little coward.”
    “No matter,” Stefanos said, and smiled at Rachael and Sherlock. “We don’t have to worry about Brady. He has a very strong sense of self-preservation.”

SIXTY
    Dillon shut MAX’s top and rose. He said, “Excuse me, sir, but Agent
    Crowne and I have to go. There’s trouble.” He and Jack were halfway to the conference room door when Maitland called out, “But, Savich, where are you going? What happened?”
    “Sherlock’s in trouble,” Savich said over his shoulder, never slowing. “MAX helped me track down her cell phone GPS coordinates.”
    “But how do you know she’s in trouble?”
    There was no answer because Savich and Jack were gone. Savich roared out of the Hoover Building garage, only to hit the afternoon traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue. The Porsche preferred to fly, but Savich also knew how to skim around other cars, slip in and out whenever there was a sliver of an opening. Too many people, Savich thought, and turned onto Seventh Street and picked up some speed as they passed the National Mall. He caught Pennsylvania Avenue again, heading toward the Potomac, and crossed the John Philip Sousa Bridge at a crawl, but was soon speeding north on 295, the Baltimore-Washington Parkway still light with commuters.
    “Looks like we’re heading to Hailstone,” Savich said. “Eighteen minutes, if traffic stays light and the cops stay away.”
    “I can’t believe she and Rachael are at Stefanos’s mansion. Why? How’d they get from Rachael’s house to Hailstone, Maryland?”
    “We’ll find out. Jack, have one of our people check out Rachael’s house, see if her Charger and Sherlock’s Volvo are there. Is your seat belt fastened?” There was a break in traffic and Savich let the Porsche hit one hundred miles an hour, smooth as a slide of silk.
    Jack nodded and used his cell phone.
    A clear stretch ahead. Savich hit the hammer. The Porsche glided to 110, passed a speeding Cadillac. Savich saw the guy’s white face flash by.
    A black Ferrari danced with them for a mile or two, then let them go, Savich smoothly pulling around it. The driver sent Savich a look of surprise and a thumbs-up.
    Traffic thickened up and the Porsche growled back down to sixty. “They got both Rachael and Sherlock, Savich, you know they did. But how? Sherlock’s more careful than the Secret Service.” What are they going to do to them? But he didn’t ask that, his jaw locked so tight he couldn’t get the words out. “Why now? In the middle of the day? It’s a huge risk. What happened to make them move now?”
    The Porsche ate up the miles. Savich said, “Jack, I’ve never believed people like Laurel Kostas wouldn’t commit murder based on strong emotions. Everything has happened so quickly, we never really thought this through. I don’t buy they murdered the senator because he was going to talk, even harder to believe they were trying to murder Rachael because she was going to confess what her father did. It simply isn’t enough of a motive. And then even after she’s with us and they know we must know everything, they still tried to get to her, broke into her house. It doesn’t make sense.”
    Jack said slowly, “Okay, if the guy who broke into the house wasn’t there to kill her, then why was he there?”
    Savich said, “Money.”
    Jack said, his eyes locked on the highway ahead, at the blur of cars, “All right, something to do with money. But what?”
    “I have a feeling we’re going to find out right now.”
    The Porsche’s sexy female GPS voice told them the Hailstone exit was in 3.2 miles. “Good, good,” Savich said like a mantra. “Almost there. We’ll make it in a couple of minutes.”
    Savich took the exit in a tight, controlled turn. After another right turn onto Nimere Avenue into the town of Hailstone, he said, “Rachael said her father left her a third of his estate, including the company stock and the house.” He smacked his palm on the steering wheel. “Why is that worth so much to them?”
    “Maybe it’s about control of the Abbott empire,” Jack said.
    The Porsche took a left on Clapton Road as smooth as spreading butter, doing sixty.
    Jack said, “Wait, the Kostas mansion is back to the right. Where are we going?”
    The GPS announced the location was 0.5 miles