With Malice

The horrible sounds continued, not at all passion but stark terror, and she grabbed for the first thing she could find, a heavy glass ashtray, the last remnant of a long-dead habit, before opening the door and moving toward the screams that were growing fainter by the moment.

Bile rose in her throat as she came to the bottom of the stairs and rounded the corner into the living room. The sounds from the woman reached a new if almost silent intensity, the nylon stocking—nearly invisible in the flesh of her neck—choking off all sound. But her eyes…

Abigail had seen a lot in her three score and fifteen years of life. She had watched a young boy scream as the doctors tried to reset the shattered bones in his lower leg, ending his dreams of college football. She had seen the boy grow into a man and the pallor in his face as he asked her whether he should propose to the woman he loved. She had watched him nearly faint at the news that his new wife was pregnant, and beam at the birth of their first child. She had watched his face, his entire countenance, sink like a gutted ship when he heard that his wife had been killed. She had seen children quiver in fear of punishment, in fear of shots, in fear of first haircuts. But she had never seen eyes like this.

They bulged from the sockets, blotched with red from burst capillaries, and they were looking into the face of eternity. The bloodied lips beneath them mouthed a word: “Abby.”

It was only then that Abigail noticed that the woman was naked, her shredded nightgown protruding from beneath her back, apparently wrapped around her wrists. Her legs, though free, made only futile kicks, easily resisted by the man who was bent over her breast. With an ugly, wet, ripping sound, his face rose from her chest. He spat, and a chunk of flesh landed on the woman’s face. Then he seemed to see through her eyes and turn to Abigail.

His was the face of a monster, smeared with the woman’s blood, white teeth and eyes glistening in a red mask of rage and fury.

Abigail’s nostrils flared with the fight or flight response. She should have flown. Instead she charged him, the ashtray raised high in her hand, the lioness protecting her pride. She closed the distance between them in four steps, swinging the ashtray down at his head with all her still considerable strength. But she was an old lioness, and her reflexes were not those of the younger woman who had snatched children from the throes of danger for decade upon decade.

He turned and caught the blow on his shoulder, grunting in pain, and then his arm flashed up. It was only then, in that last instant, that she saw the gleaming blade in his gloved hand, in the last instant before it plunged into her throat and savagely ripped across.

For a moment she thought he had missed, for there was no pain. But then she saw the pulsing explosion of red splash over his face, and in the fast-dimming light she realized it was her own blood.

She dimly heard a voice. “I’ll get him, too!”

Abigail Reese was once again dreaming, running through a tunnel, trying to escape the gurgling, wet sound that propelled her. The light at the tunnel seemed to dim, then exploded into brightness and swallowed her.

1

Senator Grant Lawrence grunted in disgust as he paged through the proposed amendments to Senate Resolution Fifty-Two. Whenever he thought about the bill he’d sponsored, he forced himself to think: clams have lips.

That reminded him of the first time he’d snorkeled in the Florida Keys, as a teenager, and had seen the beautiful coral through water so crystal-clear that he’d felt he could see forever. On that bright April day, during Easter vacation, he’d been gliding through the water when he’d seen a squiggly, bright red line in the sand beneath him. He’d reached down toward it, and the line had split down the middle, the clam opening its shell to test the disturbances around it. Apparently deciding his finger was not appetizing, it had closed its shell again, leaving only that squiggly, bright red line.

Clams have lips. And, Grant had decided, they wore lipstick.

He forced himself to remember that day because he could not repeat it. The water of the upper Keys was now cloudy and thick with sea grass, choking out the coral, hiding or chasing away the clams. The grass was the product of nitrogen in the water, the runoff from fertilizers used by sugar growers in the Everglades. The problem was not limited to his native state, of course. All along the eastern seaboard and Gulf Coast, nitrogen-laden runoff was feeding sea grasses that had replaced the native underwater flora and displaced fisheries.

S.R. 52 was an attempt—a feeble attempt, his critics said—to slow the damage. It wasn’t perfect, but it was based on the best scientific evidence and advice his staff could assemble. And it would be reasonably cost-effective to implement. Many of his colleagues in the Senate agreed, and his staff had negotiated with, cajoled and arm-twisted enough of the others that the bill seemed likely to pass.

Thus, he was not surprised by the pork amendments that had grown like barnacles on the hull of an ocean liner. Most were only vaguely related to the bill itself but would instead funnel some money into authors’ home states. Some of them were amendments he’d pledged to support, bartered in order to secure a colleague’s vote on the primary bill. However distasteful it might seem, it was the way of politics, and he accepted it as a necessary and sometimes beneficial fact of life.

Others were not so benign.

Amendment Nineteen, for example, would strike the paragraph that authorized additional funds to the EPA to monitor and enforce S.R. 52. Creating unenforceable law was an old political trick. The idea was to allow law-makers to pad campaign literature about how they’d voted on popular issues without sacrificing campaign contributors whose interests ran the other way. To the voters: I voted to protect your environment. To the contributors: But I knew this bill wouldn’t upset your apple carts.

And he knew who was behind that amendment. Randall Youngblood, head of the cane growers’ association, now lobbying for a loose coalition of agriculture associations nationwide. Randall Youngblood, old friend, now nemesis.

Clams have lips. Grant used that image to maintain his focus as he waded through the swamp of cynical motives and opaque language. He scrawled NO!!! through the text of A.19, then tossed the folder aside. He would slog through the rest of it later.

He took another minute to flip through the news digest, circulated to members of Congress by e-mail. Compiled daily from wire services and newspapers from around the world, it offered a quick précis of the day’s events. A humanitarian relief convoy had been ambushed by guerillas in Colombia, the second such ambush in a week. Two Americans were among the thirty-one casualties.

Grant scanned the rest of his e-mail. The only one that mattered was the notice of a meeting of the Central and South American Affairs Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The meeting was set for 10:00 a.m. He had no doubt that the situation in Colombia would be first on the agenda. He logged off and shut down. Colombia would have to wait. It was two in the morning, and he’d promised to take his daughters to breakfast.

While he loved having the girls in D.C. with him when they were off from school, they did make for longer days. Still, burning the midnight oil was a small price to pay for the time he had with them. He switched off the desk lamp and took a few moments in the comfortable darkness to massage the hair at his temples.

At least in the darkness he didn’t have to notice that his formerly raven black hair was turning gunmetal gray. His advisors had turned to an image consultant, who had pronounced it “statesmanlike” and “dignified.” Grant thought it simply made him look old. But within a week the advisors had tromped in with focus group research. His daily jog, trips to the Senate gym and a healthful diet had kept him trim and lean. The focus group felt that the gray streaks softened his otherwise chiseled, youthful face. “The energy of youth, tempered with the wisdom of experience,” one woman had said.

That sounded much grander than he felt about himself. He’d spent the day in the company of the energy of youth, chasing his girls around the Smithsonian. They had speed-walked him into the ground, giggling when he’d begged them to “slow down for the old man.” Energy of youth? Not.

Letting out a sigh, he rose from his chair just as the phone rang. It was his private line, and the caller ID display flashed the name.

“What’s up, Jerry?”

Jerry Connally’s voice was thick with tension. “Grant…shit, I don’t even know how to say this. It’s Abby. She’s…dead.”

“Oh no.” Grant felt the bottom fall out of his stomach and sagged back into his chair. “Oh no.”

“She was…murdered.”

Abby? Murdered? Shock froze him, caught him in an endless instant of incomprehension and disbelief. He had known the day would come when her body failed her, but this…this was beyond imagination. “Oh God. Oh God. This isn’t…it couldn’t have…”

Jerry’s voice softened. “I’m sorry, Grant. I am so, so sorry.”

Abby had been his nanny, raising him practically single-handedly while his parents had rubbed shoulders with the wealthy and powerful. It was Abby who’d taught him the difference between glitter and gold, that the wealthy were not always worthy of the privilege they enjoyed. And when his wife had died, it was Abby who’d stepped in to raise his girls. It was simply not possible that she was gone.

He had to lean forward, to put his head between his knees as he clung to the phone. The world around him swirled, and there was a faint buzzing in his ears. “Where? How?”

“She was here at home, Grant. Stabbed.”

No. It was not possible. His mind rebelled, even as the words came out on autopilot. “A burglary?”

“I don’t know,” Jerry said. “It gets worse.”

“Worse?” Grant asked. He gripped the phone so tight that his fingers ached, but that pain was a distant thing, barely scratching the surface of his horror.

Jerry paused for a moment. “They killed Stacy, too. It was…it was really ugly.”

The room spun in the darkness, shadowy images swirling, closing in on him. Grant reached out, turned on his desk lamp to hold them at bay. He had to lift his head to do it, and the room spun a little once again. The light seemed to pierce his eyes. “What was Stacy doing there?”

“Don’t worry about it. I…took care of it.”

“What? How?” He wouldn’t have thought his horror could have grown any deeper, but it did.

Jerry’s voice grew chilly. “Senator, you don’t want to know.”

Karen Sweeney looked at the body in the alley again, then looked away. “God, what a mess.”

Corporal Terry Ewing nodded in agreement, his face ashen. “Someone was really pissed at this woman.”

“Looks that way,” Karen said. She tore her focus from the horror in front of her and found a procedural routine. “Okay, Corporal, start logging the scene. ID anyone who’s been in this alley, starting with whoever found the body. Seal the scene. Nobody comes in except the M.E.”

“Should I call for the P.I.O.?” he asked.

She shrugged. “You can try, but he’s already up to his ears in College Hill.”