With Malice

“Thank you,” he said quietly. “Can I see her?”

She shook her head. “They’ve taken her away already. I hate to ask this, but I do need to go through the house with you. It looks like she surprised a burglar. Mr. Connally didn’t notice anything missing, but…it’s your house.”

He simply nodded, and she continued.

“We can do it later. But it would help the investigation to know as soon as possible. If there was something stolen, finding it might help us find out who did this. A homicide trail goes cold fast.”

“I understand, Detective.” He glanced around. “Is Jerry here?”

He wanted the comfort of a familiar face, she could tell. And she couldn’t offer it. “I’m sorry. He went downtown to fill out a statement. Procedure.”

“Yes. Procedure.” He ran a hand through his hair, momentarily appearing utterly lost. Then he squared his shoulders. “Okay, Detective. Show me my home.”

3

Grant Lawrence paused in the doorway and realized his house had become an alien land. It wasn’t just the strangers who were everywhere, the police in their uniforms, the technicians with their cases and clipboards. No, it wasn’t that his house was full of strangers. For Grant Lawrence, a stranger was merely an opportunity to make a friend or an ally, and he met with many new people right here in this house.

But the house was changed forever. It was no longer his home. It had become the place where Abby had died. It felt different. It smelled different. He stepped into it as if stepping in a mausoleum.

He had been so shaken by the news of Abby’s and Stacy’s deaths that he hadn’t given much thought to how they had happened. He wasn’t spared the knowledge for long. He turned toward the living room, that large, over-decorated space where he often entertained, the creation of his late wife’s opulent taste, and he saw.

The sight knocked the wind from him, and he spun away. It wasn’t that he’d never seen bloody horror before. The memory of jagged white bone protruding from his right shin, of bright, hot blood pulsing between his fingers as he grabbed the wound, was still vivid. He knew exactly what he was seeing. But this time it had been Abby, his lifelong second mother. And Stacy, a woman he had once thought he might be in love with.

Oh, God! He leaned against a wall, hot and cold by turns, pressing his forehead against cool plaster, closing his eyes, trying to banish the image of what he’d just seen.

A hand touched his arm, a small hand with surprising strength. It gripped him. “Senator?” said the smoky voice of Detective Sweeney. “Do you need to sit?”

“I’ll be all right.” He had to be all right. As had happened so many times in his life, he had no choice but to be all right.

He drew a steadying breath, regaining his self-command. A line from one of his father’s favorite poems floated unbidden through his consciousness. If you can meet with triumph and disaster/And treat those two imposters just the same. Rudyard Kipling’s idealized “Man” would have known how to handle this.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have warned you.”

He raised his head, pushed himself away from the wall and looked at her. “Why? That would have deprived you of the opportunity to see my initial reaction.”

He thought she flushed faintly, but if so, it was nearly invisible. “Senator, you were in Washington. You’re not a suspect.”

He knew better. Jerry had found Abby and Stacy, and had called him before he called the police. This detective didn’t look like the type who would overlook or ignore the obvious possibility of complicity.

He had to be careful not to mention Stacy, at least until he knew what the hell Jerry had done. He wasn’t going to betray his friend over something that was relatively unimportant. If it was unimportant.

He shook himself. He would have to deal with Jerry later. That would be then. This was now. “How did it happen?”

“Her throat was cut.”

“My God!” He closed his eyes for a moment, absorbing the enormity, trying not to think of Abby’s last few moments. Abby. Far more important to him than Stacy in so many ways. But both were dead. Both.

“Look,” said Detective Sweeney, “you don’t have to go into that room. It’s obvious the valuables in there weren’t taken. But I need to know about the rest of the house.”

He nodded, clamping down on the horror he felt. “Fine, let’s go.” He would have time later for feelings. He’d learned that long ago. There were a lot of things better put on hold until he had privacy to think about them and feel them. Otherwise, it was as his mother had once said: if there’s one other person who can see you, you’re on camera.

Why hadn’t Jerry warned him about what he would see?

The rest of the first floor was undisturbed. The farther he got from his living room, the more he could almost lull himself into thinking everything was normal. Until he reached his office. A file drawer, almost but not quite closed, a discrepancy that most people might not have even noticed, alerted him.

“Detective, those cabinets were locked.”

“Mr. Connally said he came for some papers.”

He looked at her, noticing again that her eyes were almost colorless, but now they had taken on an almost preternatural focus. As if she had picked up on something. He wondered if he imagined the way her delicate nostrils seemed to flare, testing the breeze.

He spoke. “I called him last night to pick up some things for me and express them to Washington. But he wouldn’t have left the files open.”

She nodded and moved forward, coming within inches of the cabinets. “It looks like this lock was picked.” She faced him. “What’s in here?”

“Background information on a conservation bill I authored. Scientific reports, mostly, the stuff I brought down from D.C. to study while I’m here. Some from independent research firms, some from the EPA.”

She looked at the lock again, then moved down the row of file cabinets. “They’ve all been jimmied. By someone in a hurry. Who would want these papers? Sugar growers?”

He gave her marks for environmental awareness. “They’re opposed to the bill, yes. Among many others in agriculture. But I find it hard to believe they would kill to get a look at these documents.”

“Maybe, maybe not.” She looked his way again, her gray eyes opaque. “Anyone else who might be on the list?”

“I don’t know.” He sighed and rubbed his eyes, and tried to focus on what she needed, reminding himself it was all he could do to help Abby and Stacy now. “I have all kinds of political enemies, Detective. Any man in my position does. But it’s hard to imagine them committing murder.”

“I agree. But the murder may have been purely incidental.”

Something in him flared, and his voice grew deadly quiet. “There’s nothing incidental about what happened here.”

Her expression never wavered. “Poor choice of words, Senator. I merely meant that murder was probably not the intention, but rather the result of panic on the part of the intruder. Except…”

Her voice trailed off, and she began to walk around the room, studying the bookshelves, the neat desktop, the view out the back window over well-tended gardens, now a riot of fresh April color. What a sorry ending to his daughters’ spring vacation.

“Except what?” he demanded when she said nothing further.

“Except,” she said finally, “I wonder how it was that Ms. Reese came upon him in the living room.”

His head snapped up a bit as he realized what she was saying. “I don’t keep anything of importance out there. Nothing of political importance, anyway.”

“I would think not. Well, it might have just happened that way. Maybe he heard Abby coming and darted in there to hide.”

Or maybe not. Grant felt his neck chill with a premonition of ugliness yet to be found. Stacy had been here, too. But he couldn’t tell her that. What if Stacy had had something to do with the break-in? What if she’d brought someone here to give them access to his papers, then had been killed to keep her silent? And what if that was what Abby had stumbled into?

He felt, suddenly, as if he were standing on the narrow tip of a very windy precipice, barely maintaining balance. He understood from Jerry’s cryptic remark on the phone that Jerry had removed Stacy from the house. He could have meant nothing else. And so far the police had only mentioned Abby, so they knew nothing about Stacy. God, he didn’t want to think about the legal ramifications of that for Jerry.

But it also put him in a precarious position. He had information that might be relevant to the investigation, information he couldn’t share without getting his closest aide into trouble, without exposing his children to the kind of scandal he’d been protecting them from for years. And protecting his daughters came first, came before everything else. Including his presidential aspirations.

“I’m going to have the file cabinets dusted for prints, Senator. Afterwards, I’d like you to tell me what, if anything, is missing from them.”