With Malice

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.”

“Very well.”

“What’s in the desk?”

“Just stationery, pens, pencils, pads, things like that. All my papers are in the file cabinets.”

She nodded and gave him what he supposed was meant to be an encouraging smile. “Could your computer have been tampered with?”

He shook his head. “I wouldn’t think so. It’s password protected. But even if it were…I don’t keep much on it. Drafts of speeches I’m thinking of making, little things like that. When I’m in town, Detective, I’m usually busy with constituents, and any private time I have is largely for thinking, not doing. That computer is full of a lot of quick notes and thoughts, but little else. If someone were going to commit electronic theft for political gain, he’d be better off hacking into the network server at my office, in Washington. That’s where we do the real grunt work.”

She looked at the monitor and keyboard sitting on his desk. “Then I doubt anyone got into it. I’ll have someone check to make sure it hasn’t been physically tampered with. But given that our perp was clearly in a hurry, it’s not likely.”

She turned to him again. “Let’s take a look upstairs now.”

He followed her up the sweeping staircase, one of the features that Georgina, his late wife, had loved about this house. To him it had always seemed pretentious, something better suited to an antebellum mansion. But Georgina had had her eye even more firmly fixed on the presidency than he had. Sometimes he thought this house had been his wife’s rehearsal for the White House.

He dreaded what he might find up there. Signs of Stacy’s presence? What had she been doing here? They’d broken off months ago, in mutual realization of the cost. Stacy had been a wonderful woman, but both he and she had seen the handwriting on the wall.

He’d met her on the rebound from his wife’s death—strangely enough, not at the club where she worked, but in his local office, when she came to help stuff envelopes during his last campaign. But rebounds can only bounce for so long. Their parting had been amicable. Understanding. And he’d long since quietly found a way to make sure Stacy could open the dance studio she’d always dreamt of, rather than baring her body for strange men in a dark, noisy, impersonal bar.

He had thought their relationship had been secret from everyone but Jerry. What if it hadn’t been? What if someone had staged this murder simply to ruin him? Somehow that seemed more believable than that someone had committed two murders over S.R. 52.

He had the worst urge to tell the detective all of this, to clear his conscience, to remove himself from this terrible position of obstructing an investigation. Damn Jerry for putting him between a rock and a hard place.

And then he remembered his daughters. He couldn’t expose them to the scandal. He’d been through media feeding frenzies before. It had been by the skin of his teeth that he’d kept the press from discovering the truth about the auto accident that had killed his wife. Where she’d been coming from. Knowledge that, if made public, would have done nothing but cause more pain.

So he’d managed to protect the girls that time. They still remembered their mother as an angel who’d been stolen from them. They deserved that memory—however inaccurate he knew it to be—and he would do anything to protect it.

God, he hated this.

His room was first, to the right. A suite from which he’d erased all vestiges of his wife. It was spare now, with white walls, heavy brown velvet curtains and lots of dark wood. Masculine, almost monastic. His own eyrie. No woman set foot in here save the cleaning crew and his daughters. A wave of relief crashed through him when he saw the bed was carefully made. He’d feared he might find the brown duvet tossed back, evidence of Stacy’s presence.

The children’s rooms were undisturbed. They had a bright airy space, a playroom full of toys, with their bedrooms opening off it to either side. Then there was the formal guest room, untouched for years.

And to the rear, Abby’s room. Her own retreat, filled with tatting and embroidery, flowery cushions, curtains and bed linen. The rocking chair, in which he would forever see Abby, stood still and empty.

The bedcovers were tossed back, indicating that she had left her bed to go downstairs. No light was on except the night-light Abby kept so the children could find her if they needed her during the night. Her bathroom was neat as a pin, as it always was.

The photos on her dresser were of him, at all stages of his life, from infancy on, and of his growing daughters.

When Grant saw them, he could no longer contain himself. He sat in the rocking chair where he had been comforted so many times as a child and began to weep.

Karen was discomfited by Grant Lawrence’s breakdown. It wasn’t that she hadn’t seen them often during her years on the force, especially since it was so often her job to break the bad news.

But Grant Lawrence was different. To her he had somehow always seemed a magical being, his footprints gilded as he strode through life. She knew about his wife’s tragic death, of course, and remembered how he had emerged from that period with the first gray showing in his hair. The story of the horrific childhood injury that had left him with an almost imperceptible limp was the stuff of political legend. But these potholes in an otherwise star-kissed life had only seemed to strengthen him.

Now she was faced with the fact that the mythical being, the possible next president of the United States, was only human after all. His grief was deep and raw, and she had to battle an urge to put an arm around him and try to comfort him.

Instead, she did what she was trained to do. She walked away, looking out the sliding glass doors of Abby’s room onto a balcony that had a view of the gardens, delicate and vital, carefully-sculpted paths among splashes of azalea and bougainvillea, orchid and mum, bamboo and palm, disparate and yet melding together into a whole that spoke volumes about the man who sat behind her, sobbing.

These people, she thought, had more money than she could imagine. Most of it had come from his film tycoon parents, although she knew he had managed to make some of his own fortune, both before and since his ascension to the Senate. But regardless of where it came from, it was more than she could imagine having.

It was a world so different from hers that she found it difficult to connect with. Unlike many, she didn’t begrudge the wealthy their good fortune; she simply couldn’t imagine what their world must be like. Standing here now, she felt she was looking through a window into places where the ordinary woes of life never intruded.

But that wasn’t true. The roses in that garden had thorns, and she had no doubt that a gardener had to pull the same kinds of weeds she struggled with in the tiny plot beside her own home. Behind her a very powerful man was weeping like a baby over the death of his nanny. Reality intruded here, too, in its ugliest forms.

“I’m sorry.”

His voice, sounding raw and thick, reached her.

“Don’t apologize, Senator,” she said, without turning. “You’re entitled to your grief.”

“Yes, but I’m sure your job is already difficult enough.”

She started a little, surprised by his perception. Surprised by his kindness. Very few people in his position were ever aware of hers. Very few considered that she might find it almost as difficult to be the bearer of bad news as they found it to receive it. But this was the quality she’d always found admirable in him, she reminded herself: his ability to put himself in the shoes of others.

“It’s okay,” she said, a little too quickly. “I’m used to it.”

“Really? Somehow I doubt it.”

She heard him blow his nose. Then the rocking chair creaked. He must be rising.

“I don’t see anything disturbed here,” he said. “It’s…obvious she climbed out of bed when she heard something.”

“So it would appear.” She turned to look at him again and felt a tug on her heart when she saw the redness of his eyes. “Tell me about Abby.”

“What do you need to know?”

“The kind of person she was.”

Grant came to stand by her at the doors and looked out on the garden. “Tough. She was very tough. When I was a child, she protected me fiercely. I remember once she chased some paparazzi away from the windows of my parents’ house.” A faint smile curved his mouth. “She grabbed up a broom and went after them. They never came back.” He turned his head, and their gazes met. “She protected my children the same way.”

“She was getting old.”

“Yes. But she was family. I know people tried to make an issue out of her race years back, but she’d come into this family when she was fifteen years old, and by the time I was born, there was no question but what Abby was family. Part of us, made so by love.” He paused for a moment. “You know, a former advisor once said I should get rid of her. Said her presence in my life harkened back to an ugly period in the history of the south. I fired him on the spot. I’d sooner have thrown out my mother.”

“What about her family?”

“She had none. She was an orphan.” His gaze grew distant and drifted back to the garden. “Do you know how she came to my family?”

“No.”

“My grandfather took Abby in after her entire family was killed in a church bombing. The Klan. The bomb killed seven people, including Abby’s parents and her older brother. Abby was sick that night. She’d stayed home.

“So my grandfather took her in. At this late date, I’m not sure of what he intended, but I do know he was outraged by the event. Anyway, my dad was five, and Abby seemed to take to caring for him. And that’s where it began.”

“And she never wanted to leave?”

“She never gave any indication if she did. She had a romance once, this really dapper guy my dad still has pictures of. But then one day she announced he was shiftless, and that was the end of that.”

“Why was he shiftless?”

His gaze saddened, and he closed his eyes. “I guess I’ll never know now.”

“Thank you, Senator,” Karen said after a moment. “You’ve been a great help. Where can I reach you when I need to?”

“At my parents’ place.” He gave her the number. “I’d appreciate it if you’d keep that under your hat. My girls are there, too, and I don’t want them…exposed.”

“I understand.”

She watched him leave the room and thought that his shoulders looked less square and his limp a bit more pronounced.

It was sad.

4

“Jerry, where the hell are you?”

Jerry Connally’s hand shook as he held his cell phone to his ear and heard Grant Lawrence’s voice. “I’m in the car, Grant. On the way home from the police station.”

He heard the pause before his friend spoke. “What have you told them?”

“I told them the truth. I came over to pick up the files you needed and found Abby. I checked out the house, called you, then called them. Straight, simple and to the point.”

And true, although not the whole truth. He had, of course, left out the part about lifting Stacy’s lifeless remains, fighting back the sheer revulsion at what had been done to her, gagging at what he himself was doing, carrying her to the trunk of his car and placing her in that alley.

He hadn’t approved of Grant’s relationship with Stacy, but he couldn’t help but admire and even like her. She was a tough, no-nonsense woman who’d fought off the demons of an abusive childhood. Some would say she hadn’t gone far, working as a stripper. That was how she’d made her living, but it hadn’t been who she was.

She would have been death for Grant’s career, and still might be, but there was no way she deserved what he’d done to her, to be left without dignity in a dark, dirty alley. He would live the rest of his life with the memory of that. But he’d done what he had to for his friend.

“What about Stacy?” he heard Grant ask.

Yes. What about Stacy? “She wasn’t there. And I won’t say anything more. For your sake.”

“Plausible deniability? Jerry, you know I’ve always thought that was bullshit.”

“And you’re right. It is. But sometimes bullshit is the best option available.” Jerry stopped at a red light and realized his arm ached from the tension of his grip on the wheel.

Grant Lawrence was as brilliant a man as Jerry had ever known. But sometimes even the most brilliant men needed a trusted friend to lay it out for them.

“Look, Senator, here are the facts. If it comes out about you and Stacy, there’ll be a Grade-A shitstorm. Forget your chances for president. They’ll be ancient history. But let’s put that aside for a moment. S.R. 52 will die a quick and painful death. Right now, we need three votes in the House and one in the Senate, and it passes. And it’s good law, Grant. It’s important law.”

Grant sounded impatient. “I know that, Jerry.”

“No, sir, I don’t think you do.” He hated to play this card, but sometimes it mattered. “You’re a hell of a man, Grant. Smart and honest and strong. But you also had a hell of a head start in life. For you, this bill is about snorkeling in the Keys when you were a teenager. Beyond that it’s about abstractions. Economics, numbers and the world your children will inherit. And yes, that’s important.

“But I didn’t snorkel when I was a kid. I watched my dad’s hands bleed as he hauled in crab traps on a smelly, oily dock on Chesapeake Bay. I got out because I could run and catch a football well enough to get a scholarship. But my brother’s still there, in a town that’s dying because the crab traps are coming up lighter and lighter, year by year. His hands are still bloody, and he has less and less to show for it. He’s the human face I see on S.R. 52. If you go down, he goes down. My hometown goes down.”

He heard the honking behind him and realized the light had turned to green. A car flashed around him as he pulled into the intersection, the driver yelling an obscenity as he passed.

“Grant, right now you’re still golden under the law. You don’t know anything, and you’re under no legal obligation to say anything. And as much as it may raise your moral hackles, that’s the way it has to stay. My brother and my hometown and thousands of other hometowns just like it, they need you. So if this hits the fan, I’ll take the fall. Not you.”

“Drop by my parents’ house this afternoon and we’ll talk about it.”

Jerry suppressed a sigh. “I’ll be there, sir. But this one is non-negotiable.”

“We’ll talk about it,” Grant repeated.