Lethal Attraction: Against the Rules\Fatal Affair Read online

  She began to cry again. “I keep waiting for John to come bounding in here asking why we’re all sitting around.”

  “I know. Me, too.”

  “I actually had a few people ask me today how this affects their jobs,” she said with disgust.

  “Well, you can’t blame them. They have families to support.”

  “Couldn’t they have waited a day or two to bring that up?”

  “Apparently not. I’ll talk to them about it tomorrow and tell them we’ll do our best to get them placed somewhere in government.”

  “What’ll you do?” she asked.

  “Shit, I don’t know. I can’t think about that until after we get through the funeral. The two of us, maybe a couple of others, will be needed for a while until the governor appoints someone to take John’s place. Whoever it is will want to bring in their own people, so we’ll help with the transition and then figure out what’s next, I guess.”

  Christina looked so sad, so despondent that Nick felt his heart go out to her. “Why don’t you go home, Chris? There’s nothing more we can do here tonight.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ll be going soon, too.”

  “All right,” she said as she got up. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Try to get some sleep.”

  “As if.”

  He walked her to the door and sent her off with a hug before he wandered into John’s office. The desk had been swept clean and the computer removed. If it hadn’t been for the photo of John with his niece and nephew on the windowsill, there would’ve been no sign of him or the five years he’d spent working in this room. Nick wasn’t sure what he hoped to find when he sat in John’s chair. Swiveling to look out the window, he could see the Washington Monument lit up in the distance.

  Resting his head back, he stared at the monument and finally gave himself permission to do what he’d needed to do all day. He wept.

  *

  Sam arrived home exhausted after a sixteen-hour day and smiled when she heard the whir of her father’s chair as he came out to greet her.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “Late tonight.”

  “I’m on O’Connor.”

  The side of his face that wasn’t paralyzed lifted into a smile. “Are you now? Farnsworth’s got you right back on the horse.”

  She kicked off her boots and bent to kiss his cheek. “So it seems.”

  Celia, one of the nurses who cared for him, came out from the kitchen to greet Sam. “How about we get ready for bed, Skip?”

  Sam hated the indignation that darted across the expressive side of his face. “Go ahead, Dad. I’ll be in when you’re done. I’ve got a couple of things I want to run by you.”

  “I suppose I can make some time for you,” he teased, turning the chair with his one working finger and following Celia to his bedroom in what used to be the dining room.

  Sam went into the kitchen and served herself a bowl of the beef stew Celia had left on the stove for her. She ate standing up without tasting anything as the events of the day ran through her mind like a movie. Under normal circumstances, she’d be obsessed with the case. She’d be thinking it through from every angle, searching out motives, making a list of suspects. But instead, she thought of Nick and the sadness that had radiated from him all day. More than once she had wanted to throw her arms around him and offer comfort, which was hardly a professional impulse.

  Deciding it was pointless to try to eat, she poured the rest of the soup into the garbage disposal and stood at the sink, her shoulders stooped. She was still there twenty minutes later when Celia came into the kitchen.

  “He’s ready for you.”

  “Thanks, Celia.”

  “He’s been kind of…”

  “What?” Sam asked, immediately on alert.

  “Off. He hasn’t been himself the last few days.”

  “The two-year anniversary is coming up next week.”

  “That could be it.”

  “Let’s keep an eye on him.”

  Celia nodded in agreement. “What do you know about Senator O’Connor?”

  “Not as much as I’d like to.”

  “What a tragedy,” Celia said, shaking her head. “We’ve been glued to the news all day. Such an awful waste.”

  “Seemed like a guy who had it all.”

  “But there was something sort of sad about him, too.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “No reason in particular. Just a vibe he put out.”

  “I never noticed,” Sam said, intrigued by the observation. She made a mental note to find some video of O’Connor’s speeches from the Senate floor and TV interviews.

  “Go on in and see your dad. He so looks forward to his time with you.”

  “The stew was great. Thank you.”

  “Glad you liked it.”

  Sam went into her father’s bedroom where he was propped up in bed, a respirator hose snaking from his throat to the machine on the floor that breathed for him at night.

  “You look beat,” he said, his speech an awkward staccato around the respirator.

  “Long-ass day.” Sam sat in the chair next to the hospital bed and propped her feet on the frame under the pressurized mattress that minimized bedsores. “But it feels good to be doing more than pushing paper again.”

  “What’ve you got?” he asked, reverting to his former role as the department’s detective captain.

  She ran through the whole thing, from the meeting with Chief Farnsworth to reviewing the tapes the Watergate had finally produced. “We only got traffic in the lobby. Nothing jumped out at us, but I’m going to show them to his chief of staff in the morning to see if he can ID anyone.”

  “That’s a good idea. Why do you get a funny look in those blue eyes of yours when you mention the chief of staff? Nick, right?”

  “I went out with him once.” She spared her father a deeper explanation of what “going out” had meant in this case. “A long time ago.”

  “But it was hard to see him?”

  “Yeah,” she said softly. “I found out he did call me after that night. Guess who took the messages and never gave them to me?”

  “Oh, let’s see, could it be our good friend Peter?”

  “One and the same, the prick.”

  Skip’s laugh was strained. “You able to be objective on this one with your Nick from the past part of the mix?”

  Surprised by the question, she glanced up at him and found him studying her with sharp, blue eyes that were just like hers. “Of course. It was six years ago. No biggie.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She should have known he would see right through her. He always did.

  “You need to get some sleep,” he said.

  “Whenever I close my eyes, I’m back in that crack house with Marquis Johnson screaming. And then I break out in a cold sweat.”

  “You did everything right, followed every instinct.” He gasped for air. “I wouldn’t have done it any differently.”

  “Do you ever think about the night you got shot?” She had never thought to ask that until she’d been haunted by her own demons.

  “Not so much. It’s all a blur.”

  Her cell phone rang. Sam reached for it on her belt and checked the caller ID. She didn’t recognize the 703 number. “I need to take this.”

  “Go on.”

  She kissed her father’s forehead and left the room. “Holland.”

  “Sam, it’s Nick. Someone’s been in my house.”

  Her heart fluttered at the sound of his deep voice. This was not good. “Has it been ransacked?” she asked, making an effort to sound cool and professional.

  “No.”

  “Then how do you know someone’s been there?”

  “I know. Stuff’s been moved.”

  “Where do you live?”

  He rattled off an address in Arlington, Virginia.

  Even though it was out of her jurisdiction, she grabbed her coat.