Philip Margolin - Capitol murder

The front door came into view. Clarence headed for it, keeping his head down so it would be difficult to see his face. Seconds later, Clarence Little was breathing fresh air for the first time in a long time.

Millie’s car was exactly where the map said it would be. Clarence slid behind the wheel and breathed a sigh of relief. He wasn’t home free, but he was damn close. He left the parking spot and headed for the I-5 bridge that crossed the Columbia River into Washington.

Clarence assumed there would soon be an APB out for Millie’s vehicle. Just before he reached the bridge, he drove off I-5 into the Jantzen Beach shopping center and parked in the middle of a crowded row in the center of the large lot. Until someone discovered that the car was abandoned, the police would believe he was driving it.

Two large SUVs flanked Millie’s vehicle and shielded him from view. He took the clothes Millie had bought for him out of the trunk. They were on a wire hanger, and there was $1,000 in cash in a wallet in one of the pockets. He changed into jeans, a flannel shirt, and a leather jacket before donning a Seattle Mariners baseball cap. He pulled the bill down before wandering around the parking lot until he found a car to steal. He used the wire hanger to break in and was back on the road to Seattle twenty minutes after he’d turned off the highway.

It took a little under three hours to drive from Portland to Seattle. Once he was in the city, Clarence planned to ditch the stolen car and get a room in a cheap motel. Then he would withdraw the money he kept in several Seattle banks in accounts he had set up under aliases. He hadn’t lied to Millie about the money. He was well off financially. There had been an inheritance, and his engineering firm had done well. He also had several passports under different names in a safe-deposit box. He would lie low until the initial furor died down. Then it was off to South America to visit a plastic surgeon who asked no questions if you could pay his fee. And then…? Then there would be a world of possibilities. His priority after he was sure he was safe would be to buy an isolated house. In it he would construct a secret room where he could entertain. Spanish was a more melodious language than English, and Clarence wondered if the screams of Latin women would sound different from the screams of his American pets. He smiled as he contemplated answering that question.

Keith Evans had been born and raised in Nebraska and probably would have spent his life there if it hadn’t been for a lucky break. He was a twenty-eight-year-old detective on the Omaha police force when he arrested a serial killer who had run circles around an FBI task force. The agent-in-charge had been so impressed by the deductions that had led the young detective to discover the killer’s identity that he convinced Keith to apply to become an FBI agent.

Keith saw a whole new world opening up to him when he started the course at Quantico, but he never duplicated the Sherlockian performance that had led him to the FBI. His subsequent successes were achieved with old-fashioned police work that involved long hours at the office or in the field and large blocks of time away from his wife. Four years after he became an agent, Keith’s wife filed for divorce, and he found himself living alone in a sterile apartment in Maryland.

One morning, Keith looked in the mirror and found a forty-year-old man staring back. He was still six two, but he had to wear reading glasses, there were gray hairs among the blond, and ten extra pounds surrounded his midsection. Evans’s career had been stagnating until he became the public face of the D.C. Ripper task force and played a part in bringing down President Christopher Farrington. His involvement in another case involving U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felicia Moss had given his career another boost. But his personal life was still bleak. There had been a few women since his divorce, but none of them had put up with his all-too-frequent absences any better than his ex-wife. He didn’t blame the women for the failed relationships. He couldn’t discuss his work, he had to break dates on a regular basis, and the things he experienced led him to be emotionally cold at times.

Half an hour ago, Keith had read a bulletin that affected two of the few people he counted as friends. He felt uneasy about having to break the bad news but not as uneasy as he felt sitting beside his partner, Special Agent Maggie Sparks.

Maggie was a slim, athletic woman in her early thirties. Her DNA was a hodgepodge inherited from Cherokee, Spanish, Romanian, and Danish ancestors that conspired to create a very attractive woman with glossy black hair, high cheekbones, and a dark complexion. The only blemish on her beauty was a faint scar on her cheek, the product of a gunfight during the Farrington investigation. Maggie still maintained a wry sense of humor and a positive outlook on life despite the horrors she encountered on the job, and Keith always felt his spirits rise when he was with her.

Keith’s attraction to Maggie had grown over the years, but he had never gotten up the nerve to ask her out because he wasn’t certain how Maggie felt about him and he was terrified that any overtures he made to her would destroy their working relationship.

“How do you think they’ll take the news?” Maggie asked as they climbed the steps to Brad and Ginny’s apartment.

“I don’t know. I never talked that much to Brad about Clarence Little. We went over the similarities in his case and the Ripper case, but he never talked about how he got along with the guy.”

Keith was breathing a little unevenly when he got to the third-floor landing. If Maggie was experiencing any physical stress, Keith couldn’t see it.

“This is it,” he said, stopping at the second apartment. He knocked, and the door opened a few seconds later, revealing a smiling Brad Miller clad in sweatpants and a New York Jets T-shirt.

“Hey, guys, come in,” Brad said, stepping aside to let the agents into his apartment.

“Thanks,” Keith said.

“Hi, Keith, Maggie,” Ginny said. She was also wearing sweats and a T-shirt, only her team of choice was the Kansas City Chiefs.

Brad took a closer look at Keith and Maggie, and he stopped smiling.

“What’s up?” he asked cautiously.

“Something happened in Oregon we thought you’d want to know about,” Keith said. “Clarence Little was in Portland for a court appearance. He killed two guards and his female attorney in the jail elevator while they were going from the jail to the courtroom.”

“He killed Millie Reston?” Brad asked, shocked.

“Did you know her?” Maggie asked.

“Not really, but she called me a little while ago to talk about Clarence’s case. That’s the only time I talked to her.”

“How did he kill the guards?” Ginny asked.

“The authorities in Portland reviewed tapes of Reston’s visits to the jail, and they think she may have fallen for Little. They’re pretty certain Reston smuggled a gun into the courthouse.”

“The poor sap,” Brad said.

“Is there anything you can tell me that might help catch Little, any favorite places, friends, relatives?” Keith asked.

Everyone looked at Brad, who flushed and couldn’t meet anyone’s eye.

“I can’t remember anything like that, but something happened that I never told you, Ginny.”

“About Clarence Little?” she asked.

Brad nodded. “He sent me two letters.”

“What kind of letters?” Ginny pressed.

“They were creepy, but there weren’t any threats in them. I didn’t tell you about them because I didn’t want to worry you.”

“When did you get them?” Maggie asked.

“The first one was slipped under the door of our apartment in Portland on the evening of the presidential election. I found it when we came back from the election-night parties. The second one was sent to my office in the Senate right after Clarence’s cases were sent back for new trials.”