Rachel Lee: With Malice

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.”

It would be better if the public information officer handled the press. But that wasn’t going to happen here tonight, not with a black woman and her two children gunned down in a drive-by. The College Hill project had convulsed under escalating street gang violence, the ironic and tragic aftermath of a major drug bust that had left the formerly dominant Dark Angels decimated and leaderless. Three other gangs had flooded into the void, warring over control of the lucrative turf, where ecstasy, crystal meth, crank and smack flowed like deadly, golden water in neighborhoods where hope was dim and life was cheap. The P.I.O. would be there, trying to sound cool and authoritative as he dispensed what little meaning could be found in such mayhem. Detective Karen Sweeney was on her own.

She sighed and looked at the patrolman. “Who’s your backup, and where is he?”

He nodded toward the end of the alley. “Patrolman Stan Barnes. Fresh out of the academy and he walked into this. He’s in the car.” Ewing pointed at a pale yellow puddle splashed down a wall opposite the body. “He lost it.”

Karen looked at the stain on Ewing’s cuff and realized he’d been standing with the other cop when it happened. Unlike the horror that had been visited upon the woman at her feet, Karen could see that scene clearly. Ewing standing there, patting the young cop’s shoulder, offering whatever supportive words there were, while the man lost both his dinner and his pride. “Tell him it’s okay. It happens to most of us the first time or two.”