Rebecca York - Guarding Grace

BRADY LOCKWOOD bent his muscular six-foot frame so that he could stare into the unpromising depths of the refrigerator, eyeing a red-and-white carton of kung pao chicken and half a Philly cheese steak.

How old were they, exactly? Probably old enough to send his digestive system into spasms.

He tossed the takeout containers into the trash, then grabbed a bottle of ginger beer and took a swig, wincing as the sharp bite of the potent soft drink hit his mouth.

For the past three years he’d lived in Washington, DC, in La Fontana, one of the grand old apartment buildings that lined upper Connecticut Avenue.

Better get back to work, he told himself, heading for the office down the hall. He’d taken a new case this afternoon. Typical P.I. deadbeat-dad stuff. Not like the interesting assignments he’d gotten from the Light Street Detective Agency.

But that was then. This was now.

He’d just started thumbing through the files, when the phone rang. Although the ID didn’t give the caller’s name, the number told him it was the Ridgeway residence.

He braced to hear his brother asking for help with his latest mess.

Instead, John’s wife expelled the breath she must have been holding. “Brady, thank God.”

“Lydia, what’s wrong?” he asked, picturing her delicate aristocratic features stiff with tension but not a strand of her dyed auburn hair out of place.

“I can’t talk over the phone,” she said, her control almost slipping. “Just come over here. I … need you.”

I need you.

In the twenty-five years they’d known each other, she had never uttered those words. In public she could look friendly. But she’d never asked for his help. What was going on over there?

“I’m on my way.”

Hurriedly, Brady changed from sweats into dark slacks and a button-down shirt. As an afterthought, he shrugged into a tweed jacket and paused to swipe a comb through his unruly dark hair.

On the ride up rain-washed Connecticut Avenue, he felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. He reached for his cell phone, then drew his hand back. He couldn’t call Lydia to ask what was wrong, not when she’d sounded so secretive. Was she going behind John’s back? What?

As he wove in and out of traffic, his mind drifted to the strange workings of fate. And of genetics.

Brady might be the smarter brother, but it was John who had the ear of the U.S. President.

Brady’s goals had been more modest. He’d seen what the quest for power did to a man, how it changed his values and warped his perspective. All he’d wanted was a fulfilling job, a comfortable life—and a wife and two kids.

His hands clenched on the wheel. Unfortunately, that had been too much to ask.

As he turned into the driveway of the Ridgeway estate, the man in the guardhouse gave him a grim-faced look. Before Brady could blink, a bank of bright lights switched on, momentarily blinding him.

“Get out of the car,” a voice boomed. “Keep your hands in the air where we can see them.”

Shadows moved behind the lights. Men. With guns—judging by the glint of metal.

“Out of the car,” the voice boomed again. “On the double if you don’t want to get your ass shot.”

Brady stepped into the rain, blinking as the spotlights stabbed into his vision.

From behind the wall of light, he heard a familiar voice, Bill Giordano, the man who headed his brother’s home security detail.

“It’s okay, Taylor. He’s Ridgeway’s brother.”

Brady was allowed to get back into the car, along with the security man, and they proceeded up a curving drive toward the fifty-room mansion his brother had bought ten years ago.

“What are you doing here?” Giordano said, speaking in the quiet tone that Brady knew meant watch out how you answer.

“Lydia called me. She said she needed me. What’s going on?”

“There’s no easy way to say this. Your brother is dead.”

Brady managed to drag in enough air to say, “How?”

“Heart attack—we think,” Giordano answered. “He was catching up on some work at the office before he and Lydia went to a reception.”

“Doesn’t the consortium have a doctor on staff?”

“And defibrillators. All the goddamn latest equipment. If they could have saved him, you know damn well they would have.”

Brady nodded, trying to pull himself together.

Lydia was waiting for him in the upstairs family lounge. Her eyes were red-rimmed as she walked toward him, setting a glass on an end table as she crossed the room.

As if to mock the occasion, she was dressed for an evening reception in a long emerald gown that was the perfect color for her hair and skin.

When she embraced him, the scent of the liquor on her breath grabbed him as tightly as her arms, and a seductive thought wove itself into his mind. He could have a shot of bourbon. Just one. To get himself through the trauma of John’s death.

Stop it.

One drink, and he was on a one-way trip to hell. No bourbon. No exceptions.

THE CAB PULLED up in front of Grace’s apartment just off Dupont Circle. She already had a ten-dollar bill in her hand, which she handed to the cabdriver.

“Keep the change,” she called as she hurried through the drizzle to the front door of the converted brownstone. Once it had been a single residence. Now each floor had two apartments.

Her low-heeled shoes clattered on the uncarpeted wooden steps as she climbed to her second-floor unit, unlocked her front door and stepped into the small living room.

When she’d locked the door behind her, she stopped short, her stomach clenching as she looked around the shadowy room. She’d been strapped for cash when she came to DC, and she’d lovingly put together this refuge with more imagination than money. Her sofa and coffee table were from a secondhand shop in Adams Morgan. She’d found the worn Oriental rug and the wicker baskets at garage sales. And she’d rescued the Queen Anne end tables from the alley two steps ahead of the trash truck.

She’d thought she was making a home for herself. Now she knew she’d been kidding herself.

John Ridgeway’s death had changed everything. Quickly she checked to make sure nobody was lurking inside the apartment.

BRADY EYED the security man hovering discreetly at the edges of the room. “Where can we talk privately?” he asked Lydia.

His sister-in-law turned, the taffeta skirt of her evening gown swishing as she led him down the hall to a bedroom that looked as if it could have graced a Louisiana plantation house.

She sank onto an antique curved-back sofa. Brady took a parlor chair opposite her. Her complexion was pale, but her eyes were fierce.

“Let’s cut to the chase. I know John was seeing other women. He’d done it through most of our marriage. That’s why he stayed late at work tonight.”

He answered with a tight nod. John loved to brag about his conquests. Man-to-man. Never to his wife. And then there was the illegitimate son he’d asked Brady to locate—not that John had actually gotten in touch with the boy as far as Brady knew.

He pulled out the small notebook he always carried and started making terse, cryptic notes.

“We had a reception tonight. At the Cosmos Club. He said he wanted to get in a couple of hours of work first—on his autobiography. With that research assistant from the Smithsonian. Grace Cunningham. He’s been seeing her for a couple of months.”

Brady cleared his throat. “And his security men knew what he was really doing? ”

“I assume so.”

“When did he usually meet with Grace Cunningham?” “From six to eight on Tuesdays. She should have been gone when he died. But his staff could be lying about that.” “Did he write her address or phone number in his book?”