walk by, glance around, say to her escort Gee, I know this guy, and Jack’s current world would disintegrate. He’d have to be out of the city with no trail left by the time she landed at Hopkins International. Go to his house long enough to pick up the go-bag and the cash, grab Greta, and head for some part of the country he’d never been to before. Don’t hesitate, don’t look back, don’t repeat the same mistakes. Don’t ever see Maggie Gardiner again.
Maybe the paper’s budget would prove too tight. Maybe.
He really needed Lori Russo to not visit Phoenix, Arizona.
Diane Cragin’s chief of staff rescued him by emerging from the conference room and waving the cops toward her.
“Thanks for the lesson,” he said to Lori Russo. Might as well stay on her good side.
“Don’t mention it. Just keep me up-to-date on your hunt for the vigilante killer.”
“I will,” he lied, and walked toward Kelly Henessey.
Chapter 6
She invited them into the conference room, but Riley told her they preferred to conduct individual interviews—meaning her and her alone. She led them to a tiny room with no window, which she said served as her office when she and Diane were in town. Kelly had lost the discombobulation of the morning but also any last bit of patience.
“What are you guys doing here? I mean, I want to find whoever did this to Diane, obviously, but I don’t see how I can and I have an awful lot to do and it all needs to be done immediately.” She slumped into a swivel chair and didn’t seem to notice that the two cops had no choice but to stand. Or maybe she did, but in either case nothing could be done about it, as the space had no room for more chairs. “And on top of everything else, I’m technically out of a job.”
None of this made Jack feel sympathetic. “Like it or not, you seem to have been the closest person to Diane Cragin. We have no choice but to start with you. First of all, we need the passcodes to her laptop and phone.”
He flipped open his notebook, pen at the ready, all business with no room for bullshit.
She said, “I don’t know.”
“Really.”
“Seriously, I don’t know. Why would I? I have my own laptop, I never used Diane’s for anything. If she wanted me to have a document or a file or an e-mail, she would forward it.”
“She never wrote those passwords down? Had no contingency plan for if she forgot them?”
“A, Diane never forgot anything”—Yet she wrote down the safe combination, Jack thought—“and B, she had me. If she wanted an e-mail sent, she would dictate it to me. If she needed to read a bill, I would forward it to her phone and she’d use the audio feature. Frankly, I don’t think she was too computer savvy. . . . I doubt she used her laptop for much, and mostly made calls with the phone.”
“Imagine that,” Riley said.
“But she was also supersensitive about privacy. That’s why I don’t have a key to her house or a password for her phone. I don’t think I’m even on her Christmas card list. She tormented poor Devin, always trying to get rid of him for an hour or two. She regarded both of us as necessary evils instead of vital helps—Hey, wait! I think she may have used one of those online programs for passwords, something called Dashlane? I remember because the annual charge came up on her Visa bill and I asked her about it.”
“You opened her Visa bill?”
The woman laughed out loud. “I paid her Visa bill. With her online banking. You think Diane would have had time for that?”
“I thought you just said she was a privacy nut.”
“About her personal time and personal thoughts, yes. She couldn’t care less about her bank balance.”
Of course not, Jack thought, since she kept her real bank account in a safe in her bathroom.
Riley said, “Fine. Open this Dashlane and give us the passwords.”
She looked a bit sorry for him, as if his advanced age made understanding this sort of thing difficult. “I don’t have it—the actual app. It’s on her phone. I can’t guarantee she even used it, only that she paid for it.”
“She only had the one phone?” Jack figured they might as well make sure of that.
“I guess. She could have had a pile of burners for all I know.”
Jack knew all about burner phones, ones bought from convenience stores for cash with no identification. He had one at the bottom of his pocket as they spoke, fully charged in case he got a call from his cousin in Phoenix to let him know that Rick Gardiner—or maybe, now, Lori Russo—were at the police department asking about a cop who used to work there. It had not rung in a while, and he hoped it wouldn’t.
“What’s that?” Riley asked abruptly. He had been staring at a long list of names and titles, blown up to poster-size and hung on the wall. Jack didn’t know if he asked the question to throw Kelly off, a standard interrogation technique, or felt curious. Riley got curious about the strangest things. Jack only hoped he never got too curious about Jack.
The list started with the chairman, committee members, general counsel, regional political director, regional political coordinator, down to directors of the Faith Initiative and the Veteran Outreach and Hispanic Initiatives programs. Plus one that sounded confusing, Chairman of the State Chairmen. “That’s the organizational chart of the party. Why?”
“Surrogates and Media Training? What’s that about?”
She smiled wearily. “That does sound funny. I assure you it’s not some sci-fi androids or something. Surrogates are volunteers who work in their localities to provide expertise and commentary on TV shows, attend speeches or rallies of our candidates and their opponents, ask good questions, and generally coordinate with us to help out in the field.”
Sounded like sci-fi androids might be more accurate than she thought. “Plants, in other words,” Jack said. “Ringers.”
“No—” Kelly argued.
“I was thinking of women having babies for other women,” Riley said.
“Not that, either.”
He said, “I’d want to be the War Room Director. That sounds cool.”
“That’s where the core staff of the party can come together so that decisions can be made quickly.”
“Is it healthy for a campaign to be thought of as a war?”
Now she laughed aloud, but not in a happy way. “The truth? Nothing about this is healthy. What you’re looking at is the people who really run the country. Not Congress, not the president—these people. They set the policy directives, focus the resources, put the most useful candidates in place.”
Her candor might have been due to shock, or impatience, or lack of sleep. Or perhaps she had grown weary of the whole charade, because she went on: “It’s like this. They don’t actually make the decisions—the people
