she lingered, not knowing where to place her focus next and not wanting to tell the detectives what she had found in front of a witness/suspect/closest thing to a family member in the vicinity. Besides, she was curious—about the victim and her untimely death, but also about the political arena.
It took Riley a while to settle the chief of staff down to answering the questions put to her. After she had cursed the entire Democratic party with every foul thing she could think of, Kelly had ached to make phone calls to the entire Republican counterpart to discuss press conferences, next week’s quorum call, who would replace Diane in the upcoming election, and where on earth the senator would be buried. Riley nearly had to pull the phone out of her hand to stop her from spreading the news just yet, and at least until the woman’s own children could be notified.
That immediately proved difficult. Kelly didn’t have their phone numbers and wasn’t positive of which cities the son and the daughter lived in. Diane Cragin either had not been very close to her children or had been so close that she chose to safeguard their privacy like the Holy Grail. Maggie guessed it might be the former when Kelly said, “Diane gave me the impression they didn’t call her much, had sided with their father in the divorce. And don’t ask me where he lives—I don’t even know his name. They split up ages ago, like twenty or thirty years, and she never talked about it.” Kelly didn’t know of any other family members at all, not siblings or aunts or nephews. Maybe Diane Cragin lived in a personal vacuum. Maybe she had simply been too busy to stay in touch.
Normally police would turn to the victim’s address book—formerly kept in decorative volume and stored in a desk, now kept in digital format on cell phones. But Diane Cragin’s phone, once the screen went to sleep, required a passcode, and Maggie knew better than to mess with that. Enter the wrong code and most phones would lock the user out for a period of time. After several it might wipe itself clean altogether, and all those contacts, texts, e-mails, and search histories would be gone for good. Maggie wished she could at least put it into airplane mode to keep it from any external interference, but without a passcode she couldn’t get to the settings. Instead she’d called the IT department and a tech had made the fifteen-minute drive to pick the phone up from her. The IT tech hadn’t even argued—her first indication of how different the investigation into the murder of a senator within city limits would be from the average drive-by or domestic case. Unfair, but undeniable.
After turning over the phone she photographed the contents of the handbag and the briefcase. They were both stuffed but, like the dining room table, Maggie couldn’t guess if any item held a clue to her death. She would spread out the items at the lab, but a cursory look didn’t find any threatening letters, illegal drugs, weapons, or large sums of money. If the agendas and reports were clues, they weren’t very obvious ones.
Meanwhile, she listened to Kelly as she offered to ask the victim’s hairdresser and pointed out that the woman who had been dying Diane’s roots for over a decade might have more personal information. “But you’ve got to let me call somebody. We have so much to do.”
“I get that,” Riley said. “But it’s important that we do everything correctly here, right? And that means getting as much information as we can before—”
“I saw the press outside, which means they’re probably airing as we speak. Fox News will jump on this with everything they’ve got, and we have to manage the message.”
Jack, not the soul of patience, spoke. “Your boss is dead. That’s a little more pertinent than this month’s election.”
“No, it’s not! I mean because she is dead. The last thing we can do is let them get away with it. They’ll spin this around so that she was killed by the rich corporate Illuminati rather than the oh-so-hardworking street thugs that fat asshole caters to.”
“I’m going to level with you,” Riley said. Maggie assumed that meant he intended to do everything but, and from the skeptical look on her face, so did Kelly. “We’re starting from scratch here. Ms. Cragin’s world obviously spread pretty wide, and the killer didn’t leave us any indication whether his motives were personal, political, monetary, or he just likes killing people. So let’s start with the first person you would suspect. Even though he might be the last person you would—”
“Joe Green,” she said, reiterating a statement she’d already made several times in as many minutes. The Democratic candidate for United States senator from Ohio.”
“Okay. Why?”
She scrunched her bottom more firmly onto the chair and shook out her fingers as if preparing for a typing test. “He’s running for her senate seat, as if he would know the slightest thing about a national office. He’s only some stupid chief of, like, the Economic Development office in the city—” She paused, as if realizing that full-time Clevelanders might not appreciate her dismissal of a local position, then cleared her throat and pressed on: “And he hasn’t raised half the funds she has. I mean, not even a whole million, only $708,000 to her $3,347,000, which means even the Dems know he hasn’t got a chance, because if he did, they’d give him more money.”
“You think he’d be desperate enough to murder?”
“I doubt it would be the first time.”
“Really,” Jack said. “Who else has he killed?”
She backpedaled, but with obvious reluctance. “I don’t know offhand. But he’s been bribing, extorting, and corrupting his way through Cleveland government for a long time. Take his latest project. He’s getting some kid financed to buy up riverfront land and build an ‘innovation center,’ a building where start-ups can rent a little space along with copiers, printers, and phones and start their own business, because we all know someone who turned their science fair project into the next Starbucks or Apple, right? That’s all cute and fine, except he’s asking the city to approve a twelve-million-dollar grant to pay for this—that’s not a twelve-million-dollar tax loan or tax credit or even subsidy, it’s just a twelve-million-dollar blank check. I don’t know how much of that is kicking back to Green, but I’ve heard estimates as high as sixty percent.”
“What has that got to do with Diane?” Riley asked when she paused to take a breath.
“Diane is the whole reason anyone is paying attention to it! Green had been keeping this as far under the radar as he could. Somehow he got the levy passed last year, but since then he’s quashed anyone who even mentions it, except when he wants to announce how he’s bringing jobs to Cleveland.” Her fingers made air quotes around the last four words, derision dripping from her voice. “Then he talks up a storm about how innovation and entrepreneurship are the keys to the future—well, yeah, because no one can make a freakin’ livable wage in this economy. But the media, news channels, a newspaper reporter who’s been trying to follow the money trail—they were all stonewalled. Diane was trying to help find the truth.”
Riley said, “Okay. Anything else?”
“Else? What else do you need?”
“We’ll check out his whereabouts. But—”
“That won’t help. He’s got a cadre of loyalists, his own doctor to keep his happy pills off the books, mechanics to sweep for bugs or plant a few, and I’m sure there’s a few professional assassins in the lot. Look, he—I mean, you live here, you must know about this guy. He’s chief of Economic Development, which is in the Regional Development division. So he’s right in there with Community Development, Building and Housing, City Planning, even the port. As they can tell you in New Jersey, that’s where the money is. Utility contracts, building contracts, construction, rezoning—anything you want to accomplish
