funds. “A halfway house system gave him a refrigerator and a trip to Las Vegas to get a partnership arrangement with the Department of Corrections. A paving company that did some work in the park system, the, um, Emerald Necklace place—”
“The Metroparks,” Maggie supplied.
“Yeah, that. They also paved Green’s driveway and his sister’s. The union negotiator for a housing development along the lake gave him limousine service for three years. One guy got a lease for an ice-skating rink at the same time Green got a speedboat that had belonged to the guy’s restaurant business. A bank executive had sex with him a few times to get her daughter a teaching position at a downtown charter school. What else would you like to know? I can go on and on.”
“One thing,” Jack said. “Do you have any proof of any of this?”
“That’s not the question you should be asking. You should—”
“Don’t tell me what questions I should be asking!” Jack shot back, his voice suddenly thunderous in that way that sucked all the air out of the room and made time slow to a crawl. Even knowing him, knowing as much as she did about him, and even though it wasn’t directed at her, it made Maggie’s heart flutter to a skitterish beat.
But then, fear pervaded because she did know quite a bit about him.
Kelly, of course, didn’t have that knowledge. She didn’t know that Jack had deceived everyone around him far more thoroughly than any politician could. “Don’t try the good cop, bad cop bit on me. It’s going to take a hell of a lot more than that act to throw me off.”
This almost made Maggie smile, because the two men were not putting on a show. Riley really was a pleasant, fairly compassionate officer. And Jack was—well, Jack.
“We don’t act,” Riley said, calmly but more coolly than usual. “Your boss has been murdered, and we are going to find out who did it. We need facts, not all the rhetoric. Now, do you have evidence to prove any of this?”
Her shoulders slumped about an inch. “If I had proof, we wouldn’t have needed to spend a penny on the campaign.”
Riley asked, “Speaking of the election, would killing Diane really make it a slam dunk for Green? Wouldn’t another candidate—”
“We’ll never get the ads, the name recognition, queued up fast enough. Even if we got someone already known—like the governor . . . that might be cool if he hadn’t already said he wasn’t interested. Two days? Impossible. All we can do is throw ourselves on the mercy of party loyalists and hope that is enough. And it may not be,” she added morosely. “There’s an awful lot of Independents these days.”
“Didn’t anyone else run in the primary?” Riley asked.
“Three, but they’re out of money, and the party wasn’t interested in any of them, anyway.”
“What about the voters? Were they interested?”
Another one of those long, perplexed looks, as if Kelly wondered what color the sky was on Riley’s planet, while the color of his skin began to flush with annoyance. Patiently, she explained, “Voters decide on the winner, but they don’t decide on who runs in the first place. Parties do. They pick the people they think could win, pay for their ads, and finance everything they need, depending on how much they need it—which depends on the district. If your district is ninety percent red or blue, obviously you don’t need to spend a lot of money.” She glanced at all three people in the kitchen to assess their tracking abilities, without appearing reassured, and went further. “Someone doesn’t wind up in office because they woke up in their bungalow in Podunk, Iowa, and decided to run for office. They get into office because their party needed a candidate and went looking for one, buttered them up, wooed them away from their jobs and homes, agreed to take care of their campaign, and sent them into the ring.”
“The other candidates are only there to make it look like a real contest,” Jack translated.
“Sort of.” Her shoulders slumped from the weight on them. “That’s why I have to get back to the HQ, so we can start figuring out who to pick.”
“What about you?” Jack asked.
Her jaw dropped a millimeter or two. “Me? I’m not a politician. I work for politicians.”
It didn’t seem like such a far-fetched idea to Maggie but was clearly laughable to Kelly. It also seemed to remove any All About Eve type motivations from Diane Cragin’s chief of staff.
Riley asked, “Let’s suppose it isn’t Green. Who else did Diane conflict with? Had she been getting any hate mail? People getting in her face at public appearances?”
“Um, everyone, yes, and all the time. That’s politics these days. Conflict drives interest, and without interest people don’t donate. But other than the usual rhetoric, I can’t think of anyone really . . . scary. Except maybe—”
A knock sounded at the door, and Riley went to speak to the scene contamination officer, who wanted to know if the chief of homicide and a few other bigwig looky-loos could be allowed into the yard. The detective went out to give them a guided tour, and Kelly moved over to the stacks of haphazard paper on the dining room table. “As I recall, these are physical letters, these are printouts of the e-mails, and these are ones we flagged for some sort of action, like referring them to someone in their precinct. Do we have any coffee? I’m running a quart low, and I’m going to need it. Can I please call DC now?”
“In a minute,” Jack said.
“And some of them,” she continued as if she hadn’t interrupted herself, “get kind of weird.” But instead of explaining, she crossed to the sink, hand reaching for a cabinet, before Jack could mutter a hey!
A frown of annoyance. “I just want a drink of water.”
Jack deferred to Maggie, who said, “Go ahead, I’m done with it. There might be black powder on the cabinet and the faucet, though.”
Kelly had the sense to stop before her pricey-looking clothes brushed the dirtied countertop edge. She got a glass from the second cabinet she opened and filled it from the tap. Then she noticed black powder from the faucet handle on her fingers, turned it back on, rinsed, turned off, still had traces of black. She finally solved the conundrum by soaking a paper towel and washing off the handles, then rinsing her fingers and filling the glass before turning the tap off, talking all the while. “I mean, this could be some psycho stalker, right? Someone who thought she was sending him love messages through the press releases and then imagined a rejection as well?”
Jack donned gloves to look through the pile, and Maggie did the same. “Did she have stalkers?”
“A few in the past. Nothing recent. Usually the FBI would pay them a visit and they’d decide to switch their attentions to someone else.”
“We’ll take a look. Are there any that aren’t here? Are some thrown out upon receipt?”
“Nothing is thrown out. You want to make a point to your congressman, send an old-fashioned letter. Not a phone call, not an e-mail. Someone has to actually open a letter, read it, and put it in a file, where it stays.”
Maggie read over Jack’s shoulder as he quickly skimmed the letters. Nearly every one accused Diane Cragin of being a racist and usually added
