Corruption of Power

by Brenda English

  “I’ve got something for you, Sutton,” he said, and I could hear he was pleased with himself. “First thing I did was get the home phone number for that certain VIP we talked about and match it to the records for the young lady. Seems he called her more than a dozen times between the middle and the end of March. One night he called three times. There are a few nighttime calls from his office, too.”

  Gotcha, I thought.

  “Oh, yeah,” Ralph continued, “the calls were all one-way. She never made any to him.”

  “This is good news, Ralph. Real good news. Can you make hard copy for me?”

  “No problem.”

  “I’ll pick it up from you sometime in the next few days. Just hang on to it until you hear from me. And Ralph? Thanks. I owe you.”

  “Not yet you don’t,” Ralph said. “We’re not even close to being even yet. ‘Bye, Sutton.”

  “ ’Bye, Ralph. You’re good people.”

  Rob still had not appeared when I hung up from Ralph’s good news, so I took some time to put together a summary of the most recent events and sent it to his private computer directory, the one that only he could access. I didn’t say how I knew what I knew, but I wanted him to know that even though Ken and I didn’t have enough for another story yet, we might very well have a hell of a good one in another day or two. Then I went downstairs to wait for Ken.

  Promptly at eleven (How can he plan it so closely in this traffic? I wondered), Ken pulled up in his tan Honda Accord and put up his hand in a wave. I came around the front of the car, let some traffic pass, opened the passenger’s door, and climbed inside.

  “Hi, Sutton,” Ken greeted me as he pulled back into the traffic, looking impeccable as always.

  “Hey, Ken.”

  “Do you think we should have called ahead to tell Maggie to make herself available?” he asked.

  “No, I think it might send her into a panic. I think she’s scared, really scared of Ed Lloyd. She’s afraid no one will believe her story and that if she breathes a word, Lloyd will crucify her. She wouldn’t tell me a thing on Saturday, and I could see her point. But today’s different.”

  “Oh?”

  “Today I have copies of her telephone records and all the calls Ed Lloyd made to her from his house. He would be hard-pressed to claim it was official business. Today, we might be able to sway her.”

  “Good work, lady,” Ken said. “It’s worth another try, especially since it’s all we have.”

  “Well, actually, it’s not.”

  “No?”

  So I told him about Noah Lansing’s visit the night before, about his confirmation of Lloyd and Taylor’s blood types and about the college kid with the pool flyers.

  Ken whistled softly.

  “Jesus, Sutton, this thing is getting creepier by the minute. So,” he said, looking at me shrewdly, “what was your quo for Lansing’s quid?”

  “I had to tell him about Maggie.”

  He raised a surprised eyebrow, then thought about it for a few seconds while he maneuvered past a string of double-parked limos in front of one of the downtown hotels.

  “You really think Lansing is serious about telling you what he knows in return?” he asked finally.

  “I think so. He agreed to give us another day with Maggie before he contacts her. He didn’t have to tell me about the kid with the flyers. I already had told him about Maggie when the call came in. He could have passed it off as anything, but he didn’t.”

  “That kid may just fry Taylor’s ass.”

  “He may,” I agreed. “No doubt Taylor will think it feels that way.”

  “So what’s Lansing’s motive for all this openness?”

  “His dead wife, I think.” I filled Ken in on Lansing’s history and the murder in Virginia Beach. “Bill Russell made a comment once that he thinks Lansing has a hard time letting a case rest until he’s closed it. I think maybe it’s real personal with him these days, especially given the circumstances in this case.”

  “Yeah, he sounds pretty driven. But his wife getting raped and murdered probably would have that effect on a guy,” Ken replied. “Okay, Sutton, if you think he’s being straight with us on this, I trust your instincts.”

  “I think he is,” I answered, also trying to reassure myself. “I think he wants to get these guys much worse than he wants to argue with us. I think the idea that they might get away with it upsets him more than the idea of dealing with me.”

  Twenty-six

  We continued to wind our way through the beginnings of the lunchtime traffic crunch and over to Capitol Hill. After circling for the third time around the areas near the Senate office buildings, Ken finally happened on someone pulling out of a parking space next to the Folger Library and wasted no time in wheeling into it as they drove away. We walked the three blocks to the Russell Building and went up to the second floor to Senator Black’s office.

  It was 11:30 when we walked in, and Maggie Padgett was standing in the reception area talking with Susan Barrett. She turned when Susan’s attention shifted to us and paled when she realized it was me again.

  “Hello, Maggie. Hi, Susan,” I said to the two of them. “This is my colleague Ken Hale.” Ken nodded to each of them in turn, and they murmured soft hellos. “Maggie,” I went on, wanting to take full advantage of having arrived unannounced, “do you think we could talk with you for a few minutes?”

  “Well, I… we’re very busy right now,” she said, looking as if talking to us was just about at the bottom of her list of things to do.

  “I know,” I said soothingly. “Sorry we didn’t call ahead, but something has come up that made it very important we talk with you as soon as possible.”

  She looked around the office, where a couple of people sat in chairs, apparently waiting to talk with someone there themselves.

  “Do you mind if we talk in the hall?” she asked finally. We agreed and followed her out the door.

  “Look,” I said, once we were out in the busy corridor, “this is way too public, too, and you really are going to want to hear what we have to say. How about if you tell Susan you’re going to go have lunch with us?”

  “I don’t know what you could say that I want to hear,” Maggie answered. “Especially since I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She was still hoping that somehow this would all just go away.

  “You may as well talk to us,” Ken said, speaking for the first time. “We’ve learned a lot since Sutton saw you on Saturday. We understand you’re scared. But if you help us, we think we can help you, too.”

  Maggie held Ken’s eyes for a long moment, a searching look that tried to delve deeply into the truth of what he was saying and that made her fear and sense of helplessness more painfully obvious.

  “I’ll go for a walk with you,” she said finally, and I sensed a note of defeat in her voice. “Wait just a moment.”

  She went back into the office, apparently to make her excuses to Susan, then rejoined us.

  We went down the elevator and outside without speaking, then crossed Delaware Avenue to the park, where we found a bench.

  “Why should I talk to you?” Maggie asked once we were seated. “No one will believe me. It’s my word against his. I can’t prove a thing.”

  “But we may be able to,” Ken told her quickly. “You won’t be in this alone.”

  “For starters,” I chimed in, “we have proof that Lloyd called you repeatedly at home in the couple of weeks before he showed up with you at Dr. Morris’s office. I’ve got the phone records, with the calls from his home and his office.”

  “And we have proof that his blood type is the same as one of the men who assaulted Ann Kane before she died,” Ken added. “If we’re able to come up with enough evidence against him, the police could force him to submit to a DNA analysis that could prove conclusively whether he was there.”

  Maggie looked as if every word we said to her pierced her like a sword, especially when Ken mentioned Ann Kane.

&n
bsp; “There are a couple of other things you probably don’t know,” I told her, more softly now, partly out of sympathy and partly in an effort to make her see us as her friends. “Ann Kane isn’t the only one who’s dead because of Ed Lloyd.”

  Maggie groaned, a hurting sound that came up from the solar plexus and stood my hair on end. This was no fun at all, but I went on.

  “You already know about Dr. Morris, the man who went out of his way to help you. Even the police are convinced now that his death wasn’t suicide, and we ail know who had a motive to keep him from telling what he knew.”

  Maggie looked from one of us to the other, her eyes wet. I went on.

  “What you don’t know yet is about Janet Taylor.”

  “Wasn’t she the one who was married to that…?” she asked, her question tailing off.

  “Right,” I said, nodding, “the supervisor’s wife out in Fairfax County, the one who was murdered last week.”

  “But I thought Lloyd was a friend of theirs. Why would he kill her?”

  “He didn’t, but the police think her husband did, and we have reason to believe it was because of something she found out, something to do with Ann Kane.” She didn’t have to know just how flimsy the evidence for our “belief” was.

  “With Ann?”

  “Maggie,” Ken said, putting his hand on her arm, “we think Hub Taylor was the other man with Ann that night she died. The blood type matches there, too. And there’s a witness who can put Taylor at the house when his wife died. We think she found out about Ann somehow, and he killed her.”

  “Oh, God,” Maggie said, looking at Ken’s hand. She sounded ill. I could feel her mind picturing the line of bodies getting longer and longer. She started to cry for real.

  Ken put his hand on her shoulder while I searched through my purse to get a tissue, which I handed to her.

  “Maggie,” I said, and she raised her tear-streaked face to look at me. “We have to stop him. Please, please help us.”

  Her eyes showed it when she made up her mind to talk to us. She used the tissue to wipe her eyes and blow her nose and then she told us what she knew.

  “Ed Lloyd goes after anything in a skirt,” she said angrily.

  “We’ve heard,” Ken told her dryly.

  “The problem is he isn’t one who takes no for an answer. There’s been more than one secretary and aide around here who’s been let go or who left in disgrace because she refused to go out with him. He carries a lot of weight on the Hill, and he doesn’t hesitate to throw it around. There are even more who’ve given in to him just to keep from getting him angry with them. We all know the wisest thing is just to stay away from him because he’s relentless once he decides you’re the one he wants next.”

  Already my stomach was turning sour at the sordid profile she drew. Ed Lloyd was a predator, a jackal, who preyed on those unable to protect themselves.

  “He started calling,” Maggie went on, “after Senator Black introduced him to me at a reception. In fact, I was talking to Ann at the time. Paul introduced us both to Lloyd. Lloyd called me later that evening at my apartment and asked me to come have drinks with him.”

  “What did you say?” Ken asked.

  “I had heard too many stories about him. I wanted nothing to do with him, but I didn’t want to make him angry. I told him I wasn’t feeling well. I hoped by the next day he would find someone else more interesting.”

  “But he called again,” I said, not needing to phrase it as a question.

  “Yes, practically every night for the next couple of weeks. And he called me at the office a couple of times, too. I told him I didn’t like to go out with people I worked with, that I wouldn’t be comfortable with the idea. I hoped that way he wouldn’t take it personally.”

  “Did you tell anyone else that he was bothering you?” Ken asked.

  “No, I was too mortified by the whole thing. I didn’t want anyone to know. I kept hoping he would get tired of me and go away. But he wouldn’t give up. He said he just wasn’t going to accept defeat, even if it meant he had to do something serious like have a word with Paul.”

  “From what I’ve heard about Senator Black, it doesn’t sound like he would have expected you to go out with Lloyd,” I told her.

  “I know that, now,” Maggie said, “but Lloyd was just driving me crazy. I couldn’t think straight about him anymore. All I could think of were the stories I had heard and how to get him to leave me alone. Finally, I thought that if I went out with him once, maybe he would find me so boring that he would want nothing more to do with me.”

  “So you went out with him?” Ken asked, sounding as if the answer he was expecting was making him feel ill, too.

  “It was stupid, I know, but I finally agreed to have dinner with him. I figured what could happen over dinner in a restaurant? But he drove over himself to pick me up, and it wasn’t until we turned into his neighborhood that I realized he wasn’t going to a restaurant. We went to his house instead.”

  “Were there other people around? A maid? A cook?” I asked, thinking about potential witnesses.

  “No one,” Maggie answered. “He told me first thing that we were alone, that he had given the maid the night off once she made dinner. It made me uncomfortable, but it just didn’t occur to me that he would try to hurt me. So we went ahead and had dinner. He had quite a bit of wine, but I barely touched mine. I wanted to keep my wits about me. It wasn’t until after the liqueur he served with dessert that I knew I was in trouble.”

  “He put something in the liqueur.” Again it wasn’t a guess on my part.

  “I think so,” Maggie went on. “We had the liqueur and dessert in his living room. I was on the sofa and he was across from me in a chair. I… I remember thinking that he hadn’t done anything out of line all evening, that maybe it would be okay, and then I started to get very warm in the room and I just was not feeling well. Lloyd was talking, and I realized he had put his hand on my… my leg and was stroking it.” She looked down at her leg as if she could still feel Lloyd’s hand there.

  “He won’t hurt you again,” Ken told her, sensing that the memories of that night still were painfully real for her.

  “I told him I had to go to the bathroom, that I was going to be sick, and I stood up quickly. But I lost my balance and fell back on the sofa. I think… I think I may even have blacked out for a few seconds. When I came to, Lloyd was on top of me, kissing me and trying to put his hands under my clothes. I pushed him off and tried to get away, but I couldn’t get my legs to work right. I kept falling down. It was all very confused. Part of my brain knew he had done something to me, but I couldn’t get the rest of it to work very well. And he kept coming after me, putting his hands on me and trying to kiss me.”

  “So when did he take you to Dr. Morris?”

  “I think I started having these muscle spasms, like my arms and legs began to jerk and tremble. It must not have been what was supposed to happen. I guess it scared him. He finally left me on the floor for a minute and came back with my coat. He put it on me and half carried me out to his car. I think I passed out again in the car. I don’t remember anything else until I woke up in the doctor’s office. I saw Lloyd there and he frightened me. He made it clear I wasn’t to say anything in front of the doctor. Later, when he took me home, he told me he would see to it I was fired and that I would never get another decent job, that everyone would know what a slut I was if I told anyone what had happened.”

  “And you believed him?” Ken, too, sounded angry.

  “Absolutely,” Maggie said vehemently. “I knew he could do it and he would. And then, when Sutton told me about Dr. Morris, it frightened me even more. I realized Lloyd was capable of murder, that he wouldn’t hesitate to destroy me one way or the other if he thought I was a threat.”

  “So did he bother you anymore?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, sighing, “but a week or so later I got a call from Ann. She wanted to have lunch. So we went out, and she
told me Lloyd had started calling her, asking her out.”

  My stomach kicked up some more bile. Maggie kept talking.

  “I know now I should have told her what he did to me,” she said sadly. “I lie awake at night thinking she might not be dead if I had just spoken up. But I didn’t. I was too embarrassed. I just told her he was really bad news, to stay away from him, not to go anywhere with him. She said she had no intention of seeing him. She thought he was a worm.”

  “So he probably showed up unannounced at her apartment instead,” I speculated. “Hub Taylor in tow.”

  “Probably said they just wanted to have a drink,” Ken added disgustedly. “Even though she couldn’t have alcohol, Lloyd somehow managed to put the Demerol into whatever she did drink. It knocked her out, and while they were having sex with her it killed her.”

  Maggie began to cry again, softly but brokenheartedly. I realized that she had been holding herself responsible for what happened to Ann Kane.

  “It wasn’t your fault, Maggie,” I said, trying to comfort her. “But there’s something else you have to do.”

  She looked up again.

  “You have to tell the police what you know. It’s the only way Ann is going to have any justice or peace.”

  “But I can’t tell the police,” she protested. “If I do, Lloyd will know!”

  “Not until it’s too late for him,” I tried to reassure her. “The detective who’s in charge of the case… I think you can trust him, Maggie. He wants to see Lloyd pay as badly as you do. And he’s not going to do anything to jeopardize his best witness.”

  “You’re the link,” Ken added. “The one who can make the connection to Ann, the one who can break this thing loose. Detective Lansing will do whatever it takes to see that nothing happens to you.”

  Maggie remained tearfully silent, looking down at her hands. Eventually, when we didn’t go away, she made up her mind.

  “All right,” she said tiredly, raising her eyes to look at us again. “I’ll talk to him. I’ll do it for Ann.”