Deadly Politics

by LynDee Walker

  Talk about a morning. I was more than a little scared and a whole lot mad, and confident I could wring Dan Kessler’s skinny neck in less time than it took to reapply my lip gloss.

  But I didn’t want to hurt Dan.

  Yet, anyway.

  “Come on. We all know—” he began, putting a warm, sticky hand on my shoulder.

  “I would take that back before I lost it if I were you.” The words slid through teeth clenched so tight I wasn’t sure how sound made it out.

  He snatched it away.

  Another breath.

  Another ten count.

  I closed my eyes and opened my mouth. “I am not having the best day ever, Dan.” Even I was impressed with how calm and (honestly) sane I sounded. “And I have no intention of spilling my guts to anybody, but even if I had gut-spilling plans, why in the name of Christian Louboutin would you think I’d confide in you?”

  He cleared his throat, his suit rustling against the leather seat as he squirmed. I checked the mirror.

  “You can talk now,” I said.

  “If you’d let me finish my sentence, what I was going to say was, we all know you didn’t make up the thing about the dead whore.”

  My head snapped around. “Watch it. Her name was Lakshmi.”

  His hands flew up in mock surrender. “Lakshmi, Lakshmi. Didn’t know you two were buds.”

  “I have to be buds with someone to remind you not to be a demeaning, misogynistic ass? Since when?”

  “Now hang on,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to be insulting.”

  “Yet you said not a word about the men who were in any of those videos.” I arched one eyebrow.

  He was quiet for three blinks. “Point taken. Truce?”

  I nodded.

  “I mean, I can tell Charlie’s hoping you’ve cracked, but even she knows better, deep down.” He leaned forward, practically rubbing his hands together. “The truth is your whole deal. A person’s inherent personality doesn’t just change overnight.” He flashed his I-belong-on-the-anchor-desk smile.

  I sighed. “What do you want, Dan?”

  “I want to know how you knew about her. We all know the cops tell you juicy stuff they don’t tell anyone else, but with the governor saying you’re wrong, I smell a rat. All I’m trying to figure out is where it’s rotting. Come on, Clarke. You help me, I’ll help you? We can do this on air after the game if you want. We’ll have twice the viewers Charlie got this morning.”

  I shook my head. “I appreciate the vote of confidence, but I can’t. I won’t burn a source for a decision I made myself.”

  He sat back and folded his arms across his chest. “See? Moral compass.” His eyes narrowed. “But is the rat Baine himself, or someone in his security detail?” His head tipped to one side. “You know the thing I can’t figure out? I would’ve pegged you for a Baine voter any day of the week. I’m rarely wrong about people’s politics.” He snapped his fingers. “It is him, isn’t it?”

  “No comment. And I didn’t say I didn’t support him—careful putting words in people’s mouths.”

  “You tried to ruin him less than twelve hours ago,” Kessler said.

  “Did I? I guess I missed that part.” I pointed to the door. “Out the way you came in, please. And Dan? Don’t do this again. Next time you’ll leave with some battle scars.” I flashed a Splenda-sweet smile as he kicked the door open.

  “Got you to talk to me, didn’t I?” he grumbled, smoothing his slacks and jacket. “You’re really not taking me back to my car?”

  “It’s nice out. Stretch your legs,” I said.

  “I hope you know what you’re getting into. And I hope I can figure it out before Charlie does.” I couldn’t tell if he was talking to me or to himself, so I just waved as I pulled away.

  I made it to the light before my phone buzzed.

  Putting my foot on the brake, I picked it up and touched the gray box with Joey’s name in it.

  The light turned green. Yellow. Red again.

  I was still staring at my screen when it flipped back to green.

  Don’t come home. Go to my place. I’ll take Darcy to Jenna and meet you there when I can. There are four state troopers on the porch with a summons for you. The kind that’ll turn into a warrant if you refuse to go.

  Leaping, flipping, circus-trick-performing Louboutins.

  Aaron had warned me. But I thought it would take longer.

  I clicked the reply line. Jenna and Chad are on a cruise for their anniversary. Just bring Darcy with you. And thanks.

  I swung the car left toward the river instead of right toward home, thankful for Charlie and Dan and their spectacular knack for pain-in-the-ass-ery that made me leave my car at home.

  Tapping my fingers on the wheel at the next light, I eyed my phone the way a normal person would a coiled copperhead resting in their cup holder. I reached for it. Shut it off. Stuck it in the console. Checked the mirrors, a Big-Brother-is-watching tightness making my skin feel two sizes too small.

  Every traffic camera was suddenly the enemy. I’d watched Kyle check footage. I knew just how closely they could track a person by plates.

  I just never thought I’d be on this end of the checking.

  For once, the fact that Joey and I had to keep our relationship quiet was my friend. I had no doubt whoever was looking for me would find out eventually, but I’d bet our careful sneaking around for the past two years had bought me at least a day.

  Turning into the garage under Joey’s building and putting my sunglasses back on in the dark concrete basement, I hauled my laptop bag out of the back seat and slipped into the elevator, hoping a day would be enough.

  Stacy Adams was a dude.

  A wiry, geekishly handsome dude with a prominent Adam’s apple and black horn-rimmed Buddy Holly glasses covering hazel eyes that looked greener thanks to his hunter-green-and-sapphire plaid button-down.

  But his photo wasn’t what had my jaw slack, eyes locked on my laptop screen.

  And neither was his job title. Energy innovation manager. I’d seen it on the business card and dismissed it as one of those business-speak things that gave someone a label without actually describing their job.

  It was his bio. A bio that touted a meteoric rise to R&D at Daltec straight out of grad school.

  That didn’t just jump out at me. It wrapped around my throat and squeezed, screaming in my ear.

  I clicked to their website, grabbing a spiral off the table next to my favorite chair and starting a new chart.

  Daltec’s home page sported the logo I’d seen on the windbreaker at the Drake house before Lakshmi’s mom shut the door in my face. Hamilton Baine worked in nuclear-alternative research at Daltec. And now this dude Kyle was talking to just before he went batshit was a former hotshot scientist there.

  I drew a line and jotted the most obvious label. Kyle went looking for information on Hamilton from an old colleague.

  Right?

  Except Aaron and Chris were supposed to be looking for Hamilton. I still didn’t really know what Kyle was looking for here at all, and it was a pretty good bet he wouldn’t tell me after this morning. When, by the way, I’d let him in and out of my house without finding out what he knew about Hamilton’s vanishing act.

  Dammit. Supposition for the win, then.

  The easiest thing? Kyle was looking for information on Hamilton. The most interesting? Fishing for information on Dr. Drake’s work. Which might lead to why Lakshmi was dead, if Angela Baker knew her stuff.

  Staring at my notebook, I realized that two days brim-full of crazy had gotten past me and I still didn’t have an answer to the most basic question. The one Bob asked before I set one boot heel on the lush capitol lawn: Why was Kyle even there?

  Nothing about a politically charged murder gets Kyle’s special agent pinky toe in the office door. At least not in an obvious way. Nobody in Baine’s inner circle was selling bootleg cigarettes or bathtub gin. Weapons, then?

  I pulled out my no
tebook and flipped back. He’d said her head and face were too badly beaten to ID her. But he didn’t say that was how she died. So had someone used some sort of illegal gun on her? Military-grade assault rifles, sawn-off shotguns, specialty weapons like 3-D-printed plastics—that was ATF purview. And while I couldn’t see how anyone would get a machine gun or a shotgun into the building, concealed and open carrying were both legal in our capitol, so the specialty train might go somewhere. I just didn’t have anyone to ask at the moment.

  I made a note and went back to Daltec’s site. Scanned the menu at the top of my screen.

  Innovation. Projects.

  Clean coal.

  I made it through three pages of high-level science that might as well have been written in Farsi for all I could comprehend, before I clicked the logo again to return to the home page.

  Scrolled.

  Scrolled more.

  Stopped and stared.

  Lakshmi’s dad. And Thomas Baine, before he was Governor Baine. Each held the end of one of those big cardboard cartoon checks. I clicked the photo closer. Grant money, given by the environmental caucus of the House of Delegates to Dr. Drake for research.

  But what kind?

  The caption on the photo said it was a year and a half old, and that Drake was on the leading edge of clean, abundant energy research.

  Vague much?

  I clicked the search bar. Clean and abundant and energy and Virginia. Go.

  Over a thousand hits. Sorted by most relevant. I didn’t see the word coal until twenty-six.

  The top twenty?

  All nuclear.

  Holy Manolos. What if Angela Baker heard wrong? Or misinterpreted what she heard? What if Dr. Drake wasn’t working on making coal better—but replacing it?

  That could motivate some executive to pressure Grayson to shut it down by any means necessary. Desperate times—and Ted Grayson had nothing left to lose. I picked up the chart again, drawing zigzag lines between words and phrases.

  Grayson wasn’t stupid. I’d never really pegged him for the diabolical genius type, but I had underestimated folks before. Baine was for pretty much everything Grayson was not. If Grayson had somehow formed and implemented a plan to blackmail Drake out of his research by using his daughter as a sex toy, it wasn’t even a long stretch to think he might’ve found a way to take down a rival politician headed for superstardom and get back at Dr. Drake in the process. Kill Drake’s daughter, put her on Baine’s desk, and alter her online narrative. It was pretty simple, as evil plans go, so there had to be a bigger why at the core—and coal could be it.

  So many moving puzzle pieces. So many trails. Had I found the right one?

  Sex or money, almost every time. And this road had both: Google said coal was a roughly $200 million annual industry in the commonwealth.

  Aaron had clearly been ordered to see me earlier, and while Grayson might have fallen from his white marble pedestal, he still had plenty of powerful friends. People with power do heinous things every day and get right away with them, because political titles and friends are damn-near unbreakable shields. Cops, prosecutors, journalists—power and money insulate secrets from everyone whose job it is to drag them out into the light. Red tape, missing files, and corporate boards worried about already-shrinking profit margins are the sorts of everyday obstacles that keep monsters hidden.

  Aaron and Kyle and DonnaJo had bureaucratic hurdles to clear in the race to Lakshmi’s murderer. But I didn’t—not anymore. Staying out of jail would be nice, of course, but my lack of a job meant journalistic rules no longer applied. Nobody had to talk to me on the record for me to figure this out. I didn’t care anymore because I had nowhere to print it. And I didn’t wear a badge, so people would talk to me who refused to talk to them.

  I looked at my chart. At my screen.

  Found the common denominators.

  All three of my surest, best-traveled trails led to or through Hamilton Baine, two of them by way of Ted Grayson.

  Kyle’s red-rimmed eyes flashed on the back of my lids with every blink, Governor Baine’s broken, hoarse voice zipping through my head as one more big piece of my puzzle slipped into place: Hamilton and Grayson were both off the grid, but Hamilton’s text to Mrs. Powers hadn’t said he was planning to disappear. The governor said there’d been no ransom demand, asked for my help, then called me a liar on live TV less than twenty-four hours later.

  So many contradictions.

  I needed to find the governor’s son. The more I thought about it, the surer I got that when I did, I’d find my least favorite ex-senator, too.

  And my money said the place to start the search was with Mr. Adams over at the power company.

  I grabbed my bag and dug for the card. Cell number. Bingo. Pulling my phone out of my pocket, I crossed my fingers, dialed, and pressed the “Talk” circle.

  20

  Voicemail.

  Of course.

  I didn’t leave a message; better to try again than be ignored.

  I laid the phone on the table as the lock clicked behind me. Joey slipped in, Darcy in his arms. “You are in some kind of serious shit,” he said by way of hello, locking the deadbolt behind him.

  I jumped to my feet, my long legs gobbling up the black floor tiles between us, and threw my arms around him, hiding my face in his shoulder.

  “It seems I’m developing a knack for that.” The words were muffled by his shirt. The dog yipped, wriggling. He put her down and she ran for the bed he kept in the corner.

  Joey straightened, wrapping both arms around me so tight he was practically hugging his own shoulders, resting his chin on top of my head. The slow, steady beat of his heart invited my breathing to match it.

  “What did White say?”

  I kissed the tip of his nose and turned for the kitchen. “You thirsty?”

  “Is it too early for bourbon?”

  I snorted. “Church isn’t even out yet.”

  “So no, then?” He winked when I looked over my shoulder.

  I pulled a cut-crystal snifter from the bar cart in the corner and took it to the counter to pour Joey’s drink before I picked up my glass and squeezed a lime over it, adding ice and Diet Coke.

  “I’m in no place to judge anyone’s choices today.” I sipped the soda and handed him his bourbon. “Something’s off with Aaron.” I put my glass on the counter and boosted myself up next to it, letting my feet dangle in front of the cabinet doors. “He was weird. I’m as sure as I can be without actually having laid eyes on it that he was wearing a wire. Oh, and he did the honors of firing me for good measure.”

  Joey’s eyes popped so wide I could see white all the way around his dark irises. “Firing you?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Andrews got away with it for a whole day last time. I think this is going to be a regular thing until he gets one to stick. I’m so tired of that guy and his bullshit. If it weren’t for Bob, I’d tell him to shove his ungodly hours and ridiculous pay straight up Shelby Taylor’s ass and see how far it gets him. He’s all blustering and very little backup. I need to save my reputation and get the story, and the board will force him to take me back. Again.” I hoped.

  Joey shook his head. “I thought White was supposed to be your friend. You saved the man’s life, for Christ’s sake.”

  “He kept trying to get me to tell him Kyle was the person who told me about Lakshmi.”

  Joey shook his head. “Throwing Miller under the bus, too. No sense of loyalty.”

  I raised one hand. “But then he kind of tipped me off that he was doing that. Which, if he was really laying a trap, makes zero sense. Aaron White could draw a murder confession out of an innocent priest and have the bishop believing it was true. He bumbled this morning on purpose.”

  “So he was there as someone’s lackey.”

  I pointed, putting my soda down. “Exactly. He did tell me he’d talked to Baine this morning.”

  “The governor is probably not a good enemy to have, princess.”r />
  I shook my head. “I’m not sure yet who’s friend or enemy here. Politics is its own universe, with its own bizarre rules. What I do know is that Baine is scared. And to be fair, I forced his hand by running that piece this morning. I didn’t expect a subpoena at the time, but it’s a brilliant move. They hit back hard. I mean, even if I can prove I’m right—hell, even if I find the killer, where do I get that information out without a newspaper to write for? It’s a bit too long for an Instagram story.”

  “You just said the board would make Andrews take you back, just like last time.” Joey sipped his bourbon, his eyes on my face.

  “Probably.” I blew out a long, slow breath. “That’s probably right.” In truth, it depended entirely on how many board members Andrews could convince that I was more liability than asset. And the longer it took me to find an answer, the more time he would have to yak at them.

  Tick-tock, Nichelle.

  “Does anyone but the governor have enough pull with White to make him do something he doesn’t want to where you’re concerned?”

  I nodded. “A handful of people, I’m sure. He’s awfully close to a thirty-year pension to go pissing off too many powerful people. But all the local politicians lead back to the governor.”

  Joey tipped his head to one side. “Except all the ones who hate his guts.”

  Holy Manolos.

  I’d seen Aaron with Baine the day before, I’d listened when he said he talked to him today. And I’d completely disregarded the possibility that he could be influenced by a political enemy of Baine’s.

  The question wasn’t even really if, because it was as possible as me coming home with new shoes on a given day. The question was who, and why.

  If Grayson was trying to make the governor look bad, this was a genius backhanded way to go about it. I’d sure made it look like I was out to get him already . . . between his interview this morning and my chat with Aaron, it wasn’t unthinkable that I’d be guns blazing after him by now. But Aaron wouldn’t listen to Ted Grayson. Not directly.

  Neither would Thomas Baine. If it was true that Baine had an enemy influencing the course of this day, it wasn’t someone from the other side of the political aisle.