Fatal Consequences

by Marie Force

“Not much, unfortunately. Neither of the women talked to their mothers about anything other than their families, their work and their immigration status when they called home.”

  “Damn it,” Sam said. “How did they explain the money?”

  “Regina’s mother said she had been saving up her pay from the cleaning company—or at least that’s what Regina told her.”

  “No way a seventeen-dollar-an-hour cleaning lady has an extra five grand laying around—not living in this city. What did Maria’s mother say about the money?”

  “She said she didn’t know where it came from and didn’t think to ask because everyone is rich in the U.S., or so she seems to think. So what’s next?”

  “Gonzo was running the phone numbers that appeared on both Regina’s and Maria’s phones. Did you get that report?”

  “Not yet. The computer geeks are backed up. They promised it by the end of the day.”

  Sam wanted to shout with frustration. Didn’t these people realize she was running a homicide investigation? “I wish to hell Farnsworth would let me test the senators for DNA.”

  “That’ll never happen,” Freddie said. “Not without probable cause.”

  “Then let’s get it.”

  “Define ‘get it.’”

  “Time to do some digging into senatorial closets.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “Yes, you have to. Let’s go run this one by Skip. Maybe he can help us figure out a way to do this without ending up unemployed afterward.”

  “That’d be preferred. I’ll meet you there.”

  “Anything yet on Nick’s phone?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You put a rush on it?”

  “Sure did.”

  Sam sighed. More delays. “Alright, I’ll see you at Skip’s.”

  On the way to her father’s house, she debated whether to call Nick. She wanted so badly to know how things were going in Cleveland—and to give him a piece of her mind for calling her father about the threat. But every time she imagined Nick’s mother wanting nothing from him but his money, she ached for him. How she hoped she was wrong about that, but her gut was telling her to be worried. In the end, she decided not to call him. She’d wait to hear about it when he got home, even if the waiting was killing her.

  Ignoring the patrol car that followed her, she parked on Ninth Street and took the ramp to her father’s house. With a quick knock she entered the living room to find Skip and Celia sitting in front of the TV.

  “What did I tell you about knocking?” Celia asked without removing her eyes from the screen.

  “I’ll do better next time,” Sam said. “What’s going on?”

  “Senator Lightfeather is resigning from the Senate,” Skip said.

  “Oh man,” Sam said.

  “…and so I’ve decided,” Lightfeather was saying, “that I need to spend as much time as I can with my family, to repair the damage I have caused.” Next to him, his wife stood with a tight-lipped frown. The dais sported a Washington Hilton logo, so at least he hadn’t left the building where Sam had told him to stay. “As such, today I announce my resignation from the United States Senate. I have treasured every moment of the years I spent representing the people of the great state of Arizona. I thank the citizens for the faith they had in me, and I will work for the rest of my life to once again be worthy of that faith. I ask that you respect my family’s need for privacy at this difficult time.”

  The moment he stepped off the stage, the network’s anchor and political analyst began speculating about Lightfeather’s association with two Capitol Cleaning Services employees who’d been murdered. “A well-placed police source tells Capitol News that Regina Argueta de Castro was expecting Lightfeather’s baby,” the analyst said.

  Sam let out a shriek. “How the hell do they know that? Goddamn it!” She reached for her phone and called HQ. “It’s Lieutenant Holland. Put me through to the chief immediately.” When told he was in a meeting, she said, “Interrupt it.”

  The chief came on the line a minute later. “Lieutenant.”

  “Sorry to interrupt your meeting, but we have a leak.” She told him what she’d heard the reporter say. “I will guarantee you none of my people breathed a word of that to the media, so I want to know who this ‘well-placed’ source is.”

  “So do I.”

  “You might want to start with Stahl.”

  “He may have it in for you personally, but he’d never squeal to the press.”

  “And you’re sure of that?”

  “Not as sure as I’d like to be. Have you seen Detective McBride today?”

  “Yes. She’s hanging in there.”

  “I wanted to see her or send her something, but I wasn’t sure if I should go there…”

  It was so unlike him to be uncertain. “In this case, it might be best to send some flowers. A visit from the chief might be more than she can handle.”

  “Then that’s what I’ll do. Keep me posted on the investigation.”

  “Find that mole,” Sam said.

  “On it.”

  Returning the phone to her coat pocket, Sam turned to her father and stepmother.

  “How’s Jeannie?” Celia asked, her pretty face etched with worry.

  “As well as can be expected.”

  “Did he…?”

  They knew she couldn’t give them details and would never ask her to. Her silence spoke for her.

  “Oh, God,” Celia said. “I was so hoping…”

  “Me too.”

  “What’s the status of the investigation?” Skip asked, his voice gruff. Sam had no doubt he was deeply affected by what had happened to McBride. Even as a disabled retiree, he was still one of them. Sam made sure of that, as did Farnsworth, Malone and Skip’s many other friends within the department.

  “Stalled,” Sam said, falling onto the sofa. “I’m convinced we’re probably looking for a senator or someone equally powerful, but Farnsworth won’t let me request DNA without probable cause.”

  “So you’re going to get it,” Skip said.

  “That’s the plan.”

  “You gotta be really careful.”

  “That much I know. How do you suggest I approach it?”

  Before he could answer, Sam’s cell phone rang again. She didn’t recognize the 202 number, but took the call anyway.

  “Holland.”

  “Darren Tabor.”

  Sam suppressed a groan. “I’m busy, Darren.”

  “I saw Detective Gonzales coming out of the courthouse with a baby in his arms. I didn’t think he had kids, so I’m smelling a story.”

  While Sam was thrilled for Gonzo, who’d apparently prevailed in court, the fact that Darren knew about it wasn’t good news. “Don’t go there, Darren. Please. I’m asking you to do this for me as a personal favor.”

  “That’ll mean you owe me one.”

  Sam grimaced. “What do you want?”

  “Tell me there’s a connection between McBride’s abduction and the dead cleaning ladies.”

  “There’s a connection, but I can’t say more than that right now.”

  “And when you can?”

  “I’ll keep you in mind.”

  “Excellent.”

  “And you’ll forget about the thing with Gonzales?”

  “What thing?”

  Sam released a sigh of relief. “Thanks. While I have you, maybe you could do me another favor.”

  “That’d put you pretty deep in the hole to me,” he said, but she could hear the laughter in his voice.

  “It’d be worth owing you if you can find out where the leak about the father of Regina’s baby came from.”

  “Is it true? It’s Lightfeather’s?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Either way, I’d like to know how the media got that tidbit.”

  “I’ll do some sniffing around. See what I can find out.”

  “Keep it down low that you’re doing it for me.”

  “Lieutenant, I am nothing if
not the soul of discretion.”

  “Sure you are,” she said, chuckling. “Let me know what you hear.”

  “Maybe you should program my number into your phone so you’ll have it when you need me in the future.”

  “Hanging up now.”

  “Where did Nick go today?” Darren asked.

  Sam slapped the phone closed.

  “If I didn’t know better,” Skip said, “I might think you enjoy sparring with that boy.”

  “He’s not as bad as some of them.”

  “He was tough on you after Johnson.”

  Sam shuddered at the reminder of the child who had died in a shoot-out she’d ordered at a crack house. “He gave us a heads-up when the Reporter was getting ready to trash me,” she reminded her father.

  “That’s true,” Skip said.

  Sam hated remembering that the entire city knew about her near-abortion—the one she’d planned to have in college before she miscarried. An employee of the women’s clinic that had treated her had decided to cash in on Sam’s newfound notoriety. But they’d taken care of her and ensured she’d be tied up in a legal web for many years to come.

  “So you want to talk about how to get those guys in high places to talk?” Skip asked.

  Anxious to think of anything other than the long-ago nightmare that she believed had led to her current fertility issues, Sam nodded. “Yeah. Tell me what you’d do.”

  Sam and Freddie took over the dining room at Nick’s place, using laptops to search the internet for every detail they could find about the lives of the five senators who’d had regular contact with Regina and Maria. The daylong canvas in Foggy Bottom had yielded two security cameras that had caught only shadowy images and not a single witness who reported seeing the abduction. They’d also gotten nothing helpful from a thorough investigation of the alley where Jeannie had been dumped. Sam was about to tear her hair out in frustration.

  “Get this,” Freddie said, his eyes dancing over the screen. “Trent was in a car accident his senior year of high school.”

  “Fatalities?”

  “Two—both girls. He was driving, and his pants were unzipped when the cops cut him out of the car.”

  “Drunk?”

  “High. They found marijuana in the car.”

  “Whoa. How’d the press never get ahold of this?”

  “They did.” He spun the laptop around so she could see the video Freddie had found of Trent’s interview on Oprah in which he’d taken full credit for what he called a “youthful mistake.” The Montana voters had bought his story and sent him to Washington ten years earlier, as an appointee to finish out the term of a senator who was forced to resign after a scandal. He’d won the seat on his own in the last election.

  “Once again, the little woman stands staunchly by her husband’s side while he admits to being a scumbag,” Sam said of the Oprah video that featured Trent and his wife.

  “You’ve got a real beef with that, huh?”

  “I just don’t get these women who think so little of themselves that they blindly stand by these guys.”

  “What would you do if the press found out about something stupid that Nick had done as a kid? You wouldn’t stand by him if it turned into a media circus?”

  “Nick doesn’t do stupid things.”

  “Everyone does stupid things at some point in their lives.”

  “Nick never did.” Sam chewed on her pen as she wondered once again how things were going with his mother. “He had an odd upbringing. Not a lot of time for foolishness.” She was quite certain, in fact, that he’d been so focused on hockey and school and his goal of going to Harvard on an academic scholarship that he never had time for youthful stupidity.

  “Why do you have that worried look on your face?”

  “Do I?”

  Freddie nodded.

  Sam told him about where Nick was and who he was dealing with as well as her worries that his mother might be after his money.

  “Damn,” Freddie said. “I can’t imagine having a mother like that.”

  “Speaking of mothers, is the dinner party on?”

  “I don’t know if I should do it. With the case and McBride…”

  “You need to get this issue resolved once and for all. You can’t be caught in the middle between your mother and Elin the way you are now.”

  “We’ll see what Friday brings. I asked them both to save the night, but I’m not sure Elin will show. She wasn’t too happy about the idea. If she does come, I might take them out to eat rather than cooking. I figure if we’re in public, they can’t claw each other’s eyes out.”

  “True.” Turning back to the case, she tapped a pen against the table as she mulled over the thoughts swirling around in her mind.

  “What’re you thinking?”

  “Something Jeannie said today keeps nagging at me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The message he told her to give me—’Tell your boss to back off on the dead whores, or she’ll be next.’”

  “What about it?”

  “He called them whores.”

  “So?”

  “So nothing in our investigation has led to any kind of promiscuity. Even though both were pregnant and Regina was involved with Lightfeather, we haven’t found a single other man linked to either of them.”

  “Figure of speech?”

  “Could be,” Sam said. “But I keep going back to the money they were sending home. Where would they get that? You said drugs, gambling or prostitution. Remember?”

  “Yeah, so you think they were hooking on the side?”

  “Gonzo spoke to Maria’s neighbor who said her routine was exactly the same seven days a week. She came home from work and took a shower. The woman upstairs heard the pipes clanging every morning.”

  “Okay…”

  “JoAnn Smithson told us they work five nights a week, Monday through Friday nights. So what was Maria doing the other two nights?”

  “Good question.”

  “One to ask her friend Selina. We can follow up with Lightfeather again about Regina’s weekend schedule. In the meantime, let’s finish the research on the senators. I’d love to find some skeletons in the closets of Stenhouse or Cook.”

  “If they’ve got ’em, we’ll find ’em.”

  By eleven, Sam and Freddie had read every word they could find about their five senators, but hadn’t found any other bombshells. “I guess we’ll start with Trent in the morning,” she said.

  “Sounds like a plan. Should I meet you there?”

  “Let’s go to HQ first to see if third shift got anywhere tonight. I also want to know if we’ve got DNA results from Maria. Will you check to see if there’s a report on Nick’s cell yet?”

  “Logging in right now.” He scrolled through his emails. “Not yet.”

  “What the hell is taking so long? Everything on this case is taking forever!”

  “A couple of dead cleaning ladies certainly don’t inspire the same sense of urgency as a dead senator or Supreme Court nominee. That’s for sure.”

  “They’re just as urgent to me.”

  “Which is why you’re a rare and special woman, Lieutenant.”

  She made a face at him even though she was amused, as always, by his sucking up.

  At the sound of the front door opening and closing, Freddie gathered up his laptop and shoved it into his backpack. “I’ll see you at HQ in the a.m.”

  Filled with anxiety, Sam followed Freddie into the living room where Nick was hanging his coat in the closet. One look at his handsome exhausted face and Sam could tell it hadn’t been a good day.

  Freddie said a quick hello to Nick and showed himself out.

  Sam went to Nick and slipped her arms around him, snuggling into his chest. At first he was rigid, but then his arms encircled her and the starch left his spine.

  “You were right,” he said after a long period of silence.

  Sam closed her eyes tight, aching from the hurt she hear
d in his voice. “I’m sorry.” While she wanted to know how much the day trip had cost him, she didn’t ask because it would embarrass him.

  “I should’ve known,” he said in a bitter tone that was so unlike him. “People like her don’t change.”

  Sam looked up at him and raised her hands to frame his face. “We don’t need her. You don’t need her.”

  He nodded in agreement.

  “It’s her loss, Nick. She’ll never know the wonderful, kind, loving, generous man that I know, because she’s too selfish to be bothered.”

  With his hands on her hips, he held her close to him. “I couldn’t wait to get home to you. All day, I stayed focused on that, and it got me through. You got me through.”

  “I felt so helpless, wanting to do something for you,” she said, hugging him again.

  “You did, babe. By being here waiting for me, you helped.” He bent to kiss her. “I’ve had enough of this day. Let’s go to bed.”

  Chapter 21

  Gonzo stood over the crib and watched his son sleep. In the course of one amazing evening, he’d learned how to feed, change and bathe him, how to properly hold him, how to console him and he’d been told that at this young age, smiles usually mean gas. Sam’s sisters, Angela and Tracy, had spent hours turning his empty second bedroom into a fully outfitted nursery and teaching him everything he needed to know to care for little Alex.

  Now the rise and fall of his tiny chest held Gonzo mesmerized. He had his hands thrown over his head, and when Gonzo touched one of them it squeezed shut around his finger in a surprisingly tight grip. Gonzo’s heart contracted just as tightly. Ever since Ms. Avery placed the baby in his arms, Gonzo’s every emotion had hovered close to the surface.

  Christina came up behind him and slipped her arms around his waist. “You should sleep when he sleeps,” she whispered. “He’ll be awake and hungry in a few hours.”

  “I’m afraid to leave him. What if he stops breathing or something?”

  “He won’t,” she said. “I promise.”

  Gonzo gazed at the baby for another minute before he extricated his finger from Alex’s grip and let Christina lead him from the room.

  Even though his bedroom was right across the hall, Gonzo still checked to make sure the baby monitor Tracy had set up was working properly. He turned to find Christina watching him, amusement dancing in her eyes.