Access to Power (20 page)

Chapter 46

Tape 3, side 2 snapped into Raymond’s head as he looked at Olson trembling before him:
running a meeting, positive communications with your executive assistant, making your client feel at ease
. Raymond didn’t need the tape because he could repeat it verbatim. Communicating was his great talent, especially when he had a clear view of the end.

Raymond could tell by the way Olson rolled his tongue over his lips that his mouth was dry and they were on the same page. He lowered the gun and took a step back, sizing the man up. Olson looked terrified. He’d been gazing at that script on his desk and had just noticed the bottle of whisky. From the little that Raymond knew about him, Olson had a long list of personal problems. If he’d kept his nose in his own business, he might have had time to deal with them.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked Olson.

It was the right question, Raymond thought. The one that he’d been asking himself for the past two days. Bitterness always bit back.

“What you’re looking for isn’t here,” Olson whispered.

Raymond flashed a bittersweet smile, glancing at the script on the desk as he sat down in the chair.
Meet Mel Merdock
.

“You’re making headlines, Ozzie. It’s starting all over again. I even saw that commercial on television. Your arrest gave them an excuse to play it again. They like playing it. They like watching a guy go down. It pays for their expensive clothing. New jewelry and fast cars. It buys the good life, Ozzie. It must be tough. Look at this place. It’s a dump. You ever thought about suicide?”

Olson’s body shuddered. Raymond waved his gun at the bottle of whisky.

“Why not have a drink,” Raymond said.

Olson’s eyes moved to the bottle. “I quit drinking,” he said.

“Have one anyway.”

Raymond slid the bottle over and smiled again. Olson stared at the bottle for a moment, then finally picked it up. He’d begun to sweat, his hands quivering as he removed the cap and took a small sip.

“Have another,” Raymond said.

The bottle flew past Raymond’s head and smashed against the cinder block wall. Olson bolted for the door, trying to escape.

Raymond sprung from the chair. He yanked him back into the room and they fell onto the couch. He could see the terror in his eyes as he straddled him. Olson yelped, his hands seizing the end of the gun and struggling to push it away from his face. The muzzle was zigzagging across his cheek. Once Raymond found Olson’s mouth, he jammed the barrel in, drove him back and screamed.

Olson was crying now, jerking his fat head back and forth wildly. He was choking on the gun, clawing at it, trying to pull the thing out. But Raymond kept his eyes on Olson’s sweaty fingers. They were leaving prints. They were moving down the barrel slowly, feeling their way toward the handle. It was a big gun, a .45 picked up at a gun show and freshly oiled. When Olson’s finger slipped through the trigger guard, Raymond pulled it back and let go.

The noise was horrendous. A big booming sound that shook the whole room.

Olson’s body thrust back and the top of his head sprayed against the wall. A moment passed. Then another as the shock waves finally dissipated. Raymond climbed off the body, eying the mess as he struggled to catch his breath.

The issues in Olson’s life were finally over. He would never have to worry about headlines again. Never be embarrassed. The man had committed suicide and his story would remain alive on TV. Olson was still a loser, but at least he wouldn’t have to watch it. He was at peace now.

Chapter 47

A camera flashed, lighting up Olson’s corpse as it slept on the couch with its eyes open and its brains blown out. A photographer with a beer gut and long sideburns rattled off shots from every angle. Crime scene techs walked in and out of the room, one with a Hoover vacuum cleaner. When the photographer had all the pictures he needed, Sandy moved in with her assistant from the coroner’s office, prying the gun out of Olson’s hand and emptying his pockets.

Randolph pushed Frank into the darkroom and Grimes closed the door. Both detectives were eyeing him nervously, skeptically—the case radioactive now.

“So you’re saying it’s your client,” Randolph said in a voice that wouldn’t carry through the door. “Mel Merdock, Frank. A candidate with all the money in the world. He or his wife or brother hired someone to commit murder, not once or twice, but four times just so no one would find out that he’s doing some girl?”

Hearing it spoken out loud sounded convoluted even to Frank. He nodded without confidence. A cell phone rang. As Grimes retrieved the phone from his pocket and flipped it open, Randolph glared at his partner with new concern.

“If it’s the U.S. Attorney, keep your mouth shut. No sources. No names. Keep to the facts.”

Grimes nodded. Then someone knocked on the door and pulled it open. It was Sandy, holding Olson’s wallet. Randolph checked his latex gloves and she passed it over. When Grimes stepped out to take his call, Randolph followed him through the door leaving Frank behind.

Frank caught up with the detective as he climbed the steps and reached the street. But he could see Randolph still shaking his head, still mulling it over and filled with doubt.

“The motive usually matches the crime, Frank. Who’s gonna kill four people to cover up that he got laid?” Randolph gave him a look and whistled. “Shit,” he said. “If everybody did that, we’d all be dead.”

Randolph’s car was parked by the main entrance to the building. Linda sat on the steps waiting for them. Wrapped in a blanket, she looked pale and frightened and Frank wished that she hadn’t been with him when he found Olson’s corpse. He turned back to Randolph, watching him open Olson’s wallet and spread the contents out on the hood. When the detective came to Olson’s license, he wrinkled his brow at Frank and whistled again.

“George Washington,” the detective said. “Thomas Jefferson, FDR, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ—and what about Clinton, Gingrich and everybody else?”

“What are you trying to say?”

“You tell me,” Randolph said. “If it had come out that Merdock was having an affair, could he have still won the election?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Maybe?” Randolph shot back. “Haven’t you been watching TV? Lou Kay’s sinking like a stone. He’s a wife beater now.”

Frank met Linda’s eyes. Then Grimes arrived with a crime scene tech and pointed to the hood of the car. For some reason, the tech began setting up his print case beside Randolph. Randolph watched him for a moment, then glanced at Olson’s license and handed it to Grimes.

“The address doesn’t match here or his wife’s place,” he said.

Grimes looked it over. “The building super says Olson had a trailer out in the woods. And the U.S. Attorney’s in. He’s going out to the Merdocks in person and on his own.”

Frank picked up on Grimes’s tone and obvious dig.

“The U.S. Attorney likes headlines,” Randolph said, turning back to Grimes. “Let’s get a head start on him and send a crew out to this trailer.”

“He wants us to notify Olson’s wife,” Grimes said.

Randolph nodded. “After we get their prints.”

“Who’s prints?” Frank asked.

“Yours,” Randolph said. “It’ll save us time if we can weed you out and work with what’s left.”

“But we didn’t touch anything,” Linda said in protest.

“That’s even better,” Randolph said, turning to the print tech. “Now get it done. They’re coming with us.”

The man grabbed Frank’s hand, pressing his fingers into the ink pad and blotting them on paper. When Frank looked back at Linda, he saw the worry on her face and felt a sudden chill. The police were taking his fingerprints. The coroners were muscling Olson’s body up the steps and struggling to get the gurney into their van. It was late. Maybe too late. And he wondered if he might not be standing in Olson’s shadow.

Chapter 48

Frank and Linda were waiting in the backseat while Randolph and Grimes notified Olson’s wife that her husband was dead. It was quiet, just the sound of the river in the background, the occasional bite of a police radio from the squad car parked further down the gravel driveway. Grimes had suggested that a black-and-white be dispatched to watch Olson’s house until they could figure out what had actually happened.

Frank knew when they told her.

He heard her cry out, heard her agony in the night and knew that he was responsible regardless of the way things played out. He could feel Linda’s eyes on him in the darkness and sensed that she was crying. He wondered whether Olson’s kids were asleep, or whether they might be listening from the top of the stairs the way kids do. The sound of their mother weeping could still be heard, even from the backseat of Randolph’s car. It was a sound that cut to the bone, and he hoped that Olson’s kids were asleep and dreaming.

Frank leaned his head against the seat, staring into the darkness beyond the house at the river beyond. He felt like a fish twisting in an ocean of sand. He couldn’t move, couldn’t get enough air.

Randolph and Grimes climbed in without saying anything. It seemed odd, but Grimes was behind the wheel now. Once they were out the drive, Randolph finally spoke, his voice low and raspy.

“Olson called his wife early this afternoon. He asked if he could see her tomorrow and said that he had big news.”

Frank remained quiet.

“She didn’t think that he sounded depressed,” Randolph went on. “Not enough to commit suicide anyway. She said that he was excited about something.”

“Excited about what?” Frank asked.

Randolph shrugged. “She was upset. She didn’t take the news very well.”

The car became quiet again. Randolph settled into the passenger seat, and Grimes brought the car up to speed. As Frank watched Olson’s house disappear into the night, he felt Linda take his hand, give it a gentle squeeze, and then let go.

It took half an hour to reach Olson’s trailer, the last ten minutes spent on gravel and dirt roads. They were in the deep woods, well beyond the lights of Washington. It was dark, the air clear, the stars jumping out of the sky for anyone who wanted to look up and grab them with their eyes.

Turning into the drive, they rode up the dirt road through a grove of pine trees. The trailer looked run-down, the windows dark as it sat beside a graveyard from the Revolution. Cops and detectives greeted them with flashlights as a crew set up a generator that would provide electrical power to the work lights being rigged on stands.

A detective half Randolph’s age waited for them as they got out of the car. Trudging through the field grass, Frank could feel Linda’s eyes still on him but remained quiet. That feeling was back. That shadow.

“Why are the lights out?” Randolph asked.

The young detective picked up his step, trying to keep up with him. “Looks like he was late on some bills.”

Randolph grimaced. They reached the trailer, opened the screen door and stepped inside. The trailer was small, the kind meant to be dragged behind a car. It looked to Frank as if there were only two rooms. The front housed a cheap table and chairs with a galley kitchen. The room in back he guessed Olson slept in. But like his office, the trailer was a pigsty—maybe even more so.

Grimes moved to the back room, hitting it with his flashlight and looking troubled.

“Olson wasn’t late,” he said. “We were. Somebody’s already been here.”

He turned to Randolph, his expression hard.

“Give me your cell phone,” Randolph said.

Grimes pulled the phone out and handed it over. Randolph opened it, turning to Frank and Linda.

“You two better wait outside,” he said.

Frank pushed the screen door open and walked out. The gasoline generator started, filling the quiet night air with a rattling noise that sounded as annoying as a neighbor mowing their lawn every Wednesday at dinner time. Then the bank of lights fired up, their beams casting a white, unnatural light onto the trailer. Everything about the place looked dead and buried.

Frank leaned against Randolph’s car and lit a cigarette, trying to think things through as he turned toward the graveyard. They were no longer living in a shadowy world of best guesses. It was Merdock. Juliana. But Randolph had planted a seed. Somehow the motive had become less clear.

“Are you having an affair with her?”

Frank looked up and saw Linda appraising him. He hadn’t noticed that she was standing behind him.

“With who?” he asked.

“Juliana Merdock.”

At first he was confused by the question. As it sank in, he shook his head without saying anything.

“Then why is she always around?”

“It’s been a tough race,” he whispered. “A real tough race. Have we reached the point where a candidate would kill to win?”