Access to Power (5 page)

The kid laughed. “I just took their picture,” he said.

“You know who she is, Bobby?”

The kid shook his head, then gasped a little as Frank lowered the camera, snapped open the back and ripped out the film.

“She’s what they call a
Washington niece
, Bobby. When someone goes out with their
niece
, they don’t generally need any pictures. Memories are good enough.”

“That’s one hell of a niece.”

Frank shot him a look. The kid had a big grin on his face and understood.

“She is, isn’t she,” Frank said as he handed back the camera. “You call my office in the morning and ask for Tracy. I’ll make this up to you. I’ve got plenty of work you can do.”

Chapter 10

Woody hung up the phone and looked at the scripts spread across his desk as he drank the last of his coffee and wished for something stronger.

He’d just finished a conference call with his client in Indiana, the campaign manager, and their pollster. The scripts had been neatly typed before the call started an hour and a half ago. Now they were covered with ink. Words had been crossed out, lines moved, new openings and closings written and rewritten. Woody shook his head as he looked at the changes, knowing that they were made more out of desperation than anything else.

The campaign was backsliding. It was drying up just when their opponent had launched a massive negative campaign against them that stood out. Tomorrow Woody would record the voice track to their response, cut the spots and ship the dubs to the stations. Copies would be sent to his client so that he could show his wife and friends. But the campaign couldn’t raise enough money to play them on the air more than once or twice a day. No matter how good the finished spots might turn out, no one watching television would ever notice them. Their response to the attacks would never be played enough to be seen. And everyone involved in the campaign knew it.

Panic had set in. Reality. Another loss.

Woody checked his watch. It was after ten. He picked up the phone and dialed, hit an answering machine and hung up without leaving a message. He reached for his cigarettes. The pack was empty and he tossed it into the trash. Then he remembered the emergency pack Frank kept in his top desk drawer.

He got up and stretched, glancing at the rain outside his window as he stepped into the war room. His eyes quickly adjusted to the dim light and he made it into Frank’s office without bumping into anything.

He slid Frank’s drawer open, reaching for the pack. As he struck his lighter, he thought about Frank and Linda and wondered if they’d ever get back together. He hoped they would. Then he lifted the flame to the end of the cigarette, feeling a sense of relief when the nicotine hit his lungs.

“Why are you sticking your nose into other people’s business?” a voice asked.

Woody nearly jumped out of his skin. “Jesus Christ!”

He saw someone standing in the gloom just outside Frank’s office. The figure was inching closer, his spooky face taking on detail as he stepped into the muted light from the monitor glow. Woody backed away, shaking when he spotted the gun.

“Don’t,” he said. “Please don’t.”

The gun flashed. Woody reached for his ear. It felt like a bee sting.

“Are you feeling suicidal tonight?” the man asked. “Or would you rather be the victim of a failed robbery?”

“What are you talking about?” Woody shouted.

The expression on the man’s face was fierce and horrific. His lips were parted revealing clenched teeth. Woody couldn’t stop shaking.

“If it’s suicide,” the man went on, “they’ll look into your past. Someone might guess.”

“What do you want? Please. If it’s money—”

The man cut him off. “You know what I’m looking for.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

The gun flashed again.

Woody grabbed his shoulder. Blood was splashing over his hand onto the carpet, his entire body shuddering now. He remembered the gun Frank kept in the bottom right drawer of his desk and wondered if it was loaded. He needed it to be loaded.

The man waved the gun at him. “Either you’ve got a lousy memory or you’re an idiot. Maybe it’s both. Now stop wasting my time.”

Woody gathered himself, looked at the man and took a step toward the desk. When the man didn’t protest, he took another.

“Okay. Okay,” Woody stammered. “I know what you’re looking for. I won’t waste your time—”

Woody went for the drawer.

The gun flashed and knocked him against the wall. It was a gut shot. Woody reached out trying to block another. Then three more shots came right at him in terrifying succession.

Woody took the hits, tumbled forward and bounced onto the floor. He guessed that he’d been shot in the head because of the blood flowing over his face. He couldn’t move, couldn’t fight back. He saw the man check the drawer and close it, then kneel down and look him in the eye.

“I guessed right,” the man said. “You’re an idiot.”

Woody stared back, unable to speak. He noticed the man’s hair, the gray spikes, and thought that he seemed vaguely familiar. He watched the man get to his feet and walk out, leaving him for dead. He could see his blood rolling across the carpet in quick waves. He could feel sleep coming on and tried to fight the tide as it swept over him. The pain was less than he would have expected and he thought about his friendship with Frank. Their early races together. That campaign in Trenton when Frank was so scared. They were like brothers. Then. Now. Brothers forgave each other, he hoped.

He tried to move again, tried to focus.

He listened to the man who had just shot him enter his office next door and begin rifling through his papers. He was searching for something—opening drawers and closing them. Then Woody remembered where he’d seen the man before. He’d delivered flowers to Linda, beautiful flowers, just the other day.

Chapter 11

Frank stood in the rain, staring at the building from a distance. He was smoking a cigarette and feeling dizzy.

His office was once the home of a very important person, but he couldn’t think of who just now. Frank told friends that he and Woody bought the old building because of its close proximity to their clients. Members of the House, Senate, even the White House this term. He told them that he liked working in a place where it was impossible to forget the past. A living history everywhere you looked....

Frank’s eyes drifted away from the building and lingered on the coroner’s van in the parking lot. He noticed a man in a suit and raincoat cross the street and begin walking toward him. After a few moments, the man reached him, his face hidden in the gloom.

“You the one who called?” Frank asked.

The man nodded. “Detective Randolph, Mr. Miles.”

The detective’s voice matched the one Frank had heard when he checked his voice mail from the hotel bar after the fund-raiser. The voice had sounded clear and steady as he listened to the message over the phone:
there had been a problem and he should come down to his office as soon as possible
.

The detective stepped beneath the street light. Probably fifty, the color of his skin reminded Frank of newly finished mahogany. He was graying at the temples, his coarse, wiry hair cropped short and even.

“What happened?” Frank asked.

Randolph shrugged. “It looks as if you’ve been robbed.”

Cars were pulling up to the curb, people with cameras—the press had arrived.

Frank glanced at the coroner’s van, then turned back to Randolph. Crossing the street, he stepped over the yellow crime scene tape and walked with the detective toward his office. As he got rid of his smoke and entered the building, he heard the fire go out when it hit the wet pavement. Randolph was on his heels. He could feel the detective measuring him, his eyes working over his face as they climbed the stairs.

The door was open. All the lights were on.

They passed the reception area and stepped into the war room. Frank had always called it the war room because this was where most campaigns were won or lost. On the second floor, sealed from prying eyes. Now there were cops, mostly crime scene techs, going through the clutter on the desks and worktables. Tracy’s desk sat beneath a huge wall board charting their client’s progress through election day. A drawer was open. Frank saw a photographer getting it on film and turned away. Everything in the office was confidential. Until now, he thought.

He looked around, trying to sort through the confusion. His own door was closed, but he could see two men in Woody’s office wearing dark blue jump suits and hair nets, placing papers, a coffee cup, the contents of an ashtray into plastic bags and marking them as evidence.

Then Frank’s door swung open and a woman from the coroner’s office stepped out and went downstairs. Behind her, he saw Woody lying on the carpet with a gun in his hand. There was a lot of blood. More than he had ever seen. And Woody’s eyes remained open, lost and vacant like last week’s catch of the day.

Frank shuddered, steadying himself against a cabinet and feeling light-headed again. He thought he might vomit.

“You gonna be okay?” Randolph asked.

He nodded, his eyes returning to the gun in Woody’s hand. Pearl handled. Why did it seem so strange?

“You don’t mind if I call you by your first name do you?”

Frank shook his head. The even tone of the detective’s voice seemed out of place for what he was seeing. It was too friendly. Too relaxed and calm for a world that had just been turned upside down, gutted and then trashed.

“Thanks,” Randolph said. “They went through his wallet, Frank. Took his cash and credit cards. You keep anything of value around here?”

“There might be some petty cash.”

Frank led the way to Tracy’s desk. The drawer was already half open. The photographer had already taken the shot. It was empty. Randolph reached for the handle anyway, sliding it all the way open with a gloved hand.

“Did he have any relatives, Frank? Parents, siblings, a wife or children?”

Frank shook his head again. Woody didn’t have anybody. Frank knew he didn’t. They’d been friends since law school and started the company right after graduation from the University of Virginia. Small races at first. Local grassroots campaigns propelling them forward until they reached clients with money and clout.

A detective Frank hadn’t seen before poked his head out of the media room and flashed a grin. Randolph nodded, introducing the man as his partner, Ted Grimes. Frank looked him over as he approached them. Younger than Randolph by ten years or so, Grimes had pale skin and slate gray eyes set wide apart in an extraordinarily round head. He stood as tall as Frank at six feet two, but he was built like an ox, his manner coming off simple, maybe even a little crude.

“Frank, did you know your partner kept a gun?” Randolph asked.

“No,” he said. “But I keep one in my desk. Bottom right drawer.”

The detectives exchanged quick glances. Then Grimes crossed the room. The woman from the coroner’s office had returned with a small Asian man. Once Woody’s hold on the pearl handled gun was broken, they began stuffing his round body into a long black bag. Woody wasn’t cooperating.

Grimes gave them a look, his grin seemingly permanent, and stepped around them. When he opened the desk drawer, the gun was there. The detective shoved a No. 2 pencil down the barrel, lifted it to his nose and turned back to Randolph, shaking his head.

“It’s a forty-five,” Grimes said. “The holes in this guy were done by something smaller. They barely poked out the back side.”

Randolph’s eyes met his partner’s. It was a Glock .45, pre-1994 with an extended clip. Unlike many handguns, there was no art to the weapon Frank kept hidden in his desk drawer. It was a
people
killer
with maximum stopping power and probably seemed out of place for the line of work he was in.

Frank turned to the door by the stairs, noticing the bullet holes in the plaster as a cop wearing a raincoat rushed in.

“Heads up, Lieutenant. We just found another one out back.”

Randolph and Grimes started for the door.

Frank followed them outside and along the gravel path around back, the cop showing them the way through the rain with his flashlight. When they stopped, Frank saw the body of a teenage boy sprawled on the wet lawn. A pistol lay beside his outstretched hand. He wore jeans and a light colored jacket, and Frank could see the plume of blood that surrounded a small rip in the material right between his shoulder blades.

“Either it’s raining bodies from heaven,” Grimes said. “Or we had ourselves a shoot-out, fellas.” He moved closer for a better look at the gun. “It’s a Beretta. Nine millimeter. Bet it matches the holes in the guy upstairs.”

Frank kept his eyes on the body as the female coroner brushed by.