With Malice. Rachel Lee

to flare, testing the breeze.

      He spoke. “I called him last night to pick up some things for me and express them to Washington. But he wouldn’t have left the files open.”

      She nodded and moved forward, coming within inches of the cabinets. “It looks like this lock was picked.” She faced him. “What’s in here?”

      “Background information on a conservation bill I authored. Scientific reports, mostly, the stuff I brought down from D.C. to study while I’m here. Some from independent research firms, some from the EPA.”

      She looked at the lock again, then moved down the row of file cabinets. “They’ve all been jimmied. By someone in a hurry. Who would want these papers? Sugar growers?”

      He gave her marks for environmental awareness. “They’re opposed to the bill, yes. Among many others in agriculture. But I find it hard to believe they would kill to get a look at these documents.”

      “Maybe, maybe not.” She looked his way again, her gray eyes opaque. “Anyone else who might be on the list?”

      “I don’t know.” He sighed and rubbed his eyes, and tried to focus on what she needed, reminding himself it was all he could do to help Abby and Stacy now. “I have all kinds of political enemies, Detective. Any man in my position does. But it’s hard to imagine them committing murder.”

      “I agree. But the murder may have been purely incidental.”

      Something in him flared, and his voice grew deadly quiet. “There’s nothing incidental about what happened here.”

      Her expression never wavered. “Poor choice of words, Senator. I merely meant that murder was probably not the intention, but rather the result of panic on the part of the intruder. Except…”

      Her voice trailed off, and she began to walk around the room, studying the bookshelves, the neat desktop, the view out the back window over well-tended gardens, now a riot of fresh April color. What a sorry ending to his daughters’ spring vacation.

      “Except what?” he demanded when she said nothing further.

      “Except,” she said finally, “I wonder how it was that Ms. Reese came upon him in the living room.”

      His head snapped up a bit as he realized what she was saying. “I don’t keep anything of importance out there. Nothing of political importance, anyway.”

      “I would think not. Well, it might have just happened that way. Maybe he heard Abby coming and darted in there to hide.”

      Or maybe not. Grant felt his neck chill with a premonition of ugliness yet to be found. Stacy had been here, too. But he couldn’t tell her that. What if Stacy had had something to do with the break-in? What if she’d brought someone here to give them access to his papers, then had been killed to keep her silent? And what if that was what Abby had stumbled into?

      He felt, suddenly, as if he were standing on the narrow tip of a very windy precipice, barely maintaining balance. He understood from Jerry’s cryptic remark on the phone that Jerry had removed Stacy from the house. He could have meant nothing else. And so far the police had only mentioned Abby, so they knew nothing about Stacy. God, he didn’t want to think about the legal ramifications of that for Jerry.

      But it also put him in a precarious position. He had information that might be relevant to the investigation, information he couldn’t share without getting his closest aide into trouble, without exposing his children to the kind of scandal he’d been protecting them from for years. And protecting his daughters came first, came before everything else. Including his presidential aspirations.

      “I’m going to have the file cabinets dusted for prints, Senator. Afterwards, I’d like you to tell me what, if anything, is missing from them.”

      “Very well.”

      “What’s in the desk?”

      “Just stationery, pens, pencils, pads, things like that. All my papers are in the file cabinets.”

      She nodded and gave him what he supposed was meant to be an encouraging smile. “Could your computer have been tampered with?”

      He shook his head. “I wouldn’t think so. It’s password protected. But even if it were…I don’t keep much on it. Drafts of speeches I’m thinking of making, little things like that. When I’m in town, Detective, I’m usually busy with constituents, and any private time I have is largely for thinking, not doing. That computer is full of a lot of quick notes and thoughts, but little else. If someone were going to commit electronic theft for political gain, he’d be better off hacking into the network server at my office, in Washington. That’s where we do the real grunt work.”

      She looked at the monitor and keyboard sitting on his desk. “Then I doubt anyone got into it. I’ll have someone check to make sure it hasn’t been physically tampered with. But given that our perp was clearly in a hurry, it’s not likely.”

      She turned to him again. “Let’s take a look upstairs now.”

      He followed her up the sweeping staircase, one of the features that Georgina, his late wife, had loved about this house. To him it had always seemed pretentious, something better suited to an antebellum mansion. But Georgina had had her eye even more firmly fixed on the presidency than he had. Sometimes he thought this house had been his wife’s rehearsal for the White House.

      He dreaded what he might find up there. Signs of Stacy’s presence? What had she been doing here? They’d broken off months ago, in mutual realization of the cost. Stacy had been a wonderful woman, but both he and she had seen the handwriting on the wall.

      He’d met her on the rebound from his wife’s death—strangely enough, not at the club where she worked, but in his local office, when she came to help stuff envelopes during his last campaign. But rebounds can only bounce for so long. Their parting had been amicable. Understanding. And he’d long since quietly found a way to make sure Stacy could open the dance studio she’d always dreamt of, rather than baring her body for strange men in a dark, noisy, impersonal bar.

      He had thought their relationship had been secret from everyone but Jerry. What if it hadn’t been? What if someone had staged this murder simply to ruin him? Somehow that seemed more believable than that someone had committed two murders over S.R. 52.

      He had the worst urge to tell the detective all of this, to clear his conscience, to remove himself from this terrible position of obstructing an investigation. Damn Jerry for putting him between a rock and a hard place.

      And then he remembered his daughters. He couldn’t expose them to the scandal. He’d been through media feeding frenzies before. It had been by the skin of his teeth that he’d kept the press from discovering the truth about the auto accident that had killed his wife. Where she’d been coming from. Knowledge that, if made public, would have done nothing but cause more pain.

      So he’d managed to protect the girls that time. They still remembered their mother as an angel who’d been stolen from them. They deserved that memory—however inaccurate he knew it to be—and he would do anything to protect it.

      God, he hated this.

      His room was first, to the right. A suite from which he’d erased all vestiges of his wife. It was spare now, with white walls, heavy brown velvet curtains and lots of dark wood. Masculine, almost monastic. His own eyrie. No woman set foot in here save the cleaning crew and his daughters. A wave of relief crashed through him when he saw the bed was carefully made. He’d feared he might find the brown duvet tossed back, evidence of Stacy’s presence.

      The children’s rooms were undisturbed. They had a bright airy space, a playroom full of toys, with their bedrooms opening off it to either side. Then there was the formal guest room, untouched for years.

      And to the rear, Abby’s room. Her own retreat, filled with tatting and embroidery, flowery cushions, curtains and bed linen. The rocking chair, in which he would forever see Abby, stood still and empty.

      The