Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(17)

“Beer guy, huh?” She had a soft Southern accent.

“Yeah . . . hot day.”

She ordered a dirty martini with three olives, and, when the waiter was gone, asked, “Well, do you believe Senator Smalls?”

“Yes. He has no reason to lie to me. I believe he’d be reluctant to see me investigating something he was lying about.”

“Ooo,” she said. “You do have a good opinion of yourself.”

Lucas shrugged, and said, “I get things done. That’s why the senator invited me in.”

“Well, the West Virginia investigator doesn’t believe him,” she said.

“That’s not exactly correct,” Lucas said. “I talked to the guy this afternoon and he thinks something about the accident smells wrong. He doesn’t have a single piece of evidence, but his gut tells him that Porter was telling the truth, that there was another truck.”

He went through what he’d learned from Armstrong, including the cop’s personal judgment. “That won’t show up in his written reports, because he has no support for it.”

“Okay . . .” The martini came, and she took it, fished out two olives, munched on them, nodded at the waiter, and when they were alone again, she asked, “What do you need from me?”

“Tell me what you do,” Lucas said.

“What the senator tells me to. I used to do a lot of research, but now I mostly manage the office, figure out what research we need, and make sure the research gets done. I read everything I can find, on all sides, about various policy options. I do liaison work with other senatorial aides, or House aides, or White House aides, and talk to media people. This week it’s mostly been damage control.”

“Is Cecily Whitehead’s death going to hurt him?”

She thought about that for a minute, then said, “No. The fact that she was killed makes the story harder to control. But there’s no definite proof that they were out there for sexual reasons . . . The medical examiner was kind enough not to look.”

“Kind enough?”

“Sort of encouraged to believe it wasn’t necessary.”

“I see.”

She shrugged. “Even if he had looked, that kind of thing happens all the time around here. Sex—adultery, I guess. Nobody wants to talk about it because too many powerful people do it. Politicians, staff, lobbyists. Even if there were proof that Porter and CeeCee were sexually involved, it wouldn’t make the news here in Washington—I suppose it might back in Minnesota, but I doubt even there. The fact is, half the newsies are sleeping with somebody they shouldn’t be sleeping with, so sex doesn’t get reported. If word got out, in the papers, to the public, it might get a little embarrassing at Senate cocktail parties, with all the senators’ wives from Idaho and Utah and such, but that’d be about it.”

“If the senator was killed, would it derail anything? Any important legislation, anything like that?”

She thought again, and said, “This summer it might have. If Porter had been killed, and you’ve got a Democratic governor in Minnesota—he’d be appointing a Democrat to replace Porter. The Senate’s balanced on a knife-edge. If Porter were replaced by a Dem, it’d be even tighter. So . . . there’s that. Then, if the senator was carrying a particularly important piece of pork, and somebody was desperate that it not get passed . . . maybe then killing him might stop something.”

“Gimme an example?” Lucas asked.

She pulled the bowl of nuts closer, took a few of them, crunched them, and said, “Okay. Say Porter had a widget factory in his district and he planned to sneak a few lines into an appropriations bill that would give that factory, and no other widget factory, a tax break. That would give the factory a price advantage over all the other widget factories. The folks who own those other factories could get upset.”

“Enough to kill somebody?”

“Suppose the widgets were actually electronics suites and critical to construction of the Navy’s new Ford class of aircraft carriers. Say the suites sold for seventy million each, and the Navy wanted six for each carrier, and there’ll be two more carriers after the Ford. Could you get somebody killed for a billion dollars?”

“Know the right guy, you could get somebody killed for the keys to a five-year-old Prius,” Lucas said.

She grinned. “There you are,” she said.

“But you couldn’t get anybody good,” Lucas amended. “You couldn’t get a serious pro.”

“But for a couple of hundred thousand, plus an office at the White House?”

“Okay. Was Smalls carrying a bill like that? Anything that important?”

She took another scoop of nuts, and said, “It’d be an amendment, not an entire bill . . . but, no. I’ll review what we’re doing this session, I can get back to you tomorrow, but there’s nothing I can think of. And I’ll tell you, this kind of stuff goes on all the time in Washington. Tight votes, preferential tax rates, and nobody gets killed. Not for that kind of stuff.”

“Smalls had a particular person in mind for this . . . attempt . . . accident . . . whatever it was,” Lucas said.

“I know.” She reached out to the bowl of nuts again, pushed it away. “Don’t let me eat any more of those things. They make me fart.”