Best Laid Plans(64)

“I’m not, I’m theorizing. So basically, he set up a one-hour meeting with someone on a Friday night hours from where he was staying. That would suggest that he knew his attacker. And—again a theory—it suggests that whatever was on this tablet was somehow connected to this meeting.”

“Then why didn’t he bring it?”

“Maybe he was suspicious of the meeting. Or maybe it wasn’t about the information he had, but information he was going to add to it.”

She turned the page. A list of dates—with no context—that went back nearly eight years. None of them meant anything to Lucy, but she went through them a second time and frowned at the very first listing.

“Barry—isn’t this the day Adeline Reyes-Worthington was elected to office in the special election?”

He looked over her shoulder. “Yes. But none of these other dates relate to elections. It might mean nothing.”

“But this is the first date on this list.”

“What are you thinking?”

“I don’t know—just that Worthington thought this information was important enough to not only keep on a tablet that no one knew he had, but to put extra security on it and create unlabeled spreadsheets so no one would understand what the data meant.”

She turned the page. A list of numbers caught her eye. “What are these?” she asked Barry.

“I’m not one hundred percent certain, but I think they’re land parcel numbers. Zach is researching them.”

There were a couple dozen numbers, some in sequential order, some not.

“Do you think there’s a connection between these numbers and the BLM files that Harper was obsessed with at his office?”

“Yes. We’re working with HWI to give us access to those files. We could get a warrant, but because they’ve cooperated, we’re giving them time to work through some contractual issues of either giving us copies or letting us access them. Flip to the last page.”

Lucy did. There was one name.

G.A.—Roy Travertine.

“Is that important?” It sounded familiar, but she didn’t know why.

“That was the first note on the tablet. Roy Travertine was the congressman who died in office—the person who Adeline Reyes-Worthington replaced. According to both Adeline and Worthington’s daughter, Travertine and Worthington were longtime friends. I don’t know how that relates to what else is on the tablet, except that the initials ‘G.A.’ appear a couple of times.”

“We should show Adeline the dates and ask her if she knows what they mean.”

“I’ve been going back and forth about that. If it were any other case, I’d do it.”

“But she’s a federal official so you can’t?” Lucy was having a difficult time treating this case as different from any other case.

“It’s not that I can’t, it’s that we have an obligation not to do anything that could be seen as impacting an election. It’s sensitive.”

“Then we go to her house. It’s reasonable that we would want to talk to her about her husband’s murder.”

“We still haven’t had it confirmed.”

Zach stepped in. “Yes, you have. This just came over the fax machine.”

It was a preliminary coroner’s report. The cover memo was addressed to Agents Crawford and Kincaid, from Julie Peters.



Barry & Lucy ~ Attached is the preliminary coroner’s report. I’m still waiting on some test results, and I need to review this with my boss, but I’m confident that COD for Harper Worthington was an injection of curare, a poison. The lab eliminated commercial availability—meaning, this strain isn’t from a pharmaceutical drug that might have medicinal purposes. This is a plant-based, homemade version from plants found in Central and South America. I’ve called in an expert to narrow this down—he should not only be able to tell us what plant was used and where it’s most likely found, but also be able to isolate the genetic markers to see if there are any unsolved cases with this strain.



You should have the final report by the end of the day. But COD is asphyxiation due to poison injected into the bloodstream. I’m ruling his death a homicide.



“Lucy, call Julie and ask her if she can suppress this report for a day or two. I need to talk to Juan.”

Barry left the squad room and Lucy called Julie. She answered on the first ring, and said no problem, she could hold the report in house until Friday if they wanted.

Now that Lucy had something to focus on, she began to feel better. The coffee that Ryan kindly brought to her desk helped as well.

Lucy looked through the pages from the tablet again. Harper had typed data into a simple note application. Each note was only a few lines, if that, except for the list of numbers that Barry thought were land parcel numbers.

There were two other meetings with the unknown “G.A.” listed in the notes. One on May 11 and one on June 1, both Mondays. June 1 was five days before he was killed. Both meetings were at different locations with no street address, just a street name.

The June 1 meeting was at two thirty at St. P—Lucy didn’t know if that was a street name, a business, a church, or what. She looked at the corresponding day in his office calendar. There was nothing scheduled on the calendar.