Something About You (FBI/US Attorney #1)(27)
Driscoll leaned in, lowering his voice to a hiss. “I don’t like it—they’re hiding something. I want to know why he hasn’t been arrested.”
“What do the lawyers say? For the money you guys are paying them, somebody should be able to tell you something.”
“The little pricks are telling us to lay low.”
“Then maybe that’s what you should do.” Grant took a sip of his beer—not normally his drink of choice, but anything stronger could impair his perception and ability to read Driscoll.
“I would think, as the senator’s personal security guard, that you might want to muster up some interest in this,” Driscoll spat out. He grabbed one of the cocktail napkins the waitress had brought with their drinks and dabbed his forehead with it.
The gesture did not go unnoticed by Grant. Frankly, he was surprised Driscoll had survived without having some sort of fit or breakdown when the FBI questioned all of them.
“All I’m saying is that we need to be very cautious in how we handle this. Did Hodges ask you to come talk to me?” Grant asked, even though he already knew the answer to that. Hodges didn’t do anything he didn’t know about.
“Of course not. He’s so grateful the FBI hasn’t arrested him, he doesn’t take a piss nowadays without first clearing it with Jack Pallas.” Driscoll took a heavy swig of his whiskey rocks, which seemed to help calm him. Either that, or he was changing tactics and a better actor than Grant thought.
“Look, Grant, we’ve worked together for a while now. So you’ve been around long enough to know that a scandal like this can’t be contained forever. Eventually somebody’s going to leak something to the press. As the senator’s top advisor, I need to flush out those leaks. Maybe even catch them before they’re sprung.”
Grant feigned hesitation. Just as he hoped, Driscoll took it up another notch.
“For chrissakes, Grant, it’s not like you’re a f**king boy scout. You’ve been covering up Hodges’s affair with that whore for over a year now.”
Grant stared Driscoll in the eyes. “What is it you want me to do?”
“Find out what the FBI knows.”
“If your twenty-five lawyers can’t accomplish that, what makes you think I can?”
“You have other ways,” Driscoll said. “You’ve always come through for us in the past.”
“My ways require incentives.”
“Use whatever incentives you want—as long as I get my answers. I want to know what the FBI’s hiding, and I want to know fast.” Driscoll stood up and pulled out his wallet. He threw a few bills on the table. “And remember, you report directly to me. Hodges doesn’t know and will never know anything about this.”
“The senator is lucky he has you to clean up his messes,” Grant said.
Driscoll picked up his glass and stared at the amber liquid. “If he only knew the half of it.” He finished his drink in one swallow, set the glass down, and walked off.
Grant took another swig of his beer, thinking about how convenient it was that Driscoll was such a paranoid ass**le.
With the chief of staff’s orders as a cover, he was now free and clear to go about using his ways to find out what the FBI knew, and more important, how concerned he needed to be about their investigation. They were holding something back, even an idiot like Driscoll could tell that. And given what Grant personally knew about the crime scene—which of course, was pretty much everything—the only explanation for the fact that the FBI had not yet arrested Senator Hodges for Mandy’s murder was that they found something that Grant had overlooked. And as calm as he might’ve seemed on the outside, that possibility was starting to make him pretty f**king nervous. Probably because the possibility that he had overlooked something was not entirely far-fetched.
He had, after all, been in a bit of a hurry after killing the bitch.
Mandy Robards.
If his ass wasn’t on the line, Grant would’ve gotten a good chuckle out of the irony of the situation. Even dead, she was still screwing people. Took one hell of a talented prostitute to do that.
And talented she had been, if at least half the stories Hodges had told about her were true.
He’d been working for Hodges for nearly three years now. Because Hodges was both a U.S. senator and an extremely wealthy man (CNN’s most recent list had estimated his net worth at nearly $80 million), he had employed a private security guard for years. When his prior bodyguard had left three years ago to work for the Secret Service, a friend of a friend had recommended Grant as a replacement.
Generally, Grant liked working for Hodges. It certainly was an interesting job. In a nutshell, he handled all actual and potential threats, both direct and implied, against the senator and his political career. This meant that he acted as Hodges’s personal bodyguard, traveled with the senator wherever he went, and was the liaison between Hodges and the various outside security and investigative agencies they worked with—everyone from the state and federal officials who handled the death threats the senator occasionally received, to the security staffs at both the Capitol and Senate Office Building.
Over the last three years, Grant had become one of the senator’s most trusted confidants. In fact, he knew things even Driscoll didn’t know.
Like how it had all started with that damn Viagra.