Words of Conviction

by Linda J White

“I’m a brood mare,” Beth responded. She shook her head slowly. “Oh, don’t get me wrong. I felt thrilled when I got pregnant. But guess what? After we had Zoe, Bruce had eyes only for her. What’s worse, he insisted we get a nanny. So suddenly, there I was, stuck on a shelf so to speak, like the trophy wife I am. Useless, except for the occasional public appearances demanded of a senator’s wife.” She snorted. “I don’t think those include police mug shot sessions.”

  Kenzie tried not to smile. “Do you feel jealous of Zoe?”

  “Jealous? Of course! But then, I also love her. Even with all the barriers Bruce tried to erect between us.” Beth’s eyes grew distant, misty with tears. “She reminds me of me—cute, feisty, a little spoiled. I remember when she was born, and I saw her hands for the first time. They were miniatures of mine! And as she grew, she quickly learned how to play us, Bruce and me, just like I played Daddy and Momma. Oh, she’s so smart!” Again, she dabbed her eyes. “I felt hurt she loved Bruce more than me. So hurt. And as for him, it seemed to me he was purposely excluding me. They created this . . . this circle,” she gestured with her hands, “that left me out.

  “Thank God Beau moved up here. I can talk to Beau. He understands me. He knows how rejected I feel! And he told me some things . . . I was trying to figure out how to get back in the circle again when . . . when . . .” She broke down in sobs.

  “So where do you think Zoe is now?” Kenzie asked quietly.

  “How should I know? Oh, God! How should I know? Why did you even ask me that?” Beth demanded. “I love her and I would do anything to get her back. Anything.”

  Kenzie rubbed her finger gently over her still-swollen lip. Beth seemed believable, and in her own mind, she absolved her of guilt in Zoe’s disappearance. The woman seemed immature, and not just a little narcissistic. But guilty of taking her child? No. Still, what might she know? She wondered what Crow, who was watching through one-way glass, had picked up. “Beth,” Kenzie said, making her voice as nonthreatening as possible, “if you were me, who would you suspect?”

  Beth’s lips pressed together. She shook her head slightly. “Washington is a shark pool. And Bruce . . . Bruce has a lot of friends. He has enemies, too, but even his friends, the ones I’ve met . . . I don’t really trust them.”

  “Tell me about that.”

  Beth tossed her head. “Well, the enemies’ list is easy. You can classify them as political or people he wouldn’t do favors for. Maybe a few he DID do favors for. Jealous people who envy his power. I can’t give you those names, but I do know this: Bruce isn’t honest with me about who he’s seeing.” Connecting with the look on Kenzie’s face, she clarified her statement: “Oh, he’s not having affairs. No little prostitute scandals in his life. He knows what I’d do to him—I’d divorce him and take Zoe with me. But he’s got something else going on. He gives me the ‘don’t worry your pretty little head about it’ response.” Beth sighed. “Anyway, you’ll have to find out about it on your own. As to his friends . . . some of them seem pretty shady.”

  “Where have you met them?”

  “Parties. At the office. And some of them at the house. That guest room on the third floor? Some of his staff has stayed there when they’ve been working late at the house.”

  “Right near Zoe’s room?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who has stayed there?”

  Beth ticked off half a dozen people. “The most frequent was Grayson Chambers, that weasly little . . . oh, I can’t stand him!”

  “I thought the senator liked him!”

  “Oh, Bruce does, for sure, because Grayson sucks up to him. But I hated him from the get-go.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, first of all, you talk about jealous. . . . He acted so jealous of me! When we got married, Grayson Chambers just about spit all over me. He seemed so worried about me bending Bruce’s ear, encouraging him to think differently than Grayson wanted him to! Like I cared about politics. I found it disgusting.”

  Kenzie recalled the writing she’d read that Chambers had done. He was clearly bright, clearly articulate, but why would he kidnap Zoe? “What reason would Grayson Chambers have to kidnap Zoe?” she said out loud.

  “Oh, I don’t think he did that,” Beth said dismissively. “He doesn’t have the courage. He’s bright, but he’s not much of a man.”

  “But would he have the motive? Might he have paid someone to do it?”

  Beth shook her head. “Grayson Chambers is off in California somewhere. Working at some college. He didn’t do it.”

  “So of all the people who have stayed in your guest room, can you think of anyone you’d suspect? Anyone who might have taken Zoe?”

  Beth frowned. She tapped her finger on her lip and focused on a ring on the table, left by some cup or mug. When she looked back at Kenzie, she had tears in her eyes. “I just don’t know!” And she began to cry.

  Kenzie thought she looked like a slightly more grown-up Zoe, a little girl-woman, sad, lonely, and scared half out of her mind.

  “And I don’t know what to do!” Beth said, panic in her voice. “I . . . I don’t even have Daddy to help me!”

  “Beth, listen,” Kenzie said. She reached out and touched the woman’s hand, and, much to her surprise, Beth didn’t pull away. “Listen to me.” She waited until Beth made eye contact. “I think you should go home, to your husband.”

  “Why? He doesn’t want me!” she responded plaintively.

  “I think you’d be surprised. I think Senator Grable is pretty . . . upset. I think he needs you.” Beth looked at Kenzie as if she didn’t believe her. “He’s a broken man, Beth. This is a time when you need each other. You need to go home. Would you let us take you?”

  “I . . . I can’t. I’ve been arrested.”

  Kenzie shifted in her chair. “Look. We’ve talked to the police. We’ve asked them not to press charges.”

  Beth’s eyes grew big. “No charges? Are you kidding?”

  “If you want to go, I’ll have someone take you home. I know your husband would be glad to see you.”

  More tears. Sobs. Then a nod. Beth got up. “Thank you!” she said, and unexpectedly, she gave Kenzie a hug.

  Kenzie walked out to where Crow waited. His eyes communicated his approval. “Will you take her?” Kenzie asked. “I want to go back to Capitol Hill.”

  Washington seemed alive this Friday morning with traffic and pedestrians, tourists, and government workers. Kenzie edged her way toward the Hill, trying to go over in her mind what exactly she had picked up about the Grables, their marriage and their lives. When she arrived at the Dirksen Building, she showed her creds to an officer and he pointed out a parking space she could use.

  Kenzie walked into the Senate office building, displaying her creds yet again, and yet another officer escorted her back to Grable’s office. The place looked so different by day.

  Louise greeted her. A sixty-something woman, she struck Kenzie as being old Washington, the kind who grew up in the city before the population explosion in the early ’70s catapulted what had been a sleepy, semi-Southern town into a bustling, multicultural metropolis. Sure enough, as she spoke, Kenzie detected the slight remnants of the old D.C. accent. A slight Southern drawl. An even more slight hard r—rendering the city’s name “Warshington.”

  “Did you grow up in D.C.?” Kenzie asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Louise responded. “In Northwest.”

  “Wilson High?”

  “Of course.”

  “I lived over on Woodley Road,” Kenzie said. “My mother insisted I go to a private school. Or I would have gone to Wilson.”

  “I got a good education there, despite what they say about D.C. schools,” Louise said. “Tell me, do you have any news for me on my little Zoe? That poor little thing. I am just praying you all will find her soon. Poor Senator Grable.”

  “We’re continually working on leads,” Kenzie responded.

  “Well, I know you’re doing your best. Now, what can I show
you?”

  Kenzie gave her a list of the kinds of files she hoped to see, and Louise promptly produced them. She sat down on the leather couch in the senator’s office and began reading and reading, and the more she read, the more curious she became about this guy, Grayson Chambers.

  “Louise,” she said finally, “tell me about Grayson Chambers.”

  The older woman smiled. “Nice young man. We worked together for quite some time. He seemed very bright and polite to me. One time, I went down to the garage to leave. It was late, maybe eight o’clock at night, and I had a flat tire. Grayson just happened to come along and he changed it for me. How I did appreciate that!”

  “Quite a good aide, I take it.”

  “Oh yes, the senator depended on him. It seemed that Grayson knew just who to go to when they needed a vote for this or that. He knew how to wheel and deal, that young man.” Louise laughed. “I call him ‘young’ though he was forty-something when he left. He had a reputation all over the Hill for being a sharp opponent . . . or an invaluable ally.”

  “He left two years ago, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why did he leave?” Kenzie watched Louise’s eyes carefully.

  “I don’t know, really,” she said, frowning. “Things seemed to be going along just fine. Then one day, he said he’d gotten a job teaching at a college, and he was leaving. I was quite surprised.”

  Kenzie pondered that. “Did he get along with people well?”

  “He was wonderful to me. And to the senator. Now April, there,” Louise nodded toward one of the small sub-offices, “she didn’t like him. But you know how people are.”

  Unfortunately, Kenzie thought, I do know how people are. And one of the characteristics of people with psychopathic tendencies is often that others experience them very differently. They know how to “play” people. They can be smooth and charming to some, and downright abusive to others, depending on how they perceive that person’s usefulness.

  “Senator Grable made a funny comment,” Kenzie said lightly. “He said Chambers was ‘ugly as a toad.’ ”

  Louise clicked disapprovingly. “Now that’s not nice. Men!” She shook her head. “Grayson looked, well, plain. Here, we probably have a picture of him.” She walked over to the “me-wall,” covered in grip-and-grin shots. Kenzie looked over her shoulder. In each picture, the senator was smiling and shaking hands, or holding some document. In many, in the background stood a much shorter man, partially obscured.

  “Would you still have a staff photo of him, in the system somewhere?” Kenzie asked.

  “I’m not sure. Let me look.”

  Louise returned to her computer and began going through files. “Oh, yes,” she said, “here.”

  Kenzie looked. Her screen held a mug shot of a man with a small face punctuated with an overly large mouth and bulging eyes. Thick glasses sat perched on a snub of a nose. Shaggy brown hair hung over his ears. It looked like he’d forgotten to get a haircut. He had a serious look on his face, and yes, if you wanted to be mean, his face looked a little amphibian-like.

  “Could you print that for me, please?” she asked Louise.

  “Of course.”

  “And you mentioned April? I need to talk to her.”

  “Let me introduce you.”

  April Silcox worked as Senator Grable’s correspondence aide. A plain-looking brunette in her twenties, she spent her days answering letters and e-mails from constituents. Kenzie guessed she’d been a poli-sci major in college and now was paying dues, hoping to make legislative aide in some office on the Hill. Washington seemed full of such talented young people, fresh-faced and full of enthusiasm.

  She was sitting at her desk surrounded by papers when Kenzie followed Louise into the room. “April, honey, this is Special Agent Mackenzie Graham of the FBI. She’s working on Zoe’s disappearance. And Senator Grable has asked us to fully cooperate with her. She’d like to talk to you, OK?”

  Louise moved aside and Kenzie reached across April’s desk and shook the young woman’s hand.

  “I’ll leave you two alone,” Louise said, withdrawing.

  “Have a seat,” April said, gesturing toward a chair. “What can I do for you?”

  Kenzie started as she always did, asking April’s name, address, phone number, and basic background information. She was, as Kenzie had guessed, a political science major at Northwestern. Her father had pulled some strings to get her a job on the Hill. Now she lived in a cute little one-bedroom in Arlington, just across the Potomac River, and followed her dreams on Capitol Hill.

  “Well, I hope you enjoy the area,” Kenzie said. She asked her then about her job on the Hill, the people she worked with, the others she met in the cafeteria, the hallway, the copy room, the coffee shop. Finally, she got around to Grayson Chambers.

  “Grayson? What a jerk,” April said, rolling her eyes.

  “Tell me. How is he a jerk?”

  April leaned forward, resting her arms on her desk. She wore a dark blue business suit and a light blue silk shirt with a small coffee stain on the front. Her computer screen, which Kenzie could partially see, had flipped into standby and a screensaver bounced around.

  “I have never been around such a manipulative person in my entire life,” she said, almost spitting out the words. She leaned forward, her eyes intense. “You know, when I first got here, I heard how bright he was. How adept at politics. And I thought, This is great—I can learn something from this guy. The problem is what I learned is how to use people.”

  “How so?”

  “I was nice to him, in a normal kind of way. Offered to get him coffee when I went downstairs, that sort of thing. But he acted so rude toward me, so demeaning. And I thought, what’s up with this guy? I began watching him and I noticed he’d play up to people he thought would be useful to him. And I wasn’t. I mean, I’m just a correspondence clerk. I’ve got no power. No prestige. No access. No useful information. I’m not even pretty. So he could be as rude to me as he wanted and he wouldn’t lose anything.”

  “Sounds like a real charmer,” Kenzie said. She’d been studying her she spoke. April seemed to be one of those young women who had plenty of brains and personality in a plain package—and therefore, sadly, most men overlooked her.

  April sat back in her chair. “If you ask a lot of people around here, they’ll say he’s a great guy. A terrific person. It’s weird. The people he wanted to be nice to, he would be, and the rest of us . . . eh!” She flipped her hand like she was brushing off a fly.

  Kenzie touched the top of her pen to her lip, which was still swollen, and still hurting. She wondered if Grayson Chambers could have been the one to assault her. “April, would you call him athletic?”

  “Grayson? No. I mean he isn’t overweight, and he’s very short. But he’s not built or anything. Never spent time in the gym as far as I know.” She frowned. “But now that I think about it, he did take some kind of karate or self-defense classes. Yes, yes, I remember now. He talked about it.”

  So, he could get aggressive, under the right circumstances. “Any family that you know of?”

  April shook her head. “Never married. Dated a few women on the Hill but all short-term. Nothing lasted with him.” She laughed softly. “Initially, I thought maybe I’d give him a whirl, you know? See if we were compatible. That thought lasted about four hours.” She picked up a pen and wrote something on a pad of paper, tore off the top sheet and handed it to Kenzie. “Here.”

  Kenzie looked down and saw a woman’s name on the paper.

  “She works down the hall,” April explained. “She dated Grayson for a while. Maybe she could tell you more about him.”

  “Thanks,” Kenzie said, tucking the note in her pocket. “One more thing, April. How did Grayson and the senator get along?”

  “Oh, famously. They were best buds. Senator Grable thought quite highly of him and Grayson did a great job shepherding his bills. I felt kind of surprised when he left. It was like, a
year after Taylor came.”

  “Who?”

  “Taylor Martin. Beautiful woman just out of graduate school. The senator took her on as an aide to Grayson but she worked more for the senator than she did Grayson.”

  “Where is she now? Can I talk to her?”

  April shook her head. “Gone to law school. Pepperdine, out in California. I mean, I guess you could call her, but I don’t know her number.”

  “All right, thanks, April. You’ve been a big help.” Kenzie stood up to leave.

  “Agent Graham? One more thing: You want a read on his ego? Check out the blogs.”

  “He blogs?”

  “He’s compulsive about expressing his opinions online. Thinks he knows politics, which he unfortunately does. Whatever he’s up to now, I guarantee you he’s still blogging, or at least commenting on posts.”

  Kenzie wrote all this down. “Does he have his own blog?”

  “I’m not sure where it is. You could Google his name. When he worked here, he used the screen name ‘KickerG.’ No space, capital G. Look for it. You’ll get some insights into this man, believe me. He’s got an ego a mile wide.”

  22

  Women. He could never figure them out. All those emotions. Sandy seemed stiff and distant this morning, like she felt ticked. Why? Because he was gone until the wee hours of the morning? So what? He was busy. And he’d have to leave again. Soon. Like right after he ate.

  He shifted his thoughts to the game he was playing and smiled. In two days max, he’d see his money. And what if Grable didn’t comply? No way. He’d have to. No way would that man let harm come to his precious little Zoe. Funny what people valued.

  Grayson clicked on the television. Nearly nine a.m. He’d missed most of the morning news shows. Just one left, a recap of the local news. “Hey, Sandy!” he yelled. “Can you whip up some eggs?”

  Focused on the television, he missed her muffled reply. A reporter was giving an exclusive on “the Grable kidnapping.” Peggy the Tripp, that’s what he’d called her when he worked on the Hill. Blonde, bright, and beautiful. “To be avoided at all costs” he’d written on many a request for an interview, ’cause for a politician, she was a human landmine. Grable usually ignored his advice, on that subject anyway. He must have a thing for her, Grayson figured.