Deadly Politics

by LynDee Walker

  I nodded. “I will do everything I can to help you, Angela.”

  She shrugged. “I am where I am. I’m smart enough to know this is, at its core, a giant game of beat the clock. And if I lose, well, I suppose that will suck for me, but you know, I’ll be dead, so what will I care? I really never meant for anyone to get hurt, Nichelle. At least if I’m going out, killing me won’t keep their damned secrets, right?”

  I nodded. She pushed her chair back and I held up one hand. “You never told me how you knew what happened to Lakshmi,” I said. “It’s been the best-kept secret in town for better than twenty-four hours now, and I’m not seeing a prison grapevine that goes to the governor’s mansion. If you want my help, I need you to be straight with me.”

  She blinked. “My lawyer came in and told me yesterday. You can check the visitor’s log.”

  Her lawyer.

  I let my eyes fall shut, back in a stifling courtroom last summer listening to thundering closing arguments. From Craig Terry.

  She stood. “You know how to get me if you need to. Thanks for coming. Good luck.”

  A long, cold walk later, I strode back into the guard shack with my best smile in place, handing over my visitor’s placard and opening the locker to retrieve my bag.

  “Get what you need, now?” The teeth the deputy flashed were darker brown, a fresh wad of tobacco tucked in his lower lip. I swallowed hard, widening the smile and my eyes.

  “Almost. Can I ask you a question?”

  He blinked. “What would the news want from me?”

  “I’m wondering if you have a list in your computer there that says who’s been visiting a certain inmate?”

  His forehead wrinkled. “I’m not sure I’m supposed to tell you that.”

  I put both hands on the counter. Leaned into the barrier. “It could be our little secret,” I said in a loud whisper. “It would really help me out.”

  I didn’t need to tell anyone where I got it. But Ted Grayson’s name was way too wound up in the story Angela just told me for me to ignore. He couldn’t do anything to hurt Lakshmi from inside the prison, though, which meant I needed to know who he’d been talking to.

  The guard’s eyes crinkled at the corners with a smile. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to help a pretty lady out. Who are we checking on?”

  “Theodore Grayson.” I kept my tone casual.

  If the name rang a bell, he didn’t show it, pecking keys with his index fingers. “G-R-A-Y-S-O-N?”

  “That’s it,” I said.

  He poked at the “Enter” key and stared at the screen. Scratched his head. Poked it again.

  “Is something wrong?” My stomach turned a slow flip as I said the words.

  “No listing found, it says. Are you sure that’s his name?”

  Two more stomach flips later, I nodded. “Did they relocate him?”

  “This system searches the whole state.” He clicked the mouse twice. Gave a slow nod. “Here it is—he’s not here anymore. Got out three weeks ago, good behavior and house confinement.”

  Leaping Louboutins. Ted Grayson was out of prison and less than a month later, Lakshmi Drake was dead.

  I managed to keep a straight face as I thanked him, rushing out the other door before he could get a coffee invitation out of his mouth.

  Locked in my car, I pulled out my phone and found Angela Baker’s email. Reply. Did you know Grayson was out of prison? Is there anyone you think might have helped him hurt Lakshmi? Send.

  The whole drive back to downtown Richmond, three facts batted around my head no matter how hard I tried to ignore them: Angela Baker was afraid someone would kill her to keep this quiet. Ted Grayson was a quasi-free man with a whole bucket of powerful friends. And the prison visitor’s log now showed that I’d gone to see Angela less than thirty hours after Lakshmi’s body was discovered.

  I’d just found myself another clock to race.

  Walking into my favorite coffee shop a half hour later, I had turned the new puzzle pieces over in my head a thousand times, and all I could really tell was that I needed more to know what fit where.

  The corner currently holding the most promise—or at least most of my interest—was Lakshmi’s father’s entanglement with Ted Grayson.

  I believed Angela’s story: Grayson had turned out to be the kind of slithering snake politician it was particularly gratifying to see in jail, because he got away with so much more than he’d ever be punished for. He was greedy, power-hungry, and lacking in anything resembling a conscience—I wouldn’t put anything past him. Coal was decent business in western Virginia, and life’s blood across the West Virginia state line. Money usually means power is somewhere nearby, and I was pretty sure I remembered that Grayson’s campaign got truckloads of money from big tobacco and a few wheelbarrows full from the mining companies.

  The more directions I turned that idea, the better I liked it. Coal companies would be interested in energy research, and might pull a paid-for politician’s strings to get inside information. When Grayson couldn’t deliver, he’d be faced with a whole lot of campaign funding drying right the hell up. The bait and blackmail plot Angela described fit his twisted personality perfectly.

  I ordered a white mocha and sank into a plush armchair in the corner, the busy Saturday midmorning bustling around me. Couples. Groups of women planning shopping days and spa visits. Parents handing single Cheerios to little ones in strollers as they discussed yard aeration and home-improvement plans.

  Just for a second, I wanted to be any one of them.

  But only for a second.

  Deep breath. Focus.

  Kyle had texted me three times since I left the prison. I didn’t know what to tell him (or not tell him), so I didn’t look at his messages.

  My phone buzzed again, but I didn’t reach for it, closing my eyes to replay the talk with Dean Baker.

  Question one: How the hell did Craig know Lakshmi was dead? I pulled out my phone and opened the contacts, touching the T in the margin and scrolling to his name. Cell. Call.

  He picked up on the second ring. “Don’t you ever take a day off, Nichelle?” he said in place of hello. “Looking for the inside scoop on the plea deal?”

  I cleared my throat. “That’d be a nice bonus, but it’s actually not why I called,” I said. “I’m curious about how you know who the victim in the capitol murder was yesterday.”

  Crickets chirping in his neighbors’ house would’ve come through in the silence that met my question.

  I let it stretch. Thirty beats. Sixty.

  “Craig?”

  He took a breath. “Who—um—who told you that?” His voice was a full octave too high, maybe more.

  “I’m afraid I can’t share that,” I said.

  Another pause. “Nichelle, I don’t always deal with the best society has to offer in my work. I know you get that. And attorney-client privilege says I cannot answer your question. I respect the hell out of the work you do, but trust me, you are in over your head. I wish I could unhear what I know. Powerful people will do just about anything to make sure their secrets stay buried.”

  “If I’m in over my head, an answer or two could serve as a life raft,” I said. “Off the record."

  “On the contrary, in this case, it might just serve as the anvil that drags you under. Back out of this now, Nichelle. Not as an attorney, as a friend, I’m telling you. Some secrets are better off kept.”

  He hung up.

  I scribbled down everything he’d said before I forgot a word, furrowing my brow as I mulled over the bizarre conversation. Craig wasn’t usually so cryptic. Dramatic, sure—he was a lawyer—but straightforwardly so.

  Attorney-client privilege. I underlined that, clicked my browser open, and pulled up news results for his name. I scanned the headlines he was associated with, not seeing a single name that so much as breathed on an alarm bell. No politicians, no science types, no more prostitutes or madams. Clicking on random stories, I found mostly court appointments in hi
s newsworthy cases: armed robbery, vehicular manslaughter, the meth lab, and three shootings (one fatal). Back to the top of the search results. More than thirteen hundred. Too big of a haystack to sort when I wasn’t sure the needle was going to help me much.

  Turning to a blank page, I dug out my earbuds and replayed my conversation with Angela, taking notes as I went.

  Question number two: Coal. Was that the center of Reynash Drake’s secret research? And what did Grayson know?

  Not exactly my department. The real-world things I knew about Santa’s naughty list gift of choice were few: it was the biggest source of electricity by a large gap, a lot of people wanted that to change quickly, it served as a decent part of the commonwealth’s economy, and it was the backbone of West Virginia’s. That was it.

  I put the earbuds away and picked up my phone, ignoring the box on the screen that told me Kyle’s text count was up to seven and clicking my browser open. Top secret government files weren’t known for magically appearing in Google results, but I could go more generic and at least get an idea of what I might be looking for. Coal research. Go.

  Sorting the articles by most relevant first, I found more than a hundred hits on clean coal technology. After bookmarking the top three, I scrolled through an article explaining carbon capture and gasification and a handful of other experimental technologies. A quick read told me if Lakshmi’s father were somehow building a government case for regulations supporting these things, coal companies wouldn’t be thrilled: it was good for their image, sure, but bad for their bottom line to the tune of tripling overhead for a fuel source whose sole draw was cheap access.

  Back on the search results page, I spotted President Denham in a thumbnail photo and paused. Clicked. She’d spent sixty percent of her Virginia visits during the last election cycle in coal country, taking questions from and making promises to the strong voter base that had helped deliver her the commonwealth’s thirteen electoral votes.

  Would she be unhappy with clean coal research, too? I tapped her name and clean coal into the search bar.

  Nine results. One interview where she said she supported carbon capture but wanted a cheaper way to do it.

  Which told me nothing. Double-talk is its own language for politicians of her caliber.

  And her upcoming visit was the only thing that put her in the same zip code as the rest of my story.

  Back to more relevant facts.

  Ted Grayson was absolutely the sort of man who would lure a college girl into escort service to blackmail her father. What he had never struck me as was a criminal mastermind. All his known forays into criminal activity were precipitated by someone else—he just followed along with the plan to satisfy his ego and his greed. So how did he even come up with such a thing, let alone manage to pull it off?

  Wait.

  Did he pull it off?

  I sipped my coffee, tapping the fingers of my free hand on the arm of the chair, letting the stray question bloom in my head.

  Lakshmi’s face as she packed up her bag that day in the classroom. The article she’d coauthored just a year ago. Grayson, in somber navy and gray, being sentenced to four years as his secretary sobbed in the gallery behind him.

  What if Lakshmi got out—or Grayson got caught—before he got to her dad with the tapes?

  If Grayson hadn’t gotten the information his donors wanted before he went to prison, what if someone got him out early to finish his mission?

  I sipped my coffee.

  New governor. New president. New challenges for and champion of the coal industry.

  Desperate times and all—I didn’t hate this goose’s chance of sprouting golden feathers.

  I clicked to whitepages.com. Drake, R. Richmond and surrounding areas. I crossed my fingers as I hit the “Search” button.

  Fifty-nine hits.

  Great.

  I started scrolling. Number twenty-eight, for RM Drake on Westover Road, showed Lakshmi as a connected person. Age 60–65. Former city of residence, Burke, up in the DC suburbs.

  Needle located.

  If I could get him to talk to me, I might get something about this story to make a tiny bit of sense. I clicked the address for Mr. Drake, set my GPS, and placed my heavy mug on the dirty dishes cart on my way to the car. My questions weren’t the sort I could ask over the phone, and surprise is often the best gate pass to sensitive territory.

  11

  “Damn, that’s a big house,” I muttered, pulling a fresh notebook from the console in my car and stashing the one with the notes from my chat with Angela in the glove box.

  The place had to be four thousand square feet, sporting wide porches dotted with ceiling fans across both floors, everything faced in the wrought iron that was so popular in Richmond architecture after the Civil War.

  The door chimes were ringing by the time I realized I had not the first damned clue whether or not these people knew their daughter was dead.

  Fantastic.

  The door opened to the round, pleasant face of a petite, curvy woman wearing a breathtaking gold-and-copper sari.

  She didn’t look like someone who’d just lost a child, and I have a hundred people’s share of experience with that face.

  I let a bit of the breath I’d been holding out and smiled. “Mrs. Drake?”

  She smiled back, not moving to open the door or otherwise reacting to my words.

  Okay.

  I tried again. “Is Dr. Drake home this morning?”

  She kept the smile in place.

  For lack of a better option, I returned it, my eyes roaming the cavernous house on the other side of the iron-and-glass storm door. Gleaming, polished cherry flooring stretched behind her as far as I could see, the walls different colors by room, from deep cinnamon surrounding a silk-clothed dining table, to muted purplish blue in what I assumed was a study, to red in the great room across the back of the first floor.

  A full minute ticked by. I took in as many details as I could without crossing to the rude side of nosy, wondering if this place had ever been photographed.

  The other woman blinked, her smile faltering. “Are you looking for him, too?” Her voice was so soft I would’ve missed it with one brain cell less attention.

  I leaned forward. “I’d like to speak with Dr. Drake if I can, please.”

  She shook her head. “Gone.” Touched her chin to her chest. “All gone. All of them.”

  I stared at the silver strands weaving through the shiny dark hair at her roots, weighing my options. I didn’t know who this woman was. Lakshmi’s mother? Couldn’t tell.

  “Is he at work? Could I call him there?”

  Her head bobbed. “His work. Always his work.” A tear fell from her face, exploding a small dark splotch on her goldenrod top.

  She fell still. Quiet. I put a hand on the outside of the glass. “Can I help you, ma’am?”

  No answer.

  With her head bowed, my eyes went to a coat rack behind her. A gray cardigan and an electric-blue fleece jacket hung opposite each other. The jacket had a logo in the top third of the front right.

  A-L-T-C and a white star were the only bits visible, the way the letters played in and out of folds in the fabric. Company logo?

  I repeated it silently until I was sure it had stuck.

  “Ma’am?” I tried once more.

  “All they asked about was him.” Her voice was clear and flat as a Texas highway, but still directed at her feet. “Nobody asked about my Lakshmi. Just have I seen Hamilton. Where’s Rey. Like she doesn’t matter.”

  Wait. What? Someone had been here asking if she’d seen Hamilton?

  Jiminy Choos.

  “Who asked you? Mrs. Drake? Who asked you that?”

  She raised her head and her right arm in tandem, pointer finger extended. “There.”

  I turned.

  A black sedan was parked across the street.

  Two dark suits, Ray-Bans in place, ties the sort of nondescript gray brown I’d never understand
as a clothing choice, sat with their heads swiveled to the front of the Drake house.

  What the actual hell?

  Surveillance? At a murder victim’s grieving family’s home?

  I pulled out my phone, turning back for the door just in time to see it close.

  Damn.

  I couldn’t ring the bell again. That poor woman was on the verge of bona fide shock.

  I jogged back down the long front steps, pausing three-quarters of the way, my hand closing tighter around my iPhone, heart rate picking up as I watched the suit in the driver’s seat slide his shades down and give me a slow once-over. I slid my thumb right to call up the camera, waving the phone in a long arc and hammering the bottom of the screen with my thumb, hoping it looked like I was just stashing it in my bag. Back in the car, I drove toward the river on autopilot, my thoughts tangled up in the bizarre half interview. Why would those guys be looking for Hamilton Baine? And how did that search lead to Lakshmi’s parents?

  I pulled out my key card for the garage when I noticed I was in front of Joey’s building. Backing into a space along the far wall, I dug my phone out and dialed Kyle.

  “Where the hell have you been?” He didn’t bother with hello. “The guard shack says you left the prison over an hour ago, and I’ve been going out of my mind wondering if you got anything that might help me catch a break in this case.”