“I’m glad you feel that way, sir,” he said. “If you wouldn’t mind, perhaps we can find a quiet corner in the airport and we can chat.” He motioned back inside.
The man was wheeling a small carry-on bag, and as Grant spoke, he looked down at it as if he was put out that he would have to be seen dragging around a suitcase for any amount of extra time. “Do you mind if I put this in my vehicle?”
He wasn’t sure that he could trust the senator to come back, so instead of merely letting him go, he motioned toward Elle. “Sure thing. I could certainly stretch my legs, as well. Nothing quite like sitting in a truck or behind a desk and making phone calls all day.” He tried to sound jovial, nonescalatory in any way.
Dean looked over at him and smiled, but it was just as fake as the man it belonged to.
Insincere people, especially those like politicians who used phony concern as a campaign tactic, were hard to read. It made getting information incredibly challenging—and this case would be no exception. The honey and the wax would be inseparable.
Elle walked closer and looked to him. As she did, he realized the senator and Elle didn’t actually know one another. How could the man not even know whom he had hired to take care of his child?
“Senator, this is Elle Spade. She is the woman who was hired to help protect your family.” As he spoke, Grant nearly bit off his tongue as he realized what he had said and the unintentional burn his words may have left. “She works for STEALTH.”
The senator stopped and looked her up and down, like he was taking her all in before choosing his words. If only Grant had taken the same time. He mouthed “I’m sorry” to Elle, but she just shrugged. Her simple action only made him feel that much worse. Of course she was probably beating herself up for what had happened, and then he had gone ahead and made it all that much worse.
“I’m sorry about what has happened, Senator Clark. Please know that I offer my most sincere condolences. Your wife was a remarkable woman,” Elle said, bowing her head in sympathy. “I would have never left your home that day if I had known what was going to take place after I had gone.”
The senator put his hand on Elle’s shoulder, and she tensed under the man’s grip. Though the action looked as if it was meant to ease her guilt, there was something insincere about the gesture. Or perhaps Grant was just picking up on what he wanted to see. He didn’t like the senator, but that didn’t necessarily mean that at his core the man was a monster—or at least more of a monster than any other human being.
Grant’s mind wandered to all the things he had seen on the job and the saintlike people who turned out to be the greatest monsters of all and the dangerous-looking biker types who went out of their way to work with law enforcement to stop crimes from happening. Assumptions could be obstacles when it came to finding the truth.
“Thank you, Ms. Spade.” The senator squeezed her shoulder. “Know that I don’t hold you or your team responsible for what has happened. This was my own mistake. I wish I had told Catherine she required twenty-four-hour protection.”
Elle looked even more surprised than Grant felt. The man couldn’t have been this kind or understanding. Yet, there he was. Was Grant wrong about him?
Grant watched the senator’s features, hoping to read any kind of details the man might give away in his body language. “Why did you hire protection?”
“I had been receiving threats. The Secret Service was aware and offered to protect my wife as well as myself, but she refused. She found my job and all these things, safety hazards included, to be invasive.” The senator started walking again.
Elle nodded as she walked beside the senator. “She had mentioned that to me on occasion.”
The senator gave a thin smile, but it quickly disappeared. “Catherine has always been a stubborn woman. No amount of my talking could convince her to take these threats seriously. She wasn’t naive, but she really felt that by living in Montana we would be kept away from the big-city dangers.”
Grant nodded. “Do you have a record of any of these threats? Any you think are more credible than others?”
Senator Clark took out his phone as they walked. “What’s your email address? I can send you exactly what I sent the Secret Service. I’m surprised they haven’t shared it with your team.”
Grant wasn’t surprised. Federal agencies often had communications and turf issues. It would have been nice if the senator had greased the skids on that.
He handed the man his card. “You can send the information here.”
“Great. Just give me a moment.” The senator didn’t even slow down as he typed away on his phone. “There you go, will be to you in a moment.”
They came to the long-term parking, and Grant stopped walking. “I’ll wait here for you while you put your bag away.” He lifted his phone slightly.
“I’ll be right back. I’m happy to give you as much time as you need to go over all the details. However, I do have some other meetings this evening.” He glanced down at his watch. “Actually, I have one with the local media outlets starting in just an hour, and I was hoping to clean up before I met them.”
“Sir, I mean this in the most professional way, but I would like to think that should I need you to answer questions about your wife’s murder and your daughter’s disappearance, I will take priority.”
The senator smirked. “Oh, they are my number one priority. They always have been and Lily always will be. However...my job doesn’t stop because of events in my personal life. This state and the people within it depend on me and my delegation. I must be able to perform to my greatest abilities. I may only be in this job a few more months before the election is over, and I have people breathing down my neck to make certain things happen.”
“People who would use your wife and your family’s safety as a card to get you to do what they wanted?”
“Perhaps this is me being as naive as my wife, but when it comes to my world, there are certain things that good, moral people won’t do. As you will see in that email, the people who have threatened me are not the kind of people you would call upstanding. These are folks who have issues.” The senator twisted his bag, clearly annoyed at being held back from being able to do exactly as he wanted.
“Hmm,” Grant said, but Elle was giving him the side-eye and he didn’t have a clue what it meant. “Let me look things over.”
The senator dipped his head in acknowledgment. “I’m parked not far from here.”
As he walked away, the only sounds were of the fellow travelers who were chatting away in the parking lots mixed with the scraping sound of plastic suitcase wheels as they ground against the pavement. Oh, he knew that sound entirely too well.
Elle stood beside him as he pulled up the senator’s email. “You watch him, make sure he doesn’t get lost.”
She nodded.
“Did you know about the death threats?” he asked.
“Catherine didn’t mention them, but I assumed there had to be something going on—why else would they have called STEALTH? We aren’t cheap, and we don’t take contracts for people who don’t have legitimate safety concerns.” Her head was on a swivel, as she must have been monitoring the senator.
He scrolled through the email, which read as though it had been drafted by a lawyer even though it had been sent from the senator’s personal account. In the email, he mentioned three possible threats, and with each person of interest he had provided a picture and evidence of the direct threats. One was an audio recording of a voice mail left on the senator’s personal phone by a man who called himself Jazz Garner.
He wished he was in his truck so he could listen to the audio and run the names through the database, but it would have to wait.
The next was an email sent by one Philip Crenshaw. He was wearing desert tac gear and a shemagh wrapped around his neck. There was a gun in his hands, but he wasn’t displaying a flag or
patches on his gear. He was standing next to a mud house, similar to those Grant had seen in pictures of the Middle East. If he had to guess, the guy looked like a contractor. But what contractor would send a senator a death threat? They weren’t the kind to threaten, they were the kinds to kill—with no one being the wiser.
Strange.
He pulled up the email. The spelling was poor and the grammar was worse, but the message was clear—if Senator Clark didn’t vote for the bill SB 102, there would be hell to pay. Grant had heard of the bill, but he couldn’t recall what it was about.
Regardless, he wasn’t sure why this had been deemed a credible threat. Yeah, the guy looked intimidating, but without seeing the man’s picture it wasn’t an email that would have made the hair rise on his arms.
The last threat was from one Steve Rubbick. Another email. In this one, the man had cited neo-Nazi propaganda before writing, “...you and your wife will feel my wrath. I will cut you down like the sheep you are and mutilate your corpse while I make her watch...”
The man went into details, listing things he planned to do to Catherine that made Grant’s skin crawl. This man had put time, thought and rage into his threat. Grant could understand why the senator would have taken note. The only thing that wasn’t listed was where the man intended to kill them or the senator’s home address. Either the man hadn’t known it or perhaps his letter was nothing more than a rant by a madman.
More than the details or even the diatribe of whys, it was the rage that drew Grant’s ire the most. Catherine had been stabbed more than seventy-three times in total. That kind of overkill was something that was only done in a heightened stage of emotional turmoil.
With murderers he had interviewed in the past, when they committed homicides like this, they talked about going into an almost trancelike state. They found pleasure in the method, pulling the trigger and focusing on the muscles in their fingers and the smell of the spent gunpowder, or when stabbing, they found a rhythm in their motion and lusted after the sensation of the point piercing the skin, slicing through muscle and glancing off bone.
“Anything?” Elle asked.
“Definitely some things to go off.” He pulled the picture of the contractor on his phone. “How long have you been active in the contracting world?”
She shrugged as she stared out into the parking lot. “I dunno, more than five years now, why?”
“One of our possible suspects is a contractor, or was one.” Asking her if she knew this guy was like asking someone from New York if they knew another New Yorker; the chances were almost nil. Yet, he had to check. He lifted his phone for her to see. “Do you recognize this guy?”
Elle reached over for his phone, not letting her watch on the senator down. She glanced at the photograph on his phone. Her gaze flicked over the image and she looked up, but a second later she looked back at it and stared.
“So, you do know him?” he asked, surprised.
“I didn’t know he was a contractor.” She frowned. “But he is one of the guys who was with Catherine the day she was killed.”
Holy shit.
It couldn’t have been that easy. No way. Yet, these stars aligned. Finally, they had gotten their break. They would have gotten it earlier if the senator had bothered to work with the locals.
* * *
SHE FLIPPED TO the next photo on Grant’s phone. Elle’s breath caught in her throat. This man in the photo collage from the senator had also been standing in Catherine’s living room the day she had disappeared. The photo of the third man, who was identified as Jazz, was the only one of the group she didn’t recognize.
The contractor, Philip, was the man she’d seen smoking a cigar. She closed her eyes, trying to recreate the last image she could recall of the living room and where the men had been standing when she’d last seen them. Steve had been across the room with the group of men, but she couldn’t recall what he had been wearing or if he had said anything to her.
There was the sound of footsteps approaching in the distance, and she looked up and watched as the senator returned. He had a smile on his face and gave them a small wave. “The email help at all?” he asked.
Grant returned the man’s smile and gave him a stiff nod. “Interesting. We will definitely look into things.” He reached into his pocket and withdrew Catherine’s cell phone; it was bagged and tagged for evidence. “I was actually hoping you could help me with one more thing before I hit you with too many questions. Do you know the passcode for your wife’s mobile device?”
The senator reached up and ran his hand over his neck, unintentionally covering his weak point. He was stressed. Daisy would do the same thing—cower and cover her neck—if she was upset or concerned for her safety. It was an instinctual move, and Elle had even caught herself doing it sometimes. Yet the senator doing it in this moment struck her as odd. Why would opening up his wife’s phone make him uncomfortable?
“I don’t know if I can get you in, but I guess I could try.” He held out his hand. “You think there’s anything on there that could help point you in the right direction, as far as possible suspects go?”
“Don’t take it out of the bag.” Grant handed the phone over. “As you well know, we’re just trying to put some pieces together here. We are trying our hardest to get to the bottom of this case and find justice for your wife as well as locate Lily.”
Taking the phone, the senator tapped in a series of numbers. He opened it on his third try and, as it opened, he chuckled and handed the phone back to Grant. “The code is 062510. I’m sorry. I thought the feds already gave this to you.”
“What is that?”
“Our wedding anniversary.” The senator smiled. “Catherine was always a wonderful wife.” As he spoke, his voice cracked with emotion.
Grant nodded. “From everything I’ve heard about your wife from the witnesses we all have interviewed, it sounds as though you were a very lucky man. I am sorry for your loss.”
The senator nodded, clearing his throat. “You guys have anything on Lily yet? The last I’d heard your teams hadn’t managed to locate anything that could point us in her direction. Is that still true?”
Elle twitched.
Grant put his phone away and rested his hands on his utility belt, masking his badge. “Unfortunately, we are still struggling to find where she could be located. Again, we are looking.”
The senator’s eyes darkened, and she could tell he was angry. For the first time, she liked the man. But it had taken talking about Lily before she had seen any genuine emotion.
“Would Lily have known any of the men that were referenced in your email?”
The senator balked. “No, what would make you ask that?”
This time, she wasn’t sure if the reaction was real. “I was just wondering if you know of anyone who she would have felt comfortable going with. For a while, on the trail, we found her tracks. She had been walking side by side with her kidnapper for almost a mile.”
The senator closed his eyes, and his head dropped low. He ran his hands over his face as they stood there in the cold. When he lifted his head, there were tears in his eyes. “You of all people have to know that I’ve been a shitty father when it came to Lily. I haven’t been with her nearly enough. The truth is, I didn’t know you—and I should have. If I tell you I know who was coming and going in her life, that would be a lie. And that, that is something I’m not proud of.”
She wouldn’t have expected those words to come out of the senator’s mouth in a thousand years. He was a seasoned politician, and even for a person in that role, the level of candor and humility in his words stunned her.
Grant nodded, and he also seemed to appear to soften to the man. “Senator, we have all made mistakes in our lives. And as much as I wish you could give me the right answers to our questions, I prefer the honest ones.”
The senator dabbed at the corne
r of his eye, collecting himself. “Do you know when they will be releasing my wife’s body? I was hoping to take care of her funeral arrangements while I’m in Montana.”
“The medical examiner has filed their reports, but there are a few more tests before everything is finalized. However, I think that you can now claim her remains at any time.”
“I will let the funeral home know,” he said. “In the meantime, if we are done here, I need to see the rest of my family and take care of some business. If you need to ask me more questions, or if things arise that need my attention, please do not hesitate to reach out.”
Elle was sure Grant had more questions for the man, and he had to be as put out by his dismissal of them as she was, but Grant didn’t say anything.
The senator turned to her and extended his hand. “And I want to say thank you. I appreciate you coming out and working with the local law enforcement in helping to find my daughter. I didn’t fail to notice that you are going above and beyond the call of duty.”
She appreciated the flattery. “You are welcome, sir. And I promise I won’t stop looking for Lily until I have her in my arms.”
“I’m sure that is true.” The senator gave her a double pat to her shoulder. “Good evening, and again. Thank you both.” He turned and walked away, leaving them standing there at the entrance of the lot.
If she had to explain the situation to someone who hadn’t been there, she would have had to admit they had just been worked over by the senator. He was definitely a power player in the world of communication. The old adage of “could sell ketchup Popsicles to a woman in a white dress” came to mind.
They watched him pull out of the lot and make his way to the toll booth before Grant finally turned to her. “What do you make of that?”
She shook her head. “I think that if he’s who we need to talk to in order to get answers, then this investigation is going to take a while.”
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