The Accused (4 page)

“Less than a year.”

“She left you?”

“Yes,” Will responded, puzzled at the approach the other man was using—particularly if the purpose of their conversation was to close the file on Audra's death.

“Mr. Chambers, before I share with you the information that has just come to light about her assailant, I just wanted to know, whether in the years since our investigation—have you, yourself, come across any additional information about your wife? Anything that might shed light on the circumstances of her murder? People, or organizations, that she had contact with shortly before her death?”

Will studied the man carefully. It seemed clear he did not consider this a closed file. As a matter of fact, his questions gave Will the impression this was a case that—for some reason—was being actively investigated.

“I don't have any more information,” the lawyer said. “I don't have anything to add to what I told investigating officers at the time. Now, why don't you share with me the details of what you told my secretary? Who is this guy who murdered Audra?”

“The guy's name was Horace Dudlow. His alias was Buddy. He was doing time for armed robbery in the state penitentiary in Nebraska. He had a substantial rap sheet. Shortly before his death in prison he told his cellmate about a murder he had committed. He said he had killed an attractive blond woman in an apartment in Georgetown. His details of the murder—how he killed your wife—matched the information we had. So we took a closer look at this guy. He had been in the Washington, DC, area at the time of the murder. His details about the crime fit all the physical evidence we had. And most importantly, he had a motive that also matched the crime.”

“Motive?” Will asked, his body tensed and leaning forward in the chair toward the captain. “What do you mean by that?”

“Dudlow was a member of a neo-Nazi group up in Brooklyn. It was the same group that you had basically bankrupted through a civil suit you had brought against them on behalf of a Jewish family they had terrorized. The leader of the group was the owner of a trucking company. As I understand it, after you bankrupted the group and the company, their leader was later convicted criminally, and the trucking line was taken over by the Jewish family and operated thereafter by them—right?”

The lawyer nodded—in a stunned daze.

“We don't know anything more that ties the murder back to the neo-Nazi group. But we are checking into that. Dudlow didn't tell his cellmate anything about the involvement of the group. He just shared the details of the murder. But we suspect that the motive was probably retaliation.”

Will was still reeling, trying to make sense of the shocking news he had just heard. “Retaliation for what?” he asked.

“Against you,” Jenkins said plainly. “For ruining their organization financially and helping to lead to the criminal conviction of their leader, who, as you know, is still serving a lengthy prison term.”

Will was staring ahead. His lips parted slightly—but no words came out.

“I am sorry this news has hit you just off the heels of your honeymoon. I was very happy, of course, to find out that you had remarried. It's too bad all of this had to come back up when it did.”

The lawyer raised his eyes, struggling to study the captain's face. The other man was glancing down at the file that lay on his desk.

After a few moments of awkward silence Will spoke up. “Your investigation is not closed on Audra's murder, is it?”

“I am afraid not.”

“Captain, there is something you know that I don't know. What information haven't you told me?”

“Mr. Chambers…Dudlow did say one more thing to his cellmate.”

“And what was that?” Will asked, his face now hard, his eyes locked on the police captain.

“Dudlow said there was another man with him in the apartment at the time of the murder. Somebody who was with him. We don't have a name…no ID. We don't have any idea who it was. But we are certainly going to try to find out. We are checking every lead we've got back to the white supremacy group. Friends, and criminal associates Dudlow came in contact with. I guarantee you, Mr. Chambers, we will leave no stone unturned.”

But that was no consolation to Will. As he shook hands with the captain and walked out of the office, he felt as if he had taken a hit with a baseball bat to his solar plexus. All the life in his body seemed to have been drained out.

It was clearly no accident that Dudlow, the man responsible for Audra's vicious murder, had had links to the same neo-Nazi group Will had vanquished in his civil suit years before.

And the implications of that were something Will was not prepared to handle. As he made his way down to the parking structure to his '57 Corvette convertible, he felt as if he were walking through a bad dream. The slow, topsy-turvy disassembling of his life in the weeks and months following Audra's death…the near-collapse of his professional and personal life in the years after that…he had finally believed it was all behind him after his spiritual conversion—and then when he had met Fiona and they had fallen in love.

But now it was all rushing back at him. The demons…the ghosts that had haunted him…the victories he thought he had won over alcohol, over despair, over his bitterness against the world at large and his petty opponents in his former law firm, who had ended up ousting him and forcing him out on his own—all that was now spreading its shadow like some long, nightmarish solar eclipse, where there was no guarantee the sun would shine again or the night would end.

As he numbly guided his car onto the interstate, the awful realization was beginning to settle in.

It was not just Audra's death.

The reality now breaking in on Will was starkly simple in its horrible implication. His obsessive pursuit of justice—his legal triumph over the white supremacist haters—had been the cause of Audra's torture and death. That had been the price tag.

It was a cruel joke. He had negotiated a deadly quid pro quo—a lawsuit victory in exchange for Audra's life—and he hadn't even known it.

How could he survive with the knowledge of that grotesque barter? How could he live with himself?

As he inched his Corvette into the gridlocked traffic exiting the Beltway, Will stared at his cell phone, which was lying on the passenger seat.

He couldn't call Fiona. He wanted to…but he couldn't. He felt as if he were drowning. But to call Fiona—to reach out frantically for her—that would mean pulling her down into the vortex…like a swimmer pulling his rescuer down into the cold, icy deep.

He wanted to pray, but that too seemed a metaphysical impossibility. His mind would not work. His lips would not open. It was if the laws of nature had conspired against his ability to think, or speak, or even cry out to God.

The Lord of all time and space—the divine Father who had reached down, plucked him out of the abyss and saved his soul so concretely and certainly—now, was he powerless to rescue Will out of the one place that so horrified him?

5

I
T WAS FIVE O
'
CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON
. But as usual, many of the staffers within the cavernous Dirksen Senate Office Building were still busy at work. The worker bees in the congressional offices—young, bright, and energetic—had learned to absorb the endless hours. When budget battles flared or special legislation of overriding national importance arose—or just before recess when a myriad of business was being done before members of Congress would fly back to their constituencies in their home districts—that was when the pace could be brutal.

But the staff of Senator Jason Bell Purdy didn't mind the long hours. What they did find irritating was their new boss's habit of disregarding deadlines, appointments, or schedules for the sake of his own personal comfort or individual interests.

The chief of staff, the legislative assistant, and the press secretary had been waiting since three-thirty. They knew the senator was not on the floor voting. In fact, he was out taking another long lunch. The staff meeting, which Purdy himself had set for that time, was now on hold while the staff awaited the arrival of the newest member of the United States Senate.

For Jason Bell Purdy, schedules were something to be kept or broken depending on whim and personal desire. Such were the consequences of his upbringing as the grandson of a former Georgia governor and heir to the vast Purdy fortune, which controlled a healthy chunk of Georgia politics.

Purdy's chief claim to fame was his co-ownership of a professional baseball franchise, coupled with his ranking as richest man in the state.

As the senator meandered down the halls of the Dirksen Building he tugged slightly at his starched white collar and tightly knotted
red-white-and-blue tie. The formal trappings of the Senate were something he was having to get used to. If it were up to him, he would stroll into his office every day wearing a golf shirt, khakis, and canvas boating shoes.

As he glided into his office, his staff quickly grabbed notepads, clipboards, and briefing books, and scurried in. The three staffers sat in the brown leather chairs in a semicircle around the ornate mahogany desk. Purdy slipped off his blue silk suit coat, hung it up on the brass coat rack, and then plopped into his overstuffed leather executive chair and swung both feet up on the desk.

“Hey, Myron,” he called glibly. “Give me the box score here.”

The chief of staff flipped through his legal pad and began a rapid-fire recitation of the status of his Senate office.

Purdy had upcoming meetings with several contingencies of constituents, a half dozen different lobbyists, followed by a briefing by his legislative assistant on several items of pending legislation. But he had failed to return a phone call from the chief of staff of Senator Wayne O'Brien, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and chair of the Subcommittee on Counterterrorism.

“Would you like me to get Senator O'Brien's office on the line right now?” Myron asked.

“Hey, let's not rush the gun on this thing,” Purdy replied. “I have a feeling O'Brien just wants me to do some Chinese laundry for him. He's tossing me nuts for the squirrels. I've been waiting for a decent leadership assignment on the Counterterrorism Subcommittee since I got here.”

“Senator,” the legislative assistant said diplomatically, “your selection, as a freshman senator, to the Subcommittee on Counterterrorism is a real coup. From what I know, it certainly takes time to build ethos with the other senators. I'm sure in a short period of time that Senator O'Brien and his colleagues on our side of the aisle are going to recognize your value.”

“Jimmy—with all due respect—don't patronize me, now. I'm telling the three of you that we gotta get some distinguishing assignments—we need some blue-ribbon issues to sink our teeth into. Otherwise, you boys and girls are going to end up with the shortest congressional careers of any staffers in the Beltway—when election time comes up
and I get a whopping because we haven't done anything significant during what's left of my appointment term.”

Linda, his press secretary, smiled and then volunteered her thoughts.

“Senator, how about that Mexico incident?”

“That's what I'm talking about!” Purdy said, pulling his feet off the desk and slapping the top of the desk with his hand. “That Mexico deal is
exactly
what I'm talking about. We got some kind of massacre that's going on down there. The Pentagon's not telling us. Everybody's scratching their heads over that. I can smell a feeding frenzy on this deal. We got that group of marines—what do you call that, a…you know, a small group…”

“A squad?” Myron asked with a wry smile.

“That's exactly right,” Purdy continued. “This squad of marines goes down there and shoots up a bunch of innocent people. Now I know we've gotta tip our hats to them for the rescue of our Secretary of Commerce. And I do tip my hat—I thank God for his safe rescue. But this colonel—what's his name?”

“Marlowe. Colonel Caleb Marlowe,” Linda, the press secretary, said.

“Right. Colonel Caleb Marlowe. He needs to be investigated. I think there is some slime on the bottom of this pond. I think the Pentagon is trying to make some kind of covert move—or maybe even the White House—I've just got that sense. They're not telling us the full story.”

“With all due respect,” Jimmy, the LA said, “Chairman O'Brien has got that as his number-one agenda item—”

“I don't want to hear what Chairman O'Brien has on his little shopping list,” Purdy snapped back. “I'm here to tell you what's on the top of my list. And this is what I want for Christmas, little boys and girls, so listen up—I want a Senate subcommittee hearing—I want to chair it, and I want to look into this Mexico massacre and this whole Marine Corps incident. And I want that to happen.”

The senator dismissed his chief of staff and legislative assistant but asked his press secretary to stay.

After the two male staff members left, Jason Bell Purdy grabbed the crystal golf ball off of the brass golf-ball holder on his desk and poised it between his index finger and thumb.