The Candidate (Romantic Suspense) (The Candidate Series) (18 page)

 Ben frowned. “Tell me about it. She had her charms, but you aren’t without your own, Abby. Andy loved you. Despite his…his attraction to Maddy, he married you, not her. And he didn’t ask for a divorce.”

She slumped down in her seat. “Because it would have been political suicide. We both know that.”

“Odds are he would have survived it. Dole did. So did Gingrich, not to mention Mark Sanford.” He shrugged. “Andy called you his ‘waypoint.’ He claimed you were the one who kept him on the straight and narrow; that you were the one who kept him in check. Whatever hold Maddy had on him, it wasn’t strong enough to take him from you.”

“You expect me to find solace in that, don’t you? Believe me, I wish I could, but I can’t. Despite our estrangement, I’d always hoped Maddy knew I loved her; that when she was finally ready to talk through her anger, I’d be there to listen. Now I see she only wanted one thing from me—my husband.” Abby pursed her lips. “Maddy could have had any man, but she set her sights on Andy. Why is that? Did I commit some slight that deserved such disregard?”

“Maybe Andy was the cause of the rift. Didn’t Paul Twist introduce you to Andy? Was Maddy there, too?” 

 “No. The introduction happened after I’d graduated from Radcliffe. By then Maddy was in New York, caught up in the art scene there. We had already grown apart, in our teens.”

“What caused the rift?” 

“I wish I knew.” Her hands, clutched in despair, fell to her side. “After our parents died, we were raised by our aunt, Lavinia, on her estate, Asquith Hall. Back then it was considered the country: Northern Virginia before the Beltway suburbs built up around DC. As you can imagine, the tragedy drew us together. We were inseparable, that is, until the summer we turned fifteen.”

“What happened then?”

“Uncle Preston suggested we spend the summer in New York. He’d be working out of the firm’s New York office. He keeps an apartment on the Upper West Side. I was shy, and I loved the fact that being out in the country took us out of the spotlight. But Maddy jumped at the chance to go. When Maddy came home, she was a different person. Aloof. Worldly.” Abby shrugged. “Bitter. She said she’d met someone she liked, and she was head over heels for him. She never said, but I presumed it was one of the summer interns in Uncle Preston’s New York office. I guess he broke her heart. I’m sure he expected more from her than she was willing to give him. You know…sex.” She blushed. “In any regard, after that summer, things were never the same between us.”

“Wasn’t Andy an associate at your uncle’s firm? Could they have met then?”

No, of course not!” Abby shook her head adamantly. “They met through me—at our wedding rehearsal, in fact. I mean, yes, he worked for Uncle Preston, but from what I remember, during that particular summer, he was still clerking for some federal judge.” 

She stared out the window, as if the memory could be found among the faces on Richmond’s bustling streets. “Besides, if they had been dating before he met me, I would have known about it, right? I mean, why would they have kept it secret?” Abby wrinkled her brow in thought. “He would have never asked me out if he was in love with my sister. And if he had the audacity to do so, I would have never gone out with him. I loved Maddy too much to hurt her.” 

If only Maddy had felt the same way, she’d be here instead of you, Ben thought. 

Now that they were in front of the coroner’s office, he could bury this regret within the business at hand. “We’re here, Abby. I hope you’re ready for your close-up.”

Andy’s sister-in-law is quite a looker, thought Smith. Hey, maybe she’d be up for some consolation sex. She’ll need it, after she sees what kind of condition Mansfield and his wife are in.

She was with some guy, but by their body language, he could tell they had nothing going on between them. 

He recognized the man—Mansfield’s campaign manager, Ben Brinker. Smith wished he could hear what Brinker was saying to the lead FAA investigator, but if he were any closer, he’d draw attention to himself, something he couldn’t afford to do. With his tidy, nondescript suit and dark glasses, he’d given the Richmond coroner’s staff the impression that he was with the NTSB security detail, which in turn thought he was with Homeland Security.

It was on days like today that his collection of official badges paid off in droves.

Thus far, site investigators had come away with the conclusion he’d hoped for: pilot error, which sent the plane into a nose dive. In fact, the crash had created such an inferno that everything inside it had been incinerated. 

This was a relief to Smith, more so because the Ghost Squad had been hacked. 

The discovery had been made only a few hours ago. The file on Operation Flamingo was among the breached files. 

The good news was that the file had been embedded with a security worm. The bad news: the trail ended at Langley. From what his tech ops could tell, it had been opened by only one person: a CIA agent named Fred Hanover.

Smith’s asshole puckered when intel on Hanover showed him to be Mansfield’s closest friend. Immediately he put a couple of ghosts on Hanover’s trail, but Better Off Dead Fred must have sniffed them out, because he flew the coop.

Did he have a chance to brief Mansfield on Flamingo? Smith wondered. Even if he had, that dirty little secret was now as dead as the senator himself. 

Apparently the Mansfields’ charred remains weren’t much to behold. He didn’t have clearance for either the evidence room or the morgue, but Smith had positioned himself so that he could see through the glass wall that separated the morgue from the hallway he was supposedly guarding. The FAA coroner unzipped one of the body bags. The Vandergalen woman gasped, but stood her ground. No such luck when the medic opened the second bag. She turned her head and ran out of the room.

He was having so much fun watching Mansfield’s sister-in-law heave her breakfast in the corner of the evidence room that he almost missed seeing the investigator hand Brinker something—

An aluminum briefcase. 

Shit, it must have belonged to Mansfield, thought Smith.  A cold trickle of sweat went down his spine. What if evidence of Flamingo was inside?

Smith followed as Brinker took both the briefcase and grieving woman out of the building, but by the time he got to his car, they were already a few blocks down the street. Two tractor-trailers and an old woman in a PT Cruiser made sure he missed the light that would have put him on the expressway ramp, directly behind them.

That’s okay. He knew where to find them.

 “You wouldn’t happen to know the code to open Andy’s briefcase, would you?” Ben waited until they were almost in Fairfax before asking Abby.

She’d quit sobbing only half an hour ago. The whole time she hadn’t said a word. She just stared straight ahead. 

Now she turned to him. With a voice lacking any emotion, she said, “It’s the date he earned his wings as a Marine Corps fighter pilot.”

 “Reach in the back. Open it.” 

To do so, she had to unbuckle her seat belt, hoist herself onto her knees and turn around in order to grab it from the floor, behind her seat.

Instinctively his eyes were drawn to the rear view mirror, but he jerked his head to the road again when the thought hit him,
Maddy’s jeans do her justice.

When she swung the case over, it sideswiped his head. “Sorry,” she murmured, but he didn’t believe her. 

Maybe she read my mind, he thought.

A moment later she had it open. “What are we looking for?”

“Just before takeoff, I gave Andy a manila envelope. It came from Fred. Inside was information on something called Operation Flamingo. Fred’s instructions were that it was for Andy’s eyes only, so I didn’t open it. But if it had anything to do with Andy and Maddy’s deaths, I think we should know about it.”

She filtered through the case. “There are four envelopes in here.” 

“It should still be sealed up. There is no label. I don’t think he had time to open it before take-off.” 

“”Three are unopened, and unlabeled.” Abby opened one and shook her head. “It’s the speech that was prepared for tonight’s event,” she muttered, as she reached for another. “This second one has some polling figures. So, I guess three’s the charm.” She cracked the seal on the final envelope and scanned the pages in her hand. “Pull over, Ben.”

 Her tone was ominous enough he jerked the car onto the shoulder of the road and let the car roll until it slowed to a complete stop. “What is it?”

She didn’t answer. Instead she handed him the paper in her hands.

It wasn’t at all what he expected. It looked official, and was marked “Confidential,” but it wasn’t a government document. 

It was a medical form. A pregnancy test.

The patient, M. Elaine Vann, was eleven weeks pregnant.

Who the hell was Elaine…

Maddy.

Maddy…had been
pregnant
?

The thought that she’d been carrying his child washed over him like a cold wave of bittersweet regrets—

 “It was his? Not mine?” The revelation slammed into his gut like a fist.

“She must have thought so.” Abby stared out the window. “Otherwise why would Andy have her test results?”

“Oh…shit! Wait! She didn’t give this to him. I did.” Ben slammed his hands on the steering wheel. “Yesterday afternoon, she called me to tell me she was ending our relationship. I was so angry that I went over to her place. I thought I could—that I could force her to change her mind. When I got there, she was rushing out the door. She had a suitcase with her, and a bunch of other things in her hands. I presume she was rushing to meet her invisible man. But I wouldn’t let her go until we—” he paused, embarrassed, “—well, until we made love, one last time.  She—
we
—dropped everything. On the floor. I guess we exchanged envelopes without realizing it.”

 “Oh Ben, I’m so sorry.” Blushing, Abby looked down at her lap. “Knowing Maddy, nothing would have changed her mind. Not when she was able to give Andy something I never could. A child.”

She’s trying to comfort me, but I should be comforting her, he thought. Then it hit him: Would Maddy have tried to get pregnant if he hadn’t let it slip about Abby’s fertility efforts?

He looked down at the test results. Yes, a DNA test had been performed, too. The results show fifteen genetic markers. Were they his, or Andy’s?

Abby frowned. “If she took Fred’s envelope by mistake, it may have burned up in the crash, along with the rest of her things.”

“That’s the strange part. She left much earlier than she needed, in order to make the flight.  And on the plane, she wasn’t dressed in the same outfit she left in. She was dressed to look like you. Not only that, the bag she had with her was different.” He stared at the DNA analysis. “Maybe she didn’t want to share the test results with him after all.”

Abby shrugged. “That’s possible. Even if she were to hide the knowledge of her child’s DNA, she may have felt that the day would come when she’d need proof of her child’s paternity.”

“In other words,” Ben interrupted, “Maddy might have hidden the envelope. But where?”

Abby shook her head. “I don’t know.”

Ben’s cell phone buzzed. Caller ID showed it was Sukie, so he answered it on speaker.

“Ben, thank God I found you!” He was touched by the concern in her voice. “Where are you?”

“With…with Maddy. I took her down to Richmond, to identify the senator’s body. What’s up?”

“She’s with you? Good, because Preston Alcott is worried about both of you. He wanted you to know that he petitioned the FAA to release Andy’s and Abby’s remains for burial. The funeral will take place tomorrow, two o’clock at Arlington National Cemetery. He feels the sooner they’re laid to rest, the less chance for the media to make a circus out of the tragedy.”

“Yeah, right,” he muttered then hung up. 

In other words, the sooner the public forgets about Andrew Mansfield, the sooner Talbot locks down the GOP nomination.

But he could tell Abby had different thoughts on the matter. “May they both rest in peace,” she murmured.