“It isn’t about me.” But she let out a shuddering breath. “I can’t think about it, Roarke. I can’t. I’ll mess up if I do, and if I mess up, he could get away with it. With rape and murder, with abusing the children he should have been protecting. I won’t let him.”
“Didn’t you say to Catherine that the only way to fight back was to tell?”
“I have work to do.”
He fought back frustration. “I assume you’ll want to go to the Washington Airport where DeBlass keeps his shuttle.”
“Yes.” She climbed in the car when Roarke walked around to get in the driver’s side. “You can drop me at the nearest transport station.”
“I’m sticking, Eve.”
“All right, fine. I need to check in.”
As he drove down the winding lane, she put in a call to Feeney. “I’ve got something hot here,” she said before he could speak. “I’m on my way to East Washington.”
“You’ve got something hot?” Feeney’s voice was almost a song. “Didn’t have to look farther than her final entry, Dallas, logged the morning of her murder. God knows why she took it to the bank. Blind luck. She had a date at midnight. You’ll never guess who.”
“Her grandfather.”
Feeney goggled, sputtered. “Fuck it, Dallas, how’d you get it?”
Eve closed her eyes briefly. “Tell me it’s documented, Feeney. Tell me she names him.”
“Calls him the senator—calls him her old fart of a granddaddy. And she writes pretty cheerfully about the five thousand she charges him for each boink. Quote: ‘It’s almost worth letting him slobber all over me—and there’s a lot of energy left in dear old Granddad. The bastard. Five thousand every couple of weeks isn’t such a bad deal. I sure as hell give him his money’s worth. Not like when I was
a kid and he used me. Table’s turned. I won’t turn into a dried up prune like poor Aunt Catherine. I’m thriving on it now. And one day, when it bores me enough, I’m sending my diaries to the media. Multiple copies. It drives the bastard crazy when I threaten to do that. Maybe I’ll twist the knife a little tonight. Give the senator a good scare. Christ, it’s wonderful to have the power to make him squirm after all he’s done to me.’ ”
Feeney shook his head. “It was a long-time deal, Dallas. I’ve run through several entries. She earned a nice income from blackmail, and names names and deeds. But this puts the senator at her place on the night of her death. And that puts his balls in the old nutcracker.”
“Can you get me a warrant?”
“Commander’s orders are to patch it through the minute you called in. He says to pick him up. Murder One, three counts.”
She let out a slow breath. “Where do I find him?”
“He’s at the Senate building, hawking his Morals Bill.”
“Fucking perfect. I’m on my way.” She switched off, turned to Roarke. “How much faster can this thing go?”
“We’ll find out.”
If Whitney’s orders hadn’t come through with the warrant, instructing her to be discreet, Eve would have marched onto the Senate floor and cuffed him in front of his associates. Still, there was considerable satisfaction in the way it went down.
She waited while he completed his impassioned speech on the moral decline of the country, the insidious corruption that stemmed from promiscuity, conception control, genetic engineering. He expounded on the lack of morality in the young, the dearth of organized religion in the home, the school, the workplace. Our one nation under God had become godless. Our constitutional right to bear arms sundered by the liberal left. He touted figures on violent crime, on urban decay, on bootlegged drugs, all a result, the senator claimed, of our increasing moral decline, our softness on criminals, our indulgence in sexual freedom without responsibility.
It made Eve sick to listen.
“In the year 2016,” she said softly, “at the end of the Urban Revolt, before the gun ban, there were over ten thousand deaths and injuries from guns in the borough of Manhattan alone.”
She continued to watch DeBlass sell his snake oil while Roarke laid a hand at the base of her spine.
“Before we legalized prostitution, there was a rape or attempted rape every three seconds. Of course, we still have rape, because it has much less to do with sex than with power, but the figures have dropped. Licensed prostitutes don’t have pimps, so they aren’t beaten, battered, killed. And they can’t use drugs. There was a time when women went to butchers to deal with an unwanted pregnancy. When they had to risk their lives or ruin them. Babies were born blind, deaf, deformed before genetic engineering and the research it made possible to repair in vitro. It’s not a perfect world, but you listen to him and you realize it could be a lot worse.”
“Do you know what the media is going to do to him when this hits?”
“Crucify him,” Eve murmured. “I hope to God it doesn’t make him a martyr.”
“The voice of the moral right suspected of incest, trucking with prostitutes, committing murder. I don’t think so. He’s finished.” Roarke nodded. “In more ways than one.”