“Bondurant.” He ignored the hand that Gray extended. “What are you doing here?” He turned to Barrie. “Is this the big surprise you hinted at, the ‘matter of utmost importance’?”
“Please sit down, Senator. Give us a chance to explain. Would you like some coffee?”
“No.” He took one side of the booth; Barrie and Gray shared the bench across from him. Drawing a bead on Gray, he remarked, “You’re a long way from Montana.”
“It’s Wyoming, and I’m not here because I want to be.”
“I’ve never known you to do anything you didn’t want to.”
“He’s here because he believes lives are at risk,” Barrie said. “As do I.”
Armbruster’s eyebrows shot up comically. “Really? Whose? Justice Green’s?”
His ridicule stung, but she kept her cool. “You may not have much confidence in my credibility,” she said, “but what I’m about to tell you is the unvarnished truth. You can draw your own conclusions. Agreed?”
“I’m interested in what you have to say only to the extent that it involves my daughter.”
Barrie took a moment to arrange her thoughts. “Senator, I don’t think your grandson’s death was accidental. I believe he was murdered, probably smothered so his breathing would be interrupted and it would look like SIDS.”
Armbruster looked at her incredulously. “What are you implying, young lady? If you’re suggesting that Vanessa—”
“David killed him,” Gray interrupted, cutting to the chase.
Remaining perfectly still, only the senator’s eyes moved, springing back and forth between them. After a moment, he leaned forward across the table and hissed, “Are you insane?”
“No,” Gray replied calmly. “David killed Vanessa’s baby because he didn’t father him.”
“That’s a goddamn lie!” Armbruster protested, but keeping his voice low. “You’re the last one to make moral judgments against my daughter, Bondurant. You slandering son of a bitch, I ought to shoot you right here, right now.”
Gray’s face grew taut. “David did not father Vanessa’s baby. He couldn’t have. He had a vasectomy. Years ago.”
Barrie was as astonished as the senator by that piece of news. Gray disregarded her soft exclamation and concentrated solely on Armbruster. “Nobody knew about it, Clete. Not even Vanessa. Especially Vanessa. For years she tried everything to conceive, and the bastard let her, knowing full well that it would never happen. He took a perverse pleasure in watching her unravel every month when she got her period.”
Barrie stared at Gray’s profile. She had already determined that he was a complex individual, but she was beginning to wonder exactly how many facets there were to him. Just when she thought she’d seen all of them, another was turned to the light.
“David Merritt never underwent a vasectomy or I would have known about it,” the senator said. “You’re lying.”
“I don’t care whether you believe me or not, Clete. I’m telling you the way it is. David couldn’t father a child, but Vanessa didn’t know that until after she got pregnant and told him.”
Clete continued to glare mistrustfully, but Barrie detected a chink in his hostility. “How do you know all this?” he asked.
“Vanessa called and told me.”
That news flash took Barrie aback. She had assumed that once Gray retired to Wyoming, he’d had no further contact with Vanessa. Apparently the senator also had been under that impression. He appeared as surprised as she.
“She called me crying,” Gray continued. “She asked me what she should do.”
“So the baby was yours,” Armbruster said.
“That isn’t the issue.”
“The hell it isn’t!”
The two men glared at each other, Armbruster with accusation, Gray with defiance. Finally he said, “Do you want to hear the rest of this or not?”
Armbruster made an impatient motion with his hand.
“Despite everything you saw in the media,” Gray said, casting a glance in Barrie’s direction, “David went ballistic when Vanessa told him she was pregnant, because that confirmed the gossip of an affair with me. You know how David takes offense at the merest slight, so you can imagine what that scene must have been like for Vanessa.