She kissed him. “You gave up the guys for a girl?” she asked, mixing them a drink at the bar concealed in the bookcases.
“I alternate,” he said. “If you were home in time to watch the news more often, you’d know that.”
“If I were home in time to watch the news, you wouldn’t talk to me until the news was over, anyway.”
“You have a point, as usual.” They touched glasses and drank.
“What are we doing for dinner?”
“I ordered a pizza.”
“What, we’re having dinner alone together twice in one week?”
“Amazing, isn’t it?”
The commercials ended, and Katie returned. Kate knew better than to talk before the news was over. Couric wrapped up simultaneously with the arri
val of the pizza.
Will opened the box and looked at the pizza. “Shit,” he said.
“What?”
“Green peppers. I ordered the Extravaganza with no green peppers.”
Kate began picking out the green slivers and putting them aside. “I hope the voters that depend on green pepper growing for their livelihood don’t hear about this,” she said. “You’d never be reelected.”
“You could be right,” he said, picking up a green-pepper-free slice of pizza. “George Bush the elder said publicly that he hated broccoli, and look what happened to him.”
Kate went to the bar, opened a bottle of wine and returned with two glasses. “Maybe Teddy Fay is like the green peppers,” she said.
“Yeah, well, I didn’t order him, either.”
“I mean, maybe we should just ignore him.”
Will’s mouth was too full of pizza to respond immediately. He chewed for a minute, then swallowed. “You really think that? I thought your people were close to nailing him.”
“We’re just guessing.”
“Kate, the man has murdered a dozen people, among them a speaker of the house and a supreme court justice. We shouldn’t catch him?”
“I don’t know.”
“You knew before. What’s changed?”
“I don’t know. I just have a bad feeling about this.”
“You want to call off Lance Cabot and his people?”
“It might be the best thing.”
“Look at it this way: you’re testifying before a committee of Congress: you can testify, truthfully, that you did everything you could to catch him and failed. That’s not a great thing, but it’s not terrible, either.”
“It’s not terrible, if I testify to that after the election.”
Will ignored that remark. “But if you’re asked if you gave an order to stop pursuing him, and you answer truthfully, then we’re both in what I believe the most eminent political scientists refer to as deep shit.”
“Not if I answer that I became convinced, after a thorough search, that Teddy is dead.”