Exclusive

Holding the weeping Vanessa against her chest, Barrie nodded. “She’s okay.”

“What about you?”

“I’m fine. Shaken. He looked ready to kill me with his bare hands.”

“I’d have killed him first,” Gray said. His eyes held hers for a five count, then he turned away and assisted in the business at hand, arresting the President and Senator Armbruster.

Merritt wasn’t responding in a dignified, peaceable manner. In fact, he was raving like a maniac. He screamed invective at Yancey, but to Yancey’s credit he maintained his cool while reading the President his rights.

Then Merritt began ranting that Vanessa, not he, had killed their son, and that anything he’d done since then had been to protect her. “She smothered him. It was her, not me. She’s the crazy one.”

“I caution you to say nothing more, Mr. President,” Yancey said. “You’re implicated in another crime in Mississippi.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Clete! Clete, tell them how sick Vanessa is.”

Armbruster opened his mouth, but his lips were slack. His jowls jiggled when he tried but failed to form words.

“Senator Armbruster will have a chance to testify,” Yancey told Merritt. “His testimony will be as valuable to us as that of the eyewitness.”

“There was no one in the nursery except Spence, Vanessa, and me. Spence is dead, and she’s lying.”

“I’m not talking about the death of Robert Rushton Merritt,” Yancey explained. “We have an eyewitness to the murder in Mississippi.”

Finally, the attorney general’s words seemed to penetrate the red curtain of David Merritt’s rage. For the first time, he seemed to grasp the bleak reality of his situation. He glared long at Yancey, then turned to Clete.

Clete gazed back at the man he had made and had now destroyed, but at tremendous personal cost.

Merritt’s eyes narrowed to malicious slits. “You sly son of a bitch,” he hissed. “What did you do?”

The Exclusive

“Senator Armbruster was there when I regaine

d consciousness.”

Becky Sturgis’s soft drawl filled the otherwise silent television studio. The floor crew had locked down the cameras. They were as immersed in her story as the millions of people watching it on TV around the world. She was staring down at her hands, which were clasped tightly in her lap.

“When I came to, I remember hoping that I was waking up from a terrible nightmare, but it was real. My baby was dead. His little body was still lying on the floor where David had dropped it. There was a lot of blood. I guess it was mine. David had hit me very hard.”

“David Merritt, the President?”

“Yes, ma’am. Only he wasn’t president then.”

She wore a scarf to cover the permanent depression in her temple, where her scalp had been crudely sewn over her crushed skull. She was very self-conscious of the disfigurement. When Barrie met her, she’d been dressed in a prison jumpsuit. Tonight she was wearing a simple dress. Other than the scarf, she was unadorned.

“After he hit me that first time, I don’t remember anything until I woke up and Senator Armbruster was kneeling beside me, feeling for a pulse in my neck. He was startled that I was still alive because David had told him I was dead.”

“He’d also told Senator Armbruster that you killed the baby.”

“I didn’t,” she said fiercely. “David did. And I told the senator the truth. He was very kind. He told me not to worry, that he would take care of it.”

“What did he do?”

“He called a doctor, who came to the trailer and sewed up my scalp and gave me a shot for the pain.”

“You weren’t taken to a hospital?”

“No, ma’am.”