| |
There were a dozen chairs around the oval table shoehorned into a small conference room on the first floor of the capitol just down the hall from the governor’s office. Maren felt as though the furniture had been placed first and the walls built tightly around it with no margin for error in design. She tried to slip sideways into a seat without scraping the chair against the wall behind her. That accomplished, she appraised the two men who had escorted her from the murder scene, where an army of professionals was now busy photographing, measuring, and bagging potential evidence.
Alibi Morning Sun, a veteran homicide detective at the Sacramento Police Department, remained standing in the doorway. At 39, only a year older than Maren, he was tall with clear dark eyes, strong features and straight black hair that grazed his shoulders. Maren recognized him from a photo that had accompanied his profile in the local paper. The reporting had included the origin of his unusual first name—his mother had chosen “Alibi” because the timing of his birth cleared his father from a murder rap.
He wore a brown corduroy blazer that didn’t quite match his brown khaki pants, and a dark green dress shirt, no tie.
The other officer, who had introduced himself as Detective Carlos Sifuentes, sat to Maren’s left at the head of the table. Young, in his early thirties, not more than five foot five, fit and well-proportioned, he wore a classic dark blue suit and grey tie. When Maren turned toward him she experienced the pleasant faint smell of almond soap or cologne.
Sifuentes powered up a computer tablet on the table in front of him, and with a soft Salvadoran accent asked Maren to recount how it was that she happened to come upon the victim.
It hardly seemed mysterious to her—the need to visit a bathroom didn’t generally require any explanation. But there was the matter of why she, a lobbyist and not on staff at the capitol, was there so late in the evening. And Maren was well aware that for most people, including the police, lobbyists ranked somewhere below used-car salesmen and purveyors of snake oil in presumed trustworthiness. She told the officers about her impromptu dinner with Senator Joe Mathis, of his need to return to the capitol, and how he’d gone upstairs to his office while she’d stayed downstairs.
“Did you know Ms. Barnes?” Sifuentes asked.
“I met her four years ago. When she first came to Sacramento as a member of the Young Fellows Program.”
“Do you remember specifically where and when you met?”
“No.” She thought about what might be helpful to the officer. “The Young Fellows Program is designed to bring the best and brightest college graduates into California public service. They get a modest stipend for living expenses and are placed in legislative and executive offices. My friend, Polly Gray, runs the program, so I’m in and out of their building. I’m familiar with many of the fellows.”
Sifuentes typed as Maren spoke. “Did you know Ms. Barnes well?”
Maren tried not to think about his use of the past tense. “Not socially. Tamara was first placed as an intern in Governor Jack Caries’s office and then became a staff member for him, a legislative aide. She stayed on in that position with Governor Fernandez when Caries left office. She and I worked together on a half dozen bills or more.”
“When was the last time you saw the deceased alive?”
Deceased . . . Alive.
His words were jarring.
“Senator Rorie Rickman’s office, around noon. Ms. Barnes—Tamara—came in without an appointment. She was extremely distressed.” Maren looked down and smoothed her skirt. When she raised her head, her eyes were soft with tears.
“Ms.—” Sifuentes consulted his notes to recall her name. “Ms. Kane,
I know this is difficult. Can you remember exactly what Ms. Barnes said?” “She said she had done something wrong. Awful, I think, was the word.”
She paused as she pictured the exchange. “No, it was they—that she and the governor—had done something wrong.”
Carlos Sifuentes’s eyebrows rose. He typed, deleted, then typed again.
Alibi Morning Sun remained leaning against the door jamb, arms crossed. His dark eyes focused on Sifuentes as though the young officer’s questions mattered more than Maren’s answers.
“She wanted to show Sean Verston something,” Maren added. “Sean is Senator Rickman’s chief of staff. He also started out in the Young Fellows Program, I think the class before Tamara’s.”
Morning Sun turned his head toward Maren for the first time. “She didn’t say what it was?”
His voice was deep. He conveyed a sense of calm that she found reassuring.
“No.”
“Is there anyone you can think of who might have wanted to kill Tamara Barnes?”
In the shock of finding Tamara’s body, Maren had assumed the murderer was a deranged, archetypal slasher, not a person with discernible motives, and certainly not someone Maren knew. She tried now to connect the dots back to the real world, the world she and Tamara inhabited daily.
“Tamara Barnes was well-liked. She was nice, she...” Maren pictured Tamara’s warm, open expression that morning as she offered to review Ecobabe’s cell phone legislation. She swallowed hard before continuing. “Still, everyone in the capitol has someone who wants them dead.”
Sifuentes’s hand hovered over the tablet.
Maren clarified. “It’s common to have enemies here. It’s part of the process of lawmaking—there are allies and adversaries. There might have been a bill that Tamara recommended for veto that stopped a project or cost a company large sums of money. But for it to end in violence?”
She paused before continuing. “I can’t think of anyone. “
* * *
MAREN WANTED SEAN TO tell her what Tamara was referring to when she said she and the governor had done something “awful”.
Her repeated messages to him had gone unanswered.
She could ask Governor Ray Fernandez for an explanation, but it had been at least a dozen years since she’d used his personal line, long before he made it to the statehouse. Even then it had been a bad idea.
After plugging in her phone to charge, she reheated yesterday’s pasta for a late-night snack and offered a little to Camper, a black pit bull Labrador mix who had shown up starving on her doorstep three years ago. Despite reaching a hefty eighty pounds he was still making up for missed meals and would eat anything. Including an entire pizza if he could get to it before Maren noticed.
Maren changed into sweatpants and a faded blue T-shirt Noel had given her on her last birthday emblazoned with an image of the TARDIS, the time machine from the Doctor Who series of British sci-fi cult fame. She brought a comforter from her room and covered herself on the couch. Maren often feared nightmares and had trouble falling asleep, but tonight she felt justified indulging her belief that bad dreams would have a harder time finding her if she avoided her bed. Camper tried to play lapdog. She pushed him firmly down to the vacant end of the large sofa.
* * *
MAREN WAS SWIMMING, holding the hand of the driver from the white sedan, Simone Booth. The old woman floated effortlessly at her side, smiling, her deep-blue eyes—so similar to Maren’s own—comforting and encouraging. Until a persistent drubbing sound started up, and Maren could feel her grip on the woman’s hand loosening, slipping away as the pounding got louder.
Maren opened her eyes to darkness, her palms sweaty, her neck strained. She found she was on dry land, although the comforter was damp and twisted where she had tried to hold on. But the noise was real. Someone was knocking.
Fumbling for her cell phone on the end table, she checked the time: 2:00 a.m. It seemed unlikely that anything good could come from a visitor this far past the witching hour. But Camper, a stalwart watchdog, was wagging his tail and barely suppressing a joyful bark. Maren pulled herself off the couch and asked who it was before opening the door, just in case Camper’s judgment was off.
Sean Verston stood barely visible in the dark—the front porch light was out. It looked as though he was wearing the same black suit he’d had on that morning in Rickman’s office, though his wardrobe had little variation so it was impossible to tell.
He stepped inside, and Maren saw that his eyes were red and circled in gray, his pallor sickly under a day’s growth of beard. His arms hung heavy at his sides.
Sean patted Camper absentmindedly. When he lived in Maren’s back studio, he’d often take the big dog running with him.
“I’ll make us tea,” Maren said, almost at the stove since her kitchen and living room were open plan, only a counter in between. “You’ve heard . . .”
He nodded. She set a plate of two shortbread cookies from the local bakery on the round pine table next to the fireplace and sat down.
Sean remained standing, his eyes shifting from the bookshelves to the floor. “I need to use the bathroom,” he said. He knew where it was, down the hall and to the left.
When he returned, Sean paced the length of the small room several times before landing in front of an abstract painting over the mantel. In greens and burnt orange, it was open to interpretation. Maren thought it looked like trees.
“How did you find out?” she asked.
Sean seemed to notice the table, chairs, and the cookies for the first time. He took one, crumbling the edges.
“Please, sit down,” she urged.
She had endured all the circling and shuffling she could at two in the morning.
He complied, hunched over in the chair, and continued to decimate the helpless shortbread.
“Did you see what Tamara wanted to show you?”
“No.” He put what was left of the uneaten cookie onto the table next to the pile of crumbs he’d made. “Senator Rickman needed a briefing paper. There was a press event, I couldn’t leave. Maybe if I had, maybe that’s why . . .”
He lowered his head, shaking it slowly side to side as though in internal argument.
“It’s not your fault,” Maren said softly. “But there might be something in what Tamara wanted to show you that would help the police. It seems as though they don’t think this was random. Have you spoken with them?”
He looked up. For the first time his tired eyes appeared alert, intent on hers. But he didn’t respond.
“I told the police what happened with you and Tamara in Senator Rickman’s office. Given that she works . . . that she worked with the governor.” Maren had trouble shifting to the past tense, especially in front of Sean. He was slumped, limp, head down. She’d never seen him like this. “I’m the one who found her—or did you know that?”
Sean stood abruptly. “I can’t go home tonight. My roommates . . . I can’t. Can I stay here?”
After Sean had moved out, and Maren had found she could get by without collecting rent, she’d converted the studio into a combined home office and guest room with a foldout couch. She remembered telling Sean about it.
“Of course.” She moved to get the spare key from a drawer in the kitchen.
Although attached, there was no direct access between the house and the studio from the inside—the main door to the studio was on the left side of the property behind a gate securing privacy from neighbors.
“I’ll help you get settled,” she said, heading with him toward her front door.
“No, that’s great.” He smiled, reaching for the key, his color returning.
“There are towels, sheets, and blankets in a basket behind the couch.” She touched him gently on the arm. “Let’s talk tomorrow.”
As she turned off the lights, Maren reflected on Sean’s behavior. She didn’t recall him ever having mentioned Tamara Barnes other than work-related. Certainly nothing personal between the two of them that might generate such a strong response. But she reasoned that the thoughtful young man would take the death of one of his own generation hard, particularly since Tamara had asked something of him that very day which he had failed to fulfill.
No question, she thought, guilt regarding death is a determined partner.
And this wasn’t only death. It was murder.