But Reeder didn’t make a trip to the basement, nor did he check for Beth at the medical examiner’s office. Instead, he treated his ass to one of those flat-cushioned lobby chairs. He had barely settled in when Beth emerged from the elevator, with Chris Jr. supporting her as she made it slowly across the lobby. No sign of their cop escort.
The son had his father’s sandy hair, blue eyes, and solid build on a shortish frame. Thirty or so, an insurance salesman by profession, he wore a gray suit with a light-blue shirt and a striped tie.
Short, blonde Beth wore black slacks and a black jacket over a black silk blouse — not necessarily in mourning, as she preferred black and navy shades, perhaps because she was just slightly on the heavy side. Her face was heart-shaped with a pug nose and Kewpie-doll lips overwhelmed by big light-blue eyes. Her chin rose as she saw Reeder approaching, then she stepped forward and fell into his arms.
As they hugged, he said, “I’m sorry, Beth. So very sorry.”
“Thank you, Peep,” she said, stepping back.
He shook hands with Christopher, who gave him a solemn nod.
Reeder said to Beth, “Where’s Detective Woods?”
“Still with the coroner. Nice enough young man. He’ll be driving us home. We just wanted to... get out of there.”
“I understand. While you wait, could we talk for a moment?”
“Please,” she said, some eagerness in it.
He ushered her to the terrible chairs and he sat on one side of her with her son on the other. Christopher sat forward, keeping an eye on his mother.
Looking from one to the other, Reeder said, “When I say I’m sorry, that’s not just condolences.”
And he told them about the call he’d received from Chris, and apologized for not following it up better.
“No apology necessary,” she said, eyes bright but shimmering. “What you say confirms my suspicions. It really does.”
“If you want my help,” Reeder said, “you have it.”
She swallowed and reached out to clutch his hand. “You knew Chris, Peep. He didn’t kill himself. He would never kill himself.”
“Right now the cops seem to think he did. But I’ll talk to them. The phone message should change things.”
“It has to. Peep, we had such a good marriage. Never even a speed bump. He treated me like I was still the slim little girl he met in college. Just a week ago or so, we booked a second-honeymoon trip to Europe. Why would Chris do such a thing, if he was in the kind of bad place where he might not be alive in three months to take it?”
Reeder knew that people could crash faster than that, but he didn’t think that was the case here, and kept it to himself.
“Chris said it was a matter of life and death,” Reeder said. “What was he mixed up in, Beth?”
“I don’t know, Peep.” She looked to her son, who shook his head, then back to Reeder. “Chris didn’t talk much about work — I don’t have to tell you about the security business.”
He gave her a smile. “Confidentiality on one hand, boredom on the other. Missed meals and late nights.”
She managed a small smile in return, then shrugged. “Everything seemed fine until a few days ago.”
“What happened then?”
Those big blue eyes were really quite lovely. “Nothing specific. Chris just seemed... preoccupied. I’d ask him something and he didn’t seem to hear me until I repeated it. Just very... distracted. Worried, but not in a depressed way, that’s not it! Anyway, on Sunday, I asked him what was wrong, pressed him a little, and he said something odd.”
“What?”
“That he shouldn’t have looked into that... sink.’”
“Sink? Like a bathroom sink? Are we talking plumbing here?”
“No sink problems at home or at the office either, Peep.” She frowned in thought. “Could it be... a name?”
“Maybe.”
Her chin crinkled. “Now I’m so mad at myself.”
“Why would you be?”
“I mean, why didn’t I ask him? Why didn’t I ask what he was talking about? But I just... wanted to respect his space. His privacy. Now I wonder if he was trying to protect me.”
“When did you see him last?”
“Monday. He said he had to do something out of town Monday night, and should be back by yesterday.”
“Where out of town?”
“No idea.”
“Did you hear from him?”
She shook her head. “Not once. Which is kind of unusual. He almost always called, nightly, from his hotel room, but... I wasn’t alarmed or anything. I wish I had been. You don’t think I missed something, Peep, do you? That maybe he was depressed?”
“I don’t. But if I dig into this for you, you have to be prepared — you might not like what I find.”
She looked to her son and they exchanged brave smiles. Then to Reeder she said, “We’ll just have to take that chance, won’t we? But I’m confident it won’t be a reason for suicide. That just wasn’t Chris.”
“I agree.”
He didn’t share with her a major reason why he felt that way — a cop uses his gun to kill himself. And for Chris to hang himself like that, to choose to die in such an excruciating, non-immediate, self-punishing way? No damn chance.
But telling Beth that would be less than comforting.
“So you’ll do it?” she asked, eyes wide, the eagerness shimmering in their teary setting, glancing from Reeder to her son and back again.
The dead man’s son spoke for the first time. “Then you will look into it, Mr. Reeder?”
“I already am,” he told them.
He gave Beth a kiss on the cheek, shook hands with Christopher again, and slipped out. He wasn’t ready to talk to the detective on the case just yet.
Three
“Integrity is the lifeblood of democracy. Deceit is a poison in its veins.”
FBI Special Agent Patti Rogers hadn’t been in the Verdict Chophouse since task force days. Not that she’d spent nearly a year consciously avoiding the place — it was well out of her normal civil-servant price range — but this was where Joe Reeder suggested they meet tonight.
He had even gone so far as to say, “My turn to pick up the check,” which it wasn’t, but she knew he wanted her to feel comfortable.
Now, sitting at a table in the bar, not far from where Associate Justice Venter had died, she felt woefully underdressed in her navy business suit, white silk blouse, and sensible shoes. She felt like a Goodwill shopper who had wandered into a Brooks Brothers world, especially compared to the living wax museum around her of heavy hitters from political and financial arenas.
Though Joe had ultimately taken the lead in the Supreme Court investigation, he had gone out of his way to give her equal credit at its successful conclusion. That meant a nice promotion for her to head up the new Special Situations Task Force. Now if the hottest young investigator in the Bureau could just locate that MIA personal life of hers...
“I’m Joe,” said a resonant male voice above her. “I’ll be your server this evening.”
She looked up into Reeder’s unreadable brown eyes and that slight smile in which she’d finally learned to locate warmth.
“Won the age discrimination lawsuit,” she asked with a smirk, “did you, Joe?”
And to her it was always “Joe” — she’d learned that the “Peep” nickname was one colleagues had foisted on Reeder, and that he’d never really liked it.