Michelle couldn’t believe she was listening to this, but she remained silent.
“But when you came on board, I thought, now this gal has what it takes. You were the poster woman for the Service. The best and the brightest.”
“And with it came high expectations.”
“Every agent here has high expectations thrust upon them, nothing less than perfection.” He paused and added, “I know that your record was spotless before this. I know that you were moving up rapidly. I know that you’re a good agent, but you messed up, we lost a protectee and an agent lost his life. It’s not necessarily fair but there you are. It wasn’t really fair for them either.” He paused again, and his eyes took on a faraway look. “You may stay with the Service in some capacity. But you’ll never, ever forget what happened. It’ll be with you every minute of every day for the rest of your life. And that will hurt you far worse than anything the Service could do to you. Trust me.”
“You sound pretty sure about that.”
“I was with Bobby Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel. I was a rookie cop in L.A. assigned to do local backup for the Secret Service when RFK came through. I just stood there and watched a man who should have gone on to be president bleed to death on the floor. Every day since then I’ve wondered what I could have done differently that would have prevented it from happening. It was one of the major reasons I joined the Service years later. I guess I wanted to make up for it somehow.” His gaze caught hers. “I never did make up for it. And, no, you never forget.”
9
With the press staking out her townhouse in suburban Virginia, Michelle checked into a hotel in D.C. She used the breathing space to snatch a quick, informative lunch with a girlfriend who happened to be an FBI agent. The Secret Service and the Bureau didn’t always see eye-to-eye. Indeed, in federal law enforcement circles the Bureau was the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in relation to all the other agencies. However, Michelle liked to remind her FBI buddies that their agency had been founded with seven former Secret Service agents.
Both women were also members of WIFLE, or Women in Federal Law Enforcement. It was a support network with conventions and annual meetings, and though her male colleagues loved to rib her about it, WIFLE had been a great tool for Michelle as she confronted issues at work related to her gender. Her friend was clearly nervous about meeting with Michelle, but Michelle had helped her earn an Olympic silver medal, thereby securing a bond that almost nothing could break.
Over Caesar salads and iced tea Michelle was given the results of the investigation thus far. Simmons was a member of the security service that had guarded the funeral home, although he wasn’t supposed to be on duty that day. In fact, the funeral home was only patrolled at night. Simmons—of course, that wasn’t his real name—had disappeared. The paper trail at the company was useless. None of Simmons’s information checked out: stolen Social Security number, fake driver’s license and references, the works, all expertly done. He’d been employed there less than a month. Thus far, Simmons was a major dead end.
“When he came running up, I thought he was just some green rent-a-cop, so I commandeered him and put him into action. We didn’t even search his van. Bruno was obviously hidden in the back somewhere. I played right into his hands. Gave him a perfect opportunity to kill one of my men.” In her misery Michelle put her face in her hands. With an effort she recovered, pushed a forkful of lettuce in her mouth and chewed so hard her teeth hurt.
“Before they pulled the plug on me, I found out that they got the slug out of Neal Richards. It was a dumdum. Probably never get a ballistic match, even if we lay our hands on the probable weapon that fired it.”
Her friend agreed and then told Michelle that the van had been discovered in an abandoned barn. It was being run for prints and other microscopic indicators, but nothing had turned up thus far.
Mildred Martin, wife of the deceased, had been found at her home, working quietly in her garden. She had been planning to go and see her husband later that night with friends and family. She hadn’t called John Bruno and asked him to come to the funeral home. Her husband had been Bruno’s law supervisor, and they’d been close. If the candidate wanted to come and see her dead husband, he could have; it was simple as that, she told investigators.
“Yet why did Bruno scramble his schedule and go to see Martin at the funeral home at the last minute?” asked Michelle. “It was just dropped on us out of the blue.”
“According to his staff, he received a call from Mildred Martin that morning asking him to come and see her husband at the funeral home. And according to Dickers, Bruno’s chief of staff, Bruno was agitated after getting the call.”
“Well, a close friend of his had died.”
“But Dickers also says Bruno already knew that Martin was dead.”
“So you think there’s more to it?”
“Well, she picked a time when there weren’t that many people at the funeral home. And a few things Bruno said after the call led Dickers to believe there was more to the meeting than simply paying last respects.”
“So that may be why he pushed me so hard to leave them alone in there?”
Her friend nodded. “Well, depending on what the widow had to say, I suppose Bruno would want it to be private.”
“But Mildred Martin said she didn’t call.”
“Somebody impersonated her, Michelle.”
“And if Bruno hadn’t come?” She answered her own question. “Then they would have just left. And if I’d gone in with him, they wouldn’t have tried it, and Neal Richards…” Her voice trailed off. “What else do you have?”
“Our thinking is that this had been planned for some time. I mean, they had to coordinate a lot of different things, and they executed it to perfection.”
“They must have had inside sources on Bruno’s campaign. How else would they know his schedule?”
“Well, one way was his campaign’s official Web site. The event he was going to when he took a detour to the funeral home had been scheduled for quite some time.”
“Damn it, I told them not to post his schedule on the Web. Do you know that a waitress at one of the hotels where we stayed knew more about Bruno’s itinerary than we did, because she’d overheard Bruno and his staff talking about it? They don’t bother to tell us until the last minute.”
“Frankly, with all that, I don’t know how you do your job.”
Michelle looked at her sharply. “And having Bruno’s mentor conveniently die? I mean, that started the whole chain of events.”
The woman was already nodding. “Bill Martin was elderly, had terminal cancer in its late stages and died in bed during the night. Under those circumstances no report was filed with the medical examiner, and no autopsy was conducted. The attending physician signed the death certificate. However, after what happened, his body was posted, and toxicology tests were run on the postmortem samples.”
“And they found what?”
“Large amounts of Roxanol, liquid morphine, which he was taking for pain, and over a liter of embalming fluid, among other things. No gastric contents because those had been drained during the embalming. No smoking gun really.”
Michelle eyed her friend closely. “And yet you don’t look convinced.”
Her friend finally shrugged. “Embalming fluid gets into all major vessels, cavities, solid organs, so it’s tough to be accurate. But under the circumstances the medical examiner took a sampling of the middle brain, where typically the embalming fluid doesn’t penetrate, and she found a spike of methanol.”