Veering to the more sympathetic audience, Wiley looked at Maggi. “She drowned?”
“Someone would like to have us believe that,” Patrick interjected, his eyes never leaving the man’s face.
Confusion returned. “Then she didn’t drown? She’s alive?”
“Oh, she’s dead all right,” Patrick confirmed emotionlessly. “But she didn’t die in the river. She died sometime before that.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither do we. For the moment.” Patrick pinned him with a look. “Where were you last night, Congressman, if you don’t mind my asking?”
The congressman’s friendly expression faded. “If you’re suggesting what I think you’re suggesting, I do mind your asking.”
“Just doing our job, Congressman,” Maggi interjected smoothly, her manner respectful. “Pulling together pieces of a puzzle. It might help us find Ms. Styles’s killer if we could reconstruct the evening.”
“Yes, of course. Sorry,” he apologized to Patrick. “This has me a little rattled. I never knew anyone who was a murder victim before. I was at a political fund-raiser at the Hyatt Hotel.” He looked at Patrick and added, “With several hundred other people.”
“Was Ms. Styles there?” Maggi prodded gently.
“I imagine so, although I really couldn’t say for certain. All of my staff was invited,” he explained.
“Looks like those several hundred people certainly didn’t help keep her alive, did they?” Patrick asked.
“If we could get a guest list, that would be very helpful. Could you tell us who was in charge of putting the fund-raiser together?” Maggi felt as if she was tap-dancing madly to exercise damage control.
“Of course. That would be Leticia Babcock.” Picking up a pen, Wiley wrote down the name of the organization the woman worked for. Finished, he handed the paper to Maggi. He glanced at Patrick, but his words were directed to the woman before him. “Anything I can do, you only have to ask.”
Patrick took the slip of paper from Maggi and tucked it into his pocket. His eyes never left the congressman’s face. “Count on it.”
Chapter 5
Hurrying to catch up to her partner, Maggi pulled the collar of her jacket up. It began to mist. The weather lately had been anything but ideal.
“You get more flies with honey than with vinegar, Cavanaugh.”
Patrick reached his car and unlocked the driver’s side. He looked at her over the roof. “I’m not interested in getting flies, Mary Margaret, I’m interested in getting a killer.”
She blew out a breath as she got in on her side. “I wish you’d stop calling me that.”
Patrick closed the door and flipped on the headlights. The sun had decided to hide behind dark clouds. They were in for a storm. “It’s your name, isn’t it?”
Her father had named her after his two sisters. She wished he’d been born an only child. “Yes it is. That doesn’t mean I like hearing it—” Maggi turned in her seat to glare at him as she delivered the last word “—Pat.”
The nickname she tossed at him was fraught with bad memories. Only his father had ever called him that, when the old man was especially drunk and reveling in the whole myth of “Pat and Mike,” something Patrick gathered had come by way of a collection of Irish stories about two best friends. According to Uncle Andrew, a number of Irish-flavored jokes began that way, as well. In any case, he and his father didn’t remotely fit the description of two friends, and it was only when he was in a drunken haze that his father could pretend that he’d created a home life for his family. In reality, home life was just barely short of a minefield, ready to go off at the slightest misstep.
Maggi sighed, trying to regain some ground. “All I’m saying is that the congressman was a great deal more cooperative when you weren’t glaring at him.”
He started up the car and got back on the road. “That’s what you’re here for, right? To win him over with your sunny disposition.”
“Attila the Hun’s disposition could be called sunny compared to yours.”
To her surprise, she heard Patrick laugh softly to himself. “Looks like our first day isn’t going very well, is it?”
She trod warily, afraid of being set up. “Could be better,” she allowed. Maggi caught his grin out of the side of her eye.
“It’ll get worse.”
“If you’re trying to get me to bail out, you’re wasting your time.”
“And why is that? Why are you so determined to work with me?” he wanted to know.
“You mean other than your sparkling personality, charm and wit?” She saw his expression darken another shade. The man could have posed for some kind of gothic novel, the kind given to sensuality. He’d be damn good-looking if he wasn’t into scaring people off. Upbraiding herself, she curtailed her own impulse toward sarcasm. “I was assigned to you, Cavanaugh, and I don’t back away from my assignments, no matter how much of a pain in the butt they might be.”
Maggi watched his eyes in the rearview mirror. Instead of becoming incensed, he looked as if he was considering her words. “Fair enough.”
She knew she should let it go, but she couldn’t. A door had opened, and she didn’t know when it could be opened again. She needed to move as much as she could through it.
“No, what’s fair is if you give me a chance here,” she told him tersely. “I’ve shown you that I don’t fall apart in tense situations and that I’m a dead shot and all in under eight hours. If you were anyone else, that would definitely tip the scales way in my favor.”
The woman could get impassioned when she wanted to. That was a minus. He’d always found that emotion got in the way of things. “I’m not anyone else.”
She sank into her seat. “So I’ve been told.”
Something in her tone worked its way under his skin, made half thoughts begin to form. It took a little effort on his part to ignore them. He had no idea why. “Make the best of it, Mary Margaret. What you see is what you get.”
Not hardly. If that were the case, then there would be no need for her to go undercover to investigate the allegations Halliday had received from an anonymous source. The allegations that made Cavanaugh out to be a dirty cop on the take.
Even if she wasn’t on the job, just one look would have told her that what you saw was definitely not what you got when it came to Patrick Cavanaugh.
Their next stop was the offices of Babcock and Anderson, which organized and handled the arrangements for fund-raisers of all types. The professional firm was run by Leticia Babcock, president and sole owner. There was no Anderson.
“I thought it sounded more aesthetically pleasing to have two names on the card,” Leticia Babcock, a tall, slim woman in her mid-thirties informed them when they asked after the whereabouts of her partner. “Makes it sound as if the company has been around for ages.” Because they’d requested to see the guest list, she scrolled through her records as she spoke to them. “Ah, here it is.” She beamed. Stopping, she tapped the screen with a curved, flame-red nail. “We raised more than was originally hoped for. The gala was an amazingly rousing success. The congressman was very pleased.”
Maggi could all but see the dollar signs in the other woman’s eyes. “Congressman Wiley?”
“Yes.” The dark-haired woman