“You opened her Visa bill?”
The woman laughed out loud. “I paid her Visa bill. With her online banking. You think Diane would have had time for that?”
“I thought you just said she was a privacy nut.”
“About her personal time and personal thoughts, yes. She couldn’t care less about her bank balance.”
Of course not, Jack thought, since she kept her real bank account in a safe in her bathroom.
Riley said, “Fine. Open this Dashlane and give us the passwords.”
She looked a bit sorry for him, as if his advanced age made understanding this sort of thing difficult. “I don’t have it—the actual app. It’s on her phone. I can’t guarantee she even used it, only that she paid for it.”
“She only had the one phone?” Jack figured they might as well make sure of that.
“I guess. She could have had a pile of burners for all I know.”
Jack knew all about burner phones, ones bought from convenience stores for cash with no identification. He had one at the bottom of his pocket as they spoke, fully charged in case he got a call from his cousin in Phoenix to let him know that Rick Gardiner—or maybe, now, Lori Russo—were at the police department asking about a cop who used to work there. It had not rung in a while, and he hoped it wouldn’t.
“What’s that?” Riley asked abruptly. He had been staring at a long list of names and titles, blown up to poster-size and hung on the wall. Jack didn’t know if he asked the question to throw Kelly off, a standard interrogation technique, or felt curious. Riley got curious about the strangest things. Jack only hoped he never got too curious about Jack.
The list started with the chairman, committee members, general counsel, regional political director, regional political coordinator, down to directors of the Faith Initiative and the Veteran Outreach and Hispanic Initiatives programs. Plus one that sounded confusing, Chairman of the State Chairmen. “That’s the organizational chart of the party. Why?”
“Surrogates and Media Training? What’s that about?”
She smiled wearily. “That does sound funny. I assure you it’s not some sci-fi androids or something. Surrogates are volunteers who work in their localities to provide expertise and commentary on TV shows, attend speeches or rallies of our candidates and their opponents, ask good questions, and generally coordinate with us to help out in the field.”
Sounded like sci-fi androids might be more accurate than she thought. “Plants, in other words,” Jack said. “Ringers.”
“No—” Kelly argued.
“I was thinking of women having babies for other women,” Riley said.
“Not that, either.”
He said, “I’d want to be the War Room Director. That sounds cool.”
“That’s where the core staff of the party can come together so that decisions can be made quickly.”
“Is it healthy for a campaign to be thought of as a war?”
Now she laughed aloud, but not in a happy way. “The truth? Nothing about this is healthy. What you’re looking at is the people who really run the country. Not Congress, not the president—these people. They set the policy directives, focus the resources, put the most useful candidates in place.”
Her candor might have been due to shock, or impatience, or lack of sleep. Or perhaps she had grown weary of the whole charade, because she went on: “It’s like this. They don’t actually make the decisions—the people in Congress vote for the bills, and the citizens of the country vote for the people in Congress. But they decide what’s going to get decided, who’s going to run, what’s going to be law. You can debate for yourself which is the greater power.”
“You sound cynical,” Riley said.
The woman shrugged, dug a bottle out of her pocket, and shook two pills into her hand, swallowing them without benefit of water. “It is what it is, and this is what it’s always been. There are groups with influence and groups with less influence. Say a million years ago you had five people living in a cave and the only word they knew was ugh. I’ll still bet each one could tell you who was top dog of that cave and who was in the number two slot, all the way down to five. That’s not corruption. It’s reality.”
Jack asked, “What about the combination to the safe?” He and Riley hadn’t wanted to mention the safe or the money in it, figuring they would keep that one quiet until someone wanted the funds enough to admit knowledge of them. But they were getting nowhere fast, or even getting anywhere slow in this investigation. They needed to start making things happen.
But Kelly merely blinked at him. “Safe?”
“The one in her house.”
Still, only a mild frown. She gestured with her hands, sketching a square in the air. “You mean like an actual safe? A box?”
“Yes.”
“Huh. I didn’t know she had one.”
And Jack had to admit she didn’t seem particularly interested in the idea—meaning either she had been unaware of the stacks of cash, or she knew of cash but didn’t know where it had been kept . . . or she was a very, very good actress.
An older man whose tailored shirt did a good job of concealing his paunch poked his head in the door. “Morton’s in. He’ll be here by this afternoon.”
Kelly’s face burst into a wide smile, the first genuine one Jack had seen on her. “Fabulous!”
“Taxes look clean, wife has a job. Two kids, though—gotta put them through the wringer. We can’t have any surprises.”
“Ages?”
“Six and ten.”
“No problem. I can do that.”
Riley said to the man, “Excuse me. We’re in the middle of an interview here. Would you mind not disturbing us?”
The guy glanced at the detective, seemed unable to interpret this non sequitur, and continued speaking to Kelly: “Mark will get you the Facebook buys and the video digital pre-rolls in about twenty.”
“Got it,” she said, and the man left. Jack watched his partner’s face flush to a deeper hue. Not since they’d investigated a firm of financial mavericks had the cops felt so disregarded, and at least the mavericks had been somewhat interested in who had been killed and by whom. Former senator Diane Cragin seemed to have been tossed out with yesterday’s newspaper. But, he supposed, they had little choice—the election dictated that work had to be done and done quickly. The staff probably assumed they couldn’t help solve the murder anyway . . . especially if no one there had actually committed it.
Kelly was explaining to them that they had found a replacement for the dead senator, an assistant state treasurer who had shown talent for community appearances and could deliver a killer speech. They weren’t entirely sure of his stand on charter school vouchers, but he seemed willing to listen. He’d been agitating to run for governor and had jumped at the chance to go straight to a national setting. He would be willing to listen to a lot of things.
Riley said through slightly clenched teeth, “Ten-year-olds need a lot of vetting?”
“Are you kidding? Kids and spouses are land mines. Their exes, jobs, finances, hobbies. Did the wife smoke pot in college? Is the kid flunking math? Getting in fights at school? Cutting? You’d be amazed at how many school-age children are on Prozac. We’re