“What’s a stakeholders’ meeting?”
“Generally, it’s a meeting hosted by organizations with an interest in a bill. A chance for them to check in with the members, and the members to show their faces and get credit. In this case, it was basically a cocktail reception. Food and drinks. To butter them up, really. The energy bill came out of the conference committee on Friday, and the vote was Monday. You heard about that, right? Most contentious issue this session. No one was happy about the timing of when that conference report dropped. It was the last day of the session—August recess was supposed to start last Friday. Everyone had vacations planned, and that made the session drag out over the weekend. Any proposed bill has to be posted on the Internet for three days before there’s a vote. So the House just stayed in session over the weekend to do a bunch of uncontroversial suspension votes and wrap things up while they waited for Monday so they could vote and get out of there.”
Potter seemed much more relaxed—and informative—prattling on about congressional procedures than talking about the dicier subject of his boss’s extracurricular activities. Quisenberry steered him back on track. “So what time did you leave the Monocle?”
“Um. I broke him free about six-forty-five, and we headed back to the Capitol. We got to the stakeholders’ meeting around seven-fifteen. The Congressman was there, eating and drinking, the whole time. Next thing I knew, the police were calling.”
Agent Quisenberry cocked his head. “In the middle of a party, you know where one man is the whole time?”
“He’s the boss. Part of my job is to keep him moving and to interrupt whenever someone is monopolizing him.”
“So you were by his side the whole time?”
“Pretty much.”
“You know there are video cameras throughout the Capitol, right?”
Potter shifted his paunch. “Of course.”
“Because when we get the video, we’ll be able to see exactly when either of you left the party.”
If
they got the video, Quisenberry thought. He knew Davenport might be able to keep it away from the prosecutors forever. But the threat was getting to Potter.
“Maybe we
did
get separated for a while,” Potter said, blinking rapidly. “I couldn’t say for sure.”
Anna had done
her research before coming here. Brett Vale had worked his way up the Hill hierarchy, never staying with any one politician for longer than a few years. He’d been a Staff Assistant, then a Legislative Correspondent, then a Legislative Assistant, to Congressmen from Tennessee, Ohio, Nevada, and Illinois, before Lionel hired him as Legislative Director. He was a reputed whiz at combing through the fine print of proposed bills. As LD, he was one of Lionel’s more trusted aides, though not his wingman. Anna thought that might make Vale the most likely both to know something and to be willing to talk about it. By contrast, Chief of Staff
Potter had served with the Congressman for over twenty years. With so much invested in Lionel’s career, Potter was likely to keep his boss’s secrets.
Anna walked into the bullpen with MPD Detective McGee and FBI Agent Wanda Fields behind her. The big office was crammed with six desks. Stacks of papers, binders, and newspapers seemed to be everywhere. A large flat-screen TV hung on one wall. It was muted but turned on, split into four screens: CNN, MSNBC, FOX, and C-SPAN.
Vale’s desk was the single smooth, clean surface in the entire room. Anna wondered if the paper chaos everywhere else bothered him.
He stood up from his desk, unfolding his long, lean body when Anna walked in. He wore another perfectly pressed gray suit that matched his silver hair. He was apparently too high up the food chain for snappy-casual. Standing with him was his lawyer, a puffy-eyed Englishman named John Singleton. On Vale’s desk was a single legal pad with a long, handwritten list of bullet points in a neat cursive script. When he saw Anna looking at the pad, he flipped it over.
As they shook hands, his pale blue eyes traveled down her body and back up, lingering on her legs a little too long. She wished she’d worn her usual pantsuit.
“I liked your pictures of the Congressman,” she said, hoping to build rapport. “Did you ever think of being a professional photographer?”
“No.”
So much for rapport. She sat across from his desk. “How long have you worked for Congressman Lionel?”
She liked to start with simple background questions to which she already knew the answers. The witness would get comfortable, and she would get a baseline for what his truth-telling looked like.
Vale had worked for the Congressman for two years, he said. As LD, he was responsible for advising the Congressman about legislative issues and supervising the Legislative Assistants who conducted much of the research. As he spoke to Anna, he stared at her with an unblinking gaze. She consciously stopped herself from squirming
under it. She sat straighter and tried to channel Jack’s cool gravitas as she transitioned to more pointed questions.
“Did you ever know Congressman Lionel to hire an escort?”
Vale glanced at his lawyer. Singleton had said nothing so far and said nothing now. Vale turned back to Anna with a pleased little smile. “You’re damn right I did. Everyone knew about it.”
“Whoa, whoa!” Singleton jolted to life, reaching forward to place a hand on his client’s arm. “Let’s talk for a minute, okay?” Turning to Anna, he said, “Would you mind excusing us?”
Chester the intern
smiled at the MPD detective but rubbed the tinted Clearasil on his neck nervously. He sat next to his assigned attorney in the now-empty reception area.
“Have you ever gone up to the Congressman’s hideaway?” the detective asked the intern.
“Sure! We had a Fourth of July party up there just last month.”
“Ever go up there without the Congressman?”
“Yeah, once in a while.” Chester blushed. “Some of the Legislative Assistants will take the key from Jamiya’s desk, bring some beers up, and drink on the balcony. You’re not going to tell the Congressman, are you?”
“He doesn’t know?”
“No way. He’d kill us!” Chester’s hand flew to his mouth. “That’s not what I meant.”
Jack made no
effort to start his interview of Congressman Lionel with rapport building.
“What’s your full name, sir, and your date of birth?” Jack asked.
“Why are you wasting my time with that?” Lionel glared at Jack. “You can get that from the Internet.”
“I’m not interviewing the Internet.”
“Emmett Douglas Lionel, March fourteen, 1949.”
“How long have you had this office here in the Rayburn Building?”
“Dammit, I’m not answering questions that you can answer on Wikipedia. You want to ask me a real question, go ahead.”
“Agent Randazzo,” Jack said, “please note that the Congressman refused to answer that question.”
Sam smiled down at her legal pad and wrote.
“It’s his hour, Lionel,” Davenport told his client. “Let him ask what he wants.”
Jack could feel Davenport’s frustration with his client. Lionel should answer as many innocuous questions as he could and then be able to say he’d been cooperative.
“I’ve been the District’s Congressman for thirty-one years, and I’ve had this office the whole time.”
“And how long have you had the hideaway?”
“This one—two years. I had a smaller one before that.”
Jack had learned a lot about hideaways over the last few days. Every senator and a few powerful House members had small offices within the Capitol where they could work without trekking back to their office buildings. For many years, the very existence of the hideaways was secret. They were the back rooms of proverbial backroom deals and the enablers of some infamous congressional womanizers, such as Lyndon Johnson. Each hideaway was unique, carved out of interstitial spaces in the Capitol over the centuries. Some were tiny windowless rooms in the basement; the nicest had views or balconies, like Lionel’s. All were assigned by seniority. As one of the longest-serving members of Congress, Lionel had moved into his most recent hideaway when a senator died two years ago.
“Who has access to your hideaway besides you?” Jack asked.
“Anyone could have access.”
“Okay, let me put it this way. How many keys are there?”
“Three.”
“Who has them?”
“Me, my Chief of Staff, and my scheduler, Jamiya. She keeps her copy in her desk, but she never locks her desk. Anyone could take it out of there.”
“Do staffers ever go to the hideaway?”
“I throw a party for them there every Fourth of July. It’s the best place in the District to watch the fireworks.”
“Are there any other occasions when staffers go into your hideaway?”
“Certainly. I sometimes have meetings with senior staff there. Mostly Stanley and Brett. And I know the LAs and interns drink beer up there sometimes. On the sly.”
“Who else goes into your hideaway?”
“All kinds of people—other members, lobbyists, the occasional journalist. I have meetings there all the time.”
“Who have you had in your hideaway over the last six months?”
Lionel grumbled as he tried to recall his guests. Jack doubted any of these people would be relevant to the investigation. But Lionel was talking. Now that he was getting warmed up, Jack would start asking him more pointed questions.
Anna and McGee
stepped into the reception area.
“Dammit,” McGee whispered to Anna. “That lawyer’s trying to stop Vale from talking to us.”
Anna agreed, but there was little they could do.
“At least he
wants
to talk to us,” Anna said. She wondered why.
“To you.” McGee chuckled. “When you get back in there, bat your eyelashes at him a little.”
Singleton opened the door and gestured for them to come back in. He looked nervous and unhappy. “Brett hadn’t shared this information with me before.”
Anna and McGee sat down across from Vale again.
“Anna,” Vale said, leaning forward as if they were talking over dinner. “Everyone knows that Lionel sees escorts. It’s an open secret.”
Anna nodded, trying to pretend she wasn’t floored. She glanced at McGee to make sure he was writing it down. He was staring at Vale. When Anna caught his eye, he started scribbling.
“Tell me about it,” she prompted.
“It’s been going on since I started. Sometimes the women would come to his office here in the Rayburn Building after hours. Usually,
he’d meet them at some hotel outside the Beltway. Outside of D.C., nobody recognizes him.”
“How did you know he was doing it? Did he talk about it, or did you see him meet these women?”
Vale brushed an invisible speck of dust off his gray jacket. “He never spoke about it, but I saw them. We all did. When they came to the office, they didn’t look like constituents, frumpy and dumpy. They looked like swimsuit models in business suits, with their hair pulled back, maybe wearing a fake pair of glasses. If he had a ‘constituent meeting’ at the Ritz in Pentagon City, he wasn’t talking to concerned citizens about potholes.”
“Do you know any of the escorts’ names?”
“No.”
“Who else in the office knew?” Anna asked.
“Stanley. Jamiya. The LAs. We all talked about it.”
Anna asked for more details, but Vale said he had no knowledge of the escort agency itself. He was refreshingly forthcoming, which unnerved Anna. She kept trying to figure out his angle. Perhaps she was getting too jaded and couldn’t accept that someone would tell her the truth for truth’s sake. But something about him was just . . . off. In any event, it was time to ask about the homicide that had brought her there.
Jack was done
with background questions. “Have you ever used the services of an escort agency, perhaps one called Discretion?”
Davenport held up his hand to his client. “Let me reiterate my understanding that these interviews are being treated as matters occurring before the grand jury. Any leak of Congressman Lionel’s answers to the press would be contempt of court, and I would expect it to be prosecuted.”
Jack understood that the Congressman was worried about the upcoming primary election. D.C. was famous for forgiving politicians for their flaws and foibles—Exhibit A was former mayor Marion Barry, who had been caught on video smoking crack with his mistress and now sat on the City Council. But there would be no time
for Lionel to put his dirty laundry through the spin cycle if it were aired now, a few weeks before the primary.
“Yes,” Jack said. “This is a criminal investigation in the grand jury stage and thus secret. The U.S. Attorney’s Office won’t release details of it while the investigation is ongoing. Any information we gather would come out only in the course of some future criminal proceeding, if it came to that.” He didn’t take his eyes off the Congressman. “Do you remember my question?”
“You gonna prosecute me for using prostitutes? Maybe I need immunity.”
“There’s not gonna be any immunity here, sir. You are presently a subject of my investigation, along with everyone else in your office. But I can tell you this. It’s not the policy of the U.S. Attorney’s Office to prosecute the johns in escort cases. And it’s not what I’m investigating. This is a
homicide
investigation. If you have information that would tend to clear you of homicide, I’d appreciate you sharing it now,
before
an indictment is issued.”
“Congressman, we’ve discussed this.” Davenport looked at his client. “You know my advice.”
“I know.” Lionel shifted his chair sideways, so he could face the window. He looked out at the Capitol dome as he spoke. “I belong to a gentlemen’s club. The concierge referred me to Discretion about five years ago. I have occasionally met with the agency’s employees over that period.”
This was the first time Lionel appeared vulnerable. Jack handed the Congressman a color copy of a DMV photo. “Do you know this woman?”
“Sasha.” The Congressman nodded. “Her real name was Caroline McBride.”
“How did you know her?”
“Through Discretion. I saw her five or six times over the past couple of years, mostly at hotels. Here at the office once or twice.” Lionel nodded toward the couch where Davenport’s associate was taking notes. The young man shifted uncomfortably on the leather cushions. “That’s how I know her name—a visitor has to be on the Capitol Police list and show ID to get in the building after hours.
The agency allowed an exception to their usual policy so I could book appointments here in my office.”