“I’m surprised he could see us on such short notice,” Train said to Sydney, ignoring his partner.
She smiled. “Irskin’s always said he’d do anything for me or my family,” she said. “I’ve never taken him up on it, but he’s a man of conviction who keeps his word.”
The buzzer on the prim-looking woman’s desk rang. She picked up the phone, holding it to her ear for a moment, then setting it down without saying a word. “Mr. Elliot will see you now,” she said, pointing to a door on the wall behind her.
The inner office was large, but hardly ostentatious. It felt, in fact, more like a glorified file room than the office of a powerful government leader. Metal cabinets lined one entire wall and papers were stacked in loose piles on top of, and all around, a broad-topped, functional desk. Behind the desk, looking like a cross between a kindly college professor and an ancient scribe, Irskin Elliot sat talking on the phone.
He held up his hand, indicating that he would be with them in a moment, then redirected his attention to the phone. “That’s right,” he was saying. “All fifty states. How can we expect children to learn if they’re malnourished or hungry? The experts say that early nutrition is one of the keys to breaking the cycle, and I want every indigent child to have the opportunity to eat breakfast and lunch at school.” There was a pause. “I don’t care, just get it done!”
He hung up the phone and pinched his nose as though he had a headache. “I just can’t understand the opposition in this country to feeding all our children properly. I swear, I’ll never understand it.” He sat quietly for a moment, until it appeared he had recovered. Then he stood, smiling as he stepped out from behind the desk. “Sydney!” he said, opening his arms. “How are you holding up?”
She walked forward, meeting his embrace. “I’ve been better, actually,” she replied truthfully.
As she got closer to him his eyes narrowed and he noticed the scratches on her face and the bruises on her neck. “Oh! My child! What happened?” He looked accusingly at Cassian and Train.
“I was attacked last night,” Sydney said. “Out in the sticks in Virginia. The detectives—Detective Cassian in particular—came out to help me.”
Elliot looked at Cassian. “Your stock just went up in this office, young man. If there’s ever anything I can do for you, please let me know. You’ve earned yourself a favor in my book.”
“Good,” Train interjected, sensing an opportunity. “Because we need a favor.”
“Of course. All of you, sit down.”
It was a pleasant enough invitation, Train thought, but a practical impossibility in the cluttered office, overflowing as it was with briefing books and binders and papers covering all of the sitting surfaces. Cassian moved some of the materials on the small couch aside and he and Sydney took a seat there. Train remained standing.
“I’m sorry about the office,” Elliot said with an apologetic smile. “I need clutter to think properly. Now, tell me what I can do for you.”
“We have a question about Abe Venable.”
“The senator?”
“The senator.” Train nodded, though he had no clear idea where to start. These were delicate questions that needed to be asked. “How well do you know him?” Train asked to start. Better, he thought, to feel his way into the conversation.
“Well, we’re both products of Virginia politics, so I probably know him as well as a person can really know anyone else in this godforsaken city.”
“You’re on opposite sides of the aisle, right?”
“That’s essentially correct, though that’s a more complicated question than it might seem. As I explained the other day, I’m a Democrat working within a Republican administration, so I’m a bit of a man without a country right now. My presence in the cabinet allows the president to seem less partisan; in exchange, I get the opportunity to help direct policy to a certain extent.” He sighed. “The compromise is that I often have to work alongside people like Venable.”
“Not one of your favorites?” Train asked.
“We’re too far apart politically to ever get along,” Elliot admitted.
“Will he be the Republican nominee in the next election?”
Elliot folded his hands into a steeple as he leaned back in his chair and considered the question. “It’s possible,” he said at last. “The primaries are still six months away, and that’s a lifetime in politics, so anything could happen. But I’d say he’s probably the front-runner right now. Why do you ask? And what does this have to do with the fact that Sydney was attacked?”
“Sydney was attacked after she visited the Virginia Juvenile Institute for Mental Health.”
“The Virginia Juvenile Institute for Mental Health?” Elliot raised his eyebrows.
“Yes,” Train said. “It’s a small mental institution out in the mountains in southwestern Virginia.”
Elliot looked at Sydney with surprise. “What on earth were you doing out in southwestern Virginia?”
“I found out that Liz had been out at the Institute—that’s what it’s called—two weeks before she was killed. She was investigating some awful things that went on out there in the 1950s and ’60s. Apparently, they used to conduct experiments on the patients out there—experiments that may have had to do with eugenics. I wanted to figure out if her visit had anything to do with her murder.”
Elliot frowned and looked at Train. “But I thought the killer had been caught. I thought he was some local drug dealer.”
“He’s still a suspect,” Train said. “But we’re investigating every possibility, and we’ve found some things that don’t fit.”
“After I left the Institute,” Sydney continued, “I was attacked by the side of the road after I got a flat tire. A man stopped and offered to help. Then he tried to kill me.”
Elliot pulled on his ear unconsciously as he let out a long breath, digesting the information slowly. “And now you think your sister’s murder has something to do with the Institute and the experiments that went on in the past?”
“I think it may,” Sydney said.
“It’s a possibility at least,” Cassian agreed.
“But I don’t see how Venable plays into all of this.”
“His father was in charge of the Institute for decades,” Train explained. “If Sydney’s sister found out something incriminating about him . . .” He shrugged. “Who knows?”
“Really?” Elliot remarked. He turned his chair away from them and stared out the window, nodding quietly as he stroked his chin. “I had no idea. It’s certainly a problem for Venable.” He looked at them. “Is there anything else that makes you suspect that Liz’s death is connected to the Institute?”
“Yes, actually,” Cassian said. He looked at Sydney, nodding an encouragement for her to continue.
“Yesterday I talked to a man who had been a patient there before the place was reformed. He didn’t tell me much, but Liz talked to him, too. This morning he was found dead. The police think it was suicide, or perhaps an accidental overdose.”
“You think otherwise?” Elliot guessed.
“The man’s doctor thinks otherwise,” Sydney said.
“And once we found out about Venable’s father, we began to wonder whether there was a connection,” Cassian said.
“Whether it makes sense to look into,” Train interjected, making sure to get control of the discussion before things had gone too far down a particular path. “Whether it makes sense to even start looking into it depends largely on whether a story with some sort of revelation about Venable’s father could actually have a significant enough impact on Venable’s political fortunes to provide him with a motive for murder. Sydney suggested that you might be someone who could give us a read on that.”
Elliot leaned back in his chair, pulling on his ear again as he gave the issue serious consideration. “It’s quite possible,” he said finally. “If it were to come out that Venable’s father was somehow responsible for illegal experiments—something like that might very well grab the public’s imagination. There’s no question that it could potentially have a devastating impact on Venable’s political aspirations. It could even knock him out of politics altogether if the revelations were specific or grotesque enough.”
There was silence in the room as everyone contemplated what acts of depravity could be sinister enough to ruin a son’s political life. Finally Train asked the most important question.
“If Venable believed that there was a danger that someone was going to reveal something that would have that kind of impact, would that be enough to supply him with a motive for murder?”
Elliot raised his eyebrows and blew out a long breath as he sank into his chair. It suddenly looked to Train as if the dark leather had swallowed his tiny frame. “In pursuit of the presidency,” he said ominously, “there’s nothing that some men won’t do.”
“S
O WHAT NOW
?” Sydney asked. She, Jack, and Train were sitting on a bench in the Botanic Garden, looking up at the Capitol building. The day had turned gray, and as the light filtered through the clouds to the west, directly behind the Capitol dome, the building took on a sinister appearance with its mar
ble façade towering over the Mall. “It has to be Venable. Who else would have a motive to kill Willie—and try to do the same to me?”
Jack rubbed his neck and Sydney could see the stress in his face. It was the first sign of weakness he’d shown since she’d met him. “Okay,” he began, “let’s break this down logically. Let’s assume that Willie Murphy was murdered.”
“That seems obvious,” Sydney interjected, the irritation in her voice surprising even herself.
“Maybe, but if we’re going to be rational about this, we need to remember the difference between fact and assumption.” He continued. “If we assume that Willie Murphy was murdered, then it’s likely that Liz was killed because of something he told her when she was out there. Or, if not something he told her, then because of something someone worried he’d told her. It follows that you were attacked for the same reason. The key to all this is to figure out what Willie knew and what he told Liz.”
“The only thing that makes sense is that he knew something about whatever it was Venable’s father did when he was in charge at the Institute. I mean, what else could it be?” Sydney’s exasperation was showing.
“We still need to know the specifics if we’re ever going to get to the bottom of this,” Train said. “We can speculate all we want, but until we can prove something, it’s just screamin’ into the wind. We need to figure out what Willie knew.”
Sydney’s hands went to her face, rubbing her eyes as she bent over. “That’s going to be difficult now that Willie’s dead and we can’t talk to him anymore.”
“True. For the moment, we’re going to have to rely solely on your recollection of your conversation with him.” Train looked at her. “Tell us everything you remember.”
Sydney threw up her hands. “I don’t know! It was a short conversation, and I’ve already told Jack everything I could remember.”
“Walk through it again. The more you talk about it, the more you’re likely to remember, and this could be the key to your sister’s murder.”
“Great,” Sydney said sarcastically. “No pressure there, huh, Detective?” She shook her head. “We only talked for fifteen minutes or so, and he really didn’t want to talk about the past. He specifically told me that sometimes the past should stay in the past.”
“Can you remember anything in particular that he did tell you?” Train pushed.
Sydney racked her brain, trying to piece together the entirety of her conversation with Willie. “He told me he was sterile,” she said, choking out a bitter, ironic laugh at the uselessness of the information.
Train and Cassian both raised their eyebrows. “Sterile?” Cassian exclaimed. “How did that come up in conversation?”
“I think I asked him if he was injured as a result of his treatment at the Institute, and he said that he couldn’t have children.” Sydney caught the look that flashed between the two police partners, and she explained further. “He said they had experimented on him when he was there, and that he couldn’t have children as a result.” She looked at them, but the silence persisted as they digested the information. “He didn’t seem to mind that much. He seemed to think he was so screwed up that the notion of having a family wasn’t a priority.”
Cassian made a face. “What did they do? Run electric current through his groin or something like that?”
Sydney shook her head. “No, he said he was fed something that had been treated somehow. He even said he was better off when they were conducting the experiments because when they were going on he didn’t get beaten.”
“Did he say anything else about the experiments?”
Sydney sighed, parsing her memory for any scraps she had missed. “He got some money as a result,” she said at last.
Train frowned. “How did he get money for being experimented on?”
“From a lawsuit,” Sydney replied. “How else?”
“Ah yes, the American way.”
Sydney ignored him. The conversation was jarring loose something she hadn’t reported to them yet, and she was focused on retrieving as much of it as she could. “It was a class-action lawsuit, he said. He was the named plaintiff. He ended up getting twenty thousand dollars or something like that for the damage caused by the experiments.”
“Who did he sue?”
“I’m not sure he really knew. From the way he told the story, it sounded like some class-action plaintiffs’ lawyer just used him to get a huge settlement for himself.”
Cassian shook his head. “I don’t understand how that works. I thought a plaintiff’s lawyer gets a third of whatever his client gets. In Willie’s case, if he only got twenty thousand, his lawyer should only have taken home ten, right?”
“That’s generally true, but in a class action the lawyer is representing an entire group of people by using one person as an example.”
“What do you mean?” Train asked.
“Basically, in a class-action situation, the lawyer picks a plaintiff as the representative of a much larger group of plaintiffs. The idea is that sometimes it wouldn’t make sense for each individual plaintiff to sue for a small amount of money, so the system lets a group of people with similar cases against the same companies sue together. The lawyer can estimate that there were, let’s say, a thousand people who were subject to the same experiments as Willie. The lawyer uses Willie as his example—what’s known as the ‘class representative’—and sues on behalf of all those who suffered the same way he did. If Willie got twenty thousand, then every potential plaintiff got twenty thousand. As a result, the lawyer would have made ten million, not ten thousand. The only trick is that the lawyer often doesn’t know who or where the other people are.”