Guarding Grace. Rebecca York
apartment just off Dupont Circle. She already had a ten-dollar bill in her hand, which she handed to the cabdriver.
“Keep the change,” she called as she hurried through the drizzle to the front door of the converted brownstone. Once it had been a single residence. Now each floor had two apartments.
Her low-heeled shoes clattered on the uncarpeted wooden steps as she climbed to her second-floor unit, unlocked her front door and stepped into the small living room.
When she’d locked the door behind her, she stopped short, her stomach clenching as she looked around the shadowy room. She’d been strapped for cash when she came to DC, and she’d lovingly put together this refuge with more imagination than money. Her sofa and coffee table were from a secondhand shop in Adams Morgan. She’d found the worn Oriental rug and the wicker baskets at garage sales. And she’d rescued the Queen Anne end tables from the alley two steps ahead of the trash truck.
She’d thought she was making a home for herself. Now she knew she’d been kidding herself.
John Ridgeway’s death had changed everything. Quickly she checked to make sure nobody was lurking inside the apartment.
BRADY EYED the security man hovering discreetly at the edges of the room. “Where can we talk privately?” he asked Lydia.
His sister-in-law turned, the taffeta skirt of her evening gown swishing as she led him down the hall to a bedroom that looked as if it could have graced a Louisiana plantation house.
She sank onto an antique curved-back sofa. Brady took a parlor chair opposite her. Her complexion was pale, but her eyes were fierce.
“Let’s cut to the chase. I know John was seeing other women. He’d done it through most of our marriage. That’s why he stayed late at work tonight.”
He answered with a tight nod. John loved to brag about his conquests. Man-to-man. Never to his wife. And then there was the illegitimate son he’d asked Brady to locate—not that John had actually gotten in touch with the boy as far as Brady knew.
He pulled out the small notebook he always carried and started making terse, cryptic notes.
“We had a reception tonight. At the Cosmos Club. He said he wanted to get in a couple of hours of work first—on his autobiography. With that research assistant from the Smithsonian. Grace Cunningham. He’s been seeing her for a couple of months.”
Brady cleared his throat. “And his security men knew what he was really doing? ”
“I assume so.”
“When did he usually meet with Grace Cunningham?” “From six to eight on Tuesdays. She should have been gone when he died. But his staff could be lying about that.” “Did he write her address or phone number in his book?”
Lydia stepped into the walk-in closet and came out carrying a manila folder.
When Brady opened it, he saw a picture of a young, appealing woman with dark, chin-length hair and blue eyes. She was pretty, but she certainly didn’t look like a seductress. Maybe that was part of her charm for John. Behind the picture were several pages of personal background.
“Can I take this?”
“Yes.”
“What about his address book?” Lydia hesitated.
“Would you rather have John’s brother check his contacts—or the DC police?”
Lydia left the room and returned with a small blue book, which she handed to him.
When a knock sounded at the door, he thrust the folder into the waistband of his slacks in back, where it was hidden by his sports jacket, and the address book into his pants pocket.
“Come in.”
“Sorry to disturb you, ma’am,” Giordano said. “We’ll be making an announcement soon about your husband’s death. You might want to change into a dark suit before the press shows up here.”
Lydia looked down at her evening gown as if realizing that she was dressed for a formal reception.
Standing quickly, she took a moment to compose herself. When she spoke, her voice was well modulated. “Yes. I’ll be right with you.”
The door closed again, and she raised her eyes to Brady. “I want to know if one of his enemies killed him. I mean—did somebody send in a woman to cut off the blood flow to his carotid artery or something? You have to find out what happened.”
“If I can, I will,” he promised. He was really speaking to himself, not Lydia. He’d gotten used to cleaning up John Ridgeway’s messes. Maybe he was too comfortable with that role.
What he did now depended on what he discovered—starting with Grace Cunningham.
GRACE WANTED to scream at Karen Hilliard. Instead she pulled off her business suit and pulled on jeans, running shoes and a dark T-shirt. Leaving her good clothes in a pile on the bedroom floor, she made for the kitchen. Because she didn’t want to announce that she was home, she worked with only the illumination from a streetlight outside the window as she pulled the sugar canister out of the cabinet, then started digging in the white grains like a dog looking for a buried bone.
As her fingers closed around the legal-size envelope, she breathed out a small sigh. She was going to need the cash. No credit cards. Not in the name of Grace Cunningham.
Or Ginnie Cutler.
She’d buried Ginnie two years ago. Everybody she’d known from before she’d made her big decision thought she had died in a boating accident. Even her parents, and it still made her heart squeeze when she thought about how her death must have devastated them.
They didn’t even have the solace of a grave site—after all the years of raising their daughter, of loving their daughter.
Scenes from her life flashed through her mind as she dashed down the hall to the bedroom.
She remembered the pink-and-white little girl’s bedroom that had made her happy. Her eighth birthday party when she’d proudly taken eight friends out to lunch. The smile on Mom’s face when her daughter had graduated from high school.
Her parents hadn’t had a lot of money, but they’d showered their daughter with love and given her the confidence to take the road she traveled now.
She’d come to Washington with a carefully constructed new identity and a lot of optimism. Like those first-term congressmen who thought they were going to make a difference. You could check her driver’s license, her Social Security number and her college transcript—from Barnard instead of Brown, where she’d really gotten her history degree. All the documents would testify to whom she was supposed to be. The background had stood up to even Ridgeway Consortium scrutiny. Not anymore. They’d go digging and find out that Grace Cunningham had never really existed.
But before that—they’d check the visitors’ book and see when she’d left this evening.
When she’d escaped through the Pennsylvania Avenue exit, she’d barely been thinking about her next move. Now she knew she was going to have to disappear—again. And come back as someone else. If she had the cash to do it again.
Not that she’d committed a crime. She’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In the bedroom she switched on the television, turning the volume low, and caught the news on CNN.
They were reporting John Ridgeway’s death. But nothing had changed about the story.
So much for honesty in the halls of power.
As she stared at the television set, she wanted to curl up in a ball on the bed and close her eyes. She wanted to wake up and find out the past hour was all a horrible dream. But it was real. Just like the nightmare of two years ago.
Only now a powerful man was dead, and she was a witness. And if she didn’t want to end up like Karen, a secret detainee,