And realized he’d just said the exact same thing.
Chapter Seven
She looked tired, Harlan thought. Not just tired like a woman who’d had a long day but tired like a woman who’d had a long and stressful life. And he was more than a little surprised when the first words out of her mouth were an apology.
“Nothing to be sorry for.” Rising from his desk chair, Harlan waved at the armless chair in front of his desk that was, temporarily at least, the only other seating accommodation he could offer. “Where’s Zachary?”
“I took him to visit Miguel and Rhonda-Miguel’s the groundskeeper.”
“I’ve met him. Nice guy.”
“Their youngest grandson is autistic.”
Heat burned Harlan’s neck. “Sorry about what happened with Zachary. I looked up Asperger’s syndrome, like you suggested.”
“I overreacted. I’m just a mama bear where my son’s concerned. I should have explained instead of getting angry. It’s just-he’s going to have problems ahead of him, no matter what I do. Therapy only goes so far.” She hunched forward as if the world was heavy on her back. “Sooner or later, kids will start making fun of him because he’s different. He’s not going to have any kind of defense against it. And it’s worse for him because it’s not immediately obvious he has a problem.”
“He has an amazing vocabulary for his age. I understand that’s a symptom?”
“Or a blessing,” she said with a sad half smile that made Harlan’s chest hurt. “I’m luckier than a lot of mothers with special needs children. My son talks to me. He communicates pretty well. If he’s in the mood, he’ll hug me.”
“But he doesn’t respond to most of your overtures, right?”
“Reading social cues is beyond him. He doesn’t know that when I frown at him when he’s making a pest of himself, it means he should stop. He doesn’t understand that not everybody loves horses as much as he does.”
“How long has he been obsessed with horses?”
“Since his first rocking horse. When I took him for riding lessons, that was that. It’s all he talks about these days.” Her smile was wider this time, less bittersweet. “When he was three, he was obsessed with his father’s cell phone. He’d sneak it out of Anthony’s briefcase and play with it. He made God knows how many calls to people on Anthony’s list of contacts.” Her smile faded. “Anthony got so angry. He thought Zachary was acting up and that if he disciplined him, he’d behave.”
Harlan’s heart sank. “And when you saw me pick him up and try to make him stop bothering you-”
She nodded. “Anthony didn’t know, either. Not then.”
“He must have felt bad about how he behaved once you figured out something was different about Zachary.” Harlan had felt like a complete lowlife, himself. He couldn’t imagine how the boy’s father must have reacted.
“He felt bad that he had a defective son.” The bitterness in her voice came as a bit of a surprise. “He didn’t stick around long after that.”
Harlan frowned. “He just left?”
Stacy’s cheeks went pink. She stood up, already turning toward the door. “I didn’t come here to talk about my marriage. I just wanted to say I was sorry and I hope we can work together without letting what happened tonight get in the way.”
He rose with her. “We can do that. How about we start fresh in the morning? Eight o’clock?”
“Eight it is.” She managed another tentative smile. “I’d better go get Zachary before he makes Miguel and Rhonda regret they said they’d watch him.”
Harlan walked her to the door of his office. “Be careful going back to your house.”
She shot him a wry look. “This place is crawling with security. I’ve never been safer in my life.”
Watching her walk down the hall toward the exit, he fervently hoped she was right. But he wasn’t sure anyone on the ranch was safe at the moment, no matter how many checkpoints he’d set up. For earlier that day, before he met Stacy for dinner, he’d gone over the security summaries from the event at the capitol, and something had struck him as highly significant.
Nobody on the staff at the capitol had known what the governor had planned until the evening before it happened. They’d worked overnight to set up the dais and the sound system for the announcement. To get the event set up on time, the governor had to send her own staffers from the ranch-both office staff and ranch staff-to aid with the setup.
About the only way the bomber could have known to set the bomb when and where he did was if he’d had prior notice. Which meant the culprit almost certainly was a member of the governor’s staff, which had known about the event at least a day and a half before the staff at the capitol. Whoever had planted the bombs had to be part of the governor’s staff in Freedom.
And that put Stacy and her son right in the crosshairs.
“YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUS.” Stacy stared at Harlan with a mixture of disbelief and growing horror the next morning, when they met for their first orientation meeting. “Why on earth would anyone here want to hurt Lila?”
“Maybe she said the wrong thing to the wrong person.” Harlan shrugged. “People go off for all kinds of reasons.”
“Not this staff,” Stacy disagreed. “People here would open a vein for Lila. She’s the kind of honest, straightforward and sensible person this nation needs, and we’d never do anything to sabotage her, much less hurt her.”
“And she pays well.”
Heat rose in Stacy’s face. “That’s not the reason I took this job. I’ve been following the governor’s career since I was a teenager in Arkansas. I knew even then she was going to be big news. That’s the way almost all of us who work for her feel. I don’t know how much you know about working in politics, but it’s not the kind of job you do just because you want to bring home a nice paycheck.”
“Fair enough,” Harlan conceded, looking pleased with her answer. “But what about the ranch staff? Could it have been one of them?”
“Lila doesn’t exactly include them in her event planning,” Stacy pointed out.
But she didn’t exactly treat them as potential leaks, either, Stacy had to admit. She’d warned the governor more than once that she should be a little more discreet about talking government business in the stables, at least. Stacy would concede that the house staff were loyal employees whom the governor treated like beloved family. But only the most senior of ranch hands were long-timers. Most of the junior stable grooms and a lot of the cowboys were relatively recent hires, as the jobs could be dirty, grueling and physically demanding. There was a lot of turnover.
“What is it?” Harlan’s eyes narrowed. Apparently he’d noticed her hesitation.
“The governor spends a lot of time out of her office when she’s here. She loves this ranch, and she likes to be hands-on about how it’s run when she gets the chance.”
“And it’s possible she might have said something about the announcement event in Austin within the hearing of one of the ranch hands?”
“Maybe. You’ll have to ask the governor if she said anything to anyone about the event within earshot of the ranch staff. I don’t remember any particular incident, but she tries to oversee ranch business three or four times a week when she’s here in Freedom, so there could have been ample opportunity.”
“I’ll definitely ask her.” Harlan nodded. “Meanwhile, when you get a chance in between your phone calls, will you get me a list of the ranch hands? The governor only gave me names of the office staff for my background checks, but I reckon now I need to go a little deeper.”
“You’re doing background checks?” Stacy blurted, then realized it was a stupid question. Of course he was doing background checks. It would be a foolish breach of security protocol not to. “I just mean-we were all screened before we took jobs with the governor.”
