'Bart Wilkins,' he murmured at last. 'Chicago, Illinois, I think; he was head of a law firm, like Mr Grace, and retired, like Mr Grace. But his involvement in active Democratic politics ended way back, when Governor Dukakis was adopted as candidate to fight Bush the Elder in 1988.
'Wilkins thought it was a disastrous choice… he was right, as it happened… and withdrew from the Illinois party executive.
'Sander Garrett? Yes, that name rings a bell; I remember meeting him in Los Angeles a while back, probably in the mid-eighties. He wasn't a Califomian, though; he was from Nevada as I recall, and involved with the Party as a volunteer fund raiser.'
Doherty nodded. 'That's very interesting. Let me throw another name at you; Jackson Wylie.'
'Leo Grace's former partner,' Savage replied at once. 'He worked for him in the attorney general's office nearly forty years ago, and fol owed him into the law firm in Buffalo. He's still an active Democrat, and a member of the State Committee.'
'I think you'l find he's less active from now on,' the deputy director drawled, with a trace of a wry smile playing at one corner of his mouth.
'How come? Who's upset him?'
'The guy who blew up his cruiser yesterday afternoon, with him in it.
He's dead. My team confirmed this morning that the explosion was no accident.'
'Dead?'
'As a rucking doornail, Rusty; and so are Wilkins and Garrett. They were both murdered in their homes within the last month. Their kil ings 172 .. ok like they happened in the course of burglaries; but they nla nro hits, both of them, as were the Graces' deaths. The Wylie Homicide wasn't disguised as anything; there was enough explosive one of his cabin lockers to have made a good-sized hole in the battleship New Jersey.
'So that's why we're here, my friend. We have a problem and so have there's someone out there who's making serious inroads into the rol of registered Democratic voters. If he isn't stopped, you could start to run out of them.'
'How can I help?'
'We're looking for connections,' said Skinner. 'We have several already from the backgrounds on the victims, gathered by the police officers who originally investigated their killings. We know that these men were al active members of your Party. We know that they were al lawyers. We know that they all worked in Washington in the sixties, during the Kennedy administration.
'But that's as far as it goes. There's something we don't know, something that links al four men together, something that's got them killed. There's nothing in the files of my father-in-law's old firm. We have people asking similar questions about Wilkins and Garrett, but if there's nothing in Buffalo, there's unlikely, in my view at least, to be anything in Chicago or Las Vegas.
'So we're here. You're the end of the road, more or less. We need to go as far back as we can into your records, to see whether they got involved in something through the Party that's led to this.'
The Democrat official took a deep breath and pushed himself up from his chair. He walked over to the window and looked out over the city, back up towards the seat of national government. 'You tried the State Department?' he asked. 'Or the attorney general's office?'
They were questions that Skinner himself had not asked, but Doherty answered. 'Of course I have. There's nothing that helps us.''
Savage turned back to face them. 'In that case, guys, I'm sorry, but I'm don't think I'm going to be able to help you, either.' He paused.
'You are correct to assume that we do store biographic material on our activists, usually going back to the earliest days of their work within our movement. However, these days we keep very few long-term paper records; just about everything we have is on computer. Last week, when I heard about Mr Grace's death, I went into our mainframe and cal ed up his file. It wasn't there; I asked our head of information technology what had happened to it.
'He looked into it, and reported that it had been erased; we've lost all the bios beginning with the letter G, and al of the Was, too. We interrogated al our users, but nobody admitted to doing it, accidental y or otherwise. His conclusion, although he couldn't be certain, was that someone had hacked in and done it.'
He frowned down at them. 'Looks like now we know for sure.'
43
'This is a mistake,' he whispered to no one, as he stood on the dark landing. He had knocked on George Rosewell's door, just in case; there had been no answer but he had decided against taking another unauthorised look inside. He had almost gone back downstairs, but instead, against his instincts, he had rung Ivy Brennan's doorbell.
'Hello, Mr Detective.'
She was tal er than she had been, the first time she had looked up at him in that doorway. He glanced down and saw that she was wearing thick-soled shoes, with high heels. She was better dressed too, in a close-fitting blue dress, and this time, there was none of the waif about her.
'Come in,' she said, holding the door wide for him.
'Are you going out somewhere?' he asked, as he fol owed her through to the living room.
'No. I was expecting someone, so I thought I'd get dol ed up for him.'
'Who? Rufus's dad?'
'No, thicko! I was expecting you.'
'Now listen, Ivy…'
She laughed, a sound as gentle as wind chimes fanned by an opening door. 'Don't get al heavy on me, now. I could have stayed the way I was; no make-up and all smelly, like the first time you came here. Would you have preferred that?'
He smiled, in spite of himself. 'No; this version's more to my taste.'
'Oh,' she murmured, turning and stepping close to him. 'Do you fancy a taste, then?'
'Ah, Christ,' Mario exclaimed. 'I knew I shouldn't have come here!'
'Ah, but you did, though. In spite of al your better judgement, you did.'
His grin was gone; he glared down at her. 'You know fuck al about my uncle, do you, girl.'
'I know that he's dead, because I saw it in the Mail today. That's how I knew he was your uncle, because you're mentioned in the story, you and your cousin, Paula. I know her, though; she owns a sauna, round the corner from here and along the road a bit.'
McGuire gasped with surprise. 'Are you on the game?'
'Certainly not!' she laughed, in a tone of mock protestation. 'I'm a good mother, I'l have you know, and I'm not a junkie.'
'I've met many a working girl who was a good mother,' he told her.
'As for being a junkie, you're acting like you're on something.' He seized her wrists and turned them, looking for needle tracks along the flat of her pale forearms and in the folds of her elbows, but they were unmarked.
When he let her go, she took a pace back from him, and hoisted up the blue dress, showing him the inside of her thighs. 'D'you want to check there as well?' she challenged. 'D'you want to check anywhere else?'
She slid the dress higher; she was wearing a G-string, but he could tell that she was blonde, for real.
'Just chuck that,' he warned her, 'or I'm out that door right now.'
'Are you really?' She reached behind her and, in a flash, pulled down a long zip, and wriggled her shoulders. The dress fel in a circle at her feet. 'See? Not a needle mark anywhere.' Her tiny body was almost classic in its proportions; a little wide in the hips, perhaps, after Rufus, but otherwise perfect. Smal, bud-like pink nipples seemed to wink up at him. 'Want to make certain?' She slid her thumbs inside the black thong and began to roll it down.
Suddenly he was aware that every muscle in his body seemed to be tensed; he could feel them bunched under his shirt and jeans. He could feel them, and more. With an effort of wil he turned, and headed for the
