tried a few, but nothing too crazy. It was fun. She was fun. Like I said, she was something in bed, almost perfect at sex. I mean she could really get you going.” Elliott seemed to smile at the memory.
“Why did it end?”
“People at the station found out, so we ended it. We were new to the station, and we both felt it didn’t look right.”
“Did you remain friends?”
“Yes. We actually became really good friends. In fact, I just recently became engaged, and she bought my fiancee and me this wonderful gift for our house.”
Mac shifted gears. “I haven’t had a chance to speak to her family. Claire had been married, right?
“Yes.”
“Must have been before she came here?”
“Yeah. She married a guy named Kevin Daniels out in Salt Lake City. It didn’t work out, lasted maybe a year and a half, and that was it.”
“Why didn’t it work?” Lich queried.
“It was her career. She didn’t want to stay at home and have babies, and he wanted that from her. She always said it was a big mistake. He wasn’t a bad guy. He probably thought he could change her, convince her to do the family thing.” Elliot shook his head, “But that wasn’t Claire then and may never have been. She was ambitious and intense about her career. Shit, I’ve never seen someone so intense about everything she does.”
“Perhaps that explains the DVDs” Mac said.
“DVDs? What are you talking about?” asked Elliott.
“When we were looking around her place, we saw she has this cabinet full of DVDs of her work.”
“That’d be Claire,” stated Elliott, nodding and smiling. “She was very vain and a complete and total perfectionist. She was like a football player. She’d watch film of herself all the time. It’s why she was so damn good at what she did.”
The rest of the senator’s afternoon schedule was cleared. There hadn’t been much on it, mostly lobbyists who would be more than happy to accommodate him and speak with him another time.
He couldn’t believe it. He’d been with her just the night before. She was fine when he left. The first question he asked was, “When? How?”
“She was found dead in her condo this morning,” Hines replied. “The media doesn’t have much, but I spoke with a few people, and apparently someone strangled her. They think sometime last night, although the police haven’t released anything official yet.”
Johnson and Hines sat in silence for a number of minutes. Hines broke the silence. “You saw her last night?”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
Johnson didn’t like the tone of the question. “What do you mean, what happened?”
“Easy. What did you and Claire do?”
“What do you think we did?”
Jordan knew what that meant. However, he was not only the chief of staff, but a former prosecutor, and he suspected now that his best friend might end up being a suspect.
“Did you use a condom?”
Johnson jumped out of his chair and screamed, “What?
Hines put his hands up immediately to say, “I’m not asking what you’re thinking.” He put his finger to his lips and looked towards the door.
Johnson composed himself. “What do you mean you’re not asking what I’m thinking. You’re asking me if I used a condom. Yes, Claire and I had sex. I did not use a condom.”
“So, you left semen behind.”
It was a statement, not a question, and in that instant Johnson knew exactly where Hines was going. Not only had his lover been killed, he might be a suspect.
“I did.” Johnson responded in a soft voice, “But, Jordan, man, I didn’t kill her. I swear to God. She was alive and well when I left.”
“What time did you leave?”
“Around 1:30 a.m.”
“Did anyone see you leave?”
Johnson immediately bowed his head, running his right hand through his thick black hair. “Yes.”
“Was it someone you knew?”
Johnson exhaled, “No, it was someone walking along the sidewalk. I looked outside before I left to see if anyone was out there. I waited until after 1:00 a.m., so someone from the bar crowd didn’t see me. I didn’t see the guy, but I obviously missed him. He passed by me right under the street light.”
The senator realized he was in a pickle. Suddenly a ton of thoughts flashed through his mind all at once. If this got out, what would his wife say? What about the political implications. Could he survive? He didn’t kill her, but it would probably come out that he was seeing Claire. “So what’s gonna happen?”
“We’ll have to see. Assuming they find the guy who saw you, the police may want to interview you. How much they want to talk to you may depend upon cause of death, what time they think she died, who else she might have been seeing, who might have an axe to grind-that sort of thing.”
“What do we do now?”
“We call Lyman.”
Late in the afternoon, Mac and Lich left Channel 6. They drove in silence along I-94 heading back towards Daniels’ place. As Mac hit the Lexington Parkway exit and headed south towards Summit Avenue, Lich piped up. “So what do you think we learned?”
“Well, we learned she’s really well liked and respected,” Mac replied. “She doesn’t appear to have any enemies at the station. She was serious and committed to her work. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, she wasn’t working on anything that would cause someone to want to kill her. Nobody’s aware of anyone she was currently seeing.”
“We’ve also learned she’s a horny little minx.” Lich added, obviously enjoying the more salacious details acquired that afternoon.
“I was wondering how long it would take you to mention that. Elliott obviously enjoyed the fling they had,” Mac said. “But we learned she was passionate, maybe a little kinky, but not into anything unusual.”
“Elliott neutered the details,” Lich replied dismissively. “I imagine at some point he’ll be going through them in his mind again, probably to great delight.”
Mac couldn’t disagree, although he didn’t respond as he turned left on Summit and drove past the Victorian Mansions and majestic cathedrals that dotted the avenue’s landscape. He zoomed by the sprawling Minnesota governor’s mansion on his right and stately William Mitchell College of Law on the left. Three more blocks east, Mac pulled into an open spot along Summit, a block short of Daniels’ place on St. Albans. As they got out of the truck, Lich remarked, “I can’t believe how warm it is.”
It was remarkably warm Mac thought. It was 5:00 p.m. and still sixty degrees, which was extremely warm for November 1st in Minnesota. Might not want to mothball the golf clubs just yet, he thought.
They walked to the corner, turned right on St. Albans towards Daniels’ condo, and stopped to take in the scene. The crowd had thinned some, but the news trucks and reporters were milling around. While Lich was standing with hands on hips, looking towards the news media getting ready for their 5:00 p.m. live reports, Mac saw Green and Clark standing on the porch to Daniels’ place. Mac grabbed Lich by the elbow and nodded his head towards the two other detectives.
In a couple of minutes, they had threaded their way through the crowd, ignoring the many questions. The yellow police tape finally held the media back. Mac and Lich climbed up the steps to the porch. “What’s the status around here?” Mac asked. Clark gave them the rundown, all the people they interviewed and buildings cleared.
