Split Second

roses.'

King looked curious. 'Interesting. She ever say why?'

Tony looked puzzled. 'Why what?'

'Why she liked hydrangeas over roses?'

'Sean, do you really think that's important?' asked Michelle.

Tony rubbed his chin. 'Well, now that you mention it, she told me more than once that to her those hydrangeas were priceless.'

King glanced sharply at Michelle and then stared at the blue hydrangea and exclaimed, 'Damn!'

'What is it?' asked Michelle.

'The longest long shot in the world. But it might just be. Quick, Tony, do you have a shovel?'

'A shovel? Why?'

'I've always been curious about pink and blue hydrangeas.'

'Nothing special about that. Some people think they're different bushes, but they're not really. I mean you can get yourself pink and blue ones, but you can also change pink to blue by raising the pH in the soil, make it more acidic, or blue to pink by making the soil more alkaline and lowering the pH. They got stuff to make it more acidic, aluminum sulfate, I think they call it. Or you can put some iron filings in the soil, tin cans, even rusty nails and such. That'll change the color from pink to blue too.'

'I know, Tony. That's why I want the shovel.'

Tony fetched the tool from the garage, and King started to dig around the blue hydrangea. It didn't take long before his shovel clinked against something hard. And a short time later he pulled out the object.

'Nice source of iron,' said King as he held up the rusty pistol.

33

King and Michelle had stopped at a small diner for a quick bite after leaving poor Tony dumbstruck in his mother's garden.

Michelle said, 'Okay, I'm officially impressed with both your detectiveand gardening skills.'

'Lucky for us that iron is a component of steel, or else we never would have found the gun.'

'I get the gun and blackmail part and why Loretta was murdered. But I still don't understand the point of stuffing the money in her mouth.'

King fingered his coffee cup. 'I once worked a joint task force with the FBI in L.A. Russian mobsters were extorting money from every business in a one-square-mile area and also running a financial scam, which was why we were involved. We had some snitches on the inside; some cash got to them from us-you fight fire with fire, right? Well, we found our snitches full of bullet holes in the trunk of a car with their mouths stapled shut. When we took the staples out, we found cash wadded up in there, probably the same cash we paid them. The message was clear: you talk, you die and you eat the betrayal money that caused your death.'

'So the money in Loretta's mouth was symbolic? The ultimate hush money treatment?'

'That's how I read it.'

'Wait a minute. Her son said that the money stopped comingabout a year or so ago. But if the person was still around to kill Loretta, why did he stop paying? And why would she have accepted that? I mean why didn't she go to the police at that point?'

'Well, it'd been seven years or so. What was she going to tell the cops? That she had amnesia and had just remembered everything, and oh, by the way, here's the gun?'

'Well, maybe the person being blackmailed figured that out too, and that's why he stopped paying. Maybe he figured her leverage was gone.'

'Whatever the case, apparently very recently someone found out that Loretta was the blackmailer, and she paid with her life.'

Michelle suddenly paled and she clutched his arm. 'When I spoke with Loretta, she mentioned that she was in that supply closet, although she never said she saw anyone. You don't think?'

King picked up on her concern. 'Someone might have overheard her tell you, or she might have told someone else later.'

'No, she was killed so soon after I spoke with her. It must have come from my conversation with her. But we were alone on that porch. Yet somebody must have heard. God, I'm probably the reason she's dead.'

King gripped her hand. 'No, you're not. The person who held her under the water in the bathtub is the reason she's dead.'

Michelle closed her eyes and shook her head.

King said firmly, 'Listen to me, I'm sorry about what happened to Loretta, but if she was blackmailing the person who killed her, that's a dangerous game she chose to play. She could have gone to the police and given them the gun years ago.'

'That's what we should do.'

'We will, although the serial numbers have been drilled out, and it's in pretty poor condition. Maybe the forensics boys at the FBI can pull something out of it. There's a satellite office in Charlottesville. We'll drop it off when we get back home.'

'So what now?'

'If someone hid a gun in the supply closet of the Fairmount Hotel on the day Clyde Ritter was assassinated, what does that tell you?'

It suddenly hit her. 'That maybe Arnold Ramsey wasn't working alone.'

'That's right. And that's why we're going there right now.'

'Where?'

'Atticus College. Where Arnold Ramsey was a professor.'

34

The beautiful treelined, brick-paved streets and elegant ivy-covered buildings of tiny Atticus College did not seem like a place that could spawn a political assassin.

'I'd never heard of this school until Ritter was killed,' said Michelle as she drove her Land Cruiser slowly down the main campus thoroughfare.

King nodded. 'I hadn't realized how close it was to Bowlington.' He looked at his watch. 'It only took us thirty minutes to get here.'

'What did Ramsey teach here?'

'Political science with a special emphasis on federal election laws, although his personal interest was radical political theory.' Michelle looked at him in surprise.

He explained. 'After Ritter was killed, I made it my business to get a Ph.D. in Arnold Ramsey.' He glanced at Michelle. 'You drop a guy, the least you can do is take the time to learn about him.'

'That sounds a little callous, Sean.'

'It's not meant to. I just wanted to know why a seemingly reputable college professor would kill a nut of a candidate who had no chance to win anyway and sacrifice his life in the process.'

'I would think that would have been checked out pretty thoroughly.'

'Not as thoroughly as if it had been a real bona fide candidate. Besides, I think everybody just wanted to get the whole mess over with.'

'And the official investigation concluded that Ramsey acted alone.'

'Based on what we've found, they apparently concluded incorrectly.' He stared out the window. 'I don't know, though, it's been a long time. I'm not sure we're going to find anything useful here.'

'Well, weare here, so let's give it our best shot. We might spot something everybody