at the head of the table, his eyes constantly roaming.
As far as he could tell nothing had happened in . here. Time d progress
was not coming easily was slipping by an gh the heavy outside the sun
momentarily pushed throu He wouldn’t clouds and Frank got his first
break on the case.
have noticed it if he hadn’t been admiring the moldings around the
ceiling. His father had been a carpenter. Joints smooth as a baby’s
cheek.
That’s when he observed the rainbow dancing across the ceiling. As he
admired the parallels of color, he began to wonder about its source,
like the folklore of tracking the pot of gold at the end of the striped
apparition. His eye scanned the room. It took him a few seconds, but
then he had it. He quickly knelt down beside the table and peered under
one of the legs. The table was a Sheraton, Eighteenth Century, which
meant it was as heavy as a semi. It took him two tries, and perspiration
broke across his forehead, a trickle entering his right eye and making
him tear for a moment, but he finally managed to budge the table and
pull it out.
He sat back down and looked at his new possession, maybe his little pot
of gold. The little piece of silver-colored material acted as a barrier
between the furniture to prevent the wet carpet from causing damage to
wood or upholstery and also stopped leaching into the damp fibers. With
the aid of sunlight, its reflective surface also made for a nice
rainbow. He had had similar ones in his own house when his wife had
gotten particularly nervous about a visit from her in-laws and decided
some serious household cleaning had to be done.
He took out his notebook. The servants arrived at Dulles at ten tomorrow
morning. Frank doubted in this house if the small piece of foil he was
holding would have been allowed to remain in its resting place for very
long. It could be nothing. It could be everything. A perfect way to
gauge the lay of the land. It would probably fall somewhere in between,
if he were very, very lucky.
He hit the floor again and sniffed the carpet, ran his fingers through
the fibers. The stuff they used nowadays, you could never tell. No odor,
dried in a couple of hours. He would know soon enough how long it had
been; if it could tell him anything. He could call Sullivan, but for
some reason, he wanted to hear it from someone other than the master of
the house. The old man was not high on the list of suspects, but Frank
was smart enough to realize that Sullivan remained on that list. Whether
his place descended or ascended depended on what Frank could find out
today, tomorrow, next week. When you boiled it down, it was that simple.
That was good, because up to now nothing about the death of Christine
Sullivan had been simple. He wandered out of the room, thinking about
the whimsical nature of rainbows and police investigations in general.
BuRTON SCANNED THE CROWD, COLLIN BESIDE HIM. ALAN Richmond made his way
to the informal podium set up on the steps of the Middleton Courthouse,
a broad block of mortar-smeared brick, stark white dentil moldings,
weatherbeaten cement steps and the ubiquitous American flag alongside
its Virginia counterpart swooping and swirling in the morning breeze.
Precisely at nine-thirty-five the President began to speak. Behind him
stood the craggy and expressionless Walter Sullivan with -the ponderous
Herbert Sanderson Lord beside him.
Collin moved a little closer to the crowd of reporters at the bottom of
the courthouse steps as they strained and positioned like opposing teams
of basketball players waiting for the foul shot to swish or bang off the
rim. He had left the Chief of Staff’s home at three in the morning. What
a night it had been. What a week it had been. As ruthless and unfeeling
as Gloria Russell seemed in public life, Collin had seen another side of
the woman, a side that he was strongly attracted to. It still seemed
like a careless daydream. He had slept with the President’s Chief of