TailSpin - Catherine Coulter [127]
Stefanos smiled at his brother-in-law, sipped at his whiskey like an elegant sloth.
Jack asked Laurel, “What did you think of the FBI press conference?”
Her heavy face froze. “I already told Agent Savich it was ridiculous. To me it smacked of conspiracy theories, which are generally nonsense. It is like saying the Warren Commission lied. How can you disprove a negative? I suppose the FBI will continue prodding and poking about, annoying us until we have our lawyers cut you off at the knees.”
Savich said pleasantly, “I certainly agree with you about conspiracy theories. However, do you really believe, Mrs. Kostas, that your brother took up drinking again, that he got into a car after not driving for eighteen months?”
“Perhaps the senator considered cutting back on his drinking, even spent some time not driving, but in the end, he seems to have been doing both. There seems no doubt about that. Stefanos, Quincy, do you agree?”
Stefanos looked bored. Quincy, in a very discreet one-finger move, adjusted his toupee.
Laurel said, “No matter what the senator said, he would not have called a press conference and made a grand announcement of his guilt. He knew if he spoke up, he would lose everything—the prestige and power of being a senator, all the privileges of being wealthy and sought after, of being endlessly feted and admired.”
Jack said, “And last but not least, he would probably have gone to jail for vehicular homicide.”
“That is not possible. The senator had excellent lawyers,” Stefanos said. “He would never have spent a day in jail.”
That might be the truth, Sherlock thought.
“No matter,” Laurel said. “The senator lived for those things. He did not like to lose. What happened the night he died was an accident. All these theories—and that’s all they are—they sound like those ridiculous conspiracy theory blogs.”
“Jimmy told me he was going to do it,” Rachael said. “There was no reason for him to tell you if he hadn’t made up his mind.” Was that the truth? To say it, flat-out, it sounded so simple and straightforward. She said, “Besides the three of you, he also told Greg Nichols. Yet you still doubt it, even after Jimmy told you the misery he’d been living with for eighteen months?”
Quincy said, his voice dismissive, “I will say this one more time: it was a phase, nothing more. The senator was self-indulgent. He liked to analyze things to death—business, politics, a specific piece of legislation, how he was going to get back at another senator or congressman or staffer who got on the wrong side of him.
“Look, I’m sure he felt very sorry about what happened to the little girl, he had a conscience, after all.”
There was a malignant look on Laurel’s face, a look filled with cold rage, and it was aimed at Rachael. “If you have convinced these three FBI agents that we murdered our own brother, you have done the senator and our entire family, Jacqueline and her daughters included—not to mention the entire country—a grave disservice. You are contemptible, Miss Janes. And no, I will not call you an Abbott; you will never be an Abbott to us.”
Laurel turned on her low-heeled pumps and walked away, Quincy and Stefanos, after one last caressing look at Sherlock, following in her wake.
“I hadn’t expected them to speak so freely,” Savich said thoughtfully, watching them begin to work the room, the tall well-built man whose ego was bigger than his brain, and the dowdy woman covered in diamonds, with her powerful, vicious eyes. And Quincy, looking like a beautifully dressed royal adjunct.
Sherlock said, “Do you know, the three of them have one thing in common. They all radiate clout. Look, there’s the senator from New Hampshire going over to them.”
“They’re a big deal,” Rachael said. “They’re American royalty, rich—oozing confidence, used to getting what they want.”
Savich said to his wife as he touched his fingertips to her ear, “I really like the jet-black earrings.”
“You should, you bought them for me.”
He could feel the tightly coiled