Capitol Murder by Phillip Margolin Page B

one of the pockets. He changed into jeans, a flannel shirt, and a leather jacket before donning a Seattle Mariners baseball cap. He pulled the bill down before wandering around the parking lot until he found a car to steal. He used the wire hanger to break in and was back on the road to Seattle twenty minutes after he’d turned off the highway.
    It took a little under three hours to drive from Portland to Seattle. Once he was in the city, Clarence planned to ditch the stolen car and get a room in a cheap motel. Then he would withdraw the money he kept in several Seattle banks in accounts he had set up under aliases. He hadn’t lied to Millie about the money. He was well off financially. There had been an inheritance, and his engineering firm had done well. He also had several passports under different names in a safe-deposit box. He would lie low until the initial furor died down. Then it was off to South America to visit a plastic surgeon who asked no questions if you could pay his fee. And then . . . ? Then there would be a world of possibilities. His priority after he was sure he was safe would be to buy an isolated house. In it he would construct a secret room where he could entertain. Spanish was a more melodious language than English, and Clarence wondered if the screams of Latin women would sound different from the screams of his American pets. He smiled as he contemplated answering that question.

Chapter Seventeen
    K eith Evans had been born and raised in Nebraska and probably would have spent his life there if it hadn’t been for a lucky break. He was a twenty-eight-year-old detective on the Omaha police force when he arrested a serial killer who had run circles around an FBI task force. The agent-in-charge had been so impressed by the deductions that had led the young detective to discover the killer’s identity that he convinced Keith to apply to become an FBI agent.
    Keith saw a whole new world opening up to him when he started the course at Quantico, but he never duplicated the Sherlockian performance that had led him to the FBI. His subsequent successes were achieved with old-fashioned police work that involved long hours at the office or in the field and large blocks of time away from his wife. Four years after he became an agent, Keith’s wife filed for divorce, and he found himself living alone in a sterile apartment in Maryland.
    One morning, Keith looked in the mirror and found a forty-year-old man staring back. He was still six two, but he had to wear reading glasses, there were gray hairs among the blond, and ten extra pounds surrounded his midsection. Evans’s career had been stagnating until he became the public face of the D.C. Ripper task force and played a part in bringing down President Christopher Farrington. His involvement in another case involving U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felicia Moss had given his career another boost. But his personal life was still bleak. There had been a few women since his divorce, but none of them had put up with his all-too-frequent absences any better than his ex-wife. He didn’t blame the women for the failed relationships. He couldn’t discuss his work, he had to break dates on a regular basis, and the things he experienced led him to be emotionally cold at times.
    Half an hour ago, Keith had read a bulletin that affected two of the few people he counted as friends. He felt uneasy about having to break the bad news but not as uneasy as he felt sitting beside his partner, Special Agent Maggie Sparks.
    Maggie was a slim, athletic woman in her early thirties. Her DNA was a hodgepodge inherited from Cherokee, Spanish, Romanian, and Danish ancestors that conspired to create a very attractive woman with glossy black hair, high cheekbones, and a dark complexion. The only blemish on her beauty was a faint scar on her cheek, the product of a gunfight during the Farrington investigation. Maggie still maintained a wry sense of humor and a positive outlook on life