Murder at the Library of Congress by Margaret Truman Page B

touched him.” She wrapped her arms about herself and shuddered.
    Mac took one of her hands in his. “Only natural, Annie, that there would be this delayed reaction. We get caught up in the swirl of the event, being questioned by the police, hearing more about it on television. Then we go to bed and it hits us like a bad dream.”
    “And so real when you wake up.”
    “Yes, so real. What’s this business about others having died while searching for the diaries?” Annabel had paraphrased Lucianne Huston’s broadcast for him.
    “Nothing contemporary, Mac. There was a team ofresearchers trying to find the diaries in the Canary Islands a hundred years ago. They were killed, presumably by a competing team. And the same thing happened to another group in the Dominican Republic. Natives were blamed, as I recall.”
    He frowned, cocked his head. “I was thinking of something more recent, Annie.”
    “Oh?”
    “Yeah. Wasn’t there a scandal involving the library eight or ten years back? Some researcher there—I think he, or maybe it was a she—disappeared or was killed.”
    “It rings a bell, but only vaguely.”
    “As I remember it, the individual worked in the Hispanic division.”
    Her shrug was a statement: “It just doesn’t register with me.”
    “I’ll pull it up from the Post ’s Web site.”
    “What did we ever do before Web sites?”
    “Haunted the newspaper’s morgue and got ink on our fingers, or went blind looking at microfilm.”
    “I’d better get showered.”
    “Why don’t you stay home?” he suggested. “No need to go there today. You probably won’t get much done. The office space Consuela assigned you will be off limits while the police continue their investigation.”
    “I’m scheduled to spend another day in Manuscripts looking at the Book of Privileges. Las Casas helped Columbus write it. I’m trying to link similarities between language he used in that document and in his other writings that he’s been given public credit for. Finding a needle in a haystack isn’t easy, but it doesn’t mean a needle isn’t in that hay. I don’t want to lose a minute of my time at LC, Mac. It’s such precious time.”
    “Your call, of course. More coffee?”
    “A little fresh, please.”
    She took her cup into the bathroom, leaving him at the kitchen table with his own thoughts. He eventually got up and went to the terrace overlooking the Potomac. The first rays of sun sent its ripples dancing. The city was waking up to another day of politics and pressure, its primary occupations. Like the river, it would surge ahead of its own weight and volition, influencing the nation and world and being influenced by them, preaching lofty goals but falling short of them too much of the time, the most wonderful form of government ever put into practice—and the most difficult to make work.
    While this was happening, he, Mackensie Smith, would go through his planned day, meeting with faculty colleagues at the university, walking the dog, buying the ingredients for dinner that night, and worrying about the wife he loved spending her day at a murder scene.
    Whoever killed Michele Paul, Mac thought, presumably was someone from within the Library of Congress, a colleague or at least a person who’d had enough contact with Paul to want him dead. Of course, there was the possibility that the murderer was an outsider, perhaps someone who’d gained access to the library for the express purpose of killing him. But that was less likely.
    Annabel had said Paul was disliked by many, with an intensity bordering on hatred by some. If he had to bet, Mac would assume it was a murder fueled by passion, a killer with a personal motivation. Passion of one sort or the other, not reason or greed or ideology, was behind most murders. At least that had been his experience when practicing criminal law, and the statistics bore it out.
    But that was simply intellectual speculation. What really bothered him was that if Michele