"I'm fine," she repeated, smiling weakly. "Finish your fruit cocktail, Mandy, then I'll read you a story before your nap."

She tried to respond to Mandy's constant chatter, a sign of her continuing progress, but her mind kept wandering back to Zee and the damning information she had collected on Carole.

"All done?" She praised the two empty bowls Mandy held up for her inspection. Finishing her tea, she led Mandy to her bedroom. After helping her untie her shoes, she lifted her into bed and covered her with a quilt. She settled down beside her with a large picture book.

Her father had read to her from such a book when she was a girl. It was filled with beautiful illustrations of damsels with long, wavy golden hair being rescued from distress by handsome, brave heroes who overcame impossible odds. Her memories of lying beneath covers or sitting on her father's lap while his voice lulled her to sleep were some of her earliest and most precious memories of childhood.

Those had been coveted moments, when Daddy was home and paying attention to her. In the fairy tales he read, the princess always had a doting father. Good was always victorious over the forces of evil.

Perhaps that's why they called them fairy tales. They were a departure from reality, where fathers disappeared for months on end and all too often evil was the victor.

When Mandy fell asleep, Avery slipped from the room and quietly closed the door behind her. Mona retired to her quarters every afternoon for a couple hours of watching soap operas and resting before preparing dinner.

No one else was at home, but Avery stealthily tiptoed along the tile flooring straight from Mandy's room toward the wing of the house Zee shared with Nelson. She didn't weigh the rightness or wrongness of what she was about to do. It was a ghastly invasion of privacy and would have been unthinkable under other circumstances. The circumstances being what they were, however, made it necessary.

She located their bedroom with no problem. A very pleasant room, it was shuttered against the bright autumn sunlight. The floral fragrance she associated with Zee was redolent.

Would Zee keep such explosive documents in the dainty Queen Anne desk? Why not? It looked as innocent as a novice nun. Who would think to violate it? Nelson conducted ranching business at a massive desk in the den down the hall. He would have no reason to go through his wife's seemingly innocuous desk.

Avery took a nail file from the dressing table and applied it to the tiny gold lock on the lap drawer of the desk. She didn't even try to cover her crime. Zee expected her to check. She had said as much.

It wasn't a very sturdy lock. Within seconds, Avery pulled the desk drawer open. Inside there were several thin boxes of stationery engraved with Zee's initials, a book of stamps, an address book, two slender, black Bibles, one with Jack's name embossed in gold block letters, the other with Tate's name.

The manila folder was in the back of the drawer. Avery removed it and pried open the metal bracket.

Five minutes later, she left the room, pale and trembling. Her whole body shook as though she had palsy. Her stomach was queasy. The harmless tea had turned rancid in her stomach. She hastened to her own room and locked the door behind her. Resting against it, she drew in draughts of cleansing air.

Tate. Oh, Tate. If he ever saw the revolting contents of that folder. . ..

She needed a bath. Quickly. Immediately.

She kicked off her shoes, peeled off her sweater, and slid open her closet door.

She screamed.

Reeling away from the grotesque sight, she covered her mouth with both hands, though retching noises issued from her throat. Opening the closet door had caused the campaign poster to swing from the end of its red satin cord like a body on a gallows.

In bright red paint, a bullet hole had been painted in the center of Tate's forehead. The paint trickled down his face, hideously incongruent with his smile. Written in bold red lettering across the poster were the words, "Election Day!"

Avery bolted into the bathroom and vomited.

FORTY-TWO.

"It was ghastly. So ugly."

Avery sat with her head bowed over a glass of brandy that Irish had insisted would help calm her down. The first unwanted swallow had burned a crater in her empty stomach, but she kept the glass because she needed something to hold on to.

"This whole frigging thing is ugly," her irascible host declared. "I've thought so all along. Didn't I warn you? Didn't I?"

"So you warned her. Stop harping on it."

"Who asked you?" Irish angrily rounded on Van, who was sipping at a joint that Irish had been too upset to notice wasn't an ordinary cigarette.

"Avery did. She called and told me to haul ass over here, so I hauled ass."

"I meant who asked you for your opinion?"

"Will the two of you please stop?" Avery cried raggedly. "And Van, will you please put that thing out? The smell's making me sick."

She tapped her fingertips against her lips, as though contemplating whether or not she was going to throw up again. "The poster terrified me. He really means to do it. I've known so all along, but this. . ."

She set the glass of brandy on the coffee table and stood up, chafing her arms. She had on a sweater, but nothing helped her get warm.

"Who is it, Avery?"

She shook her head hard."Idon't know. Any of them. Idon't know."

"Who had access to your room?"

"Earlier this morning and beforeIcame home at noon, anybody. Mona says they should install a revolving door. Everybody's in and out constantly. As the election approaches, they come and go at all hours."

"How do you know someone didn't follow you here?"

"I kept one eye on the rearview mirror and doubled back several times. Besides, no one was home when I left."

"No clues from the folder you found in the old lady's desk?"

Avery answered Van's irreverent question with a dismal shake of her head.

"She's a strange one," he observed. "What makes you say that?"

"I've got lots of her on tape. She's always smiling, waving at the crowds, but damned if I believe she's all that happy."

"I know what you mean. She's a very private person and says little. At least until today."

"Tell us about Carole Navarro," Irish said. "She's more to the point than Zee Rutledge."

"Carole, or whatever her original name was, was a tramp. She danced in the seediest nightclubsa"

" Tittiebars," Van supplied.

". . .Under a number of spicy and suggestive names. She was arrested once for public lewdness and once for prostitution, but both charges were dropped."

"You're sure of all this?"

"The private investigator might have been slime, but he was thorough. With the information he supplied Zee, it was easy for me to track down some of the places Carole had worked."

"When was this?" Irish wanted to know.

"Before I came here. I even talked to some people who knew heraother dancers, former employers, and such."

"Did any mistake you for her?" Van asked.

"All of them. I passed myself off as a long-lost cousin to explain the similarity."

"What did they have to say about her?"

"She had severed all ties. Nobody knew what had happened to her. One drag queen that I spoke to, in exchange for a twenty-dollar bill, said she told him she was going to give up the night life, go to business school and improve herself. That's all he remembered. He never saw her after she quit working at the club where they shared a stage.

"This is pure conjecture, but I think Carole underwent a complete transformation, finessed her way into the Rutledge law firm, then once on the inside, saw a way to take her self-improvement campaign one step further by marrying Tate. Remember the piece I did several years ago on prostitutes, Irish?" she asked suddenly.

"While you were working at that station in Detroit? Sure, I remember it. You sent me a tape. What's it got to do with this?"

"The personality profile of those women fits Carole. Most of them claim to hate men. She was probably no different."

"You don't know that."

"No? Look how she treated Jack. She flirted with him to the extent of damaging his marriage, but I get the impression she never came across. If that isn't malicious, I don't know what is. For the sake of argument, let's say she didn't view men too kindly and set out to ruin one whose future looked the very brightest, while at the same time elevating herself."

"Wasn't she scared that someone would recognize her, that her shady past would eventually catch up with her?"

Avery had thought of that herself. "Don't you see, that would have iced the cake. Tate would really be humiliated if it was revealed what his wife had been before he married her."

"He must be a real dunce," Van muttered, "to have fallen for it."

"You don't understand how calculating she was," Avery said, leaping to Tate's defense. "She became everything he could possibly want. She laid a trap, using herself as the perfect bait. She was pretty, animated, and sexy. But more than that, someone who knew Tate well coached her on the right buttons to push to elevate lust to love."

"The one who wants to kill him."

"Right," Avery said, nodding grimly at Van, who had voiced her hypothesis. "He must have sensed, as Zee did, that Carole was an opportunist."

"When he approached her, why didn't she run to Tate?"

"I'm not sure," she admitted. "My theory isn't without holes. Maybe being the bereaved widow of a public official held more allure than being a senator's wife."

"Same status, but no inconvenient husband," Irish speculated.

"Hmm. Also, she wasn't sure Tate would make it to the Senate. Or maybe her coconspirator made it financially profitable for her. In any case, once they were married, it was her responsibility to make life miserable for Tateaa job she did with relish."

"Butwhywas someone out to make him miserable?" Irish asked. "It always comes back to that."

"I don't know." Avery's voice was taut with quiet desperation. "I wish to God I did."

"What do you make of the latest message?" Irish asked.

She raked a hand through her hair. "Obviously, they're going to make their move on election day. A gun of some kind will be the weapon of choice."

"That gets my vote. No pun intended," Van added drolly.

Irish shot him an irritated glance, then said to Avery, "I don't know. This time the symbolism seems a little too obvious."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm not sure," he admitted, gnawing on his lip. Absently, he picked up Avery's glass of brandy and took a hearty swig. "What happened to the subtlety of the earlier notes? Either he's testing your mettle or he's the cockiest son of a bitch I've ever run across."

"Maybe he's cocky because it can't be stopped now," Van said moodily. "It'll go down no matter what. Everything is already in place."

"Like Gray Hair?" Avery asked. Van shrugged.

"What about the footage you shot earlier today in Houston? Any more of him?" Irish asked Van.

"Nope. He hasn't turned up since Fort Worth. Not since Avery's been staying home." His eyes were mellowed by marijuana, but the look he gave her was meaningful enough for Irish to intercept.

"Okay, what don't I know, you two?"

Avery moistened her lips. "Van thinks it's possible that Gray Hair is watching me, not Tate."

Irish's head swiveled on his thick neck around to the photographer. "What makes you think that?"

"It's just an idea. A little off the wall, buta"

"In every one of the tapes he's looking at Tate," she pointed out reasonably.

"Hard to tell. You're always standing right beside him."

"Avery." Irish took her hand, pulled her back down onto the sofa, and squatted in front of her. He covered her hands with his own. "Listen to me now. You've got to notify the authorities."

"I said to listen. Now shut up and hear me out." He reorganized his thoughts. "You're in over your head, baby. I know why you wanted to do this. It was a terrific ideaaa once-in-a-lifetime chance to make a name for yourself and save lives in the meantime.

"But it's gotten out of hand. Your life is in danger. And as long as you let this continue, so is Rutledge's. So's the kid's." Since she appeared to be receptive to his argument, he eased up onto the couch beside her, but continued to press her hands beneath his. "Let's call the FBI."

"The feds?" Van squeaked.

"I have a buddy in the local bureau," Irish pressed on, ignoring Van. "He usually works undercover, looking for dope coming up from Mexico. This isn't his area of expertise, but he could tell us who to call, advise us on what to do."

Before he even finished, Avery was shaking her head no. "Irish, we can't. Don't you see, if the FBI knows, everybody'll have to know. Don't you think it would arouse suspicion if Tate were suddenly surrounded by armed bodyguards or Secret Service operatives in opaque sunglasses? Everything would have to come out in the open."

"That's it, isn't it?" he shouted angrily. "You don't want Rutledge to know! And you don't want him to know because you'd have to give up your cozy place next to him in bed."

"No, that's not it!" she shouted back. "The authorities could protect him from people outside the family circle, but they couldn't protect him from anybody within. And as we know, the person who wants him dead is someone close to himasomeone who professes to love him. We can't alert Tate to the danger without alerting the enemy that we're on to him."

She took a deep breath, but it was still insufficient. "Besides, if you told government agents this tale, they'd think you were either lying or crazy. On the outside chance they believed you, think what they'd do to me."

"What would they do to you?" Van wanted to know.

"I'm not sure, but while they were figuring it out, Tate would be exposed and vulnerable."

"So, what do you plan to do?" Irish asked.