Chapter 3 – The senator can’t stop killing people

 

Carol Waters hurried down the long hall, the sharp echo of her shoes against the tiles resounding ahead of her like an alarm.

Few moments in her 42-year life scared her as much as this moment did, except maybe that moment after the polls closed and the shocking news filled the chamber full of campaign workers, the sobbing of true believers who watched their place in history vanish, finding the former senator hunkered down in a back office – if not drunk at that moment, well on her way, not sobbing the way her followers were, just as stunned, staring into space, the ship of history moving on without her.

That was bad; this was worse – worse even than the email scandal, and that thing with the embassy, something even the distraction of the press with the current president, the sharks looking for blood in the water, could not keep from the news feeds.

More mysterious deaths associated with the former senator and would be first woman president, but worse than that.

Waters stopped in front of the office, tapped on it, and when a voice gave her clearance, she went in.

Two professional looking people, a man and a woman, stood to either side of the inner door that led to the former senator’s office: secret service with bland faces that neither showed the grim circumstances or fear. Like the palace guards in England, they rarely displayed anything, and were more like explosives, going off when necessary, but giving no hint of when or how.

Waters gave them a nod. They knew her.

The senator’s secretary knew her, too, and nodded, too, her gray hair and lack of makeup hardly the reason for her grim expression. Someone had already reached this office with the news. Waters wondered if they had brought all the grim details, the worst of it, the deaths and perhaps more.

“Can I go in?” Waters asked.

The gray head nodded – a woman so close to the former senator that she’d come to even look like her, a veteran of not this campaign, but all the others going back decades to the senator’s husband’s on the national and even state level.

“She’s expecting you,” the secretary said.

Waters walked through the door, passed the two pillars, whose gaze did not even deviate, gaze that stared at everything and nothing, that expected everything, but showed now sign. At five foot three, she always felt particularly small in their presence, but not nearly as small as she did now.

The door opened, she passed into the senator’s inner sanctum. Two walls of law and other books to either side, and a large desk – if not the one in the Oval Office, then one that rivaled it – facing the door.

The senator looked at this moment even smaller than Waters felt.

If the Senator had been drinking, the room showed no signs of it, no tell-tale scent from the woman herself. But the expression looked the same – a staring into space, vacant compared to the two guards at the door, distracted.

“Why is this happening to me?” the Senator asked, her voice even more shrill than it had been in the waning days of the campaign, nearly as shrill as that night when she refused to come out and comfort her broken followers, though back then, nobody close to her trusted her to go out, fearing she might stumble and look at drunk as everybody assumed she was.

“I don’t know,” Waters said.

“Do you think he did this?” the Senator asked.

“You mean the president?” Waters asked, knowing that the Senator thought almost exclusively about the man, and in private conversations with the publishers of several mayor newspapers railed against him, blaming him for the loss of the election.

“Yes,” the senator said.

“I don’t think even he would go as far as to kill people to get to you,” Waters said.

This redirected the Senator’s attention.

“Kill people?” she asked, looking very puzzled, and in that, a slow creeping concern. “You mean there was more than the fire?”

“Much more,” Waters said, slowly lowering herself into one of the leather seats in front of the Senator’s desk, well-aware that she brought news the Senator had not heard, and died not want to hear, but had to hear non-the-less.