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in quick waves. He could feel sleep coming on and tried to fight the tide as it swept over him. The pain was less than he would have expected and he thought about his friendship with Frank. Their early races together. That campaign in Trenton when Frank was so scared. They were like brothers. Then. Now. Brothers forgave each other, he hoped.
    He tried to move again, tried to focus.
    He listened to the man who had just shot him enter his office next door and begin rifling through his papers. He was searching for something—opening drawers and closing them. Then Woody remembered where he’d seen the man before. He’d delivered flowers to Linda, beautiful flowers, just the other day.

 
     
     
     
    Chapter 11
     
     
    Frank stood in the rain, staring at the building from a distance. He was smoking a cigarette and feeling dizzy.
    His office was once the home of a very important person, but he couldn’t think of who just now. Frank told friends that he and Woody bought the old building because of its close proximity to their clients. Members of the House, Senate, even the White House this term. He told them that he liked working in a place where it was impossible to forget the past. A living history everywhere you looked....
    Frank’s eyes drifted away from the building and lingered on the coroner’s van in the parking lot. He noticed a man in a suit and raincoat cross the street and begin walking toward him. After a few moments, the man reached him, his face hidden in the gloom.
    “You the one who called?” Frank asked.
    The man nodded. “Detective Randolph, Mr. Miles.”
    The detective’s voice matched the one Frank had heard when he checked his voice mail from the hotel bar after the fund-raiser. The voice had sounded clear and steady as he listened to the message over the phone: there had been a problem and he should come down to his office as soon as possible .
    The detective stepped beneath the street light. Probably fifty, the color of his skin reminded Frank of newly finished mahogany. He was graying at the temples, his coarse, wiry hair cropped short and even.
    “What happened?” Frank asked.
    Randolph shrugged. “It looks as if you’ve been robbed.”
    Cars were pulling up to the curb, people with cameras—the press had arrived.
    Frank glanced at the coroner’s van, then turned back to Randolph. Crossing the street, he stepped over the yellow crime scene tape and walked with the detective toward his office. As he got rid of his smoke and entered the building, he heard the fire go out when it hit the wet pavement. Randolph was on his heels. He could feel the detective measuring him, his eyes working over his face as they climbed the stairs.
    The door was open. All the lights were on.
    They passed the reception area and stepped into the war room. Frank had always called it the war room because this was where most campaigns were won or lost. On the second floor, sealed from prying eyes. Now there were cops, mostly crime scene techs, going through the clutter on the desks and worktables. Tracy’s desk sat beneath a huge wall board charting their client’s progress through election day. A drawer was open. Frank saw a photographer getting it on film and turned away. Everything in the office was confidential. Until now, he thought.
    He looked around, trying to sort through the confusion. His own door was closed, but he could see two men in Woody’s office wearing dark blue jump suits and hair nets, placing papers, a coffee cup, the contents of an ashtray into plastic bags and marking them as evidence.
    Then Frank’s door swung open and a woman from the coroner’s office stepped out and went downstairs. Behind her, he saw Woody lying on the carpet with a gun in his hand. There was a lot of blood. More than he had ever seen. And Woody’s eyes remained open, lost and vacant like last week’s catch of the day.
    Frank shuddered, steadying himself against a cabinet and feeling light-headed again. He thought he