“Not unless this Glynis of yours stirs the pot.”

“No!” Jake snapped. “I don’t want her involved in this.”

“Sounds to me as if she’s already involved,” Amy said, knowingly.

“That Perez guy warned us to back off,” Jake said. “But Glynis wants to nail whoever it was that murdered Professor Sinclair.”

“What’s she after? What makes her tick?”

Jake hesitated a moment, then told Amy in a lowered voice, “She was involved with Sinclair.”

“Involved? Sexually?”

Feeling ashamed of himself, Jake muttered, “Yeah. They were sleeping together.”

Amy considered this for a moment, then said confidently, “Let me talk to her, Jake. Maybe I can talk some sense into her.”

Brightening a bit, Jake said, “That would be good, Amy. I appreciate it.”

“Think nothing of it.”

Hallowe’en

HALLOWE’EN

With just nine days to go before the election, Senator Leeds threw a massive Hallowe’en rally in the city’s National Guard armory. Everyone invited, bar none. Free food and drinks, courtesy of the Leeds campaign. Thousands were expected.

Jake watched the preliminaries on the television news as he dressed for the much smaller costume party that Tomlinson was hosting at his home. The TV news team was walking through the huge, open, high-ceilinged space inside the armory as volunteers, each one sporting red-white-and-blue Leeds buttons, were setting up long tables while caterers and workers from local bars were carting in crates of food and drink. Jake spotted waitresses from O’Brian’s Irish Pub in their kelly green skirts and off-the-shoulder white blouses. They all wore Leeds buttons, too.

The TV commentator was saying, “Despite slipping slightly behind Franklin Tomlinson in the statewide polls, Senator Leeds is looking confident about the outcome of the election.”

The screen cut to a pre-recorded interview of Leeds, standing in front of the city’s cathedral steps at an earlier rally. He was wearing a dark blue overcoat with a burgundy muffler wrapped around his throat. Hatless, with his thick thatch of silver hair. The woman interviewing him had a knitted cap pulled over her golden curls.

“The polls don’t mean a thing,” the senator was saying, smiling heartily. “What counts is how people vote. And they’ll vote for the better man, I’m sure.”

“Meaning Senator Christopher Leeds?” the interviewer prompted.

“You said it,” Leeds replied, laughing, “I didn’t.”

“But what about this FBI investigation? The Tomlinson campaign keeps harping on the links between the state’s gambling casinos and organized crime.”

The senator’s face grew serious. “Nothing but insinuations and innuendos,” he said. “It’s all a smear, a desperate attempt by my opponent to cloud the real issues of this campaign.”

“Which are?”

“The state’s economy. Jobs, jobs, and jobs. Real jobs for real people. Not some pie-in-the-sky promises that’ll only employ a handful of elite scientists and engineers for the next ten or twenty years.”