Cab took a spoonful of soup. ‘When a politician asks me to take something on faith, I find myself becoming agnostic.’

‘I’m a lawyer, too,’ Ramona said with a ghost of a smile. ‘Does that help?’

‘Even worse.’

‘Here’s what I can tell you. I’ve been kept apprised of these so-called threats against Diane. The FBI doesn’t believe they can substantiate their veracity.’

‘In other words, it’s just a bunch of crackpots.’

‘That’s one possibility,’ she said. ‘Another possibility is that people at the Common Way Party have manufactured the threats. They may not be real at all.’

‘You obviously don’t like the people at Common Way,’ Cab said. ‘This couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that Diane is pummeling you in the polls, could it?’

Ramona took a small bite of her sandwich and dabbed at her lips with the cloth napkin. She ate slowly, like a woman in no hurry. ‘If you read the papers, you know that the spread in the polls is no more than a few points. Hardly pummeling.’

‘Even so, I’m surprised you would take the threats lightly, given what happened to Birch Fairmont.’

She took his measure, the way a woman sizes up a man. Solid or not solid. Fake or sincere. Deep or shallow. ‘May I speak confidentially, Cab?’

‘By all means,’ he said.

‘I’m sure you know that before I was elected, I was a criminal attorney. I built a statewide reputation by taking on high-profile cases that received a great deal of media attention. That included Hamilton Brock and the Liberty Empire Alliance. Not a case that my political enemies will allow me to forget. Obviously, I won’t say anything about the specifics of the legal matters, but I will tell you my personal belief that the threat from the Alliance was over-blown in the media. Ogden Bush oversold them as radical domestic terrorists, and he had a specific political purpose in mind, namely, helping the Democrats. However, Brock and his associates were mostly paranoid blowhards who loved guns and spouted off about imaginary government plots. We’re talking about plumbers and realtors. There were some thuggish characters among them perhaps, but not assassins.’

Cab thought about Brock in prison. He wasn’t convinced that the man was a paper tiger. He also thought about Rufus Twill, with his limp and his one eye. The Alliance wasn’t afraid of violence.

‘So who killed Birch Fairmont?’ Cab asked.

‘I have no idea.’

‘Then why do you assume the same person couldn’t be targeting Diane?’