The Ferendelli master bedroom had two tall mullioned windows that overlooked the tops of shade trees and beyond them the Potomac. Spectacular. Set up beside the window was a professional-grade artist's easel with the rough sketching on an eighteen-by-twenty-four-inch canvas for an oil painting and evidence that someone—Jim Ferendelli, he supposed—had begun painting the piece. Gabe expected it to be a rendering of the view he was seeing, and in fact it was a landscape. But instead of the scene outside the window, it was one of vast, rolling hills surrounding, in the distance, some sort of structures, perhaps the house, barn, and other outbuildings of a farm.

Physician, inventor, artist. Gabe had always felt that the term Renaissance man was overused, but it certainly seemed that in his predecessor he had found one.

Not the least bit certain what he was searching for, Gabe flipped through the clothes hanging in the two closets, checked the floor beneath them, and scanned the contents of the bureau and the bathroom medicine cabinet. There were the usual salves and over-the-counter analgesics, but no prescriptions. A healthy Renaissance man at that.

In no particular rush, Gabe checked the two smaller bedrooms on the second floor, then entered the exquisitely appointed office and library. The room, perhaps a thirteen-foot square, featured a mahogany desk, oxblood high-backed leather chair, and matching love seat. Finely framed prints, both Renoirs, graced two of the walls.

The drawers of the desk held nothing of interest except three portrait sketches that confirmed Ferendelli's skill as an artist. Two of them, both rendered in charcoal, were of a lovely younger woman with a narrow, intelligent face and large, widely set eyes—Ferendelli's daughter, Jennifer, perhaps.

A third portrait, again in charcoal, again neck-up, was of a somewhat older woman, also quite attractive, with short hair and eyes that seemed almost luminescent even when done in char—

Gabe stared intently at the work. Then he carried the sketch over to the room's only window. The early summer evening light was quite enough to confirm his initial impression that the subject of the drawing had to be Lily Sexton, the woman destined in the event of a Stoddard/Cooper victory in November to be the first Secretary of Science and Technology.

The wall across from the desk and the window was the library—neatly aligned volumes, nearly all of them hardcover and many leather bound—ten feet across and extending up nine feet to the ceiling, the collection was impressive. There were classics: Chaucer, Dickens, Hemingway, Tolstoy, Fitzgerald; coffee-table art books: French Impressionists, Picasso, Winslow Homer, and a number of others; plus several volumes dealing with WW II.

In addition, there were groupings of American and European history, world history, philosophy, and politics—mostly conservative. Gabe opened several volumes, but there were no bookplates and no other indication as to whether the books belonged to the owner of the brownstone or to Renaissance man Dr. Jim Ferendelli.