Missing Member; A Me and Mr. Jones Mystery

by Jo-Ann Power

• ISBN13: 9780312357993
• ISBN10: 0312357990
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2006-09-19
• Publisher: St. Martin's Minotaur

Summary

Few Americans remember these days that politicscanbe funny. But Texas congresswoman Carly Wagner knows this firsthand. She won her first election delivering one-liners about her opponent that made people chuckle so hard they voted herinto his seat. She won not only because she could outtalk her rival but also because she wasn't shy about employing her sexy contralto, big baby browns, and the long legs that once got her the crown of Miss Texas. She doesn't apologize for her methods, either---in the Lone Star State, sassy women have always plowed tough ground to get what they want. Although she currently sleeps alone, professionally, Carly knows politics can make strange bedfellows. But when she walks into her office one morning and finds her party's second most powerful man murdered in her office chair, she finds out that politics can also be deadly serious. Someone has to find the culprit before this capital crime kills Carly's prospects for reelection. Resourceful and gutsy, she wants to go it alone, but her party can't take that chance. When they send in the cavalry, she can't believe the kind of man they choose. He's young, yummy, and lethal. He calls himself Mr. Jones, owns toys like Mr. Bond---and acts like Mr. Corleone. He's one of the town's secret weapons of mass destruction---and she wants nothing to do with him. Then she wants to do everything with him. Missing Memberis the first in a vastly entertaining new series featuring the crime-solving duo of Congresswoman Carly and the delectable Mr. Jones.

Author Biography

Take a lifelong Washingtonian, drop her deep in the heart of Texas, and you get a gal with a yen to spin a yarn about the two places she knows best. Jo-Ann Power, who used to work on Capitol Hill in Washington, began to write Missing Member after she moved to San Antonio. Creating a spunky congresswoman in a heap of trouble, Power realized she could tell a tall tale---not forgetting tall, dark, and handsome---and chuckle as she wrote. She is the author of sixteen popular romance and suspense novels, including Never Say Never and Allure. This is her first novel in the Me and Mr. Jones series; the second will be coming soon from Thomas Dunne Books. For more information, please visit her Web site at www.jo-annpower.com.

Excerpts

Chapter One 
It’s easy to wish the womanizer with a zipper problem would one day wind up with his dick in his hand. But when the guy is one you’ve dated, with news-hour name recognition, and he’s gracing your office chair one morning with a bloody hole in his chest, your letter opener in one hand, and his severed penis in the other, you wish you’d never been so bold.
 
You ask yourself, calmly, while your mind does the whirling dervish thing before you call the guard at the front desk, Did I ever say out loud I wanted this guy on a slab?
 
Did I ever voice this to a friend? No, I shake my head, doubtful mostly because my closest friend died in ’96 and I don’t take time to make new ones.
 
Would I ever say this to a colleague? No. I would have to have downed half a dozen body shots of Herradura Silver to rage on someone like that. True, anyone on my staff might imprudently blurt out I could kill a man at twenty yards with my stare, but no, I don’t do straight shots of tequila like I used to when I was young, loco, and unknown, with nothing to lose but my virginity.
 
I take a step closer to the body. Whoa, there. Death definitely smells like stale fish. And it doesn’t provide a flattering photo op, either. Alistair Dunhill, once a six-foot-nine black-haired powerhouse with a year-round tan and blinding Brite Smile teeth, slumps without pride or dignity in my overstuffed, old oak chair. With head sloping over to one shoulder, his skin the color of paste, he’d be horrified to see himself, perfectionist that he once was. His mouth lies slack, with pink froth drooling out one side onto his crisp white shirt collar. His Armani suit coat is open. A dark red splotch marks his shirt on the right above his belly, the only flaccid part of him. His shirttails frame his open fly, gaping wide to reveal pale skin and a few short and curlies. Blood, dark and dry, encrusts the zipper.
 
I slap a hand over my mouth and gag, but, ghoul that I am, I move in for a closer look. His big onyx eyes are wide open, milky in death, and gazing . . . or rather, not, but pointing toward the skyline.
 
I get down to his level, something I repeatedly refused to do when he was living, and face the way he is, squinting at the detail. The view is the office building across the street. Its gray gaping windows stare back, most of the blinds still down. At five forty-five a.m. in this nose-to-the-grindstone town, the worker bees have not yet begun to swarm into their hives.
 
Thanking God, Buddha, and Allah (I pray at the altar of political correctness), I stride to the window. Lower the shade. On the second yank of the cord, I lift my hands, splay my fingers, then curl them like a burn victim. I shouldn’t have touched that and left my prints and perspiration and whatever else forensics pros collect from scenes like this.
 
I wipe my hands on my skirt while my blood pressure climbs the charts. Dizzy does not become me. Get it together, Carly. You need to be centered when the police start to ask questions—and you will need to be firmly in command of your army when Katie Couric tries to break this story like morning eggs all over the seven o’clock news.
 
I take two steps to my briefcase, still standing like a soldier where my fingers dropped it to the carpet upon discovering Alistair in my chair. I dig out my cell phone. Punch in the number for the front desk. And breathe.
 
The guard picks up. I identify myself. What do I say? Look, Harry. Small problemo. I have a dead man in my office. In my office chair, my inner office, Harry.
 
Who the hell knows what I say, but it must be something like that because Harry at first is speechless. I envision him, groping like a guppy. Good. I am not alone. Always have allies.
 
He mutters something that sounds like a curse and then enunciates so slowly that he implies my IQ logs in at cretin. “Don’t touch anything. Don’t do anything. And do not make or take any phone calls.”
 
Oh, don’t worry. I’d prefer to do the Three Monkeys on this one: See, hear, and definitely speak no evil. My personal fave would be to turn around, drive home, and crawl back between the sheets. I could pull them over my head and tell myself that the day has not begun. Dunhill is not clutching his cigar-sized penis, not holding the shiny silver murder weapon tipped with blood, not soaking my chair with his bodily fluids. I am not involved. I could even call in and declare I am just working from home today!
 
In a rat’s eye, I could.
 
Denial is one psychological trait I used to get into big-time. Like a bubble bath. But I reformed years ago in the interest of keeping my job—and excelling at it. Wallowing now during the daylight only in projections, budget numbers, and press releases, I do tai chi to relieve tension. But when fatigue sets in, I turn on my patio lights and dig at night in the dirt of my backyard garden, burying seeds and bulbs along with any remaining frustrations. The result is I tend a disgustingly overcrowded English garden. Surveying Alistair, I predict that tonight I’ll be planting enough seeds to regrow the Amazon jungle.
 
I curse. Then clamp the phone closed, drop it back in my briefcase.
 
I study Alistair.
 
What the hell is he doing in my inner office, in my chair? Why not outside in my receptionist’s?
 
I circle my desk.
 
Alistair could have picked any one of the other offices on this hall to die in. Or how about in his own office chair?
 
But he did not pick, did he?
 
Someone did it for him.
 
They chose the place. Mine. The weapon. Mine, too. They’d also chosen the time–clearly, after I had gone home, maybe nine-thirtyish. I had been here alone most of the evening, except for Alistair’s ten-minute visit to me around nine. Chances are, whoever killed him and left him here might have known that.
 
Crossing my arms, I shiver as I recall my actions after he’d left. I had pushed my chair into the desk, flicked off the overheads, then traipsed down into the garage, revved up my trusty Chevy Tahoe, and toddled on home alone to an empty house. No alibi, no corroborating witnesses in sight. Then, with no one at home to confirm my story there, either, I had planted chrysanthemums in the backyard until my energy and my desire for gin ran out a little past midnight.
 
I stoop to examine Alistair’s body more closely—and this time I ignore his twanger, just like I did when he was alive. His hair is ruffled. His suit is a shambles, wrinkled as if he’d slept in it. His left lapel is torn or ripped—maybe by my letter opener. His left eyelid seems cut with a line of blood as if someone poked him good. Did his killer attack him, beat him up first? Makes sense to me. Weaken your foe before you move in for the final blow. I haven’t risen this far up in the world without practicing Sun Tzu’s Art of War. Of course, my mother’s five rules formed my character first. Tempt ’em, tell ’em, order ’em, love ’em, leave ’em wanting more. Sadie O’Neill didn’t raise no fool.
 
I jam my hands in my skirt pockets and devote myself to wearing a circular path in my carpet while I absorb details of the crime scene. My desktop is bare, except for the two items that should be there. The photo of my pride and joy, my twelve-year-old daughter, Jordan, and the small marble trophy I won at age fifteen for Texas State Rodeo Barrel-Racing Champion. Definitely the desk is the way I left it, but what about all the drawers? All appear neatly closed, the way they should be. But are they locked? I wince. My heart picks up a salsa beat. They better be. I try to remember and, for the life of me, can’t recall if I did turn the lock with my key before I left for home! But at least the center drawer had to have been open, right? Otherwise, how could Alistair be holding my letter opener? I reach to open that drawer and think better of that little maneuver. I’m not into implicating myself or covering up anyone else’s prints . . . if indeed there are any, other than Alistair’s.
 
I bend over, scrutinizing the keyholes and edges. None appears to be tampered with. The desk, due to its advanced age, is secure as a vault, the previous owner told me when I purchased it from him as he left this office. The four-foot-by-six-foot expanse is early Johnson (Andrew, not Lyndon), and coveting it as I had for years, I was thrilled to find it for sale when I moved into this building last year. The building, like the desk, was supposed to be unbreachable, an inner sanctum, holy of holies, that no one could just enter at will. After all, the doors to each of our offices are key coded. No one passes through the metal-detector gates down at the front entrance or the garage or even the press entrance without presenting a badge with photo ID. Briefcases are wanded. All packages, too. Bomb-sniffing dogs as feral as those patrolling death row at Huntsville roam the halls and the grounds, receiving one solid square meal a day for their 24/7 devotion. Security is the highest priority here. No need to worry.
 
Unless you are Alistair Dunhill and someone wants to cut off your life and your dick.
 
And that same someone wants to frame the little lady who works in Rayburn Office Building Room 2336, Carly Wagner, five-time elected congresswoman from the Twenty-third District of Texas.
 
I have often thought I might be bipolar. With a mother like mine, you would, too. Sadie O’Neill’s usually an Irish angel in snakeskin boots. Unless you cross her. Then, before you can turn tail to run, she’ll sink her fangs into you and swallow you whole. This day when a dead man lies in my office, I note my mood swings from red-haired viper to cool fish with a career to save.
 
To Harry Woznowski, who mans the front desk and is the guy I broke the news to about Alistair—I am calm. He enters my office now, approximately four minutes after I called him, and he’s huffing and puffing, two hundred pounds of Polish sausage stuffed into five-foot-five, tops. And on him, I smile down, grateful for his speed. I remain cooperative. Personable.
 
While he does a silent and lengthy perusal of Alistair, I tell him that, yes, this is how I found the fourth most powerful man in the House of Representatives, the minority whip. My party’s number-two honcho here. No, I have not touched anything in the office—except the cord of the window blinds. I also did touch my phone, my briefcase, my skirt, but that is irrelevant to the crime scene since all those things were with me or on me before I walked in. Yes, I am blathering, and I know it, so finally I just shut up. But when Harry moves in for a close-up of Alistair’s shriveled little wiener and says, “Wow. Not too big, was it?” I show the other side of my nature—and bare my teeth at him. “Harry, forget his penis.”
 
“He never did.” Harry does a salacious chuckle, but clears his throat and repents. “Sorry. Any ideas how he got in here?”
 
I roll my eyeballs.
 
But he smacks his thick lips like a dog over a bone and offers, “Someone let him in or he had a key.”
 
Here, I go over to my Sadie O’Neill suffer-no-idiots pole and hiss, “No one let him in and he did not have a key.” The words tumble out, but I realize I have reason to wonder if they’re true. Couldn’t someone have come in after I left or given him a key?
 
Skeptical, too, Harry grunts at me as he bends to examine the bloody spot on Alistair’s shirt. “We gotta ask your staff.”
 
“By all means. But I was the last one in here last night.” I shift from one foot to the other, antsy with my growing suspicions. “Congressman Dunhill had been here to visit me a few minutes earlier but left maybe ten minutes before I did.”
 
“And?”
 
I level my gaze at Harry and stare.
 
Most men—even an impartial, erudite newsman like Jim Lehrer—can go goofy over my eyes. For those I wish to warm, my big brown babies can melt a man. For others who try to walk on the hot sands of my disapproval and live to tell the tale, my stare can mean many things. Get lost. Get to work. Get the answer. Get a life.
 
For Harry, this morning’s message is, Get real. But realizing how this will play out in police records and in the press, I strive for serenity. “When I left, the congressman was not in the hall. No one was,” I recall with clarity.
 
“So the congressman did not leave with you?” Harry could really be a testy little bugger.
 
“He did not go with me, nor did I leave him here.” I conclude that is all I will say to Harry. I’ll save myself for the big boys. For certain, this is kind of like saving yourself for your wedding night, knowing you have given the goods away but lying to yourself that the groom won’t notice because he is so eager to get on with the main event.
 
“I’m going to take my briefcase and sit in my legislative aides’ office.” I know I can watch from that vantage point who comes in and out of my suite’s main door and my inner office. Plus, I can sit there and try to read this slew of statistics before this morning’s committee meeting on military base closings.
 
Sure, I tell myself that the prospect of dealing with murder and the police could put the fear of god in me. But I’m a big girl. I can weather that.
 
I snort. Recognizing I’m serving myself a load of prime bull, I know if I stop to think too hard, I’ll wind up in the john with my head over the toilet.
 
And I am nothing if not brave. You can’t fix stupid, but brave you are either born with or not. No acquiring it.
 
Me, I now vow to keep the lid on my nerves by focusing on the possibility that the committee chairman would postpone this morning’s session because of Alistair’s murder. That I can’t have. This morning’s hearings are to discuss Air Force bases the President wants to close down in my district. These bases bring in more than three billion dollars a year to my district’s economy and delaying the hearings would only prolong the agony of impending layoffs for folks who counted on me to ensure the federal budget gave them their daily bread.
 
So I focus on money. Money that soothes and money that heals. Like money from alimony—and money from child support. I like any kind of money.
 
My head clears, my stomach stops flipping. I’m going to be fine. Alistair is gone, but there is nothing I can do about that. I repeat that to myself as I commandeer a desk in the main room, sit down, and dig my cell phone out of my briefcase. I’m calling in my cavalry, speed-dialing my chief administrative aide at home. Why? Because in this political town, when something goes awry in a politician’s day, the man to call is the one who knows more about the politician than god. In my case, that was my AA of nine years, Aaron Blumfeld. And this morning, ol’ Aaron is not answering his phone very quickly. So when I get voice mail, I end the call and hit the number pad again. He’ll know who it is. I listen to the ring begin and take the phone from my ear to read the face clock . . . 6:08 a.m. April 4. Tuesday.
 
Springtime in the nation’s capital. Pink cherry blossoms. Lady Bird’s psychedelic-colored tulips. A dead man in my inner office. Just another day, right?
 
I tap my fingernails on the desktop. Where, oh, where is Aaron? To fail to answer his phone means he is doing one of two things. Either walking from his D Street townhouse to Rayburn (because he loathes talking on the horn on the street)—or he is still in the sack humping his newest romantic interest. Another guy. Aaron changes lovers like laundry.
 
At the next ring, he picks up and shouts, “Hello?” He’s out of breath, like he’s been running.
 
“Aaron!” He knows my voice, understands my tones. “What took you so long?”
 
“Good morning, ma’am. I apologize.” He’s fumbling with the phone. As if he’s jumping into his pants. “What can I help you with?”
 
“Are you on your way in?”
 
“Yes, ma’am. I will be there in about . . . twenty minutes.”
 
“Speed it up, will you?”
 
When he asks why, I deliver the news.
 
He pauses, processing for maybe half a second. “Media there yet?” Aaron always thinks of first things first.
 
“No.”
 
“Good. I’ll be there in . . . fifteen.”
 
“Ten.”
 
“I’ll hail a cab.”
 
It’s tough to find a cab in the residential areas east of the Capitol at any time of the day, especially this early on a midweek morning. Nonetheless, within his own time frame, Aaron blows through the door. He is dressed in a dapper dark gray suit, appropriate for someone who needs to appear bereaved. Holding aloft a necktie of an even grimmer charcoal in his hand, he’s trying to squeeze past one recently arrived uniformed Capitol policeman, another with a giant camera bag, and one plainclothesman, all of whom are chatting each other up like women at a baby shower.
 
Aaron is lithe, quick, but he can’t elude the reflexes of the tall one in plainclothes, a dour-faced black man.
 
“Hold on a minute there, sir!” He grabs Aaron by the sleeve, a faux pas of the highest order to Aaron the Fashion Plate, who irons every item of clothing, probably even his silk thongs.
 
Aaron is definitely affronted and lets his eyes slowly ascend from the man’s hand up into this guy’s very long, very broad face. “Excuse me,” he tells his captor. The policeman releases Aaron’s elbow. “I work here. I am Congresswoman Wagner’s chief aide and she needs me.”
 
A set of onyx eyes fly to mine. “Guard.” The plainclothesman beckons Harry from his roost in front of my office door and nods at me. “Now is good for introductions.”
 
Harry walks him over, so I get to take my time examining him. He reminds me oddly of Columbo because of his wild and woolly hair and his wrinkled raincoat. But any resemblance ends there. This man is young, maybe late thirties, and therefore surprisingly young for a Capitol policeman, most of whom are retired from the D.C. police force and looking for less stressful duty. With shoulders like a quarterhorse and tall as an NBA allstar, he is one supple hunk of flesh I don’t want to wrestle with.
 
“Ma’am,” Harry does his duty when they get in front of me, “this is Capitol Police Detective Brown. Sarge Brown.” Detective Brown takes stock of me, from my natural wine-red hair to my sensible black pumps—and I know he’s matching the woman he’s seen on TV to the one in this chair. I get no read on what he concludes, so I play to both of my advantages—power and sex appeal, in that order.
 
I do not rise from my chair, though I do—with Miss Manners my constant guide—stick out my hand to shake his. Wrong move.
 
He shoots his white palms up in the air. “Ma’am, if you would please not touch anything until we get our crime inspection crew here. We want to process your hands. I’m sure you understand.” One point to the detective.
 
“I do, but the only things I touched this morning were the window shade cord, my cell phone, this pen, these papers, and my suit.” One point to me.
 
His jaw tightens, unhappy with my snap. “We’ll process those, too.”
 
“When?” I’m determined that if he’s got his sights set on being a star, he can’t cast me as his stairway to heaven. “I am happy to cooperate, Detective. But let’s do it quickly. I have hearings beginning soon.” Purposely, I do not say when. “If you need my clothes, that’s no problem, just say so. I can change into another set I keep in my inner office closet, but let me get on with my work.”
 
Shouts interrupt us.
 
We both turn to my inner office door, where Harry is barring the door with hands out across the jamb. He and Aaron are nose-to-nose.
 
Detective Brown lurches toward them. “Sir!”
 
His outrage makes me grimace. I hustle over to catch Aaron before he goes into his version of “This Land Is My Land,” but I don’t quite make it.
 
“Officer, we need to be in this office,” Aaron objects to Harry, but turns to Sarge.
 
I step forward. “Sergeant—”
 
“Detective,” he corrects me. “My given name is Sarge.”
 
“Sorry,” I reply, but he’s not listening.
 
He’s leaning down, nearly pressing his broad flat nose against my Aaron’s beak. “Now, as for you, sir—”
 
Aaron remains unruffled. “Detective, my job is to see that the congresswoman moves through her day quickly and efficiently. If you bar us from her office—”
 
Soon these two guys are gonna bite each other. But the only one I can control is Aaron. I reach out to him, but the detective inches closer.
 
“Your name, Mr. . . . ?”
 
“Blumfeld. Aaron Blumfeld.”
 
“Mr. Aaron Flowerfield.”
 
“You know German?” Aaron is mildly impressed.
 
“Yiddish. My grandmother cleaned house for thirty-two years for the rabbi over at Temple Sinai. Mr. Blumfeld, hear me. You will not go into that room. No one does, not even you, ma’am.” He pins me with his fathomless black eyes. “We will start processing the crime scene with my photographer there.” He nods to the guy he’d been talking to. “More of my technicians will soon get here.”
 
“Detective,” I press him, “I have to be able to get in there. I have a lot of papers locked in my desk”—or I hope they are—“that I’ll need today.” Like my notes on how job losses in San Antonio will affect local health care if the Air Force medical facility there closes. “I cannot allow you to keep me out indefinitely.”
 
“Depending on what we find,” he insists, “you can probably get in sometime tomorrow or the next day.”
 
“That’s too long, Detective.” I like giving suggestions that make folks pivot. “What if you supervise me, can’t I get into my desk? Certainly, if you want me to change clothes, I’ll have to go in there to get them.”
 
“No, I’m sorry you can’t do that, either. Have someone on your staff get clothes from your home. We’ll do our best to give you access as quickly as we can, but I have no idea what we’ll need to process when I haven’t even been in there myself yet.” A group of officers in jumpsuits appears at the door. “Here they are. I’ll get them started and then come back to talk to you, Congresswoman. Until then”—Sarge directs his heavy-lidded gaze toward the chair where I had been sitting when he came in—“please sit down.”
 
I glance at my watch and try for whatever concession to power I can grab. “I hope this means within the next twenty minutes.” I’m not due to the committee hearing room for another three hours, but I’m not going to cool my heels waiting for Sarge to decide how I manage my day.
 
“I’ll do my best,” he says without convincing me.
 
Aaron hovers at my side, sizing up what I really think of Detective Sarge Brown.
 
He knows what I think of policemen in general.
 
I don’t venture any words, but lift my chin toward him, our signal that I am able to handle this situation on my own. Detective Sarge Brown is the first law enforcement type I have dealt with for a personal reason since my father stomped out of the family ranch house one morning twenty-six years ago and never came back. We never found him, not hide nor hair, and nearly everyone in the county suspected Sadie had shot him and buried him somewhere in the high, hot South Texas desert. And for a good long while, so did I.
 
But that was old news. Past as prelude, crisis as character development, and motivation to wash yourself white as snow.
 
Which I had.
 
Which I would do here, too.
 
So I walk over and settle myself into my old chair, filling my lungs with fresh oxygen, inventing this new form of stress reduction for murder suspects. At the tender age of sixteen when my dad disappeared, I didn’t have any such exotic techniques to cope with disaster. I just had nerves of steel, taut and sharp as our barbed-wire fence. Back then I developed a distrust of sheriffs and the white-hatted do-good Texas Rangers. They didn’t listen well, didn’t know how to write well or read, and years later, I cut my teeth in Texas politics by standing up for better schools and better law enforcement.
 
I vow Sarge is getting nothing out of me that I do not want to give.
 
But I know I better get Aaron to send our receptionist over to Georgetown to get another suit of clothes for me—and while she’s out she should swing into Johnson’s to buy a dozen or more flats of seedlings for me. Better to fill my day anticipating planting impatiens than brooding over how this murder might put me in an early political grave.
 
Copyright © 2006 by Jo-Ann Power. All rights reserved.

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Excerpted from Missing Member by Jo-Ann Power
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.