Political Suicide (3 page)

Lou cruised through the gated entrance of McHugh’s elegant Tudor-style home. The electric candles in each window looked as if they had been included in the design when the house was built, but there were no bulbs on the shrubs. Lou observed only one car parked in the circular driveway—a Lexus, which he assumed belonged to Missy, McHugh’s wife. McHugh prided himself on his high-end black Jaguar. Lou wondered if the car had somehow been involved in the man’s current plight—a fatal accident of some sort, perhaps. Then he reminded himself that McHugh had very specifically said
murder.

He braked the Toyota to a stop in front of the roofed entranceway. McHugh—graying red hair, broad-shouldered, dense five o’clock shadow—stood waiting. He wore a green collared sweater, but no jacket. His face was distorted by a huge bruise involving the area between his left cheek and hairline. His left eye was swollen shut.

“Hey, thanks for getting here so quickly,” McHugh said grimly, “I forgot it was rush hour.”

“No problem. Gary, let’s get inside. It’s freezing out here.”

Limping slightly, McHugh set Lou’s peacoat on a hook in the foyer, and shook his hand. His wrestler’s grip had not been diminished by whatever had battered his face. His one open eye was bloodshot, and Lou almost immediately smelled alcohol—more, it seemed from the man’s pores than from his breath. Whatever had happened today, booze was almost certainly part of it. Lou’s recurrent warning that he did not feel McHugh could ever drink in safety had gone unheeded and was now apparently extracting a heavy toll.

“What’s going on, Gary?”

“Let’s go my study,” McHugh said. “I just lit a fire to take the chill out.”

The temperature in the cherry-paneled room had already responded to the neatly laid blaze. The space was perhaps a third the size of Lou’s entire apartment. A forty-inch plasma TV mounted above the stone fireplace was tuned to CNN. The walls were decorated with pictures and souvenirs that defined the man—his travels to exotic locales, his plane, skydiving certification, skiing with a skill and grace that showed even in a photograph, black-tie parties featuring A-list notables, testimonials and letters of thanks, at least two from recent presidents.

McHugh motioned Lou to one of two red leather armchairs, while he remained standing, glancing from time to time at the TV.

“Talk to me, Gary,” Lou said.

McHugh, now watching CNN steadily, had his back turned. Despite the odor of alcohol, there was no evidence in his speech or manner that he was intoxicated. “Anytime now,” he said, “CNN is going to report breaking news regarding the shooting death in his garage of Congressman Elias Colston.”

Lou stiffened and dug his fingers into the thick arms of his chair. Colston, the chairman of the House Committee on Armed Services, was one of the more popular congressmen in the House. Maryland District 1, Lou guessed, or maybe it was District 3.

“How do you know?” he asked.

“I was there,” McHugh said flatly, wincing as he sat down in the other chair. “I saw the body. At least two shots—one to the chest and one dead center in the forehead.”

“Are you absolutely sure? Did you check for a pulse?”

“Believe me, Lou, I checked, but I know dead.”

“And the body temp?”

“Warm.”

“When did this happen?”

“I got there at noon.”

“And you had been drinking?”

There was an embarrassed silence, and then, “Yes. Fairly heavily.”

Lou groaned. Gary McHugh seldom did anything in half measures. He could only imagine what
fairly heavily
meant.

“Why hasn’t the story broken by now?”

McHugh shrugged. “I guess because I’m the only one who saw him—besides the person who killed him, that is.”

“And why didn’t you call the police?” Even as he was asking the question, Lou knew the answer.

“I … intended to find a phone booth and call them anonymously, rather than risk giving them my cell phone number. I knew if they caught up with me and I were found to be drinking, I could kiss my medical license good-bye.”

“Oh, Jesus, Gary. But before you could call anyone, you smashed up your car and did this to your face, yes?”

“You got it. I must have skidded off the road and hit a tree.”

“You don’t remember?”

“The first thing I remember after seeing Elias’s body, I was being transferred from an ambulance stretcher to a bed in the ER. Apparently, someone found me unconscious in my car. Somebody said something about having to use the Jaws of Life.”

Blackout from alcohol or concussion, Lou thought. Most likely both. He probably should have been kept overnight.

“Which hospital?” he asked, checking the screen expectantly.

“Anne Arundel.”

“Are you okay now? I have my medical bag in the car. Maybe I should check you over.”

“They did everything—blood work, CAT scan. I had to beat the frigging residents and med students off with a stick.”

“Did they want to keep you?”

“They wanted to, but I wouldn’t consider it. All I wanted to do was get the hell out of the place as quickly as possible. Missy came and they let me go.”

“Your alcohol level?”

“It was probably high. One of the nurses who knows me said a good lawyer could get me off any charges by saying I was head injured and couldn’t authorize having my blood drawn. That may be the reason the police decided not to charge me on the spot.”

“I’m not sure that’s true if the ER people had good reason to draw your blood in the first place. Besides, you can always be charged later. But more important, the charges you’re talking about may be significantly bigger than a DUI. Why do you think they would charge you with Colston’s murder?”

McHugh rose and began to pace in front of the fire. “Colston is a patient of mine. I’ve been to his house many times before. There are security cameras.”

“Then maybe one of them recorded the murder.”

“Maybe, but it took place way in the back of the garage, by the stairs that go up to Colston’s office. I don’t remember any cameras being there—just outside on the driveway. I’ll bet the only thing those cameras recorded is me, driving up and later driving away—maybe even with Elias’s blood on me from when I checked him over.… What in the hell is going on? Why hasn’t anyone found him and called the cops?”

“Gary, why would you be drinking in the morning and then go off to make a house call on one of your patients?”

“Because I wasn’t making a house call, Lou.… Dammit, what is going on with this station? Why haven’t they reported anything about this?”

McHugh grabbed a poker and stoked the fire as if he were spearing a wild boar.

Lou tightened his grip on the chair once more.

Again an inflated silence.

“Easy does it, Gary.”

“Shit, I suppose everyone’s going to find out anyway. I didn’t go there to see Colston. I went there to see his wife, Jeannine.”

“Not to treat her.”

McHugh sighed. “No. We’ve been having an affair for more than two years.”

“Oh, Gary,” Lou groaned.

McHugh assaulted the fire again. “That’s not all,” he said.

CHAPTER 3

Lou stared across at McHugh and drew a nervous breath.

That’s not all.…

What did he mean by that?

How much more could there be?

Before McHugh could explain, the news of Congressman Elias Colston’s murder hit CNN like a wrecking ball. The report varied little from McHugh’s account. Colston’s body was discovered by his wife, Jeannine, after she returned from a meeting of a congressional spouses’ group in Washington.

Jeannine Colston was not available for comment, but a spokeswoman for her said only that their son and daughter had been notified at college and were on their way home, and that Jeannine had no other comment at that time. The feed of the crime scene around the Colstons’ tasteful country home was bedlam.

Lou waited for a commercial interruption to the first wave of reports, then turned to his host. “Okay, Gary,” he said, “short and sweet. What else is there you haven’t told me?”

McHugh threw an unnecessary log on the fire and began pacing again. “From what I can piece together, I skidded off the road and hit a tree just after I had crossed the bridge.”

“Bridge?”

“I really don’t remember a hell of a lot, Lou, but there’s a stone bridge across a river about a mile down the road from the Colstons’.”

Lou saw no significance to this latest revelation. “Explain,” he said.

“Well, unless they find it at the scene, the police are going to suspect that I stopped and tossed the murder weapon off the bridge and into the river, then kept going and went off the road. There aren’t many homes between Colstons’ place and the bridge, so a logical conclusion would be that I was headed away from there.”

Lou winced. “That’s exactly what they’re going think,” he said.

Then he remembered something else—something that McHugh had been required to discuss the first day his PWO monitoring contract began—his love affair with guns. McHugh owned several pistols and some hunting rifles. Years before, after a client’s gunshot suicide, the monitoring contract was modified to demand that all guns be removed from a doctor’s house, cataloged, and locked in a storage facility using a padlock provided by the PWO.

“The PWO has a record of the guns I turned in when I signed my contract,” McHugh said as if reading Lou’s thoughts. “They’re all legally registered, so the police will learn about them, too, even though I know you people are protected from telling them anything.”

Lou shrugged.
Not a big deal,
he was thinking. So why was McHugh being so dramatic about it, unless one of the guns registered to him was missing before he turned his collection over to the PWO?

No, there was something else.

“Gary, why were you drinking at that hour of the morning?” Lou asked. “What happened between you and Jeannine that led you to put your career on the line like that?”

McHugh’s refusal to accept his alcoholism, and his failure to embrace a recovery program made him a setup for relapse. Still, he had managed to stay sober for several years. Often, in Lou’s experience, the first drink after a long period of abstinence resulted from cutting down attendance at meetings followed by some sort of catalyst. Given the spontaneity of McHugh’s early-hour intoxication, his rush to the Colstons’, and the fact that he did not even know Jeannine wasn’t home, Lou guessed that heartbreak might have been at the root of his relapse.

“She wanted to end it,” McHugh replied, still staring at the screen.

“Did she say why?”

“Not really. She called me last night out of the blue and said I shouldn’t try to contact her. I tried to get her to explain to me over the phone what was going on. All she kept saying was that Elias needed her, and she would call over the next few days.”

“Elias needed her. What did she mean by that?”

“I don’t know. I love her, Lou. I really do.”

McHugh gestured toward the screen, where CNN was now reporting breaking news from an unnamed source that Maryland State Police had identified a person of interest in connection with the murder of Congressman Colston. They were not naming any names, but Lou and McHugh both knew who that person of interest most likely was.

Means, motive, and opportunity—in the absence of absolute proof or an eyewitness, these were the three critical circumstantial components of a crime, usually needed to convince a jury of guilt.

Lou felt his jaws clench.

Means—an affinity for guns and a place, the river, probably partially frozen, where the murder weapon might have been disposed of.

Motive—an affair with the victim’s wife.

Opportunity—security camera footage placing McHugh at the scene close to the time of the killing.

But there was even more.

The suspect, himself, was probably operating in a blackout, and was incapable of providing anything useful toward his own defense.

Not good.

McHugh said he remembered checking Colston’s body for pulses and finding none. Lou wondered now, as McHugh himself had suggested, if investigators would find blood, DNA, or other incriminating evidence in his Jaguar or on his clothes.

Not good at all.

“Did you call your attorney?” Lou asked. “We have you down as being represented by Grayson Devlin. It doesn’t get any better than that.”

“Actually, I called him from the hospital, but by then I knew I wasn’t going to be arrested on the spot for DUI. He was busy with some sort of big case, but he promised he’d send one of his top associates over as soon as he could.”

Before McHugh could expand on his answer, there was a soft knock on the office door, and Missy McHugh, petite and almost scarily thin, entered carrying a silver tray with a steaming teapot, sugar bowl, and spoon, and two blue china teacups.

“Here’s the tea you asked for, darling.”

Missy set the tray on their mahogany coffee table from enough of a height to rattle the dishes. She spoke the word
darling
as if it were a curse rather than any term of endearment. Her brown hair, streaked with silver, framed a pale, tired face that Lou knew had once been quite beautiful. He had been an usher at their wedding, but the closeness between him and Gary never carried over to her, and before he and Renee had split, she had never been able to warm up to the woman either.

“Nice to see you, Lou,” Missy said without a glance at the television, “although I’m sorry it’s under these unfortunate circumstances. Gary doesn’t tell me very much, but I’ve been concerned about his not going to meetings, and I confess I wasn’t all that surprised when he called me to get him away from the hospital and told me about the drinking and the accident. Now it appears he’s going to lose his medical license.”

Her baleful expression had Lou wondering how much she knew about other aspects of her husband’s life. If the police and CNN reporters were doing their jobs, the answer to that question would soon be moot.

“I’m going to do what I can to help Gary put the pieces back together,” Lou said.

“That’s very nice of you. How are you feeling, Gary?” No
dear,
no
honey,
no contact between them. The woman’s iciness put a chill in the room that even the crackling blaze could not offset.