"About five eight. You saying it couldn't have come from a cut hand?"
"A lawyer could argue that your guy left the place with his hand held high, but that would cause the blood to run down his arm. No one I know would walk around that way-they'd stick the hand down and to one side."
"Plus," Joe mentioned, "the lawyer in question is claiming the wound was bandaged before his client left."
"Oh, I doubt that," David said, his voice surprised. "The blood drops are very consistent with a free-flowing cut. And you have the trail he took, out the back door after loitering around the hiding place in the floor."
"They're claiming now he went out the back on the victim's insistence-the old man didn't want anyone scared by a bloody man coming out the front door."
Joe could almost hear Hawke shrugging at the other end of the phone line. "Well, I'll leave that to you. If asked, I'd have to say that whoever was dropping that blood clearly stopped at the hiding place, even if I couldn't swear he actually opened it up."
"Okay," Joe allowed. "What about the second detail you mentioned?"
"Again, nothing to really hang your hat on, but among the samples gathered, there were a couple of tiny hairs as well, consistent with having come from the nose."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning they're also consistent with being hair from any part of the body, more or less. Obviously, nose hairs are very small and short, and these two fit that bill perfectly, but I could never claim on the stand that that's where they came from-only that they could have."
Gunther nodded to no one in particular. "Okay. I got you. Still, that's good. I owe you one, David. Thanks."
He hung up, his expression thoughtful.
"Home run?" Lester asked.
Joe looked rueful. "Call it a solid single-another one." He sat back in his chair and put his feet up on his desk. "I just wish," he added, "that I could find some rock-solid piece of evidence that Bander couldn't dance away from." He reached out his hand and closed his fingers around thin air. "I am so close, I can almost grab it. I just can't see it yet."
Gail's run for the senate was hanging in limbo. More important to her personally, she was feeling in limbo. Sitting in her command center living room, surrounded by her front-rank lieutenants, she was having a hard time concentrating on what they were saying.
She had a headache and was still feeling woozy. In the last few days of the campaign, it was traditional, if a little dopey, for candidates to stand on the edge of Brattleboro's rush-hour traffic every night, waving and holding a banner with their name on it and, in her case, fighting the rising nausea from all the exhaust fumes. Supposedly, this ritual was so voters could catch a glimpse of the person behind the hype, but Gail was also suspicious that if she didn't do it, she'd be accused of being aloof and arrogant.
And she'd had enough of that. So far, she'd had her wealth, her birthplace, her lover, several of her past professions, and the fact that she'd been raped all used against her in one way or another, mostly to prove that she was a rich, uppity, moneygrubbing flatlander with no morals or scruples.
Not surprisingly, most of this had come from the near-anonymous "other side"-backers of the man she'd been told to refer to only as "my opponent" so as not to give him extra visibility. But she'd also been reading of her shortcomings in letters to the editor, hearing them on the street, and listening to them discussed on the radio and TV.
Gail had begun to wonder, as anyone might against such a barrage, whether there might not be some truth to all the rumors. After all, hadn't she been brought up on the principle that all politicians were only after power and money? What made that so different now that she was one herself? Hadn't she been doing the same things as her opponents throughout both the primary and the general election?
Her present nausea from all that carbon monoxide gave her the answer to that one.
And the fact that she'd left Joe to fend for himself in the midst of what was clearly a crisis. She was still ruing having asked him to lobby on her behalf with his law enforcement contacts, even though she'd just as quickly told him not to. Too little, too late.
And, at their very last conversation over dinner at his place, even while overtaken by appreciation for the man and what he stood for, she'd felt guilty and somehow inadequate. He'd revealed himself to be as unrecovered from his emotional wound as she would be forever from her rape. But instead of helping him, she had left him in the lurch, much as Ellen had so many years ago, for different reasons, obviously, but, coincidentally, while he was investigating the exact same crime.
She knew this was all essentially the raving of an exhausted, stressed-out, almost irrational punch-drunk fighter, but Gail was nevertheless beginning to wonder, just days away from the election, whether any of it was worth the cost.
"You want another aspirin, Gail? Or a soda?" Susan Raffner asked her, intruding on her daydream. "You're still not looking too good."
Gail shook her head. "I'm fine. It's passing. So, what's the consensus?"
"Honestly?" Susan answered for them all. "Not great. You've been doing the right things. You haven't been acting or looking too much like a candidate and nothing else, and your pedigree as a selectperson and a prosecutor has stood you in good stead. It's just-the stats still aren't there."
Janet Grasso, the team's number cruncher went further. "We're doing fine among the people who saw you through the primary, and what endorsements we've got so far have been great, but that's the bedrock we expected all along: the Reformer backing, Women for Women, Planned Parenthood, the unions. The tough parts have been the western towns and places like Vernon-which we didn't expect to carry-but Townshend, too, and Westminster and Dummerston. Those are where we should be doing a whole lot better. Part of it may be that you lost a little credibility when you shifted slightly to the right after the primary win, but that was a gamble we all agreed to-trying to steal a little of Parker's thunder."
"It may be the economy, too, at least partly," Susan added. "People are feeling hopeful enough, they don't want to listen to bad news."
"I haven't been telling them bad news," Gail protested.
Susan rubbed her forehead. "I keep telling you this. Democrats by their very nature are about bad news. We need to help the poor, the hungry, the disadvantaged, to use our wealth to help those in need. The Republicans just say, 'Fuck 'em; the economy will see 'em through.' Sad but true, that's what people like to hear when they finally feel they have some money in their pockets. They don't want to share. They want to buy stuff. Parker is cleaning up just singing his 'Happy Days Are Here Again' message."
"Not to mention all the national security hoopla," Nancy Amidon, Gail's treasurer, chimed in. "That adds to the fortress mentality."
Gail held up both her hands. "All right, all right. Basically, you're saying I'm out of luck. We did it by the numbers, and we're about to lose. Is that it?"
"Yeah," Susan said.
"No," came from both Janet and Nancy.
The three others in the room, silent so far, remained so, damning with no praise.
"Is it money?" Gail asked. "Can we flush in another few thousand in a last-second blitz?"
Nancy shrugged. "We know we've reached well over twenty-five thousand households. We've already spent eighteen thousand doing it. That's a lot. Probably more than Parker has, not that we ever want that to get out."
"Let's hear it for having the Reformer in our pocket," muttered Susan.
Nancy continued. "We do have more cash available. If you want to go ahead with that."
"Do it," Susan ordered, and then rose to her feet to pace around the room. "What I don't get," she burst out, "is why the hell this thing with Tom Bander hasn't even touched Parker. If they were any closer, they'd have to exchange vows, for Christ's sake. It pisses me off how every Republican can hang out with thieves and murderers, while Demo-crats get slammed for getting blow jobs."