Senator Love by Warren Adler

shouldn't have called," she had rebuked,
watching him wolf down her carefully prepared breakfast with little relish.
    "Hell," he said. "I bought us the
night."
    He had finished his coffee standing, then put the cup on
the table. For a moment, it crossed her mind that he might be one of those people
who, once satiated and empty of desire, needed to rush away from the scene of
their sexual enterprise. She had encountered men like that on occasion and had
had episodes of such emotions herself.
    "Hope your day is awful," she had called after
him. He had wrapped her in his bear hug and they had lingered for a long
moment. No, she had decided, he truly wanted to stay and she could feel the
tension calling him away.
    When he'd gone, she had stared at the table until her eggs
had grown too cold to eat. Nor could she concentrate on the newspapers. She
truly deserved this day of leisure, loving and release. She had reserved it in
her mind. Indeed, last night and throughout the early morning, her body had
seemed to demand it and acted accordingly, allowing her a feast of orgasms.
Still, she knew that her appetite craved more. From self-pity, it was a tiny
step to injustice.
    From there it was a circuitous but logical path to arrive
at the injustices that had to do with the circumstances surrounding the
investigation of the old bones of the young girl.
    It helped for her thoughts to sail back to this gritty
reality of shop talk. For a detective, the puzzle was always in play in the
subconscious. Little effort was required to bring it back to the surface and it
came roaring back with all the force of the repressed anger that the eggplant's
attitude had spawned. His priorities were misplaced. Time was not the issue.
    It was, she decided, unjust to ignore the girl's remains
and all that they implied. It was a travesty, an outrage. It deserved more than
short shrift. It demanded her attention.
    "It's my own time," she had said aloud, as if the
eggplant was standing at her shoulder.
    She fished a name out of her notebook, Emma Taylor, Fredericksburg, Virginia. It took a half-hour to find the right Taylor, mother of Betty.
The long silence after the question told her the truth of it. Had she been too
callous in the asking? she wondered.
    "Did you have a daughter named Betty?" was the
way she phrased it. It was too late to recall the tone.
    "Ah have a daughter named Betty," the
woman said, in a soft, polite, deep Virginia twang, yet offering a dash of
indignance to mask the sudden pain of it. Fiona noted the not-so-subtle change
of past to present tense.
    Fiona identified herself, then tried to soften the blow
somewhat, although she knew it was too late.
    "We have some new facts..." she began, then
waited, listening to the woman's breathing at the other end of the line. She
imagined she could hear her pumping heart.
    "Ah'll nevah undastand wah she just upped and
disappeared into thin ayah."
    The voice and inflection suggested the usual southern
clichés. All the predictable images surfaced of a small-town woman holding onto
appearances at all costs, playing for approval of the local ladies from the
bridge club.
    "You heard from Betta?" the woman asked suddenly,
hope ascending in her voice.
    "Not exactly," Fiona said, lying.
    "Ah'd appreciate ya tellin me if ya do," the
woman said politely. There was a long pause. "Ah'll nevah undastand,"
she sighed. "Somethin up thayah in Washinton jes turned her head in the
wrong direction."
    "I'd like to come out and see you, Mrs. Taylor,"
Fiona said.
    "Ah would welcome that," the woman said.
"Deed ah would." Another pause. "Not a day goes bah when ah don
hope."
    There was no point in a direct response. Instead Fiona got
directions and hung up. She lingered for a long moment. Perhaps it had not been
a good idea, after all. And yet something in the woman's voice, the inflection,
not the words, troubled her. It was a trade-off, she decided. She detested
playing the messenger of death. The fact that she would