The Candidate by Lis Wiehl, Sebastian Stuart Page A

things to people.”
    The words hang in the air a moment— power can do strange things to people —and then Erica says, “You know, Moy, I think I’d like to do a segment on the candidates at home. Try and get up close and personal, see what I find.”
    “I smell a reporter’s instincts kicking in.”
    “We are journalists.”
    Erica’s work in nailing Nylan Hastings led her into the heart of darkness. Man is capable of unthinkable acts of evil and depravity. She walks over to the window and looks out at the glittering lights of Central Park, their radiance turning the leafy canopy into a sea of iridescence. “Meanwhile, I’m consumed with the bombing story. Every federal law enforcement agency is working 24/7 to find this guy. Let’s hope there’s a break this week.”
    Erica hangs up and flashes back to the moments before the bombing, the look in Mike Ortiz’s eyes when he turned to his wife for permission to speak. Her short hairs stand up. Suddenly she feels chilly. Has the temperature dropped outside? She walks out to the foyer to grab her favorite red scarf from the row of hooks on the wall beside the coat closet. She always puts her scarves there when she walks in the door. But she doesn’t see the red scarf. She fingers through them. Definitely not there. She opens the coat closet. No scarf.
    She walks down the hall and into the kitchen. “Jenny, honey, have you seen my red scarf?”
    “Uh-uh.”
    Erica scans the living room and her office, then heads into her bedroom. No scarf. A certain neurotic compulsion kicks in when she can’t find something, especially something she was sure she knew the location of. She distinctly remembers putting the scarf back on one of the hooks when she wore it the day before yesterday. She walks quickly back to the front door and checks again. Nope.
    Scarfs don’t just dematerialize. What is going on?
    Erica takes a deep breath and wills herself to cool it. It’s only a scarf. She must have left it at the office. Of course. That’s what happened. Right?
    Then she triple-checks the locks on the front door.

CHAPTER 8
    IT’S MONDAY, AND ERICA IS in the temporary broadcast booth that GNN has set up outside the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in Philadelphia, where the funeral of Fred and Judy Buchanan is being held. With the president and First Lady due at any moment, security is massive. In spite of that, Erica feels a wave of anxiety. She likes to think of herself as a battle-toughened pro, but the truth is the Buchanan bombing has unnerved her. It happened so suddenly—a boom, a flash, the blood, the bodies, the children, the thin line between life and death. Erica keeps seeing the crumpled, twisted corpses. Followed by Tim Markum’s bland, round face—such a benign mask for evil. She’s been having trouble sleeping, she jumps every time she hears a sudden noise, and she has begun to worry about Jenny’s safety on the streets of New York.
    But no matter how sleep-deprived and spooked she is, Erica knows she has a job to do.
    And today it’s an important one. The nation was convulsed by Buchanan’s murder; he’s the most prominent politician to be assassinated since JFK. And the horror has been magnified because it was broadcast live, caught on scores of cellphone cameras, and seen by billions of people around the world in the last five days. This day of mourning matters to the nation, to the people of Pennsylvania, and most of all to Philadelphia, where Buchanan was born and raised and is revered. The streets surrounding the brownstone cathedral are jammed with thousands of people who feel compelled to join in this public sorrow.
    Because she was there when the bomb went off, Erica is a part of the story. Today she wants to be part of the soul-searching that Americans are going through. How do you make sense of such horror? How does the country respond? Leaders from hard left to hard right are pouring into the cathedral—no matter what ideology,