"What?" She struggled to process the news, even though her instincts had already been warning her that something terrible had occurred. Shock crept over her - shock and disbelief. "This can't be happening. Senator Clarence can't be dead. He was supposed to give a speech today at a hospital charity breakfast ..."
Avery laid his hand consolingly on her shoulder. "We're gonna catch this guy. Don't you worry about that, all right?"
She mutely shook her head, trying to make some sense out of the awful news. Looking for explanations, answers. "The man last night at the station - he warned that the senator was in danger. You heard what he said, didn't you? He said someone wanted to kill Senator Clarence. Someone called Dragos."
A harsh scoff sounded from beside her. Tavia looked over and met the hard gaze of a uniformed policeman who had drifted over while she and Detective Avery were talking. A scar split the dark slash of his left eyebrow, making his scowl look even more severe. "Nothing but bullshit out of that bastard. Shoulda pumped his skull full of bullets. Maybe that woulda kept him down."
At Tavia's confused look, Avery said, "The man we had in custody ... he escaped last night from the infirmary."
"Escaped," she murmured. "I don't understand. How is that possible?"
"We're trying to figure that out ourselves. I saw the guy when he was brought out of the lineup room. He was in bad shape. Somehow he managed to overcome a two-hundred-pound male nurse, knocking him unconscious before slipping out of the building unnoticed. I mean, the guy shouldn't have been able to walk out of there on his own motor, let alone find his way to Marblehead to go after the senator like he did. I've never seen anything so brutal. So goddamn bloody."
Tavia swallowed past the lump of sadness and horror that had lodged in her throat.
"I'm sorry," Detective Avery said, looking at her in concern. "I realize you probably don't need to hear the ugly details. You've been through quite a bit yourself lately."
"It's all right." She drew in a quick breath, regaining her composure. "I'll be fine." "We'd like you to come into the station, if you feel up to it. We have some more questions for you, and the feds will want to talk to you as well - "
"Of course."
He gestured toward the door of the building, to where the reporters had seemed to multiply in the time since she'd been inside. "We can go now, before this place really turns into a zoo." Tavia nodded, falling in behind him as he and a small group of uniformed officers escorted her out to a waiting police sedan.
For a moment, as she stepped outside into the cold morning, she felt as though she were walking through a different world, one that didn't belong to her. There was an unreal quality to everything, as though she were peering through the gauze of a veil, unable to see anything clearly.
Or maybe it was simply that she didn't want to see.
She was unable to imagine the kind of man - the kind of inhuman lethality - it would take to do to Senator Clarence what Detective Avery had implied. She didn't want to think about the senator's final moments. She'd worked for him for years, knew he was a good man who believed he could make a difference. Sure, he'd seemed to be acting a bit odd lately. Detached somehow. Distracted. Who wouldn't be, after the shooting at his house just a few nights ago? A bullet that could have easily struck him but had instead hit one of his VIP guests. Drake Masters.
The name played through her head, and she returned again to what the man in the jailhouse lineup had said - that at the party he'd shot the person he knew as Dragos. The person he seemed convinced meant to harm or kill Senator Clarence. Someone who probably didn't exist except in his imagination.
It sounded crazy to her now, even in her thoughts.
All the more so when she considered how violently that same man in police custody had leapt at Senator Clarence the moment he saw him in the viewing room.
And today Bobby Clarence was dead.
A confessed killer, clearly deranged, was on the loose.
Suddenly the troubling dream that had woken her last night felt even more disturbing in the chilling light of day.
As the police sedan rolled away from the curb, Tavia could only hope