The Strategist (26 page)

CHAPTER 41

I
f one word came to define Sonya Richmond’s existence, it would be balance. During the course of a typical eighteen-hour workday, she was forced to wear many different hats. Sometimes she needed to switch those hats at a moment’s notice; sometimes she needed to wear five of them at once. But for a woman who earned the media nickname ‘Grace’ because of her uncanny ability to stay level-headed even under the most intense situations, the juggling act, for the most part, was easy.

But there were days when the mayor’s grace was severely tested. And today was proving to be the toughest test of all.

It began with a contentious town hall meeting in Denver’s Five Points Neighborhood, a historically African-American subdivision whose social and economic make up had undergone a radical, and unwelcomed, transformation due to its recent gentrification. Residents who called the Five Points home for decades were now being squeezed out in droves because of increased property taxes, and greedy land developers who believed that multi-unit lofts and trendy coffee shops were worth more to the city than the homes those proud people raised their children in. The residents who attended the town hall were mostly black, over sixty, and fed up with a city and a mayor they felt had systematically disenfranchised them. When Sonya was sworn in, she took the oath to represent everyone. And for the most part she upheld that oath. But that didn’t mean she could solve everyone’s problems in the fashion they needed her to. Despite the daily toll of life as a sitting mayor and active U.S. Senate candidate, Sonya wore the stress well. She easily looked ten years younger than her actual age of fifty-two, and the smile that many had called the softest, most disarming they had ever seen was always on display, always ready to diffuse any situation, always employed with the intent of winning over even her most ardent critics – and she had plenty of those. But when the Five Points residents began throwing words at her like ‘racist’ and ‘corrupt’ and ‘hypocrite’, she knew there wouldn’t be a smile in the world pretty enough to win them over.

Things weren’t much better at the Denver Chamber of Commerce Business Awards luncheon she attended a couple of hours later. In addition to the opportunity to spread the message of her campaign to yet another audience, she was slated to receive a special recognition for her long-standing commitment to small business development. Her husband Elliott was supposed to present her with the honor, but when the time came, Elliot was nowhere to be found. Sonya’s communications director was forced to fill in at the last minute. When Elliott showed up some forty-five minutes after she received the award, he had no explanation and seemingly felt no remorse. His demeanor was as cold and distant as Sonya had ever seen it. She would have actually been worried about him had she not been so upset. Elliott’s mood could change on a dime, and in their twenty-six years of marriage, Sonya had come to know those moods and what could trigger them better than she knew her own. But there was no accounting for his attitude today. Her first fear was that it was campaign related. But beyond his repeated assurances that it wasn’t, she was left with no other answers.

So she let it go, as she had done so many times before. Sonya was never one to shy away from a political battle, whether it was with the city council, the local unions, or the state attorney general who doubled as her senate campaign opponent. But the personal battles were always difficult to handle. As a career manager, Elliott was an invaluable partner and highly trusted advisor. As a father, he was demanding, yet deeply committed. As a husband, he was physically and emotionally vacant. Sonya was well aware of the reasons why. There had been other women throughout their marriage, a couple of them he admitted to; most of them he wrongly assumed were a secret.

Julia Leeds fell into the latter category. Sonya knew about their relationship almost from the moment it began, though the extent of that relationship didn’t become clear to her until this evening.

Now, as she sat in her home office, still reeling from the video image of Julia engaging her husband in the most intimate ways imaginable, Sonya was hit with the bleak realization that the personal battle she was about to embark on would be far and away the most difficult of her life.

The flash disk had been delivered to her office at the City and County Building via courier a couple of hours earlier, along with a note explaining its contents:
Summary of Schumann Investment Group 2013 Board of Directors meeting ~ Attention Sonya Richmond
. The disk was passed on to Sonya by her assistant after assurances that it had been thoroughly scanned for viruses and other potential malware.

As a significant stakeholder in Schumann Investments, she was used to receiving such summaries on a regular basis, so she thought nothing of it as she put the disk in her briefcase and brought it home.

With her two children at soccer and field hockey practice, and Elliott unaccounted for since they left the Chamber luncheon, Sonya had decided to squeeze in a few fundraising calls before her future United States Senator hat would need to be replaced with the mother/chef/tutor hat that she did her best to wear with pride every night.

It was during a break between calls that she took out the disk for what she thought would be a quick once-over. Sonya knew how wrong her thought was the instant the disk opened. There were hundreds of files pertaining to the Schumann Investment Group, Brown, Wallace, and Epstein, Springwell Technologies, and the Denver Clerk and Recorder’s office. But it was the movie file that immediately caught her a
ttention. The title of the file: ‘
My Final Night with Elliott’
conjured up the worst fears imaginable. And within seconds of opening the file, Sonya’s worst fears were confirmed.

Beyond the primal devastation that came from watching her husband having sex with another woman, a woman who was now dead, what bothered Sonya the most were the words the two of them exchanged afterward. Even though their words were filled with venom, and in Julia’s case, hatred, there was also passion behind them that had long been absent in Sonya’s own marriage. Watching the argument infused her with a feeling of jealousy that both enraged and mystified her. But it was the last words that Elliott spoke before he walked out of Julia’s bedroom that truly frightened her. “
There will definitely be regrets at the end of all this, but they won’t be mine
.”

The attention that Julia Leeds’ murder received bordered on excessive, and though no one in the media was aware of her business connections to Elliott, Sonya was still forced to answer questions regarding the investigation. Based on the regular updates she had received from Police Chief Connolly, she knew that they had a suspect in mind almost from the beginning, and as of today that suspect was in custody. With her mind focused on issues infinitely more important than who killed Julia Leeds, she accepted the direction of the department’s investigation and
publicly praised Chief Connolly for a job well done. But Sonya had always found it odd that Elliott never once spoken about Julia’s murder, even though she was his firm’s lead counsel. As such, she would be as intimately involved in his business dealings as anyone else, and her loss undoubtedly had a tremendous impact on him. Yet, her death was seemingly nothing more than a news story to him, and any news story that didn’t directly involve the campaign was of no consequence.

Guilt about the affair was the reason Sonya came up with to explain this. But after seeing the video and viewing a number of the other documents on the disk – documents about a project that only she, Elliott, and a few select others were supposed to know about – Sonya began to suspect something else altogether. The thought took her mind to very dark places. But the most terrifying thing of all was that none of what she suspected surprised her in the least. Elliott was a powerful man capable of great good. But his need for power was insatiable, and as he had shown Sonya in a variety of ways over the years, should anything arise that he perceived to be a threat to his power, he would abandon everything, including his own morals, in order to neutralize that threat.

Based on what she just saw, Julia Leeds was a threat. And Elliott neutralized her. The disk and its contents were the obvious reason why. What wasn’t obvious was where the disk came from, if Elliott knew of its continued existence, or how it ended up in her hands. There was no note aside from the Board of Directors cover. If it was sent to her, it was no doubt sent to her opponent, and probably every media outlet in the city. And if that were the case, she would be powerless to stop it. The only option she had was to employ a spin control campaign the likes of which the world had never seen. She had the resources to do so. All she needed to do now was summon the will. She was on the cusp of achieving something that she had worked her entire professional life for, but the existence of this disk promised to destroy not only her senate campaign, but her entire life. She was not about to let that happen, either to herself or her children. If she and Elliott still had one thing in common, it was that insatiable need for power, and the ability to abandon everything – including your spouse of twenty-six years – in order to preserve it.

She had considered calling his cell phone, but ultimately thought it a useless gesture. Nothing he could say would change the situation or make her feel any better about it. Instead, she put the disk back in her briefcase and made another phone call. Just as she finished the ten-minute conversation, she heard a key in the front door, followed by the sounds of random teenage chatter.

“Hey you two,” she said with a manufactured smile as her daughter Miranda and son Owen stood in the office doorway.

“Mom, would you please tell your child that I’m just as capable of driving us home as she is? You and dad got that car for both of us,” a newly licensed Owen told his mother.

Miranda, eighteen and clearly above it all, rolled her eyes at her younger brother. “It’s bad enough that I have to wait for you forty minutes after my practice ends. Now you want me to let you drive so we can both end up wrapped around a telephone pole? You are beyond clueless.”

“Unbelievable. Mom
–”

Sonya cut off her son’s protest before it could start. “I’m a politician, which means I’ve mastered the art of compromise. So why don’t you guys get changed, I’ll start dinner, and we’ll come up with a solution that works for the both of you.”

Miranda sighed while Owen hoisted his muddy soccer cleats on his shoulder. They mumbled insults to each other as they walked out of the office.

A typical night
in the Richmond household had suddenly become far from typical. But her children couldn’t know that. And right now, neither could Elliott. Fortunately, the mom hat that she changed into this time every night fit as snugly as ever.

The faithful, understanding, overly-tolerant wife hat, however, would be
a much different story.

CHAPTER 42

D
etective Graham could not help but feel good about himself, despite Matthew Westerly, his ties to Brown, Wallace, and Epstein, and his enthusiastic, yet misguided, belief in his client’s innocence. He knew in the end that it didn’t matter what Matthew Westerly thought. The entire police department stood behind Graham’s assertion that Clemmons was guilty. And that belief was all that the public would need to ultimately convict him, circumstantial evidence and all. Stephen Clemmons was a nobody, a black nobody at that. Matthew Westerly couldn’t find a jury anywhere who would take his client’s side, even if the senior partners at his grand old law firm selected them personally.

As he made the short walk from his desk to Commander Brandt’s office,
the same Commander Brandt he had made a frantic phone call to only a short time earlier, Graham tried to convince himself that he wasn’t looking for a pat on the back. But he knew that he was deserving of one. He had steered the investigation exactly as the commander had asked, never once revealing even a hint of his objective to his partner, the lieutenant, or anyone else. Even with the curveball that was Camille Grisham, Graham kept his head, and his focus. And because of that, the public would rest easier thinking that Julia Leeds’ murderer was behind bars, the mayor would commend him for a job well done, and someone with a vast amount of power would owe him a very big favor.

Before today, Graham had no idea who that someone was. When he was initially approached by Commander Brandt, he was told first and foremost not to ask any questions. So he didn’t. As a member of the Army Rangers, he was well versed in the standards of protocol and chain of command: you do your job and only your job, you never question orders, and you never worry about the larger meaning of it all. And Graham didn’t worry. Commander Brandt ensured that he was well-compensated for his efforts. His retirement nest egg was considerably larger, and his spotty personnel file was suddenly blemish-free. All he needed to say was a silent ‘thank you’ to the man he now knew to be ultimately responsible, and not give him, Julia Leeds, or Camille Grisham’s computer disk a second thought.

The door to Commander Brandt’s office was ajar, and inside he could see Brandt and what looked like a uniformed officer huddled in quiet conversation. When Graham knocked on the door, the two men quickly separated and Brandt rushed toward him. He yanked the door open, greeting Graham with a look he could only describe as irritated.

“Can I help you?” he asked, as if Graham were a door to door salesman who had interrupted his dinner.

Graham was taken aback by his tone and at first didn’t know how to reply.

The commander’s round, pale face was suddenly infused with red. “What do you want, detective? I’m in the middle of a meeting.”

The uniformed officer, who Graham now recognized as Patrick Davies, stared at him with the same irritated look as Brandt.

“I need to talk to you sir,” Graham finally said. “It’s about the Clemmons interview.” 

“It’s not a good time, Walter.”

“How can it not be a good time, sir?” Graham asked with genuine confusion.

“Because there are much more important things going on right now.”

“Are you kidding me? What could possibly be more important to anyone in this department than Stephen Clemmons?”

Brandt shook his head as he looked back at Davies.

“What the hell does
he have to do with anything?” Graham asked, pointing at the officer.

Davies’ hard stare didn’t waver.

“As I said, we have other business to attend to right now. If you want you can schedule a meeting with me sometime this evening or tomorrow morning. ”

Now Graham was the one who was irritated. “Schedule a meeting with you? Look, if you’re still upset about that Camille Grisham thing, I don’t think it’s anyth
ing we need to worry about any—”

Brandt sighed as he pushed the door closed. “Goodbye Walter.”

Graham put a hand up to stop the door. “Goddamn it, Oliver. You can’t just dismiss me like that. After everything I’ve done, I deserve a few minutes.”

Before Brandt could even respond, Officer Davies rushed to the door and slammed it in Graham’s face.

The detective was too stunned to move. From behind the door, he heard voices, though he couldn’t hear what they were saying. Had it been anyone other than Commander Brandt, he would have stormed the office door and demanded answers. But doing so would probably cost him a lot more than his badge. So he waited. In less than a minute, the door swung open, and Officer Davies blew past Graham like he wasn’t even there. Graham immediately turned to give chase, but a heavy hand stopped him.

“Don’t think about it, Walter.”

Graham’s eyes burned with a fury that he did nothing to suppress. “Who does that cocksucker think he is?”

Brandt simply stared at him.

Graham fought back the urge to punch him in the face. “You’re just going to let him get away with doing that to me?”

“At this point I’m not particularly worried about it.”

“Did I just step into Alice in Wonderland or something? What the hell is this all about?”

“Something that doesn’t involve you.”

“Now all of a sudden things don’t involve me? Stephen Clemmons is sitting in that holding cell right now because of me. I get that done and now I’m not of any use to you anymore?”

Brandt’s doughy face suddenly contorted with anger. “I suggest you watch yourself, Walter. What’s happening now is of no concern to you whatsoever. I don’t know how many different ways I have to tell you that.”

“But they are of concern to Officer Davies?”

Brandt walked back into his office. “I don’t have time to sooth your hurt feelings, detective. As I said before, if you want to talk to me another time, email a meeting request.” With that, Brandt closed the door.

Graham was in the process of raising his hand to pound on it when a voice stopped him.

“What’s going on Walter?”

Graham turned to see Detective Sullivan approaching. He couldn’t help but roll his eyes.

“What were you and the commander talking about?”

“Nothing at all,” he mumbled.

“Well, I need to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“Camille Grisham.”

“Seriously? Enough about Camille Grisham.”

“It’s important, Walter.”

“No it is not.” Graham tried to walk past her but she stopped him. “Take your hand off me, Chloe.”

She promptly complied. The concern in her eyes was palpable, but Graham couldn’t worry about explaining. He walked away without saying another word. At that moment he couldn’t have cared less about Camil
le Grisham or his soon-to-be ex-partner. He had one objective and one objective only: find Officer Patrick Davies and put him in his place.