Terror in D.C. by Randy Wayne White

Author:Randy Wayne White
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504024570
Publisher: Open Road Media Mystery & Thriller

fourteen

James Hawker had entered the Capitol Building by the west portico after first standing on the steps near the crypt, reviewing in silence the Statue of Freedom perched atop the building’s bright white cupola.

Then he made his way down the marble halls of the north wing, the Senate side of the Capitol, along the line of open doors. Most of the senators weren’t in their offices. But their secretaries were. Hawker took an informal survey as he walked. He saw more than two dozen secretaries between the rotunda and Thy Estes’s office. All of them were very pretty. Most of them were brunettes or blondes. They looked up and smiled as Hawker clickity-clacked by. They were firm-breasted, sleek, stylish, and had bodies that squeezed at the heart.

Hawker had seen these women before on his few previous trips to Washington, and though the faces changed, the personality type did not. These were the power groupies, the best of the large female herd attracted to D.C. by the allure of association with the men who held the reins of history. They came in many guises, in many roles. In the 1960s they had come as peace advocates or freedom marchers. Now the favorite facade was that of the “modern” woman, an independent business person who demanded respect and equality. But whatever the current social costume happened to be, the goals of the power groupies remained always the same: do anything they had to do to find some niche in the power structure, then hang on to that little crevice of importance by whatever means necessary.

The standard vehicle was, of course, sex. As a result, the prettiest of the power groupies usually prevailed. The rest either meshed into the Washington treadmill of lesser jobs, or they went home with the hopes of marrying a member of the hometown power structure. Some, no doubt, succeeded at neither, and these girls were to be found beneath the streetlamps in the bowels of the city.

In truth the jobs of the successful and unsuccessful did not differ all that much.

Hawker’s appointment with Senator Thy Estes was scheduled to last twenty minutes. It was on her secretary’s agenda: “James Hawker, friend of J. M. Hayes: 5:10 P.M. to 5:30.”

It was to have been the senator’s last appointment of the day, a courtesy call that demanded her to do nothing more than shake hands and smile.

As it turned out, though, she and Hawker were still talking when the senator’s brass and maple grandmother clock gonged seven times.

Her secretary had long gone, as had most of the other workers in the north wing of the Capitol Building.

To Hawker it seemed like they had just started talking. As in the film musicals of old, time flew by. Lester Rehfuss was right. The woman had a weird magnetism. It had nothing to do with her looks—although she was attractive enough. She was a solid-looking woman in her early forties, two inches under six feet, with good shoulders, long runner’s legs, firm globes of buttocks beneath the gray tweed skirt suit she wore.

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