Without looking back, Sean ran with everything he had down the hallway. He thumbed the elevator button rapid-fire. He twisted around and saw Finkle, shirtless, muscles pulsing, bearing down.
Sean sprinted to the emergency stairway and ran full-throttle, skipping steps. He heard the screech of sneakers racing after him echoing above. He stumbled, nearly nose-diving down the concrete stairwell. If Finkle didn’t kill him, the fall damn well might. On the ground floor, Sean stole a quick look up the stairwell. He and Finkle locked eyes. Sean pushed through the emergency door and ran through the lobby and outside. He saw Emily standing across the street and he caught her eye. He shook his head and mouthed Go. He then raced in the other direction.
CHAPTER 68
Sean had eluded Finkle, assuming the man had even followed him out of the building. He called Emily and they met up at the Friendship Heights Metro station where they caught a cab home.
Ryan was waiting for them at the door. He was pacing about the entryway. “I found them. I found everything you needed.” He held a messy stack of papers in his hand.
Sean squeezed him on the shoulder. “Nice work.” Sean tried to sound enthusiastic, but he was coming down from the adrenaline rush fueled by his turn as a breaking-and-entering artist and voyeur. His quest to secure hard evidence against the senator had failed. The image he’d snapped was of two blurry masses. On the bright side, James didn’t know that. And, photo or not, Sean knew James’s secret.
It was good to have some possible leverage against Senator James, but beyond that Sean and Emily weren’t sure what this meant about Abby’s death. Until then, Emily’s working theory had been that James raped and murdered Natalie Carlisle, John Chadwick had taken the fall, and Abby was a threat to James because she could expose the truth. They had no evidence that James or Finkle had killed Abby, but that day in the hideaway office James had confirmed that they’d at least been following Abby and had warned her to back off. And there were those missing girls from James’s past. But his relationship with Sebastian Finkle changed everything.
Sean thought of his meeting with John Chadwick at the prison. The man was certain that the senator had nothing to do with Natalie’s death. Trust me, Mason James is the last person in the world who’d rape and kill Natalie. Did Chadwick know James was gay? Chadwick wasn’t smirking when he’d said it, but looking back, there was a wink to his tone. Was that all this was about—James trying to hide his sexual orientation? Was that why he’d had Finkle follow and then threaten Abby? Was that why he’d been following Sean the night Brice died?
Ryan flattened a sheet of paper on the kitchen counter. Sean couldn’t make the kid wait any longer. “So what’d you find?”
Ryan displayed a handwritten list. “These are the owners of the houses for the addresses you gave me.” There were two names written in Ryan’s messy scrawl. “And here’s the owner of the Range Rover. That took longer to find.”
Sean read the names. They were familiar, but he couldn’t quite place them. Emily looked at them and her brow furrowed.
Then Ryan revealed another sheet of paper from behind his back. His eyes glimmered with pride. “And here’s how they’re all connected.”
He handed Sean a printout from a website. The header read UNITED STATES SENATE COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY—the committee that voted on Supreme Court nominees. Under the header was a list of names, the eighteen members of the committee. Three names were highlighted in yellow marker. Sebastian Finkle had delivered the envelopes to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Ryan smoothed out another sheet of paper on the counter. A news story with the headline THE FOUR HORSEMEN: THE BIPARTISAN OPPOSITION TO THE NOMINATION OF MASON JAMES.
“I ran a search of all their names together and found this story. These three and one other senator announced that they would likely vote against Senator James’s nomination to the Supreme Court.”
“Great work, buddy,” Sean said.
“What’s it all mean?” Ryan asked.
That was a good question. It was evident that James was blackmailing the hostile senators on the Judiciary Committee to prevent them from voting against his nomination. And he obviously had something on Justice Carr, whom he appeared to be blackmailing into supporting the nomination.
But all Sean worried about was what it meant for Ryan. What could Sean and Emily do with this information?
The answer came in the form of an e-mail delivered to Sean just before midnight. The e-mail did not show the name of the sender, and it deleted itself from the computer two minutes after Sean had opened it.
Mutual assured destruction.