The Gray Zone by Daphna Edwards Ziman Read Free Book Online Page A

Porter had married her.
    Suzanne patted her mouth with the handkerchief, leaving a ghostly imprint of her lips. “I don’t know why, but it helps to know that you were in the dark too,” she said sincerely.
    Jake nodded. He knew what she meant but still didn’t want to become her new best friend—if that were even possible with her. He was, if anything, more loyal to Porter now than ever. Porter must have been shut out by her to even contemplate an affair in the middle of a campaign.
    Suddenly Suzanne tacked again. “Say
something,
Jake. It sounds to me like you’re protecting someone. An adulterer? A liar? A bitch who knew he had a family?”
    They were both silenced by the severity of her words, which hung in the room like a nuclear cloud. Suzanne was fishing; Jake knew that. But he didn’t even try to reassure her. He just sat and waited.
    Finally she cleared her throat. “We’re going to do the service in LA. He was okay with that,” she said, somewhat defensively. “I wanted to ask if you would give the eulogy.”
    “Of course.” There was another long silence.
    “What’s with that fucking wig?” Suzanne spat out suddenly. “Was she a stripper? A hooker? Because I don’t know what’s worse …” Suzanne brought her hand to her mouth. Her shoulders convulsed once.
    Stiffly, Jake put a hand on her arm. “No idea,” he said, honestly. But there it was again, the wig and a flash to the night before. The triumphant look in the singer’s eyes when she’d pulled off the crown of platinum blonde.
    Abruptly, Suzanne stepped away. “I’m going back to LA tonight. I’ll call you before the service, make sure we’re on the same page.”
    “Are Ian and Anna coming with you?”
    “They’re meeting me at home.” She paused.
    For lack of anything better to say, Jake mumbled, “It’s going to be okay.”
    “Sure it is, Guv,” replied Suzanne, the sarcasm twisting her mouth. “Maybe when I’ve got a seat on the appropriations committee and every lobbyist in Washington is standing in line to kiss my ass, I’ll thank that hooker. But at the moment what it is”—she took a deep breath—“what it is, is humiliating and dirty and selfish.” Before she could see Jake’s reaction, she retreated to the bathroom, blotting her eyes.
    On his way out, Jake closed the door as quietly as he could.
    * * *
    Jake had been in the meeting for only three minutes and already he knew it was going to end badly. Cooper was bad enough, with hisprovincial thinking and hostility. Plus, Jake couldn’t imagine a dimmer pair of FBI agents than the ones assigned to Porter’s case.
    Brewer was a beefy man with a chin that tapered to a rounded point like the end of a baseball bat. He had gone around the room handing out his business cards, flicking each one out of the stack like a magician, offering them with his first two fingers, cigarette-style.
    Norris was a thin, weaselly man in a turtleneck and blazer, a style Jake loathed for its Gallic pretentiousness. He had a thin, bristly mustache and combed-back hair.
    The two spent twenty minutes pissing around the corners of the investigation, alternately bullying and confusing Cooper as they tried to establish their dominance. Once Brewer, the more obvious bully, had that down, Norris took over as the talker.
    “What we’re probably looking for is some kind of loner. Working alone. Probably a right-wing extremist. Possibly a white supremacist.”
    Jake groaned. Everyone turned in his direction as he said, “You’ve gotta be shitting me. That’s what you’ve got? You’re here to tell us
that
?”
    Brewer grunted. “Last I checked, you were an ambulance chaser with an important friend. Are you a detective now?”
    “No,” Jake answered evenly. “It’s just that I was hoping this case, the murder of a member of the U.S. Congress, would be assigned to competent investigators. I wasn’t expecting Washington to send out Frick and Frack, waving invisible-ink pens and