Death of a Washington Madame Read Online Free Page A

way,
confession in record time, although that didn't count either.
    But what did truly count came early one morning in late
April. Fiona and Gail had worked all night following a lead on yet another
domestic, where the alleged perpetrator had stabbed his girlfriend to death and
disappeared. He was spotted by the sister of the deceased coming out of a blue
Buick and going into a large apartment complex in Southeast Washington.
    Not knowing which apartment the man was visiting and
unwilling to roust people in the complex, the two detectives staked out the car
until the man came out sometime after three in the morning. He was arrested
without incident protesting his innocence, a given, and by the time he was
booked and they were heading home it was nearly dawn.
    They drove in Gail's beige Camaro and preceded northward,
then cut to the East toward Spring Valley. The car pulled into the circular
driveway of Fiona's house just as the sun began to poke above the budding
Magnolias Fiona's father had planted to partially screen the house next door.
    Bone tired, Fiona gave Gail a good-bye tap on the shoulder
and watched as the car kicked up gravel and sped out of the driveway.
    She stood for a while studying the facade of the house in
the incandescence of the early morning light. Her father had bought the house
in the spring of the year he had been elected to his second Senate term. She
must have been five or six. It had seemed less of an extravagance then, a fitting
home for such a political rising star, a neighborhood of equals, a validation
for a shanty Irishman who had burst into the lace curtain firmament. She was
determined never to sell it, a treasured heirloom, to be passed down through
the generations, except that there was no progeny ... not yet ... perhaps
never.
    Seeing the house in the glory of the April morning, sun
tinting the brick in a rusty glow, trees and shrubs pregnant with burgeoning
life, she felt again the renewal of the instinctive drive to propagate. At such
moments it, the mating phenomena and its complications rose once again in her
mind as a central concern. It was, she knew, the one temptation she had so far
resisted for a more permanent relationship with Hal Perry, a subject she did
not have the courage to broach, mostly because she feared it would sentence her
to the role of Corporate wife for life.
    At this moment, she felt needy. And when she felt this way,
she found herself reflecting on the shipwreck of her various relationships,
assigning blame, mostly to herself, which she knew was over-reacting. At times
she berated herself for being too independent, too heavy-handed, too demanding,
too romantic, too honest, too analytical, too picky, as her mother had alleged,
or the ultimate, too fearful of commitment, always a convenient cop-out.
    And yet, men, strong, assertive, potent men were the sugar
candy of her life. She loved the whole process, from initial engagement to the
skirmishes of flirtation and seduction which led to the inevitable and various
acts of sexual congress, all of them, especially the accelerating rhapsody of
physical pleasure, the getting and the giving ... the coming and the coming.
    Perhaps, she told herself candidly, what she feared most
was anything less than variety, an accusation that frightened her. Or was it
that old Catholic bugaboo, the echo of her mother's admonitions, which put
making love on a level of sinfulness along with theft, lying, even murder,
which was an irony in itself.
    At times she wished she could scream out at her mother's
clinging ghost, which haunted her mind and memory, impossible to exorcise.
Fiona was certain that her genes had absorbed molecules of guilt in her
mother's womb, marveling often at their enduring power.
    She let herself into the house and yielding finally to the
strain of exhaustion, unbuttoning and unzipping as she beat a path to her
bedroom and fell naked into bed and quickly, thankfully, into oblivion, leaving
the question of Hal