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not-quite-handsome. He was now stunningly good-looking—completely jello-knee inducing—like the even-more-attractive love child of Denis Leary and Damian Lewis. And he was particularly attractive because he was now looking at Jenn as if she were not just interesting, but an interesting
woman
.
    “I voted for the idiot,” he admitted. “But he was the idiot I knew, so …” He shrugged expansively, charmingly.
    Hank sent Jenn an air kiss as he closed the door behind him. Now that the show was over, Ron and Gene, too, escaped into Maria’s office with the package.
    “Our website was extensive and easy to access,” Jenn told the detective, hiding her fluster and resisting the urge to fix her hair. There was nothing she could do to make it look better anyway, and if she touched it, her body language would shout that she was vulnerable to his charm. She wasn’t certain of much—except for the fact that she wanted to keep that newsflash from him. Instead, she pushed her glasses up her nose and folded her arms across her chest. “It still is. The assemblywoman’s positions are clearly outlined.
She’s
your champion, Detective. The
idiot
thought the solution to budget cuts was to downsize the police department and instead imposea strict youth curfew. A curfew, in the city that Frank says doesn’t sleep.”
    “Really?”
    “You voted for him, and you don’t know that? His position was that cuts to the police and fire department were inevitable. Maria, on the other hand, has been outspoken in her belief that New York needs to grow both departments—”
    “And pay for it how?”
    “We’re still working on that,” she admitted. “Hence the line-byline perusal of the budget—”
    “Hence,” he said, with another laugh. “Who says
hence?”
    “—and the accompanying hoopla over the question about ammunition,” she continued.
    “Hoopla
, I like,” he told her, the twinkle in his eye on full power.
    “The hoopla,” she repeated, enjoying the eye contact. Was he actually flirting with her? “… is nothing compared to the full-on uproar over the Ten Commandments issue, which is what this”—she gestured to the threatening note and the knife—“is about.”
    He nodded. “Yeah, I actually heard about that one.”
    One of the newly elected assembly members from a more conservative upstate district wanted to reinstall an antique plaque with the Ten Commandments in the lobby of the building that housed Maria’s office in Albany. It had hung there over fifty years earlier, was removed during renovations, believed lost, but had now been found.
    Maria had made a statement announcing that because her many constituents in New York City had a wide variety of religious beliefs, the presence of this plaque in a state building should also mean that other religious icons and messages could now be placed in the lobby as well.
    It was then that the flood of angry e-mails and phone calls started—most of them from out of state. They’d received a numberof anonymous threats, all of which they’d reported according to legislative guidelines, but it wasn’t until this ugliness—delivered at the end of a very sharp knife—that Jenn became more than just mildly concerned.
    Maria was worried about it, too—enough to drive back from Albany, even though Ford was developing an odd-sounding cough.
    “The really stupid thing,” Jenn told the detective now, “is that it’s over. Completely. We all compromised—we found common ground. The plaque
is
a part of New York’s heritage, and everyone agreed that in order to preserve it, it should be in a special glass case.” With another plaque documenting its history, as well as a clarification from a local constitutional scholar as to the importance of separation of church and state.
    “In the back of the lobby,” Callahan pointed out. “Near the rest -rooms.”
    “Which nearly every guest to the building visits,” she countered.
    He laughed. “Nice spin.”
    “Both