Margaret Truman's Experiment in Murder Read Online Free Page A

have to run,” said Smith. “Can’t be late for my tennis match with Dean Molino.”
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    Mackensie Smith had recruited Tatum to teach the law school course. Smith had been one of D.C.’s top criminal attorneys, the go-to lawyer when your life was at stake. He was a ferocious advocate in the courtroom but a gentle, accepting man outside it. It was that lighter side that had attracted Annabel Lee to him. She’d been a successful matrimonial attorney until meeting the erudite Mac Smith, whose first wife and only child, a son, had been slaughtered on the Beltway by a drunken driver. When the drunk’s attorney successfully mitigated his client’s culpability before a jury of his peers and got him off with a minimal sentence, Smith reconsidered the use to which he’d put his extensive legal knowledge for all those years. He folded his private practice and accepted a teaching position at GW Law. Was teaching young attorneys to defend people any less unsavory than doing it himself? He sometimes wondered. But not often.
    Recently Smith had succumbed to the lure of the courtroom and the give-and-take of negotiation, and had taken on a small select number of clients, mostly friends in whom he believed and whose legal needs weren’t outside his comfort zone. Annabel wasn’t especially happy with his reimmersion into the world of advocacy law but understood what was driving him. While the classroom could be challenging at times, it paled in comparison with what her husband termed “the real world of the law.”
    After they’d married, Annabel, too, decided that she’d had enough of representing men and women whose need for revenge against a soon-to-be-former spouse trumped their common sense, especially when it came to the welfare of their children. She’d fostered a lifelong ambition of owning an art gallery devoted to pre-Columbian art, and with Mac’s encouragement she took down her shingle, found the perfect space in Georgetown, and realized her dream.
    While both were busy people, they found time to maintain relationships with a variety of Washingtonians, including some in high positions of government, a few cabinet members, the attorney general, congressmen and -women, and Senator George Mortinson, whose campaign to unseat the current president, Allan Swayze, had gained traction and placed him comfortably ahead in the latest polls. Smith had acted as counsel to a committee chaired by Mortinson, and they’d become good friends, their relationship embellished by their love of tennis. They often played when Mortinson was in the Senate and whenever Smith’s bad knee wasn’t acting up. Since Mortinson announced that he was running for the presidency, their tennis matches had become less frequent, although he occasionally took time out from campaigning to meet Smith on the court, much to the chagrin of his campaign staff and the Secret Service detail assigned to protect him while on the stump.
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    Tatum, in his midforties, had earned his Ph.D. in American University’s behavior, cognition, and neuroscience graduate program. He’d been at the top of his class since high school and throughout college; his doctoral thesis that correlated a person’s level of hypnotizability with the effectiveness of acupuncture was considered one of the best papers ever written by someone in the program, and he was recruited upon graduation by myriad universities, hospitals, and government agencies. To everyone’s surprise, he opted to join the Washington MPD’s small but growing Criminal Behavior Unit that had been established to better predict the actions of known criminals. Patterned after the FBI’s criminal-profiling department, the CBU was soon emulated by other police departments across the country, and Nic Tatum was quickly recognized as a rising star in the division.
    His resignation only three