Capitol Offense (Texas Heroines in Peril) (9 page)

So, certain she would be.

Since she was close to a small,
out-of the-way book shop she frequented, she decided to stop
there. Then she could determine if she were being followed. She
turned left. The blue car, which lagged three of four cars behind
her, slowly rounded the corner after her. Two blocks down, she
turned right. Driving very slowly, she kept checking the
rear view mirror. The blue car also turned right. She inched
her car up to a parallel parking spot in front of the book shop.
She was trembling now.

As she turned off the engine, she searched
her mirror, trying to identify the men. The driver wore a white
shirt, dark suit and tie. His hair was grey. The other man would be
easy to spot again. He was redheaded, young and wore shirt sleeves
with no tie.

As she entered the shop,
she saw the blue car drive by slowly. She felt as if she were in a
fishbowl. She was the only customer in the shop. She darted for the
bookcases which displayed works of English fiction when the poetry
section caught her eye. She stopped in front of it. Her eyes
quickly scanned the familiar titles, then stopped on one slim
volume. Its title was
Tarnished.
The poetess was Laura Windsong. Her heart
pounding with excitement, Lacy snatched it away. She looked at the
flyleaf, hoping to find an inscription. There was none.

Her concentration on the book broke when the
door opened. She looked over the shelves. It was the redhead.
Fright rushed over her, leaving her quivering. She followed him
with her eyes without moving her head. He was careful not to look
her in the face. Going directly to the rear of the shop, he
selected a spot from which he could watch her every movement.

She seized this moment to pay for the
book.

Lacy thought the cashier concentrated a bit
too much on her trembling hands. "By the way," Lacy said, trying to
divert her attention, "I've been trying to locate the 1906
collection of Governor Hogg's speeches. Seems you can't get one
outside of the archives. Is there any possibility of you locating
one?" She knew the few volumes in existence belonged to private
collectors.

"You can leave your name and number, and
I'll let you know if I hear of one coming available," the clerk
said.

Lacy jotted down the information and
left.

Still shaking as she took the driver's seat,
she quickly locked her door. She had difficulty finding the
ignition keys. In her panic, she had passed them over several
times. Before starting the car she searched the block for the blue
car. It was not visible. As she started the car, she saw the
redhead peering at her from the book store window.

She left the street far more quickly than
she had entered. Rounding the corner, she spotted the blue car. The
driver's face was hidden behind a map.

Before she reached the main intersection two
blocks up, she saw through her rear-view mirror the young redhead
get in the blue car. Throughout the next two miles, the blue car
followed her, keeping several car lengths behind. Lacy knew she
would not be able to call Bryson. A call from a pay phone would
look too suspicious.

Why were they following her? Could it have
something to do with Jim suspecting her of alerting Bryson? She
felt sure Jim was responsible for the two men tagging her. Could
she be sure the men were simply following her and recording her
activities? Then a bizarre—but terrifying—thought seized her. Could
they be murderers contracted to kill her? She suddenly imagined the
redhead pulling the trigger of a high powered rifle, aiming it
at her head at that very minute. Should she risk going home where
she could be cornered by the two watchdogs? She thought of Jim. He
was still very much attracted to her, in love with her in his own
peculiar way. He would not have her killed unless he had caught her
at something. They couldn't have caught her at anything yet, though
no one but she could have contacted the FBI. She reassured herself
that she was just being followed.

Knowing her dangerous predicament, she felt
the safest course would be to act naturally, to go directly
home.

Safe in her
house  alone  she could let her terror subside.
After securing the deadbolt lock on both front and back doors, she
tried to exercise calm reasoning. It was a case of mind over
matter. She was safe in the confines of her house. She now knew her
enemy, which put her a step ahead of them. She would not do
anything foolish.

When night fell, she looked out of her
bedroom window without being seen. As she suspected, the blue car
parked several houses down the street from hers. She supposed they
would stay there all night, or at least until a replacement
arrived.

Now that she was certain she was being
watched, she could not rule out wiretapping. Anyone capable of
illegal wiretapping could also have planted bugs in her house. For
no reason would she consider calling Bryson from home, nor could
she risk calling him from her office.

She then remembered the ladies' room at a
local department store had a pay phone in it. She planned to go
there the following day on her lunch hour. At least her watchdogs
would not be able to follow her in there.

She ate a bacon sandwich and settled down to
read Ruth Chambers' poetry book. It took her only an hour and a
half to read it. On the whole, Ruth Chambers' work represented to
Lacy a pitifully amateurish effort. Both in subject matter and in
banal phraseology, all of the poems were trite. Lacy could tell
from the verses that Ruth Chambers had been a deeply religious
woman. Many of the poems were inspirational. For the insight into
Ruth Chambers' life, the poems were valuable. The poem Lacy reread
the most dealt with a shattered marriage  shattered
because the husband was not what the wife thought he was.

In the poem Lacy found the most
enlightening, Ruth Chambers had apparently found her husband guilty
of:

Sins which would surely guarantee

This man I had loved

A horrendous eternity.

She had concluded the poem with:

Though I live in deepest strife,

I'll keep His binds

Until He concludes this life.

This was the closest Lacy had come to
finding tangible evidence to use against Jim Chambers. The book
publisher was bound to have a record of who paid for the private
printing. Lacy could also seek out the poetry society that Ruth
Chambers had belonged to and find members who might be able to
identify her, if not by name, at least by the lake address or by
her photo.

Lacy realized the pseudonym and the fact the
accusations (sins) against Jim were vague would pose a legal
problem, but it would be something to start with. She could
scarcely wait until she could give her newly found leads to Bryson
the next day.

After she turned out her bedside lamp, she
went to her window and peeked out. The blue car had swapped with a
white one. A lone man sat in the white car, taking advantage of
full view of Lacy's house.

Chapter 11

The headline on the bottom
of page one of her newspaper arrested Lacy's attention the
following morning.
FBI agent found
dead
. Her heart pounding furiously, she
read on, hoping against hope it was not Bryson.

An agent for the Federal Bureau of
Investigation was shot dead early Tuesday in his parked car at 503
First St.

Police seek two men who were seen fleeing
from the scene in a late model dark blue car.

Joseph Bryson, an FBI agent assigned to
Austin, was pronounced dead on arrival at Breckinridge Hospital at
12:30 a.m. He suffered a bullet wound to the head.

Police were summoned to the area by two
students who heard gunshots while walking to their cars after
seeing a band on Sixth Street.

Also late Monday, Bryson's office in the
Federal Building was ransacked, leaving police no clues as to the
nature of the case Bryson was working on at the time of his death.
A local FBI spokesman said Bryson was "between cases."

Numb all over, Lacy laid down the paper. She
regretted their decision to shoulder the dangerous suspicions
alone. What else could she have done? Intuition had told her from
the start that investigating the Hispanic girl's accusations could
be a deadly business.

Not only was Bryson dead, but his office had
been broken into. Had he written anything about her? What was that
peculiar shorthand he had recorded the day of their first meeting?
Had they got that last night? If only she knew what Bryson's files
had held on her. She could very well be marked for the same fate
which had taken Bryson's life.

Suddenly she remembered she had Bryson's
phone number in her billfold. She had meant to memorize and destroy
it from the very first, but it was one the things she never got
around to doing.

She got the billfold from her purse, took
out the crisp card and flushed it down the toilet. Watching it
disappear into the sewage, Lacy felt her last hope was perishing
with that tiny slip of paper.

Like a thunderclap had awakened her, Lacy
realized her own life was drastically threatened. It was as if Jim
had cut off her oxygen supply to force her to surface. She would be
followed every minute. Her every phone call would be monitored. And
if she attempted to get help, to jeopardize Jim Chambers' vast
political empire, her life would be snuffed out.

What was she to do? She knew her phone wires
had to be tapped. If she placed a call now, she'd probably be dead
before help arrived. If she drove for help, the minute she stepped
out of the car, say at a police station, she would be gunned down
just as Bryson had been.

Perhaps she could somehow manage to smuggle
out a letter. This last idea gave her encouragement.

She went to her computer, and as quickly as
she could type, she wrote her entire story, starting with the trip
to Schneiderburg. She included details of her meeting with Bryson,
her overheard conversation between McNally and Jim, Ruth Chambers'
poetry, and concluded with the account of being followed by the two
men in the blue car, the men who matched the description of
Bryson's killers. Although she used abbreviations, incomplete
sentences and people's initials after the first reference, the
letter still ran twelve pages.

But who would be trustworthy enough to
receive the letter? State employees were out of the question. Jim
had some sort of hold over most of them.

She considered sending it to the FBI in
Washington, but was afraid it would never reach the right people
while she was still alive. If only she knew someone who owed no
allegiance to Jim Chambers. That left out most of her friends. And
though Becky's loyalty would be only to Lacy, since she was Lacy's
roommate, they probably watched her closely already.

Lacy could think of no one. She printed the
letter, signed it, and put it in a stamped, blank envelope. Then
she basted it to the inside lining of her suit jacket before
getting dressed for work.

She had lost all track of time. She would
not have been surprised if it were already ten o'clock. She was
relieved to find it was only eight. The time she had spent on the
letter had been only slightly longer than the time she set aside
each morning for reading the newspaper.

Just as she was about to leave, Becky
meandered in. She wore an un-ironed shift and sandals. Her hair was
a mess.

"Lace, I hate to ask it of you, but my car's
on the blink. I'm going to have to put it in the garage at Sears
this morning, and I wondered if you could follow me over, then drop
me by the university?"

"Sure, it's not much out of the way, and the
university's not far from Sears. What's the matter with your
car?"

"Something in the cooling system. Every time
I stop, I have to put water in the dumb thing. Yesterday it made
the most awful noise  sounded like the mating call of a
dying rhinoceros."

Lacy let out a roaring laugh. "You ought to
turn your wit to speechmaking."

"No, thanks. I'm perfectly apolitical. It'd
kill me, too, to be part of the establishment."

Becky's car! It might just be the escape
vehicle Lacy needed. She was not at all sure how she would manage
it, but she had to try. She could work out the details later.

"Do you want me to pick you up about five
today, so we can get the car?" Lacy asked.

"You're an angel. That'd be great. If you
really don't mind, why don't you pick me up on the drag in front of
the Union?"

"Fine." At least she could plan on the car
being there until five. Now, if she could only lose her followers
long enough to pick up Becky's car, she could maneuver an
escape.

It did not surprise Lacy to see the two
watchdogs in the blue car following her again. She kept close watch
on them via her rear view mirror. They obviously were puzzled
by her tailgating of Becky. And when she saw the redhead who rode
shotgun talking into a cell phone she knew he must be requesting
aid to follow Becky.

When they arrived at the Sears auto center,
she caught sight of a white car with two men in it tailgating the
blue car.

Becky was with the mechanic only a
minute.

Despite the fear which strummed through her,
Lacy kept up a typical conversation with Becky all the way to the
university. She had to act perfectly natural. Becky must suspect
nothing. For Becky's safety, she had to remain ignorant of Lacy's
peril.

It was difficult, though,
for Lacy to laugh with Becky about yesterday's
Daily Texan
editorial when visions
of Bryson's blood stained body kept blurring her
concentration. And it wasn't easy discussing the evening's dinner
when she didn't know if she'd be alive at dinner time.