A Killing Sky by Andy Straka Page A

grabbing at my dress and was trying to undo his belt when, thank God, someone knocked on the other door.”
    “What happened then?”
    “He broke away and slipped out the door he'd come through. I was so shaken up, I pretended I was ill. The girl who'd driven me down from Charlottesville came upstairs. They got me out to the car and she took me home.”
    “That's it?”
    She nodded.
    “You ever tell anyone about this?”
    “No. Not for a long time, that is. The only other person who knows about it is Karen Drummond. I told her after she decided she wanted a divorce from Tor.”
    “How about your ex-husband? Why didn't you tell him?”
    “Are you kidding? Art would've tried to kill Tor.”
    “The thought's just been crossing my own mind,” I said.
    “Besides, what good would it have done? At first, I just kept telling myself Tor had been drunk, he didn't know what he was doing. Then I started wondering about myself. Had I done something to encourage him? Later I decided I hadn't, but I doubted anyone else would ever believe me.”
    I nodded. When I was a rookie cop in New York, I'd interviewed a rape victim, a young woman who worked on Wall Street, well educated, emotionally stable. But she'd decided in the end not even to press charges. She'd met the schmuck in a bar, gotten a little tipsy, and finding they both shared a passion for art, let him talk her into dropping by her place so he could see her small collection of paintings.
    “Now you know why I never volunteered for another campaign,” Marcia said.
    “But you stayed friends with Karen and the girls.”
    “Yes. But to this day, I've always done my best to avoid Tor.”
    “How about him? He never approached you, never tried to get you alone to go for the grab-and-pull act again?”
    “No.”
    Sophisticated sexual predators will sometimes move on once the thrill of the hunt is gone. “You ever try talking to him about it?”
    “Once. It was a few months later, when Art and I were beginning to have our troubles. He called the house looking for Karen and the kids—they'd been by to visit earlier in the day. Tor asked me how I was doing. I don't remember exactly what I said, something about Art and his drinking. Then I told him point-blank: ‘You men need to take more responsibility for your actions with alcohol.’ “
    “What did he say?”
    “He said I needed to be more careful how I presented myself around ail-American studs like him and Art. I knew then and there I'd never be able to accuse him of anything and make it stick.”
    “You know if Drummond's ever done this to anybody else?”
    She shook her head. “Like I said, I try to have as little to do with him as possible.”
    I put my arm out and gently pulled her to me across the seat. She leaned on my shoulder, and I kissed the top of her head and held her close. The curtain of fog continued to rise from the fields while we watched. Here it would be a while before the sun was able to burn through the haze.
     

13
     
    Congressman Torrin Drummond looked haggard, most likely from lack of sleep. I caught glimpses of him on the phone as a secretary and an aide intermittently buzzed in and out of his office, triaging what appeared to be a blizzard of messages and calls.
    I waited just outside the door in a conference room of his campaign headquarters. The building was an old double storefront in the Belmont section of town, just the kind of area where Drummond needed to drive home his slogan of “standing for the working people.” The walls were festooned with REELECT DRUMMOND! posters. His chief aide, Mel Dworkin, the chunky man with bulbous lips and blow-dried hair that Cassidy had described, sat across the table from me.
    “Wow,” I said, “I hope it's not always this frantic.”
    Dworkin was stone-faced. “Man's lost his daughter. Wouldn't you be frantic?”
    I had to admit he had me there.
    “So the congressman must be pretty close to his daughters, huh?”
    He shot me a look like he