At Any Cost by Cara Ellison Page A

says.”
    â€œIt says the Department of Justice has probable cause to believe that five years ago you sold a fatal dose of cocaine to Leo Jacobellis.”
    Fallon frowned and shook her head pensively. “I never sold him anything. I’ve never done any illegal drugs at all. But … Leo was my boyfriend. And he did overdose on cocaine. You probably heard about it during the campaign. Dad’s opponent made sure that every person in America believed I was a drug-addicted whore.”
    Her voice had turned bitter; he saw that Fallon had been genuinely hurt by the attacks. But voters apparently believed that nasty gossip had nothing to do with the ability of Preston Hughes to govern, which made the timing of the search warrant even more curious. If the incumbent administration was going to harass the opposition with a murder investigation, why wait until it was too late to affect the outcome of the election?
    Fallon was still visibly shaking. She was so pale that for the first time, he noticed
    fine, coppery freckles sprinkled over the bridge of her nose. Had they always been there? He tried to remember.
    Lifting the drink to her lips, she swallowed the rum and coke in huge, fast gulps. Then poured another. She still had that scared, glittery look in her eyes, like shaken dice offered in a cup.
    â€œI didn’t kill him,” Fallon said. “Though I think … I think it will be difficult to prove that.”
    Tom could have laughed. The thought of Fallon killing someone was actually amusing. But he only said, “It won’t get to the stage where you have to prove it. ”
    A loud knock at the door was followed by an authoritative male voice saying, “Miss Hughes?”
    Fallon stiffened. Kevin White, the agent posted to the control room all morning, peered inside. “Ma’am, please pardon the interruption. Max Hall is here to see you. He says he has an appointment.”
    â€œOh thank God,” Fallon muttered, visibly relieved that the reinforcements had arrived. “Let Max in, please.”
    Max Hall had been the president’s personal attorney for thirty years. In all the time Fallon had known him, even on social occasions, he never lost the patina of supreme competence. In a town full of attorneys and politicians, Max Hall had a monopoly on composure; he simply did not lose control, ever. It was this element of his personality that permitted Fallon a faint glimmer of hope that this nightmare would be handled well and quickly.
    â€œMax, they served a warrant on me at work,” she said, thrusting the document at him. “It’s not true. I’ve never bought or sold or used cocaine. I don’t know how this happened. Why now?”
    Max let her babble while he scanned the document. He flipped to the back page and read the signatures of the FBI agents and judge. “This is shit,” he said calmly. “They haven’t been here yet?”
    â€œNot yet.”
    â€œThey will be,” he said. “They are looking for indications of drug transactions, financial records, and narcotics and narcotics paraphernalia.”
    â€œOh God,” she groaned.
    â€œWhere I can make a call?”
    Fallon indicated the back of the house, toward the office area. She took another gulp of her rum and coke, then stood very still at her black-granite bar, looking bewildered, as if she recognized nothing about her own life.
    The burning anxiety in her eyes activated all kinds of protective instincts in Tom. It went beyond the rote throw-yourself-in-front-of-a-bullet training to something altogether more personal. Fucking his protectee in a hallway was the epitome of bad judgment, but it also helped clarify just how intensely he was committed to keeping her from harm, whether it was a bullet, an indictment, or a map of the keys, whatever that was.
    Max Hall returned to the kitchen, where Fallon was still guzzling her rum and coke. “I am meeting Ben Lambert