The Devil's bed

Lee was a neat man. The office was clean and orderly. There were shelves of books dealing with law and with congressional issues, several filing cabinets, and near the window, a hutch with a computer, monitor, and printer. In one corner sat a large safe. A big desk was central and, except for a couple of neat stacks of papers, was free of clutter. To the left on the desktop, set in a gold frame, was a photograph of Lee standing proudly beside his docked sailboat. Another photograph, in a much larger frame, occupied a place to the right. This one was a family portrait, Lee and his wife flanked by two sons who very much resembled their father. They all looked happy with life and with one another.

“Where do we begin?” Lorna Channing asked.

“Let’s see what he’s got on his desk.”

Bo began by checking the stacks of papers. Memoranda, mostly, composed but lacking Lee’s signature initials. Not sent? Nothing of their content leaped out at Bo as significant to his purpose. Channing shook her head as well.

They went carefully through the desk drawers and drew a blank there.

“The computer?” Lorna Channing said.

Bo went to the hutch and turned on the PC. It booted and asked for a password. Bo looked at Channing, who just shrugged her shoulders.

“Ask Ms. Delvitto if she knows,” he said.

When she came back, she said,“Maggie.”

Lee’s wife. It made sense. Bo typed in the name, but was denied access.

“He must have changed it without telling his secretary.”

“I wonder when,” Channing said. “And why.”

Bo sat back a moment. “What are his sons’ names?”

“Nick and Cal.”

Bo tried them both, then Nicholas and Calvin. No luck.

“Any pets?”

“Not that I know of.”

“All right,” Bo said. “Let’s check the file cabinets.”

He abandoned the computer and, with Channing, went through the cabinets, drawer after drawer. He didn’t hope to stumble across anything marked as obviously asSenator Dixon’s Conspiracy, but he hoped something might click. Nothing did.

He turned his attention to the big safe, which occupied a whole corner of the room. It was a Wilson, bolted securely to the floor, and locked. “Do you know the combination?”

“No,” Channing said. “Maybe Dorothy does.”

She stepped outside and returned a minute later.

“Aside from Lee, only Ned Shackleford and John Llewellyn know the combination. I’d rather not alert them to what’s going on.”

Bo sat in the chair at Lee’s big desk, made a steeple of his fingers, and thought for a while. He looked at the family portrait and considered how Lee’s death hadn’t just robbed a man of his life. It had destroyed the lives of those who loved him as well.

He looked at the photo of Lee with his beloved sailboat and recalled the documents and reports he’d gone through that dealt with the investigation of what had happened on the inlet of Choptank River. He nodded to the computer.

“TryGryphon,”he said, and spelled it out.

“Gryphon?”

“It’s a mythical animal. Body and hind legs of a lion, head and wings of an eagle.”

Lorna Channing stepped to the keyboard and typed. “We’re in,” she said. “How did you know?”

“It’s the name of his boat.”

First Channing did a search for files whose label names contained the wordsWilliam Dixon. There were none. Next she searched for files that containedWilliam Dixonin the text. There were several dozen.

“This could take a while,” she said.

“Try files created since the president put Lee on the senator’s tail.”

There was only one, a file labeledW. D. Schedule.

“Let’s see what it is,” Bo said.

A document several pages in length came up. The upper right-hand corner of each page contained the notationWilliam Dixon.

Bo said, “What do you make of it?”

Channing looked the pages over. “I’d say they’re Senator Dixon’s daily schedules. Meeting agendas, appointments. They don’t look like much.”

“Sometimes important things don’t. Let’s print it out.”

When the printer had finished, Bo gathered the pages. “I’ll take these and see if I can make anything of them. Are you sure you don’t want to contact Shackleford or Llewellyn about the safe?”

Channing shook her head. “The fewer eyebrows we raise around here, the better.”

It was nearing seven-thirty when he returned to his hotel. He hadn’t eaten since he’d lunched with the president, and he was hungry. He ordered a chicken Caesar from room service, and while he waited for his food, he took a careful look at the documents he’d taken.