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And his wife is basically Darth Vader in an Oscar de la Renta dress.”
    “Really? I always thought she looked like a decorator lamp with a twenty-five-watt bulb.”
    “The lamp part is right, the dim bulb not so much,” Green said. “She’s at least half the brains in the family and she’s not going anywhere.”
    —
    GREEN HEADED Henderson’s security detail. Lucas had introduced them at the end of a U.S. Senate campaign in which Green, aformer Secret Service agent, had been working for a psychopathic Senate candidate named Taryn Grant. Lucas was positive that Grant had orchestrated the murders of several people during a Senate campaign in Minnesota.
    Lucas asked, “You hear anything from Taryn?”
    “No. She was unhappy when I quit, so I don’t think I will,” Green said. “You still thinking about her?”
    “From time to time,” Lucas said. “I know goddamn well that she was behind those killings.”
    “Won’t get her, not after all this time,” Green said.
    “Not for those,” Lucas said. “She’ll go after somebody else, though—freaks like her do it for the thrill of it and they get addicted to the risk. She’ll screw up somewhere along the line. I’d like to be there when she does.”
    “You’d need a new cop job,” Green said.
    “I could see myself coming back, under the right circumstances,” Lucas said. “I just haven’t figured out exactly what the job would be.”
    “Nobody likes a freelancer,” she said.
    “Including me. I wouldn’t go freelance. I’d like a real badge, but it’s got to be the right one,” he said. And, “Do you have any idea what Elmer wants?”
    “Yes, but I’ll let him tell you. The governor speaks for himself.” A group of young women dressed all in black were picking up the leftover food and dumping it into garbage sacks and stacking up unused paper plates, signaling the end of the party. Green said, “Let’s go talk to the guy.”
    —
    HENDERSON, A TALL, SLENDER MAN with blond hair, was still surrounded by coeds and the kind of soft-faced young men who walked around with policy manuals under their elbows. They’d all wind up in Washington where, even if they never did good, they’d certainly do well.
    The governor saw Lucas and lifted a hand and said to the people around him, “My muscle has arrived. We’ve got to go talk. I’ll be back. I’d like somebody to show me those pool tables.”
    Several young things volunteered and the governor, babbling a variety of assurances and clichés, waded through the crowd, shook hands with Lucas, and said, “Come on, let’s go across the street.”
    He led the way down the steps to the street level, Mitford, Green, and another security guy running interference for them. They crossed the street and Henderson waved back at the crowd, then took Lucas’s elbow and led him onto a sidewalk that bordered a large winding pond.
    “So what’s up?” Lucas asked, as they walked along.
    “Let me turn my music on,” Henderson said. He took an iPhone from his pocket, pushed some buttons, and JD McPherson started singing “Let the Good Times Roll.”
    Lucas looked around. “Boom mikes?”
    “Can never tell,” Henderson said. He held the rockin’ iPhone between them. “Better to not take a chance.”
    “It’s that bad?”
    “Don’t know,” Henderson said. “But it’s got a nasty vibe.”
    “Tell me.”
    —
    HENDERSON OUTLINED some background that Lucas already knew: that he wasn’t really running for the presidency, but for the vice presidency, and that most political insiders knew that.
    “I’d like to be president someday and this is my only chance—I can’t get to it without getting the vice presidency first. That whole Henderson Hoagie business, and too many people know that I fooled around with some cocaine . . . well. Since 1901, seven vice presidents—Teddy Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, and George Bush the First—got to be