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he would handle the matter alone. “I think it’s best if the Realm keeps a low profile on this one,” Smith had said. “The heat hasn’t died down yet from the Harvey Gates thing.”
    Harvey Gates had been the wildly popular black mayor of Charleston. Three years earlier he had provided Alexandra Burton with a stiff challenge for reelection to the U.S. Senate. Gates had called Burton’s dedication to civil rights enforcement into question and accused the five-term incumbent of being out of touch with the “new South Carolina.” Gates had been right, of course. Conveniently for Burton, though, the mayor had turned up dead in a fleabag motel in a seedy part of the city. The Klan had shot him at the senator’s request, and Billy Joe Collier had been the trigger man. Consequently, Earl Smith had suggested that Collier sit this one out.
    Collier understood his place in the chain of command and was willing to do what his grand dragon had asked him to do; namely, nothing. But he wasn’t happy about it. The Gates murder had been almost three years ago, and the lynchings that had taken place since then—that of Lincoln Jefferson, for example—had been a group effort.
    Billy Joe Collier liked to kill alone.

CHAPTER 10
     
     
    The morning session had gone as expected: the senators who supported the president had asked nothing but softball questions, while those who opposed the president had come about as close to accusing Peter McDonald of wanting to rewrite the Constitution as good taste would permit. “Is it true, Professor McDonald, that you graduated at the top of your law school class?” Hamilton Holt, a pro-Jackson senator from New Hampshire, had asked. McDonald had answered, “Yes, Senator.” Meanwhile, Susan Armstrong, an anti-Jackson senator from Georgia, had wanted to know why the professor had written an article “calling for the end of the death penalty.”
    McDonald had written nothing of the kind. He had simply concluded in an essay for the Harvard Law Review that the death penalty was sometimes misapplied by jurors who didn’t understand the law and that, as a consequence, judges needed to do a better job of explaining the law to them. But subtleties such as that were often lost in the hardball politics of the Supreme Court confirmation process. Just ask Robert Bork, the brilliant conservative jurist whose nomination went down in flames after liberal interest groups spent millions of dollars on television ads distorting his record.
    Then came the confrontation for which everyone had been waiting: that between the nominee and Senator Gregory Carpenter.
    “This should be good,” the FOX News reporter said to his TV audience.
    Gregory Carpenter was the junior senator from South Carolina. He previously had served as Alexandra Burton’s top legislative aid, the post currently occupied by Jeffrey Oates. It was no secret in Washington power circles that Oates was jealous of Carpenter because Burton had recommended Carpenter rather than Oates when the South Carolina Republican Party had been looking for a candidate to challenge the state’s then-incumbent Democratic senator in the most recent election. Thanks both to Burton’s tireless efforts on Carpenter’s behalf and the increasingly conservative makeup of the South Carolina electorate, Carpenter had won by a landslide. As a result, he was now a member of the nation’s most exclusive club—the United States Senate—while Oates was forced to continue serving a woman he no longer respected.
    Given the fact that Carpenter owed his Senate seat to Burton, he was more than willing to ask the question that Burton herself couldn’t ask—the question about affirmative action. “Good afternoon, Professor McDonald,” Carpenter said.
    “Good afternoon, Senator.” McDonald squeezed his water glass.
    “I very much benefited from listening to your answers to my colleagues’ questions about the death penalty, privacy, abortion, and so forth, but I’d like