Political Suicide Read Online Free PDF Page A

am.”
    McHugh rubbed at his stubble. “I didn’t shoot Elias, Lou, but proving that isn’t going to be easy. I called you because I’m afraid I’m going to need your help to check around about him—see if you can learn who might have wanted to kill him. Hire a detective if you think you need one.”
    “Gary, shouldn’t that be a job for your lawyer or, better still, the police?”
    “His lawyer, actually,” said a woman. “But either would be correct.”

CHAPTER 4
    Lou turned, expecting to see Missy McHugh again. The woman in the doorway couldn’t have been more dissimilar. She was tall and slender—an athlete, Lou guessed, dressed in a gray pants suit. Her straight ebony hair descended to just below her shoulders. She assessed him with intensely expressive eyes—an unsettling blue-green. There was something familiar about her, and Lou wondered if he was staring because of that—or simply because he couldn’t pull away.
    “Lou, I’m assuming this is Sarah Cooper, my attorney.”
    “You assume correctly, Dr. McHugh.” She turned to Lou. “Grayson Devlin, Dr. McHugh’s usual attorney, is in court with a case, so he sent me. Dr. McHugh, your wife let me in as she was leaving, so I just hung my coat in the foyer.”
    Sarah shook McHugh’s hand, then, without waiting for a formal introduction, Lou’s. Her fingers were long, and her grip confident. She wore a simple band on the fourth finger of her right hand, but none on her left. Her eye-to-eye contact was practiced and so firm that Lou felt he had been thoroughly analyzed by the time she turned away.
    “Thanks for getting over here so quickly,” McHugh said. “Grayson told me that he’d be at your disposal should you need him, but that you would take good care of me.”
    “Count on it,” Sarah said.
    “Lou, this woman was in charge of her firm’s team in the Sandra Winkler trial. I assume you know about that case?”
    Of course. That’s where Lou had seen her before—in the papers and on TV. She wasn’t easy to forget. The case made international news when an attractive young mother from Bethesda was accused of strangling her eight-year-old daughter behind the garage of their home. Cooper earned her client an acquittal, while she herself received a slew of death threats from outraged court vultures, who believed justice had not been served. Subsequently, a man accused of another, similar crime, admitted to guilt in the case.
    “Nice job,” Lou said. “Even after the verdict, I never knew what to make of that whole thing. I’m afraid to admit it, but until the killer confessed and the police found the proof in his room, I was on the side of those who thought she was guilty.”
    Sarah assessed him once again. “You were wrong,” she said coolly. “And you would be?”
    “Lou Welcome. I’m an ER doc at Eisenhower Memorial and a friend of Gary’s.”
    He flashed on the first time he had met Renee. He was a resident at the time, awkwardly trying to start up a conversation while the two were standing in the lunch line of the hospital cafeteria. Eighteen months later, they were married. Ten years and one Emily after that, they were facing a judge while Renee dissolved the union, citing the havoc wreaked by Lou’s methamphetamine and alcohol addictions.
    “Can I ask why Dr. McHugh called you here now?” Sarah asked.
    “You can ask, but I’m professionally constrained from telling you.”
    “Well, that certainly gets us off to a strong start.”
    “Here,” McHugh cut in, grabbing a sheet of paper from his desk. “If you really need to appease your boss at the Physician Wellness Office, I’ll write you a release. Ms. Cooper, Lou is my monitor. I was required by the board to contract with Physician Wellness because of a DUI I once had. Lou is the only real human connected with the PWO, but he’s still a company man.”
    “So if Dr. McHugh drinks, he loses his medical license,” Sarah said. “Is that it?” Lou looked to McHugh,