Fatal Series 01 - Fatal Affair

Chapter 1
    The smell hit him first.
    “Ugh, what the hell is that?” Nick Cappuano dropped his keys into his coat pocket and stepped into the spacious, well-appointed Watergate apartment that his boss, Senator John O’Connor, had inherited from his father.
    “Senator!” Nick tried to identify the foul metallic odor.
    Making his way through the living room, he noticed parts and pieces of the suit John wore yesterday strewn over sofas and chairs, laying a path to the bedroom. He had called the night before to check in with Nick after a dinner meeting with Virginia’s Democratic Party leadership, and said he was on his way home. Nick had reminded his thirty-six-year-old boss to set his alarm.
    “Senator?” John hated when Nick called him that when they were alone, but Nick insisted the people in John’s life afford him the respect of his title.
    The odd stench permeating the apartment caused a tingle of anxiety to register on the back of Nick’s neck. “John?”
    He stepped into the bedroom and gasped. Drenched in blood, John sat up in bed, his eyes open but vacant. A knife spiked through his neck held him in place against the headboard. His hands rested in a pool of blood in his lap.
    Gagging, the last thing Nick noticed before he bolted to the bathroom to vomit was that something was hanging out of John’s mouth.
    Once the violent retching finally stopped, Nick stood up on shaky legs, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and rested against the vanity, waiting to see if there would be more. His cell phone rang. When he didn’t take the call, his pager vibrated. Nick couldn’t find the wherewithal to answer, to say the words that would change everything. The senator is dead. John’s been murdered. He wanted to go back to when he was still in his car, fuming and under the assumption that his biggest problem that day would be what to do about the man-child he worked for who had once again slept through his alarm.
    Thoughts of John, dating back to their first meeting in a history class at Harvard freshman year, flashed through Nick’s mind, hundreds of snippets spanning a nearly twenty-year friendship. As if to convince himself that his eyes had not deceived him, he leaned forward to glance into the bedroom, wincing at the sight of his best friend—the brother of his heart—stabbed through the neck and covered with blood.
    Nick’s eyes burned with tears, but he refused to give in to them. Not now. Later maybe, but not now. His phone rang again. This time he reached for it and saw it was Christina, his deputy chief of staff, but didn’t take the call. Instead, he dialed 911.
    Taking a deep breath to calm his racing heart and making a supreme effort to keep the hysteria out of his voice, he said, “I need to report a murder.” He gave the address and stumbled into the living room to wait for the police, all the while trying to get his head around the image of his dead friend, a visual he already knew would haunt him forever.
    Twenty long minutes later, two officers arrived, took a quick look in the bedroom and radioed for backup. Nick was certain neither of them recognized the victim.
    He felt as if he was being sucked into a riptide, pulled further and further from the safety of shore, until drawing a breath became a laborious effort. He told the cops exactly what happened—his boss failed to show up for work, he came looking for him and found him dead.
    “Your boss’s name?”
    “United States Senator John O’Connor.” Nick watched the two young officers go pale in the instant before they made a second more urgent call for backup.
    “Another scandal at the Watergate,” Nick heard one of them mutter.
    His cell phone rang yet again. This time he reached for it.
    “Yeah,” he said softly.
    “Nick!” Christina cried. “Where the hell are you guys? Trevor’s having a heart attack!” She referred to their communications director who had back-to-back interviews scheduled for the senator that morning.
    “He’s dead, Chris.”
    “Who’s dead? What’re you talking about?”
    “John.”
    Her soft cry broke his heart. “No.” That she was desperately in love with John was no secret to Nick. That she was also a consummate professional who would never act on those feelings was one of the many reasons Nick respected her.
    “I’m sorry to just blurt it out like that.”
    “How?” she asked in a small voice.
    “Stabbed in his bed.”
    Her ravaged moan echoed through the phone. “But