Fatal Series 01 - Fatal Affair

me everything you can find on the three women we met today. No detail is too big or too small. If they have a tattoo, I want to know what it is and where.”
    “Tramp stamps,” he wrote as she snickered at the term. “Got it. You’re really sure it was a woman, aren’t you?”
    “Every fiber of my being tells me this was a love affair gone very wrong.”
    “Or someone wants us to think that.”
    “We can’t rule that out,” she conceded.
    “In light of what we’ve learned today, we also can’t rule out that it might’ve been a love affair with a man that went very wrong.”
    “Right again,” she said. “Nothing is ever as cut and dried as we’d like it to be, is it?”
    “Nope.”
    “You’ve had a few girlfriends.”
    “So?” he said warily.
    “Don’t you compare notes on past relationships?”
    His face flooded with color. “Depends on how serious it is with the new one and whether or not she asks.”
    “Is it weird that Natalie Jordan never told her husband that things got kinky with the senator?”
    “I don’t know, Sam. That falls into a serious gray area. What guy would want to know that his woman did it all with the ex?”
    “Hmm. It just seems strange to me that she’s never even alluded to it. I mean, they’re married . And you saw his face. He had no idea what I was talking about.”
    “Did you share that kind of stuff with Peter?”
    “Bad example. We weren’t your typical married couple.”
    “Sorry to dredge up the past, but I think you’d be in a better position to answer your own questions than I would be, having never been married myself.”
    “Yeah, I guess, but I hardly had the kind of marriage where major sharing factored in.”
    “So what’s next?” he asked, seeming anxious to change the subject.
    “I need to go back to HQ, write up what we have so far, and deal with the brass on this thing with the Johnson case.”
    “What’ll you do if they put you under?”
    “ If they do, it’ll only be for a couple of days at most—one of those days I’ll be in Chicago, another one we’re taking off because we’ll need to recharge, and then Monday is the senator’s funeral. With all the local police and Secret Service who’ll be there, I can’t imagine they’ll stop me from going. I can pull the strings from the sidelines, but I’m not letting it go.”
    “Even if they order you to?”
    “Especially then.”
    “Righteous.”

    Back at her desk, Sam downed a soda, opened the e-mail Gonzo had sent, and discovered the real Thomas O’Connor was a thirty-six-year-old man with dark hair and eyes. She made a note to ask Nick whether John had ever mentioned having a cousin of the same age. Regardless, the man on her screen was not the boy in the picture, and she now had positive confirmation that Graham and Laine O’Connor had lied to her about the boy. But why? Why would they deny their own grandchild? Sam had no idea, but she intended to find out.
    Her stomach clenched with pain as she read—and then re-read—an e-mail from the chief’s admin, confirming her four o’clock appointment. Checking her watch, she realized she had just a few minutes to get there on time. She stood up, but the pain had other ideas. Collapsing back into her chair, she put her head down and tried to breathe her way through it. A bead of sweat slid down her back.
    This was a bad one, but it had been getting progressively worse over the last few months despite her best efforts to ignore it. Sooner or later, she was going to have to do something about this “nervous stomach” situation, possibly even give up diet cola as she’d been told to do. But not now. No time for that now. When the worst of the pain had passed, she tested her shaky legs, took another long deep breath and set out for the chief’s office.
    She was waved right in but stopped short just inside the door. When Farnsworth called in the brass, he called in the brass. Seated in a wide half-circle in front of Farnsworth’s desk were Deputy Chief Conklin, Detective Captain Malone, Lieutenant Stahl and Assistant U.S. Attorney Miller. Sam glanced at Miller’s shoes, saw the stiletto heel, and confirmed it was Charity, one of the identical triplets who worked for the U.S. Attorney. Neither Faith nor Hope would be caught dead in stilettos.
    “Well,” Sam said, as the pain resurfaced with an ugly vengeance. Determined to stay cool, she took shallow breaths and slipped into the remaining chair. “You didn’t tell