Flash

privately that he's not sure that Eleanor's candidacy can survive the scandal."
    "No big surprise there." Jasper picked up his glass of scotch. "The police said that Haggard confessed to the crime. He also made it clear that he acted on his own initiative. He's obsessed with Eleanor Lancaster."
    "She's innocent, but she'll be tainted no matter how much spin control her people do. It's going to be hard to explain why she inadvertently hired a campaign manager who committed murder to help her launch her political career. Doesn't exactly demonstrate astute judgment."
    Jasper's mouth curved faintly as he tossed another sheet into the fire. "The public doesn't expect a lot of sound judgment from politicians, but it may feel that Lancaster pushed the envelope of stupidity in this instance."
    "You're sure Dixon won't tell the police that some of the files were removed?" she asked again.
    "He didn't see us take the one box downstairs to the car. Besides, all he could think about was that he had screwed up. He was oblivious to what was going on around him."
    Olivia knew that Dixon Haggard had slipped into a world of his own, one in which he was Eleanor Lancaster's failed knight in shining armor. He was still weeping when the police took him into custody.
    Silas had recovered consciousness shortly after Olivia and Jasper had arrived downstairs, but he had remained stretched out on the floor of his office, dazed, until the aid car got there.
    Olivia raised her brows. "I trust you really have learned your lesson from all of this. An obsession with filing is not a healthy thing."
    Jasper grinned briefly. "I knew you wouldn't be able to resist rubbing it in. Don't worry. Like I said, I've already made plans to clean out some of my old records."
    "I should hope so." She contemplated the flames. "I suppose we'll never know for certain how Melwood Gill discovered Uncle Rollie's secret files."
    "The information about the storage locker at Pri-Con Self-Storage was probably in Rollie's home office files. You would have come across it when you cleaned them out, if Gill hadn't gotten there first and set the fire to cover his tracks."
    Olivia nodded and tossed another page to the ravenous flames. "We'll never be able to prove it, but that's the only scenario that makes sense. No wonder Rollie told me that if anything ever happened to him I was to destroy all of his personal files. He knew there was some potentially lethal stuff in them."
    "Rollie trusted you." Jasper met her eyes. "He must have known that you'd figure out what to do when you came across the Lancaster information."
    "I wonder why he didn't tell Todd the whole story before he left on that safari trip?"
    "Not enough hard data to make accusations," Jasper said. "And none of it implicated Eleanor Lancaster, herself, just her campaign manager. But it was enough to make Rollie uneasy about Todd's involvement with the campaign. He tried to warn him."
    Olivia nodded. "Uncle Rollie may not have been unduly concerned at that point. As far as he knew, Todd was only serving as a temporary consultant to the campaign. He hadn't realized that the relationship between Eleanor and Todd was getting personal and serious."
    "He would have been a lot more worried if he had known that your brother was getting sucked deeper into Lancaster's intimate circle. After all, the closer he got to Eleanor, the more a nutcase like Haggard was likely to resent him."
    Olivia shivered. "At some point Dixon's twisted brain might have concluded that Todd was a rival and a threat. I think he was already heading in that direction."
    "Yes."
    "My God. Dixon might have eventually worked himself up to the notion that Todd had to be removed the same way Eleanor's husband had been removed. He might have murdered my brother."
    "It's over now," Jasper said quietly.
    There was a short silence broken only by the crackle of the flames.
    "Yes," Olivia whispered. "It's over."

    "
Jasper
." Olivia came out of the nightmare with his name on her lips. Her pulse pounded. She gasped for breath.
    "It's all right." Jasper's warm arms closed tightly around her. "Only a dream."
    "No." She refused to be comforted. She pried herself out of his arms and sat up, clutching the sheet to her breasts. She stared down at his shadowed face. "No, it wasn't a dream. It really happened. You almost got killed in that locker."
    She trembled as fragments of the nightmare wafted through her mind. She relived the ominous rattle and clatter of padlocks