Flash

and killed by a car. He had no next of kin in Seattle. Acting in our capacity as his concerned employers, we entered his house with a key that he had provided to the company for emergency purposes."
    "Oh, yeah, right. I keep forgetting."
    "Regarding today's activities," she continued briskly, "we did our civic duty. We gave the police everything they needed to arrest Dixon Haggard. The stuff we didn't tell them about had nothing to do with either Melwood's death or Richard Lancaster's murder."
    Jasper grinned. "I love it when you talk like a big-time corporate CEO."
    She clung to the word
love
and let the rest of it go. Wrapping her arms around his neck, she pulled him down so that she could kiss him.
    She wondered why he had brought up the subject of their relationship in such a roundabout way. She wanted to ask him what his point was, but something told her he'd have to come to it in his own time. If ever.
    Jasper was as skittish around the subject of marriage as she was.
    Now, what had put marriage into her head?
    "I forgot one other thing on my list of stuff we have in common besides our business interests," Jasper muttered against her mouth.
    "What's that?"
    He curved his hand around her hip. "The sex is great."
    "There is that."

27
    « ^ »
    "T he good news is that Glow and Light Fantastic got some great publicity out of this thing." Bolivar opened the newspaper and spread it out across the Café Mantra lunch counter. "But the Lancaster people will be doing some very heavy spin work for a while. Wait'll you see the headlines."
    Olivia leaned over his shoulder to look. Zara, perched on a stool beside him, did the same.

    L ancaster C ampaign R eeling from A rrest of M anager

    Dixon Haggard, manager of gubernatorial hopeful Eleanor Lancaster's political campaign, was arrested yesterday and booked on charges of murder and attempted murder.
    Jasper Sloan, CEO of Glow, Inc., and Olivia Chantry, proprietor of Light Fantastic, a Seattle event design and production firm, were instrumental in apprehending Haggard. "We were in the wrong place at the wrong time," Mr. Sloan said. "But we got lucky."
    Sloan and Chantry, who share ownership of Glow, Inc., had gone to a south-end self-storage facility to retrieve some documents from lockers rented by the former head of Glow, Roland Chantry, and Melwood Gill, a Glow employee. Both men are recently deceased.
    While at the facility, Sloan and Ms. Chantry were surprised by Haggard, who had followed them to the facility.
    Police say Haggard believed that Gill had been blackmailing him with information stolen from the files of Roland Chantry. After allegedly murdering Gill in a hit-and-run incident, Haggard conducted a search for the information that Gill had allegedly used in his extortion efforts.
    Haggard allegedly followed Gill's employers to the storage facility, assuming that they would lead him to the information stored in Roland Chantry's private files.
    "We had reason to believe that Gill had taken some files from Mr. Chantry's locker and stored them in his own locker," Sloan explained. "We were looking into the situation when Dixon Haggard arrived and threatened to kill us."
    Police state that Haggard has confessed not only to the murder of Melwood Gill, but to the killing six years ago of Richard Lancaster. The effect on the Lancaster campaign is difficult to predict
    Todd Chantry, a spokesperson for the campaign, issued a statement saying that Lancaster is stunned by the news that she had unwittingly hired her husband's alleged killer.
    "We believe Haggard may have been a kind of stalker," Chantry said. "He apparently developed a sick obsession with Ms. Lancaster and—"

    "Whew." Bolivar shook his head. "Todd's good, but I'm not sure anyone is good enough to pull Lancaster's bacon out of the fire this time."
    "But Eleanor Lancaster is just an innocent victim," Zara protested. "Surely the public will understand. She's in the same terrible situation Sybil was in when she hired Burt, the gardener, never knowing that he was a stalker. She can't help it if some sicko murdered her husband and then insinuated himself into her campaign so that he could be near her."
    Olivia rolled her eyes. "The woman hired her husband's murderer. Don't you see the problem here? It makes Lancaster look something other than brilliant, to say the least. At best, she comes across as a naïve victim."
    "Not exactly leadership material," Bolivar concluded. He opened the second section of the