Maddocks rammed the Crown Vic into gear and spun the tires in a U-turn. They took off after it.
CHAPTER 38
“What the—? It’s ... Zach Raddison, the mayor’s aide.” Angie peered through the camera’s telephoto lens, watching as the tall dark male rapidly exited city hall with Jayden Norton-Wells. The two men stopped and began to argue in the rain, arms gesticulating. She clicked off a rapid series of shots. Norton-Wells shoved Raddison in the chest. Raddison reeled back, then lunged forward, grabbing Norton-Wells by the shoulders, holding him firmly as he spoke intently, face up close to Norton-Wells. Angie shot more frames, the digital camera firing a fast staccato ofclick click clicks.
She and Maddocks were parked across the street from city hall. Norton-Wells, the guy who’d professed to be too ill to leave his house in order to come down to the station to make an official statement, had raced the Porsche straight here. He’d parked at a bad angle in an off-street parking space and run inside, wearing just his T-shirt and jeans despite the wintery cold. It was barely minutes before he exited with Raddison in tow.
“So,” said Maddocks, “the ADAG’s son, who might have given Drummond a Saint Christopher on a chain, and whose vehicle might have been used in the commission of a crime, has some sort of volatile relationship with the manager of Jack Killion’s election campaign, Zach Raddison, who is now the mayor’s right-hand man.”
“Like they say, we all move within six degrees of separation from one another.” Angie clicked again as Raddison gripped Norton-Wells by the upper arm and began marching him back to the badly parked Porsche.
“So, Norton-Wells is spooked by our visit, and he rushes here, presumably straight up to the mayor’s office to find Raddison. Why?” he said.
Norton-Wells got back into his car. Raddison slammed the door shut on him. Norton-Wells pulled out into the street, driving slowly now. Raddison stood on the sidewalk in his shirtsleeves, in the rain, watching the Porsche disappear down the road, before turning and heading back into city hall. He looked visibly rattled.
Angie lowered the camera. “Do we follow Norton-Wells, or pay Raddison and the mayor’s office a visit?”
Maddocks reached for the door handle. “Mayor’s office. While Raddison is still shaken.”
Zach Raddison was by all accounts a model-handsome kinda guy, thought Angie. Dark Mediterranean-type skin, liquid black eyes, an impossibly white and quick smile. And his looks came with the kind of arrogance that money and privilege and the adoration of too many women could bring. Angie and Maddocks stood in his office, which was in a kind of antechamber off Jack Killion’s office. Rain ran in squiggles down the window behind him. He’d offered them both a seat, but they’d declined, so he perched his honed butt and tailored pants on the edge of his gleaming desk and folded his arms over his chest. He waited for them to tell him what they’d come for.
“Got a little wet, I see,” Maddocks said with a jerk of his chin to the rain marks on Raddison’s crisp white shirt and royal-blue tie.
Raddison smiled, not missing a beat. “We have an inaugural council meeting tonight where Jack Killion will officially be sworn in as the new mayor of this city. If you could get to the point, detectives, I can return to my business.”
Angie did her meandering around the office thing, looking at his art, what was on his shelves, while Maddocks engaged the subject up close and personal. She burned to ask Raddison directly about Drummond and Hocking, but they had their orders from Buziak—stick with the Lexus. And she needed to play by the book for a while after her blowup with her senior partner.
“Do you know Jayden Norton-Wells?” Maddocks said.
Again, Raddison didn’t hesitate. “He’s a friend of mine. We go back to high school days. Our parents are well acquainted.”
“Private school?”
“And this is going where?”
Angie came to a ceramic bowl on the shelf near the door—painted with some kind of First Nations art. It contained business cards and a few books of matches. She touched her fingers to the assortment, moving some of the cards aside, and she picked up a matchbook. Her pulse quickened.
“Could you not touch anything, Detective? Please. Thank you,” Raddison called out over Maddocks’s shoulder. Ah, she was finally hearing the beginnings of an edge in his voice.
“Sure.” She replaced the matchbook and came to Maddocks’s side, putting her hands into her coat pocket.
“Were you perhaps dining with Jayden at the Auberge on Tuesday, November twenty-eighth?” said her partner.
A quick flicker ran through his eyes. “No, why?”
“Apparently Jayden was eating there with friends, imbibed a bit much, left his Lexus parked in town, and it disappeared.”
“Disappeared?”
“He claims it was stolen.”
Raddison’s brows lowered. “You don’t believe him?”
“Did you know that it was stolen?”
“Of course. He told me.”
“Outside, a few seconds ago?”
