Free Degree of Guilt by Richard North Patterson

deflect charges of callousness if they decided to prosecute. Paget said evenly, ‘I appreciate your sensitivity.’
    Brooks smiled a moment, as if acknowledging the subtlety of the compliment. Something in the smile reminded Paget that, beneath his geniality, Brooks was as sentimental as a Venus’s-flytrap. Paget, Mary, and even the pressures on Marnie Sharpe would get as much or as little consideration as Brooks’s circumstances required.
    Brooks’s smile faded. ‘What are you doing here?’
    Paget shrugged. ‘Miss Carelli is a friend of mine.’
    ‘The Lasko case.’ Brooks nodded. ‘Of course.’
    Paget felt Sharpe watching from the side, her wary, suspicious look seeming somehow to include both men. ‘I don’t suppose,’ Paget said, ‘that either of you doubts this is traumatic for her. Even without all the publicity, stretching it out will make things that much worse.’
    ‘It’s just a mess,’ Brooks agreed. ‘I’m sure you’ve already told her how little we enjoy things like this.’
    ‘Of course. But she’s a little beyond the standard consolations. She’s been beaten, forced to kill a man to keep from being raped, and thrown in a jail because she wanted to see me. The first two things you can’t do anything about. The last one, you can.’
    Brooks held up a hand. ‘Please understand. We’re not going to shove her in some cell with a bunch of drunks. She’ll be as comfortable as we can make her here.’
    ‘That’s the key word: “here.”’ Paget appraised him. ‘Right now she’s under arrest. Within forty-eight hours, you’ve got to file a complaint charging her with something, or let her go. You can rearrest and charge her anytime you want. But nothing that happens in the next forty-eight hours is going to turn this into a case. And making someone like Mary Carelli wait two days for you to spring her is bad practice and worse politics.’
    Brooks spread both hands. ‘We had to be cautious , Chris. We’ve got a corpse on the first floor who was America’s most famous living writer when he checked into the Flood this morning.’
    Paget turned to take in Sharpe. ‘How much of Ransom’s work have either of you read?’
    Sharpe stared at him in silence. ‘A few of his books,’ Brooks answered.
    Paget kept looking at Sharpe. ‘Then is either of you really surprised that Ransom tried to rape someone? Because a lot of literate women in this country won’t be.’
    Sharpe seemed to tense; there was, Paget thought, something brittle about her. It would make her harder to deal with, and the only place it might ever work for him was if they went to trial. ‘We have to go on the evidence,’ she said. ‘Not on what he may have written. Or was planning to write.’
    ‘Which brings us,’ Brooks said quietly, ‘to this nasty tape about Laura Chase and Senator Colt.’ He paused. ‘Millions of people still love the man. Including me.’
    Paget nodded. ‘You met him, as I recall.’
    ‘I campaigned for him.’ Brooks shook his head. ‘When his plane crashed, two friends and I drove three thousand miles across the country in a state of shock to see them bury him. It was like we couldn’t let go.’ He gazed at Paget. ‘The country,’ he added softly, ‘has never quite let go.’
    That was right, Paget thought. Perhaps it was that Colt’s plane crash at night in the California desert, three months after Laura Chase had died, had seemed so arbitrary and irrational. With his blond hair and grace of movement, his smile and quick wit, James Colt had seemed at forty impossibly young to be President; yet there had been something bracing in the thought, as if only a country whose best moments lay ahead would choose him. One had not thought of James Colt and thought of death; perhaps that was why the shock of it remained imprinted on the mind like the images of his memorial service: his ash-blond widow, painfully stoic; the unformed face of his teenage son, transformed by the wishes of those