Free The Jefferson Allegiance by Bob Mayer Page B

anything more about this than you. Just wanted to share the feeling.” Evie was staring at the gruesome photos, not with shock, but with detachment, which said a lot about the woman. Or anyone for that matter. Tension was coming off her in waves, though. It was costing her a lot to keep her emotions under control.
    “Do you see something?” Burns asked her.
    “I think there’s a message here,” she said, tapping the photograph of the Zero Milestone.
    “’Think’ or know?” Burns prompted.
    “Interesting the way you phrased that,” Evie said. “’Think or know?’ What’s the difference?”
    “Pretend you have the podium, professor,” Burns said with visible impatience, his fingers lightly drumming on the desk.
    “Head and heart,” Evie said.
    “We know what they are,” Burns fairly growled.
    Evie frowned. “No—the symbolism. It’s from a letter.”
    “What letter?” Burns asked.
    Evie shook her head. “It makes little sense. But—“ her voice trailed off.
    Ducharme spoke up. “Who wrote the letter?”
    “Thomas Jefferson.” She reached into a pocket and pulled out a silver cigarette case.
    “No smoking,” Burns said.
    Evie ignored him and flipped open the lid. She pulled out a piece of gum and popped it in her mouth. “I quit a while ago. Nicotine gum.”
    “The letter,” Burns prompted.
    “In spring, seventeen eighty-six, while serving as US Ambassador to France, Jefferson met a married woman named Maria Cosway. We don’t know for sure if he had an affair with her, but he certainly was in love. When she left for England with her husband, he sat down and wrote her a rather remarkable letter that has come to be known as the Head-Heart Letter. Where his head argues with his heart over missing her, and whether to pursue the relationship.”
    Burns looked confused. “And what does that have to do with the murders?”
    “I have no idea,” Evie said, but Ducharme had a sense she was holding something back. “It just popped into my head. And McBride had a fascination with Thomas Jefferson. I’m not fond of coincidence. Except, I don’t know how your General LaGrange,” she added, glancing at Ducharme, “figures into things.”
    Burns held out the disks. “What are these?”
    “Wooden disks.”
    Burns looked from her, to Ducharme and then back at her. “Two wise guys. Are you going to help me or not?”
    “We are helping you,” Evie said. “We’re not suspects in this, yet we freely came here.”
    Burns tapped the disks. “These come from a Jefferson Cipher.” He glared at Evie. “You know that. Being the curator at Monticello. Where are the other twenty-four?”
    “No idea,” Evie said.
    “There was something else,” Burns said, grabbing a photo of what at first appeared to be just snow-covered ground. “Something was pushed down into the snow next to the tracks of Professor McBride. A couple of things, actually. As near as we can tell, it looks like the imprint of the bottom of a bottle and some flowers; three of them—roses, as there was a petal left in the snow. Mean anything to either of you?”
    Ducharme shook his head and glanced at Evie as she answered: “If it was a bottle of cognac, then I have an idea.”
    “Thomas Jefferson put them there, I suppose?” Burns said.
    “No.” She looked at Ducharme. “Did General LaGrange graduate from the United States Military Academy?”
    Ducharme nodded. “Yes. I did too.”
    Evie tapped the photo of the imprints. “Since nineteen forty-nine, on the anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s death, a man goes to Poe’s grave in Baltimore and leaves a half-empty bottle of cognac and three roses on the grave. He’s known as the Poe Toaster.”
    Burns sighed. “You’re just full of useless information, aren’t you? What the hell does Edgar Allan Poe and a grave in Baltimore have to do with two murders within blocks of the White House, and a two-hundred-year-old letter from Thomas Jefferson?”
    “History,” Evie said.