Free The Way You Look Tonight by Richard Madeley

the agent slid back out of the room as quickly as was decently possible.
    He stared, expressionless, at the sparsely worded paragraph in front of him. After a moment, he closed his eyes and wearily pinched the bridge of his nose between a thumb and forefinger.
    ‘Oh,
shit.
’
    ‘Hey, Bobby . . .’ His brother inclined his head towards Stella, still perched on her beanbag.
    ‘What? Oh . . . I apologise for my language there, Miss Arnold . . . Stella, I mean . . . would you, ah, excuse us a moment?’
    ‘Of course,’ Stella said, beginning to get up. ‘Do you want me to go outside?’
    ‘No, no, you stay comfortable in here. Jack, would you come into the hall, please?’
    Stella was left alone in the den. She looked out at America’s most powerful at play while their President and his brother whispered outside on the stairs.
    She’d always had a vivid imagination, but she couldn’t have got close to predicting such a wildly improbable scenario.
    Despite everything, she started to laugh.
    ‘Four!
Are they sure?’
    ‘Pretty much. The FBI say everything about the new one found this morning screams the same
modus operandi
as the first three, Jack, even before the post mortem. We’ve got a
real problem here. And there’s something I haven’t told you yet.’
    The President was sitting on the stairs, his hands cradling his head. Now he raised it to stare at his younger brother. ‘Oh man, this thing just gets better and better. What, and
why
, if you please?’
    ‘C. Farris Bryant is flying up to Washington from Miami tomorrow and he wants to see you in the White House first thing Tuesday when we get back. The
why
is that I only took his
call as we were leaving Hyannis Port earlier and I didn’t see any good reason to burden you with it until the morning.’
    The President pushed his hair back with both hands. ‘Great. So we have four murdered and mutilated women down there inside precisely three weeks, and the state governor on the warpath to
Washington. Thank the saints Bryant’s a Democrat, at least.’
    ‘Small mercies, yeah . . .’ Bobby considered a moment. ‘I’ll give you the background during the flight down to Washington tomorrow, but the bottom line is that Bryant is
attracting serious investment to turn Florida into America’s new winter playground. He’s building freeways and bridges and green-lighting all kinds of tourist development. There are
huge deals on the brink of being signed.
    ‘But the mother of them all – and don’t you start in on me, Jack, this was news to me too, I swear – Bryant says he’s begun secret talks with Walt Disney to get the
new Disney Park located down there and things are at a very delicate stage. Right now, Bryant needs a multiple murderer rampaging round southern Florida like he needs a fucking hole in the head. He
wants to know what we’re going to do about it.’
    ‘And this conversation with him this morning was
before
he knew about this fourth one?’
    ‘
Oh
yeah. I’m expecting sweet, loving messages from him waiting for me when we get back to Hyannis Port. I’d probably be hearing them right now if the radio car
wasn’t out of action.’
    The President looked back towards the den where Stella waited patiently for them.
    ‘And Bryant’ll be opposite me in the Oval Office Tuesday? Wanting answers?’
    ‘You can bet on it.’
    His older brother nodded slowly. ‘Right. Then we’re going to feed this guy some seriously good news. We’ll tell him that we’ve drafted one of the world’s foremost
young minds concerning homicidal psychopaths, and she’s on the case as a special advisor to the FBI as of yesterday.’
    His brother stared at him, and gave a short laugh. ‘Isn’t that what you might call something of an over-promotion, Jack? Sure, she’s as bright as a new penny but Jeez . . .
she’s only twenty-one, twenty-two at most.’
    ‘
We
know that, Bobby, but Bryant doesn’t. We’ll sell her to him as a prodigy. Come on,