“Okay. Hit me.”
“Charlie Robinette just announced he’s going to run for his father’s seat in Congress,” Michael said.
“Who’d you hear that from?”
“Unfortunately, Buddy Bright broke the news a few minutes ago,” Michael said. “When I got to city hall, everybody was talking about it. I don’t think anybody saw it coming. He’s formed a campaign committee and everything. But it gets better. You’ll never guess who else is gettingready to announce for Robinette’s seat.” He didn’t bother to wait for an answer. “It’s Robinette’s wife.”
“Vanessa? She’s going to run for Congress? Against her own son? Where did you hear that?”
Michael hesitated, then lowered his voice. “I’ve, uh, been dating this girl who works in the county clerk’s office. She was running copies for one of the lawyers in town this morning, and she overheard him talking on the phone.”
“Hmm. Thirdhand. Not so reliable.”
“No. It’s true,” he insisted. “I checked around. One of my old classmates at FSU works in the governor’s office as an assistant to Roy Padgett’s director of communications. The governor is going to call for a special election to fill Robinette’s seat, and according to Jill, Vanessa Robinette started calling his office late last week to ask him to support her.”
“Can you get anybody to go on the record that she’s going to run?” Conley asked.
“Grayson’s working her contacts in Rotary,” Michael said.
“Call up Vanessa,” Conley said. “Just ask her flat out, ‘Are you running?’ If she says yes, that’s a hell of a story. Unless damn Buddy Bright already broke that too?”
“He hasn’t so far,” Michael said. “I’ve got the radio on in the office right now.”
Conley stared out the window of the Subaru, absentmindedly watching the front door of the sheriff’s office. “Is Grayson in the office now?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Hang up and tell her to call me back ASAP.”
“Gray?” she said when her phone rang a minute later. “This is a hell of a story, if we can confirm it.”
“I know. Amazing, right?” For a change, her sister sounded just as breathless as her young staff member.
“If we can break this story ahead of everybody else, especially Buddy Bright, it could be huge,” Conley said. “The wire services and the national press will be all over it. But we’ve gotta nail it down and go with it, like, right now.”
“We don’t go to press until tomorrow night,” Grayson reminded her.
“Doesn’t theBeaconhave a digital edition?” she asked.
“Sure. We run local calendar listings, high school scores, the Humane Society’s pet of the week, that kind of stuff.”
“But you never run actual news stories?”
“Sometimes we run briefs, like on an Election Day. We have a hard enough time putting out the actual paper,” she said, sounding defensive.
“That changes now,” Conley said. “Gray, this is important. If we can nail down a story saying Symmes Robinette’s widow is going to run for his seat—against her own son—it’s crazy good. This is some seriously Shakespearean shit. Even if we just break it on the website, it means theBeaconowns the story. Not some crappy radio station.Wedo.”
“I’m not even convinced anybody pays attention to the digitalBeacon,” Grayson said.
“They will,” she vowed. “After you left this morning, Vanessa admitted to me that Symmes was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma back before Christmas. They’d kept it a secret from the public, probably to allow Charlie to begin quietly building up a campaign war chest to run for his father’s seat in Congress. I’m over at the sheriff’s office in Bronson right now. Start working those phones. If Charlie has started raising money, he will have had to have filed some kind of financial disclosure. We’ve gotta get Vanessa on the record that she intends to run too. If it’s for real, Michael needs to get his friend in the governor’s office to try to get a quote from Padgett about whom he plans to support. He’ll probably try to weasel out of endorsing either one at this point, but we need to at least have a ‘no comment’ comment.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Grayson said warily. “Man, what a morning! What’s going on at the sheriff’s office? Has Goggins been at all helpful?”
“He hasn’t had a chance to shut me down yet,” Conley said. “But that’s only because I just got here.”
Merle Goggins donned a pair of half-moon-shaped reading glasses and looked down at a document on his desktop, then back up at Conley Hawkins.
“You seem to think there’s something sinister about Congressman Robinette’s death. Why is that?”
