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“All the evidence? From what I’ve heard there is very little evidence.”
“You know what? I didn’t come here to talk about my investigation with you. This meeting was your idea, and I think it’s time you put your cards on the table.”
“Fine.” Baker nodded. He opened the sealed envelope and extracted a series of 8x10 black-and-white photographs. He turned the first one over and placed it on the coffee table so both McMahon and Kennedy could view it. It was a close-up of a woman. The photograph had the slightly grainy quality of a surveillance photo taken from a distance and then blown up.
“That, if you didn’t know it already, is Jillian Rautbort. President–elect Alexander’s deceased wife.”
Baker grabbed a second photo and set it down next to the first. This one was not blown up. It showed Jillian Rautbort and a man. It was evening and they were standing on a terrace. Jillian was in a halter dress and the man was in a suit. Baker put down the next photo. This one was of just Jillian from the waist up. She had a very mischievous look on her face and she was reaching behind her neck with her hands.
Baker glanced at Kennedy. “This is where it gets interesting, and I apologize in advance, but you need to see this.”
He laid down the next photo. Jillian Rautbort was now standing with her dress around her waist; her tanned and perfectly sized breasts exposed. Baker put the next photo down. Now Jillian and the man were kissing. The photo after that captured Jillian on her knees, her face buried in the mystery man’s groin. Baker began lying the photos down like a blackjack dealer would cards. They showed Rautbort and her lover in an escalation of sexual acts culminating with him on his back on a lounge chair and her completely naked on top of him.
Baker placed the empty envelope on the table next to the photos and said, “That’s pretty much it.”
“Are you sure,” asked Kennedy, “that the woman in these photos is Jillian Rautbort?”
“Yes.”
“When were they taken, and how the hell did you get your hands on them?” McMahon asked.
“I think they were taken over Labor Day at the Rautbort estate in Palm Beach, and no, I didn’t hire someone to do this.”
“Then how in the hell did you get your hands on them?”
“I was contacted by the man who took them,” replied Baker.
McMahon scoffed. “So you didn’t hire him, but in the end you paid him.”
“There is a distinction, Agent McMahon. I’m not going to sit here and tell you I’m an angel. Politics is a rough business. Since you were willing to sign my confidentiality agreement, I’ll give you the straight facts. I paid for these photos. I paid a lot of money for these photos, and it was all legal. My only regret now is that I didn’t destroy them the moment I received them.”
“Why is that?” asked Kennedy.
“Because I allowed my ego to get in the way, and in the end it cost my candidate the White House.”
“How could these photos have cost your candidate the White House?” asked a skeptical McMahon.
“There are very few people in the world who I truly despise. Mark Ross and Stu Garret are two of them.”
Kennedy and McMahon shared a look, and McMahon said, “You’ll get no argument from us.”
“Well, with a month to go in the race, my guys had an eight-point lead, which, if you know how polls are conducted—who answers their phone, who doesn’t, who says they vote, and who actually votes, and all these national polls have a built-in bias for the Democrats—with four weeks to go is huge, especially if you’re on the Republican ticket. I never really wanted to buy these photos, and I certainly never wanted to use them. At least, not in terms of releasing them to the press.”
“Then why did you buy them?” asked McMahon.
“To take them out of play,” Kennedy answered.
“That’s right. Elections are about controlling as many factors as possible, and I’ll be damned if I was going to allow these things to float around and do God only knows what. The conventional wisdom would be that they would hurt the Alexander camp, but one never knows for sure. The smart thing is to leave nothing to chance. We were flush with cash, so I paid the guy.”
“That was the only reason why you bought them?” Kennedy asked in a slightly skeptical tone.
Baker grinned. “There was one other small reason.” He shifted in his chair and crossed his right leg over his left. “I wanted to make Garret and Ross sweat.”
“You sent them these?” McMahon asked with his mouth agape.
“Only a few. I had them personally delivered to Garret’s hotel room during a campaign stop in Dallas.”
“Did he know you sent them?”
