“Were they successful in this regard?”

“Not entirely. My wife’s father was the only one to make it out alive.”

“Thank you, Mr. Farquar,” Cass said. “Sorry to put you through that. I’ll yield the balance of my time back to Mr. Payne.”

It was a good moment for the Transitioners. Gideon Payne was seen about town in the days following with red blotches on his face. The consensus was that they were from burst blood vessels. But another development prevented Cass from taking a victory lap.

Police in Budding Grove, Ohio, arrested a pudgy, soft-faced twenty-nine-year-old nursing home attendant named Arthur G. Clumm and charged him with putting to (permanent) sleep thirty-six residents over a six-month period. This might have been just another one of those self-appointed avenging angel stories, only the police found his somewhat unkempt apartment plastered with photographs and clippings of-Cassandra Devine. They impounded his computer and found that the cache of his Internet search engine was chockablock with CASSANDRA blog page views as well as sites linked to CASSANDRA.

During his interrogation by the police, Nurse Clumm showed no remorse at all over having dispatched nearly three dozen senior citizens and, according to the Ohio State Police detective sergeant who conducted the interrogation, blithely and repeatedly referred to his deceased charges as “Wrinklies” and “resource hogs.”

On being apprised of this tiding, Gideon Payne lifted his eyes toward heaven and said aloud, “Lord, Thou art truly just and bountiful.”

Terry Tucker’s reaction was in a different key, consisting of a single word beginning with the letter f, uttered loudly.

Cass’s reaction was somewhat more dignified but equally dismayed.

She and Terry reached Randy on his cell, on his way to a fund-raiser in Hyannis.

“Oh, hell,” Randy said. “How’s this going to look?”

“We weren’t calling,” Terry said over the speakerphone, “to alert you to a public relations triumph.”

“Well, you’ll have to insulate me,” Randy said.

“That’s my boy,” Cass muttered. “First one into the lifeboat.”

“What?” Randy said.

“I was just praising your moral courage, to Terry.”

“Is this ghastly person Clumm connected to you in any way?”

“Yes, Randy. We’ve been having phone sex for years.”

“Please tell me you’re kidding.”

“Of course I’m not connected to him, you idiot.”

“Well, why in heaven’s name is his apartment a shrine to you?”

“Randy,” Terry said. “John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan to impress Jodie Foster. As I recall, Jodie Foster wasn’t impressed.”

There was silence on the line. Randy said, “Is that going to be our line?”

“No,” Terry said. “We’re going to need something better. We’ll keep you posted. Go raise money.” Terry hung up and said to Cass, “Do we really want him a heartbeat away from the presidency?”

“Our leader,” Cass said. “He makes you want to take the bullet for him.”

“Never mind him. We got some spinning to do.”

Chapter 25

Gideon carried his own bully pulpit wherever he went. In the days following the arrest of Arthur Clumm, he was ubiquitous, on every TV show, fulminating and demanding that the attorney general investigate “all links between Arthur Clumm and Cassandra Devine’s diabolical death factory.”

Watching this explosion of spittle, Terry said to Cass, mentor to student, “You caught the operative word in there, right?”

“‘Diabolical’?”

“No. ‘All.’ Not just one link. All links. Subtle, in a diabolical sort of way.”

Arthur Clumm’s salamandrine visage was on every front page and TV show. Here was Arthur, in jailhouse orange jumpsuit and manacles, being transferred from Budding Grove jail to a more secure facility. Here was Arthur again, arriving at the Cunch County Courthouse, wearing a flak jacket and a-what’s this?-blanket over his head. “What’s the blanket for?” a reporter asked. “To confuse snipers,” replied a sheriff’s deputy.

At his arraignment, Arthur, in the best tradition of American criminality, pleaded “not guilty.” It transpired that during his interrogation, he had called CASSANDRA “my personal goddess and inspiration.” It was further revealed that Arthur possessed an autographed photo of Cass, with the inscription “Keep up the good work.” This was not good news for the Cass camp.

This grim tiding was revealed to her by way of a phone call from a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch. She told the reporter the truth-namely, that she received many requests for photos and autographs from followers of her blog.

The problem was, the reporter informed Cass, that the postmark on the envelope containing the autographed photo was dated in the middle of the six-month period during which Arthur had taken it on himself to euthanize half the population of the Budding Grove nursing home.

“Oh shit,” Cass said. She immediately added, “That was off the record.”

The reporter said he wouldn’t be able to quote her exactly, as the Dispatch was a family paper, but that he would have to quote her as uttering an expletive.

She told Terry about the call.

“‘Personal goddess’?” he said. “Uch.”

“I feel like Transitioning myself.”

“Why so glum?” Terry said. “I thought women liked being on pedestals.”

“I’m dead meat,” Cass said.

“Cass, you didn’t…know this creep?”

“Of course not. I get thousands of requests for autographed photos.”

“Why did you write, ‘Keep up the good work’?”

“I have no idea. I don’t remember every autograph, for God’s sake. He probably wrote that he was a nurse or-I don’t know. You don’t think I’d encourage a freelance mass murderer?”

“You weren’t, like, urging him to put people to sleep.”

“No.”

“Well,” Terry said, “that’s a relief. Good to know that one of my senior vice presidents isn’t moonlighting advising serial murderers.”

“Hilarious,” Cass said. “So hilarious.”

Not long afterward, two FBI agents appeared in the reception room of Tucker Strategic Communications.

“Your friends are back,” Terry alerted Cass by intercom. “It’s always nice to have a couple of G-men in the waiting room. It really impresses clients. Especially the big corporate ones.”

“Terry, I’m sorry about this. But-”

“Just don’t tell them anything until I get Allen. It’s always good to talk to Allen. He’s a great guy, and he only charges seven hundred an hour. Which, under the circumstances, is going to come out of your next paycheck instead of mine.”

Allen Snyder arrived and conducted a $700 discussion with the FBI agents over the finer points of something called Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Cass and Terry, listening in, gathered that it had to do with the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and “probable cause”-in this instance for searching the hard drives of Cass’s computers. Allen eloquently maintained that they had no such probable cause. The agents argued that they did, and if it came to that, they would be more than happy to return with a search warrant.

“May I have a word with my client?” he said. The FBI men assented in the laconic way of their ilk.

Allen, Cass, and Terry huddled in another office.

“Is there anything on the computer?” Allen asked.

“Like what?” Cass said. “Coded messages to the Death Angel of Budding Grove telling him to exterminate a whole nursing home?”

“I meant, is there anything on the computers that you wouldn’t want them to see? Personal matters.…”

“I-I mean-I keep a diary.”

Allen nodded gravely. “A diary.”

“It’s password protected. But the FBI will probably figure out a way through it.”

“Is there anything in the diary that could cause you a problem?”