Page 40 of State of the Union (First Family 3)

As she considered Stahl’s many fuckups, she also had to accept that her dad and others in command had either turned a blind eye or had been unaware of his lack of effort. Or they’d been so overworked during times of tight budgets that they hadn’t noticed. Whatever the reason, the blowback could put a dent in Skip’s legacy, and that possibility made her sick.

As she approached HQ, she was shocked to see media trucks lining the road a half mile from the building. “Holy shit,” she whispered. This was even bigger than the turnout right after Nick had become president, and they’d come looking for scoops on the first lady police officer.

If she was looking for proof that this would be a day unlike any other, the media crowd was her first clue. She could only imagine how furious the chief must be. As she always did in times of intense press coverage, she drove around to the morgue entrance in the back, but even that was staked out. “Shit.”

She was thankful for the presence of Vernon and Jimmy, who would get her inside without being accosted. Vernon signaled for her to wait for them. No problem, she thought. Not that she couldn’t defend herself, but this was a whole other level of intense.

When the agents were in position outside her car, Sam opened the door to a barrage of questions that were every bit as brutal as she’d expected.

“What took so long to find Carisma?”

“Were you called back from vacation at Camp David?”

“Did your father know that no one bothered to look for Carisma?”

“What else has the MPD ignored?”

“Does the MPD have a racism problem?”

That, right there, was why the chief had ordered them to stop investigating Stahl’s cold cases. Motherfucker.

“Did the president give you a ride back to DC on his helicopter?”

Sam ignored the questions and let Vernon and Jimmy move her through the throng into the morgue door, where Lindsey waited to greet her.

“I knew from the roar coming from outside that it had to be you.”

“You must’ve gotten up early.”

“Four a.m.,” Lindsey said with a yawn and sleepy grin. “I heard you were coming in, and I’m very sorry to see you here when you’re supposed to be on vacation.”

“I’m sorry to be here,” Sam said. “I meant to ask you at the camp why you were coming in on a Sunday?”

“With Byron away for his brother’s wedding, I needed to be back in town, so I came in to do some paperwork that I can’t ever seem to get ahead of. And P.S. the Brown bust is amazing.”

“Even if it’s eleven years too late.”

“Yeah.”

“What’s being said online?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“And the word on the street here?”

“Also not great.”

“Fucking hell.” Sam used her chin to gesture to the morgue. “You got a minute, Doc?”

“For you? Always.”

They went through the sliding glass doors into the antiseptic-smelling morgue, Sam’s least favorite room in the building. “There’s a very good chance I could get fired for this.”

“No way. For one thing, the chief would never fire you, because he loves you. For another, having the first lady working for us is the best PR we’ll ever get. And third, you guys did the right thing pursuing those leads. No one knew it would blow up into something like this.”

“The chief was afraid of this very thing.”

“You know what? Who cares if it’s a media shit storm? Jeannie saved the lives of ten people, nine of them little kids and babies. That’s what matters here. That’s the only thing that matters, and if you say that, over and over, eventually people will hear you.”