"Remember the McDermott case, Jim?"
He frowned, then smiled at her. "Yes," he said. McDermott had been a factory hand, an overgrown moron of 22 who had beaten his 70-year-old father to death one night shortly before Harker had become Governor of New York. The verdict had been speedy, the sentence one of execution. With the boy in the death house and the night of the execution at hand, his aged mother had relented, lost her vindictiveness, pleaded with the new Governor Harker to commute the sentence.
The boy had had a long criminal record. The court had found him guilty. He had murdered his father in cold blood, premeditatively. He deserved the full penalty.
Harker had refused to commute. But then he had spent the rest of the evening staring at his watch, and at the stroke of midnight had burst into an attack of chills.
He nodded slowly now. "I refused to commute Barchet's sentence. That's all there is to it."
CHAPTER XVI
The newspapers Saturday morning gave full play to the Thurman disappearance. Several of them ran biographies of the missing Senator, tracing his political career from the early founding days of the National-Liberal Party to his present anti-reanimation stand.
The police and FBI statements were simply mechanical handouts, repeats of last night's assurances that no stone would be left unturned. Harker read them with some amusement. He had slept well, and a good deal of last night's tension had departed from him.
He had come to a calming conclusion: Raymond and Barchet had done a violent thing, but these were violent times. Somehow he would have to forget about the shocking Thurman affair and continue along the path already entered upon.