Release (36 page)

Once Franklin understood that Rook and Sauren had been lovers.

“I have to go. Just promise me you’ll stay with Genny.”

Franklin didn’t look happy about it, but he nodded his head grudgingly.

“Good. I’ll have my secretary phone you with Rook’s description,” Sean told Franklin before he turned and rushed out of the emergency room. He thought of Genny back in the ER, her face as white as newly fallen snow, her body sagging limply in his arms.

He fought against a powerful instinct to race back in there. To hold her. To comfort.

She’d thought he’d killed Max. No wonder she’d avoided him. No wonder she’d winced every time he looked at her in those weeks after Max’s death.

Of all the damned things, Sean thought bitterly as he shoved open the metal door and jogged out onto the icy sidewalk.

It was like the cards had been stacked against Genny and him from day one.

 

 

 

Genny blinked open heavy eyelids. Her brow crinkled in confusion when she saw a dark brown face looming over her. She strained to focus her vision.

“Detective Franklin,” she mumbled. She started to sit up.

“Whoa, not so quickly. You fainted. You were out of it there for a few seconds when the nurse brought you over to this cot. Your knees folded like an accordion underneath you.”

“Where’s Sean?”

“Off on a mission to save the world, apparently. Or at least on a mission to save you, I’m guessing.”

“What do you mean?” she whispered as she leaned back on her elbows. Things seemed a bit clearer now, less hazy. Still, her head pounded with pain.

“He said he was going to get something that would help to prove that a man named Albert Rook killed your husband.”

“The briefcase.”

Franklin’s features hardened. Suddenly, the puppy dog disappeared and a hard, formidable man took its place. “What briefcase?”

But Genevieve stared to the left of him, deep in thought. “He’ll have gone to my aunt’s and mother’s house.”

“Hey,
hey
, now. What are you doing? That nurse is worse than my grandma Flora used to be. She’ll skin me alive if I let you get up.” Genevieve ignored him—fierce scowl and all—and swung her feet to the floor. She sat for a second or two, assessing how she felt. No dizziness crashed into her like before so she slowly started to stand. Franklin put out his hand to help her.

“I need to go to my mother’s.”

“You’re not going anywhere. Look at you. You can hardly stand. You can’t operate a vehicle. Besides, have you forgotten? You don’t
have
a vehicle at the moment. The officers probably had your car towed to one of the city facilities by now.”

Genevieve bit her lower lip. She hadn’t thought of that. She studied Franklin speculatively. He looked somber and genuinely concerned. She wondered if he suddenly seemed so much less threatening because she no longer believed she had to protect Sean from him.

“You could drive me there.”

“Why would I do that?” Franklin asked skeptically. “You’re not even supposed to leave the hospital yet.”

“I thought you were the cop who wasn’t going to rest until Max Sauren’s murder was solved.”

Franklin pursed his lips together and considered her thoughtfully. “You do know the right buttons to push. Are you sure you’re okay?”

Genevieve took a deep breath and nodded. “The faint must have done me good. I feel much better.” If it wasn’t exactly the truth, it wasn’t precisely a lie, either. She did feel better than before, when Sean had said he was leaving.

Of course, she’d felt so awful then, to say she felt better wasn’t really saying much. She realized something crucial at the same moment she took note of the continued doubt on Franklin’s face.

“You
have
to take me to Gary, Detective,” she said firmly.

“Why? What are you thinking?”

“Sean told you about Albert Rook?” She put her hand on his upper arm and started to urge him out of the semi-private examination cubicle. Franklin didn’t exactly go along with her willingly, but he didn’t plant his feet either.

“Yeah. He thinks Rook murdered your husband.”

“Right. Well, I just realized—Rook stole my phone when he forced me off the road. It’s got all my addresses and phone numbers in it.”

Franklin stopped dead in his tracks, halting her as well. She gave him an entreating glance. “We
have
to go. Rook likely remembers I have a mother in Gary. The only reason he probably hasn’t broken into her house like he has everywhere else associated with me is because the house is under my aunt’s name. Not my mother’s. He probably didn’t know her correct address before he stole my phone. He’ll go there to find that briefcase.”

“Okay. There’s still no reason for you to go. I’ll go alone.”

“Not if you don’t know where to go, you won’t.”

Franklin gave her a narrow stare. “I can play poker with the best of them, Ms. Bujold. You wouldn’t put people you care about at risk just to make a point, would you?”

“You want me to beg? All right, fine.
Please
take me to my mother’s in Gary, Detective. Maybe we can find out a few things from each other along the way.”

He considered her for a long moment, and then nodded decisively. “Okay. Let’s go. Keep an eye out for that nurse though. She’d kick my butt from here to Biloxi if she knew I was making off with you.”

Genevieve couldn’t help but give a small smile at the evidence of such a huge man—a homicide detective who dealt with the toughest elements of society—being intimidated by a short, plump, and fierce elderly nurse. She was beginning to realize it wasn’t an act. Franklin really did have both a smart, relentless police detective and a cuddly, kind man residing inside that big body.

“Detective?” she asked as they moved hastily through the bustling emergency room.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“How come you never call me Genevieve?”

“I ’spect it’s because you never asked me to.”

“Oh. I thought it was because you thought I was a murderer,” she mused as he pushed open a door and held it for her.

Franklin smiled. “I might have thought it once. For about ten seconds three years ago.”

Genevieve gave him a surprised look. “I thought I was your primary suspect.”

They left a long corridor and walked into the enormous welcoming hall for the entire hospital. Bright winter sunlight streamed through floor-to-ceiling windows. Genevieve squinted in the brilliance.

“I’ll admit I thought you were guilty of something. You’re one of those unfortunate people who wears her heart on her sleeve, I’m afraid. But feeling guilty and committing murder are two very different things. As Max’s wife, you were in a position to know things about him that others didn’t. Things about the state of his health, for instance.”

Genevieve came to an abrupt stop just feet inside the sunlit hall. Franklin halted along with her. They locked gazes for a few tense seconds.

“An autopsy was performed on your husband’s body, Genevieve. It’s normal procedure, in cases of murder.”

She shook her head slowly.

“You never told me you knew,” she whispered. “You never said anything about it to anyone.”

“It’s not uncommon for us to hold certain things back in a case like this.”

Maybe she’d experienced so much shock earlier that it was impossible for her to feel even more. Genevieve just felt numb as she stared up at Franklin.

“I’m guessing from your reaction that you were one of the only people besides Max’s doctor that knew he was dying.”

“Max told me for the first time on the same day he was killed,” she admitted through leaden lips after a long pause. “He . . . he said that he planned to taunt Sean . . . to goad him with the knowledge that he would never have me. He planned to whip Sean into a rage so that . . .”

“What, Genevieve?”

“So that Sean would murder him,” she whispered.

After a tense silence, she glanced up into Franklin’s face. His features had settled into a hard mask, but compassion shone in his velvety black eyes.

A giant knot had formed in Genevieve’s throat, but she fought past it. It was time for these toxic secrets to be released into the open, time for their power to be diminished by the blinding light of the truth. She believed Sean when he said he hadn’t murdered Max. If
he
hadn’t, and
she
hadn’t, there was no longer a reason to shelter Max’s manipulations.

“I tried to warn Sean on that day, even though Max had already told me he would be conveniently unavailable. Max had sent him in his place for an important meeting with the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury about some important government business Sauren was trying to procure in regard to a counterfeiting operation.”

“Why didn’t you call the police?”

“How many people do you know who would plan their death in such a ruthless, heartless fashion, Mr. Franklin?” she countered defensively. “I wish I
had
called the police. More than you could ever know. But the fact of the matter was, that afternoon was the first time I’d ever seen Max behave that way. I didn’t really believe he could be capable of such ruthlessness. Such selfishness. I was a fool not to take him at his word.”

She inhaled heavily and sighed. “He was dead within three hours of our conversation.”

Franklin glanced off into the distance. After a pause, he whistled softly. “I see your point. Well, if
this
ain’t something. Sauren wanted to go out with a bang not a whimper. You’ll pardon me for saying so, but your husband was a singular son of a bitch, Genevieve.”

“Sean
didn’t
kill Max,” Genevieve stated fiercely.

“I don’t think he did, either. I was convinced of it at one time, but my captain was always betting on you. It seems now as if Sauren manipulated this guy Rook to do his dirty work for him—or at least that’s what Kennedy thinks. Sauren got his abrupt, dramatic death and managed to keep you and Kennedy apart in the process. He just kept pulling those strings.”

“All the way from hell,” Genevieve murmured.

The knowledge that Franklin didn’t believe Sean was a murderer seemed to cause relief to sink all the down to her bone marrow.

“Let’s go,” she urged. “Sean’s got a good twenty-minute lead on us.”

CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT

S
ean drove slowly down the narrow, residential street lined with well-maintained bungalows. He’d tagged along with Genevieve on two different occasions to visit her mother. Both the neighborhood Genevieve had grown up in and this one were inhabited by blue-collar families, but this one was a bit more respectable than Genevieve’s and her parents’ had been—a little less shabby.

The bungalows had been built back in the 1920s and ’30s, and only had single-car garages. As a result, cars lined both sides of the street. Sean parallel parked a half-block away from the address Genny had written on the piece of paper. The cold winter air struck him like a slap when he got out of his SUV. The storm clouds had completely cleared. The sun would be setting soon enough, but for now it shone fiercely, as if it were trying to make up for its absence for the past few days.

As Sean made his way down a narrow opening in the hills of shoveled snow on the street, he realized he should have asked Genny for her mother’s phone number. It’d’ve been nice for Mrs. Bujold to get some kind of advanced warning of his visit. The trip from Chicago to Gary had been pleasantly short, considering the recent bad weather. He’d been so busy talking to Carol the whole time, and then contacting the operatives he’d sent in search of Genny, that he hadn’t even considered how odd it was going to be for him to just drop in like this on Genny’s aunt and mom.

He’d asked Mike Butler and Paul Dershiwitz to follow him out to Gary. Until Rook was found, Sean wanted Genny’s aunt’s house watched.

He grew hyperalert as he approached 5437 Grove Street, taking in the neat house with the freshly shoveled sidewalk and steps, scanning the area for anything out of place . . . looking for the vehicle that he knew Rook drove.

He saw nothing unusual.

He sprung up the front porch, his gaze flickering over the mailbox with the gold lettering that read Cline. His fist drew back in preparation to knock on the front door when he heard the muted sound of glass breaking from the interior of the house. He shifted quickly away from the door, pressing his back to the brick separating the front door and a large bay window that overlooked the street. He eased down the small front porch toward the window as he reached for his gun.

At first, the bright sunlight prevented him from seeing anything in the dim interior of the house. Then he made out the profile of an older, attractive woman with short, graying brown hair and a delicate face sitting rigidly in a chair near the window. He inched farther down the porch, peering around the edge of an ivory scalloped drapery into the living room.

A tall man with white hair was standing near a couch set against the far wall. On the table in front of him, a broken coffee cup lay shattered just inches from a phone. Sean made out another woman who sat on the couch, her gaze fixed on a second man who stood just to the right of the couch holding a gun.

Albert Rook.

And the man who’d obviously tried to reach for the phone when Rook had entered the room was Jim Rothman, the man who worked for Genny and had previously worked for Max. Rook waved the gun and the three adults all stood and moved out of Sean’s vision, Rook bringing up the rear.

Sean moved stealthily off the front porch and vaulted over a hill of snow into the front yard. He plodded through the thick snow toward the back of the house.

 

 

 

Detective Franklin reached across Genevieve’s lap and stilled her hand from reaching for the release on the car door.

“I’ll go and check things out at your mother’s house first. I’ll let you know once I see everything is okay. If I don’t come back out in thirty seconds and wave for you to come up to the house, you call the local police, okay? I carry two cell phones. You take one.”