The Charity (67 page)

“I know I can trust you,” he said more as a command than a statement. The additional knowledge Lainely had concerned him. He turned and started back to his truck.

Lainely was not ready to have their outing come to an end and nearly tripped over herself in scrambling to block Michael’s access to his vehicle. “What would you like me to say to the owners?”

He stood back and took a last look at the view. This mountain was situated at the northern gap. From where he stood he could see the untouched valley of Perc, with its horse farms and etched out homesteads. The other side of the gap contained terrain just as striking, but with the deep, earthy scars of coal mining operations, some his, some belonging to other companies. The open sores of the land did not cause him to flinch.

“I’m not interested.”

Fury mixed with rejection as Lainely dug her long nails into her palms. “
What!
This property fits your objectives perfectly! It has untapped mineral potential; the timber alone would bring in thousands of dollars, and the transaction could be made through ‘We Ourselves Affiliates’ or that new ‘Unity Green Trust’ you’ve been dealing with, just like your other transactions. Your name would never be connected with either the sale or the mining operations. The owners would get a fair price for what they think is just a scruffy, isolated mountain top. You
have
to buy it!”

His facial muscles did not flicker. “I said, I’m not interested.”

Lainely took a deep, steadying breath and forced herself to relax. “Well, of course you’re not interested now. I can certainly understand your wanting to wait until more time has passed before you resume buying properties. Maybe in a couple of months then.”

“Lainely, thank you for finding this property for me. If and when this property is placed on the market by the owners on their own accord, I might take another look at it. But for now, I’m not interested in taking any more chances.”

She smiled and stepped back from him as she again shifted strategy. “You’re right. I guess I just got caught up in another possible sale! Well!” she straightened her shoulders and hugged her fur closer to her, “I’m ready to go. I think it’s my turn to buy lunch, isn’t it? You’ve been out of town for so long, I’ve forgotten whose turn it is.”

“Sorry, Lainely. That reporter is still poking around. I don’t think we should be seen together. Some other time.”

Her stretched smile was nearly frozen on her face. With a flourish, she dove into her crimson leather purse and pulled out a calendar, stuffed with papers and sectioned with color-coded tabs. “Fine. I have tons of work to do at the office anyway.”

They rode back down the mountain in silence.

“Abbey, get a life.”

Abbey looked up from her desk, skin pale and eyes dark from concentration and exhaustion. “I have one and right now it’s called The Commonwealth of Massachusetts versus Magnus Michael Connaught. Here are the depositions on the embezzlement counts I took today.”

Shea gathered up the papers and shoved them into his briefcase. “I lost all track of time and ran out of chips and candy bars. Want to grab a bite to eat?”

“Shea, it’s past midnight. I doubt anything’s open. Try the vending machine in the lounge.”

“Empty. Everyone thinks like I do. Work after six. Snack until you go home. Evenings are when the phone stops ringing and the office gets quiet.”

“Well, at least I don’t sleep in my office like some people around here,” she said with a knowing smile. “What’s your big hurry anyway? You’ve been running around here like a madman.”

“I’m going to Kentucky to spend some time with Jessica and I don’t want to have a lot hanging over my head when we’re together.”

“I thought she made you swear it was going to be a working visit?”

“I never said how much work we would do.” He smiled. Seeing her again would feel good. “The date for Magnus’ trial has been set and there’s a lot to do to make sure the case is as airtight as I want it to be. This is the case I’ve been waiting for. It will, well, it will put an
end
to things.”

“Like what he did to your family?”

“And Jessica’s and countless others.” The emptiness left from his wife’s and child’s deaths could never be totally filled by the hours he poured into his work or in putting Magnus away, but it worked to dull the ache. He would never completely recover, but meeting Jessica gave him a glimmer of hope that he could carve out a new life with someone.

“So something’s going on between you two, eh?”

“No. I, um, I’ve learned to take my time with her,” he said trying to hold down his embarrassment. He would not make the same impulsive mistakes again. He changed the subject. “You’ve been your usual indispensable self. I noticed you lined up the appropriate witnesses to independently substantiate as much of Jessica’s testimony as possible.”

“Shea, you were right when you noted that anything having to do with either the Wyeths or Jessica herself may be inadmissible as hearsay evidence or tainted as prejudicial. Linking Magnus to conspiracies and racketeering was one thing. Linking him with murder is another. The conspiracies and cover-up give him more than sufficient motives for murder.”

“We can’t take the risk that one half of this case would fall apart if something happened to the other half. Doubling up on witnesses and testimony is a good strategy. This is no time to be lax. How are you doing on Sarge’s session?”

“Well, it was easy enough to find him. He was at the diner just like Jessica said he would be,” Abbey said as she rustled through the papers. She showed a pink form to Shea and continued talking. “We took him in under protective custody knowing the Charity will try to get to him before he has time to talk to us. I moved as fast as I could with all the details so tomorrow we’ll get Sarge’s deposition. I made arrangements for a videotaped session complete with a court reporter for a full transcript. Sarge’s testimony will be as damning as Jessica’s against Magnus.”

“I just hope Jessica is safer with Sarge giving the heavy hitting stuff. But with these guys, you can never tell.”

“Well, with the documents and the case as they stand now, even a law student could try it and win. You’ve done a great job.”

“Right. Thanks.” Shea looked uncomfortable receiving the compliment.

Abbey rubbed her eyes and sat back in her chair. “You know, I’ve been pouring over the murder case documents and there’s some stuff that just doesn’t make sense.”

Shea sat down to listen. “Like what?”

“Well, look at Sarge. He’s ‘retired’ from the Charity, right? I mean, here’s this guy with all this dirt on Magnus and his buddies who’s no longer working actively in the group, and he’s still living. They didn’t kill him. Why couldn’t Gus just retire? Why kill him?”

“Because he wanted out. He signed a notarized statement to that fact.”

“He wanted
out
at the same time Jessica wanted
into
her family’s business. That’s what she said she overheard. They didn’t kill Gus because he wanted to retire. They killed him because he was protecting Jessica.”

“Protecting? Yeah, I guess so. He always had a real soft spot for her. It was Gus who made sure Jessica was not with her family when their car crashed.”

“Yup. And another thing bothered me. That Aunt Bridget may have come off as crazy, but she was a pretty savvy old lady. I mean, look at the trust she drew up for Jessica and the accounts she had ready for some emergency. It was like she could see this whole thing coming. Anyway, how could someone that savvy not have picked up on how successful the farm was all those years—you know, those were the farm’s most successful years by all accounts—and not notice that a couple million bucks were lost. That’s a hell of a lot of rolled oats for old Nellie.”

“Abbey, what are you getting at?”

“I wanted to get some dirt on Sarge to make him talk to us. I figured I could tie his statement into the sister’s disability. I took the record Jessica found in the safe deposit box, you know, the one about Erin’s brain injury? Anyway, I went into the Beverly Hospital’s record archives.”

“And?”

“I found that Margaret and Jim Wyeth had one baby girl. Erin. It was Margaret’s first child.”

“Could you be mistaken?”

“I thought maybe the birth profile on Margaret was wrong, so I looked up Jessica’s certificate.”

Abbey grabbed another stack of papers looking for something. She then pawed through the back of a file drawer. “A file for the birth of a baby girl was there, but there was no document at all stating the names of the parents for Jessica.”

“No birth certificate?”

“Nope. That bothered me a lot, so I looked up the records on Margaret for the dates of Jessica’s birth and found nothing. Ah! Here it is,” she said waving a yellowed paper in the air. “Okay, here. I didn’t bother to copy it. I figured someone would question its authenticity or something so I just took it.”

Shea looked down. The yellowed paper contained the information on the birth mother for an infant girl. The patient was listed as Bridget Heinchon. Next of kin was Gus Adams.

“My God, Abbey! Jessica has no idea about this!”

“Well, I’m not sure she really has to know.”

“But why? She has to.”

Abbey walked around her office and absently straightened papers. “Think about it. I’m not sure, but I thought Bridget was a widow. Either way, Bridget being pregnant by Gus was bad news. Either Bridget had an affair or she was fooling around out of wedlock. Gus was married to the Charity. He knew if he had any family of his own that they would harm them to get him to go along with grander schemes. The way I look at it is Gus could look like the dedicated bachelor soldier and watch his kid grow up on a thoroughbred breeding farm. Margaret would take in her sister’s illegitimate daughter to save face.”

“So Bridget worked on the family to set up their money in a certain way and to make her guardian if anything happened to them.”

“Yup. And Gus made sure something did. I figure ‘Auntie Bridgie’ was in that up to her eyeballs, too.”

“No one ever bothered Jessica until she showed interest in the business.”

“My hunch is that they would have tried to coerce her by threatening to make her family secret public—that is
if
they ever knew this. She was of no real interest to them until she witnessed Gus’ murder.”

“Her
father’s
murder.”

“Yup.”

“She has to know the truth.”

“To learn you witnessed your real father’s death and suspect that your real mother conspired to kill the only parents you ever knew? What would be the point of that? It wouldn’t change anything.”

“Jesus H. Christ, Abbey! Wouldn’t
you
want to know?”

“No. Not really. She’s gone through enough just to get back to being Jessica Wyeth. Now you want her to become Jessica
Adams
?”

“But I’m not sure the theory about Aunt Bridget is right. More points to her just trying to survive than conspiring to murder.”

“Either way, she knew a lot and was actively protecting Jessica from the Charity.”

Shea slumped back in the chair. “This is amazing. I don’t know if I can keep something like this from her.”

“Try.”

They finished their work an hour later with the kind of focus only late hours and overwork could bring. Abbey stayed on, but Shea was done for the day. He gathered up his papers and clicked his briefcase shut then pulled on his coat and made his way out of the building, nodding to the security guard in the lobby as he walked through. The brass bar of the heavy doors felt cold against his bare hands, giving only a margin more reality to the night. His head throbbed with the information Abbey gave him. It fit. It was just too incredible. Maybe getting some air would help shake him out of it. Shea pushed hard to open the door and cold air greeted his face.

The city street was deserted except for snow crews with their payloaders and dump trucks cleaning up after another storm. This winter had been a brutal one for the northeast and the weather forecast was for another nor’easter to come through in a day or so. He hoped to have Sarge’s deposition taken and be on a plane to Kentucky before it hit.

Maybe it was his fatigue or just a desire to stretch his legs, but he chose a route toward the harbor. He watched with bleary-eyed fascination as the payloader scooped up a pile of filthy snow and dumped its cargo into the back of a waiting truck. The driver of the truck sat hunched behind the steering wheel as he waited with detached boredom for the signal to drive to the pier and dump the snow into the harbor. The sound of heavy gears engaging told Shea another truck was already laboring on its way to the pier.

The cold air was gradually dissipating the fog that still swirled in his head. He forced his mind to click away at lists and facts to keep alert. Slowly, the surroundings of the street sharpened and he took habitual of inventory it. It had been years since he was a cop walking the beat, and old habits die hard. Old or not, the habits had kept him alive on several occasions.

His eyes swept the plane of the sidewalk and each shadowed angle was instantly assessed as he walked to his car. Was the shape regular? Was the crevasse deep enough to hide a person? If a movement occurred, his mind would quickly run through the possibilities of what it might be. A slight wind would stir up papers that sounded like a body shifting its weight. A heated grate might be the bed for a slumped figure for the night. Stunned impressions from his night’s work began to fade as his inventory of the street continued.