McQuaid's Justice

by Carly Bishop

  Cy nodded. “Bottom line, he knew enough to have come up with the scheme on his own. Did Gould know you tried to establish a link between him and Eisman?”

  “You bet he knew.” Her father’s nostrils flared minutely. “I wanted him to know. I wanted to make him sweat. After what he’d done to Pam—” he broke off, shaking his head.

  Cy looked to Amy. She gave a small nod. “Yesterday in Steamboat we had a run-in with Zach Hollingsworth. Gould was the one egging him on to run with this story in the first place. Hollingsworth figured Gould wants to scuttle your nomination. What he couldn’t figure was why.”

  “And so in my nomination he’s found the perfect venue to exact his revenge. A prince of man, isn’t he? A bastion of integrity.”

  A few moments passed. What more was there to say about Gould? Amy drew a deep breath. “What happened then? After the kidnap?”

  “A couple of months later, Pam was spotted on the surveillance tapes of a bank robbery in Salt Lake City.”

  “But she escaped capture?” Amy signed.

  Her father gave a tense, abbreviated nod. “Hollingsworth’s story is accurate. They all escaped. There was a getaway driver as well. All of them were captured within seventy-two hours. All but Pam. I prosecuted the case for Pam’s kidnap as well as the bank heist they pulled off.”

  Amy shook her head. “What am I missing? Why did they rob a bank?”

  “Because the family flatly refused to pay the ransom demand. Eisman and DuLong had their mitts on a rich heiress, but her family stiffed them.”

  Amy felt her entire body recoil. “How could they refuse to pay? Especially after all she’d been through—”

  “There’s the rub, you see. They didn’t accept that she’d been through anything. Knowing what they had already done to her,” her father asked, “why do you imagine they might pay off a ransom demand?”

  “She was their daughter.”

  “And they chose to believe she had participated in her own kidnap to get back at them for refusing to believe Gould had raped her. When she was caught on the surveillance footage, they took it to mean she was a willing participant in that crime as well.” Byron Reeves shook his head. His lips tightened. “It was outrageous.”

  “To be fair, sir,” Cy pointed out, “Jessup was caught on camera toting an automatic weapon.”

  “She had been held hostage for seven weeks. She was subjected to illegal drugs, beatings, isolation—and that is only what her captors admitted having done to her. Eisman is still in a federal pen in Illinois. Nonetheless,” he added, anticipating Cy, “what you say is correct. She was armed and present at the commission of a felony. If Zach Hollingsworth has a point to make, it is not that I was overzealous in the prosecution of Eisman and DuLong because of my family ties to the victim of their kidnap and extortion—”

  “But that another prosecutor would have pressed harder to catch Pamela Jessup,” Cy concluded.

  Her father met Cy’s gaze with his own, flinty and unapologetic. “Yes.”

  “Did you exert your influence to get them to call off the dogs?” Cy asked, equally unrelenting. Looking from one to another, Amy thought how alike they were, both of them unbending men of a certain code, posturing at one another like mountain stags locking horns.

  “Yes.” He refused to soften his answer, justify it or make the case for himself that any prosecutor would likely have granted Pam immunity for her testimony, or at the very least gone lightly in the charges laid against her.

  “Are you prepared to answer for that now?”

  “Cy, my father is not answerable to you or anyone—”

  “He is, Amy,” Cy interrupted, signing fiercely. “No man is above the law. Especially one who officially sits in judgment of others.”

  “He’s right.” Her father took his suit jacket from the coat tree. “I’ll just say this, though I don’t intend to make any statement to the press at all. The office of the U.S. attorney was not used to aid and abet the flight of Pamela Jessup from prosecution.”

  As FAR AS CY was concerned, the clarity and precision of Judge Reeves’s assurance to Amy seemed a little disingenuous.

  Riding in the front seat of Byron Reeves’s car with the chauffeur, en route to the restaurant, he decided Reeves would know exactly where to draw the line. If Pamela Jessup had been aided in any way in her flight from prosecution, Byron Reeves had done the deed personally, carefully separating his personal and professional lives.

  If he had done it, he’d done it for values he must believe superseded the law. Cy had the feeling Byron Reeves would stand up and say so publicly if it came to that.

  Grudging admiration curled in his gut, and he squirmed.

  He felt pulled in two directions. His own code of honor had always been unstinting. Still, as he’d told Cameron, things were never all black or white, and Cy had to wonder what he would have done if he’d been in Reeves’s shoes. Would justice have been better served if all the stops had been pulled out to track down Pamela Jessup?

  The limo delivered them to the front steps of the restaurant, and a few minutes later they were seated in a small, elegantly appointed alcove. Her father preoccupied with the menu, Amy sat stiffly, smoothing the fanfold pattern of creases from her napkin.

  The image that had haunted Cy from the start came back. Amy sitting on the landing of that daunting old staircase trying to hear what danger was coming next, calming, consoling herself by stroking the flocking on the wall beside her.

  Consoling herself again, stroking the whiskers on his jaw when he kissed her and must have reeked of his regret to her.

  He wanted to give Amy something else to touch besides the linen. His hand for instance.

  Instead he stretched his arm across the pristine white tablecloth and spelled her name where she would see him doing it She needed a shove to get out of her head and put her questions on the table. “Amy.”

  She watched his hand.

  “Ask him,” he signed, “what you need to know.”

  Judge Reeves closed his menu and set it aside. He’d missed nothing. He tolerated the discreet appearance of the waiter at his elbow, ordered, then ordered for Amy at her request, and waited through Cy’s request for rare prime rib. Then he took Cy on. “My daughter has never needed anyone’s encouragement to speak her mind to me.”

  “Don’t, Daddy,” she signed “Don’t make this into a pissing contest between you.”

  She had shocked her father. She’d intended just that, spelling the word, meaning to stop him cold.

  “I have...this isn’t easy for me. If it weren’t for Cy I wouldn’t be here, asking you what happened. Things I have needed to learn for a long time.”

  He sighed heavily. “My apologies to you both. What else can I tell you?”

  “Finish with what happened the night my mother died.”

  Reeves nodded. “There isn’t a great deal more to say.” Waiting until the tureen of oxtail soup had been served, he picked up at the point where Pamela Jessup had become relevant and he’d become sidetracked.

  He referred back to Julia’s tirade. “It was true that you weren’t physically harmed beyond a chill and a few cuts and bruises, but I was so angry at her selfishness that I told her again to get out. She finally left and I sat down with you in the rocking chair in your room. I stayed until you had fallen asleep.

  “When I finally arrived back downstairs,” he concluded, “Brent had taken off, and your mother was over the edge with worry about him.”

  “Do you know, of your own personal knowledge, that she was worried about Brent?” Cy asked. This was the moment to confirm with her father whether Brent could have been responsible.

  He frowned. “Yes—”

  “Is there any possibility that your brother intercepted you as you came downstairs and told you Brent had run out? That you didn’t actually see Julia at all before you left to go after your stepson?”

  “No.” The creases about his eyes and on his brow deepened. “I did see her
. She was—”

  “Still alive, sir?”

  “Of course she was still alive! We even argued about which of us would go after Brent. I prevailed. She wasn’t in any shape to be chasing after the boy.” He paused. “Are you asking if there is any possibility Julia was dead before Brent left?”

  She exchanged looks with Cy. “He believes she was, Daddy.”

  “Brent?” He shoved his soup bowl away, rested his elbows and laced his long fingers. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Yes.” She was. “Brent believes he was responsible for mother’s death.”

  The waiter removed the soup bowls and now served their main courses. “Why would he think such a thing?”

  “That’s the point, sir,” Cy answered. “Why would he believe it, unless it was true? Or unless someone—your brother for instance—went to a great deal of effort to make Brent believe he had somehow killed his mother?”

  “Wait,” her father demanded. “One thing at a time. First, did Brent tell you that he had killed his mother?”

  “He didn’t,” Cy said. “What he did do, within a couple of hours of our visit to him, Amy’s and mine, was to call your brother long-distance on a cell phone.”

  Her father’s chest seemed to deflate. “I presume the conversation was intercepted?”

  “Yes.”

  “By the FBI?”

  “No, sir,” Cy answered. “Hollingsworth got it on tape.”

  Her father scowled. “Got what on tape?”

  Cy gave him the gist of the conversation, all the times Perry Reeves had tried to calm Brent, reassuring him that there was no evidence to bring him down, urging him over and over again to repeat aloud the assertion that his mother’s death was an accident.

  “I am aware, sir,” Cy went on, “that the tape is proof of only one thing. Your brother and stepson have had a long-term understanding between the two of them as to what happened the night your wife died. Your brother’s version of the events has been consistent from day one with your own. But it’s hard to imagine that Brent would be so riddled with guilt if, in fact, when he left the house, your wife was still alive.”

  “Unless Brent was lying in wait for her somewhere outside. Is that it?” The judge’s mind worked quickly, arriving in a few short seconds at the only other possibility.

  He described a scenario in which he had missed Brent, going further and further afield looking for his stepson so that when Julia followed, she and Brent had clashed again in an argument that ended with her death. “The logic of it is impeccable—but wrong. Brent wasn’t hiding. It had begun to snow right about the time I arrived back at the house with Amy. Brent’s footprints were clear. Easy to follow in the snow. He bolted, he went down the front steps, and I followed the trail he left all the way down the mountain. He angled through the forest on a direct course for the highway leading into town.”

  “Then the question remains,” Cy replied, unfazed by the dismantling of a theory neither he nor Amy had ever believed. “Why did Brent panic? Why did he make that call to your brother?”

  “I have no idea,” Judge Reeves answered. “Do you?”

  “We think she must have lost consciousness, Daddy,” Amy signed. “Uncle Perry told us that she was having terrible asthma attacks all day long. Maybe she passed out—at least long enough for Brent to run because he thought he’d hurt or killed her when he shoved her down. If Brent is panicked, then it has to be that Uncle Perry has let him go on believing all these years that she died because of whatever he did.”

  Cy spoke along with her signing, translating for her because although her father could follow her fairly well, he was more deeply upset than he showed.

  He made an obvious effort to regain his composure, lifting his heavy silver flatware, cutting carefully into his roasted quail and delicately seasoned new potatoes.

  “I take it you still do not believe your mother’s death was an accident, then?”

  “I don’t, Daddy. I don’t accept that Uncle Perry was trying to make me back off for my own good. He could have asked. He could have said I should talk to you. He had no reason to bully me, Daddy, but he was. And Brent—”

  “I have to say, sweetling, that I am at a loss.” He placed his knife on the rim of his plate. “While I agree with you that it would be a heinous, despicable act on Perry’s part to have fostered Brent’s belief that he was responsible for his mother’s death, nothing you have told me disproves the simple conclusion that Julia’s death was an accident.”

  Amy looked steadily at her father. “I am asking you to consider another possibility.”

  “That your uncle killed your mother.” It took no special insight to guess.

  She nodded. “Can you do that? Can you imagine it’s possible?”

  “Anything is possible, Amy,” the judge chided gently, “but what would be the point?” He paused. “I don’t believe it. I’m frankly astounded that you can even entertain the notion. I don’t pretend to appreciate Perry’s tactics in discouraging an investigation, but that is a very long way indeed from the commission of a felony murder and coverup.” He began to fiddle again with the silver flatware. “What is it that you want? The assignment of blame?”

  “Isn’t that what we do? Isn’t it everything you stand for—to hold people accountable for their crimes?”

  “Yes. So is the doctrine of innocence until guilt is proven. But even if I were to suppose your uncle killed your mother, Amy, if I entertained that possibility, then blame would have to be assigned, and it would fall to me.”

  “With all due respect, your honor—”

  “Spare me the honorific, McQuaid,” her father commanded. A rigid expression seized his features. “Let us suppose, for the sake of our discussion, that Perry killed Julia. If so, he has kept it to himself with exquisite care. I would not in a million years have suggested he get rid of her either, but the fact of the matter is that my brother has hardly taken a step in thirty years that wasn’t calculated to further my interests.”

  “Maybe,” Cy argued, “but since we don’t hold people liable for the murderous action of others, why hold yourself to a higher standard? You weren’t even an accessory to the murder unless you knew—”

  “Is there some doubt in your mind, Mr. McQuaid,” he interrupted jokingly, “that I am somewhat familiar with the threshold for accessory-to-felony murder?”

  Cy cracked a grin. “None.”

  The tension between them broke, but her father sighed deeply and his disbelief was still thick.

  “There’s more, Daddy.”

  He sighed deeply. The waiter removed his plate. “What is it?”

  Amy deferred to Cy for the sake of her father’s ease of understanding. “We have assumed in the Bureau,” he said, “that the notarized letter in which Dr. Courson recanted his original finding of accidental death never saw the light of day—not until the extortion attempt began last week. If it had, our forensic accountants figured to follow the money. As you know, there wasn’t any obvious payoff.”

  Her father nodded. “No evidence whatever of a lump sum or an income stream which couldn’t be explained.”

  “Exactly. But your brother told us that he was in the midst of a complicated real estate transaction on the day Amy fell and your wife died. As real estate was his area of expertise, I thought it might be worthwhile just to give the records a cursory check. Amy and I went to look through old county records, beginning with that day, going forward. Again, there was nothing, no sale of record by Courson or his wife. No—”

  “Are you coming to a point?” her father interrupted wearily.

  “Yes.” Cy’s jaw tightened. “We were referred by the county clerk to corporate sales of time-shares in various properties. Six days after your wife’s death, on the date of first release of the coroner’s findings, Greg Courson became the owner of a time-share that sold then for fifty thousand dollars down and equal amounts every year after. The records indicate ‘For value received by Magenta Corp’—which h
as holdings at the finest resort locations all over the world.”

  “Dad,” Amy signed, “Courson didn’t have fifty thousand dollars to plunk down anywhere. Not then. Not every year since. And Uncle Perry is listed in the secretary of state’s office as one of the directors of the Magenta Corporation.”

  “I’m guessing, sir,” Cy concluded, “that your brother has been paying all these years for the time-share Courson used.”

  “Don’t bet your ranch, Mr. McQuaid,” her father warned. He had listened carefully, but as if it all applied to a case being described to him that involved someone he didn’t know. “If Perry orchestrated this deal, you won’t find a trace of his participation.”

  “Are you saying,” Amy signed, “that this is not enough—”

  “Legally, no,” he answered, anticipating her direction. “Is it coincidence that Courson wound up with such a plum, and on the date of his release of findings? Again, no.” He paused to take a drink of his wine. “What you are left with, however, is identical to the old joke about the evidence for the existence of a vast right-wing conspiracy in this country.” He laughed gently. “The proof is in the utter lack of any proof.”

  “Daddy, stop it!” Amy signed angrily. “This is not some intellectual exercise. This is Uncle Perry paying hush money to the coroner so that—”

  Her father held up a hand. “I know what this is, Amy.” His chin began to tremble. “I know what this is.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Cy couldn’t sleep. Judge Reeves had insisted he avail himself of one of the guest rooms in his D.C. town house. He lay in his boxers on the floor, his head and shoulders propped up against a chair. Beside him a fire burned in the gas-log fireplace and he sat staring at the flames flickering with only the slight hiss of fuel.

  A gas fire was a far sight cleaner than wood, but he missed the scent of burning pine or cedar or oak, and the sounds. The crackling and popping of real wood on fire. As far back as he could remember, he’d loved the feel of the heat of a good hot fire on his face—and the taste of flaming marshmallows melting Hershey bars on a graham cracker.