by Beverly Bird
“You’ve gotten erroneous information. I saw it there, as well. I was present for the autopsy and it was there when Dr. Byerly unbagged the victim’s hands.”
Angela stared at the screen, stunned. He hadn’t! What was he saying? What was he doing?
Throwing his own reputation over hers to cover it, to protect it, she realized. She had asked to be able to trust him. He had given her something beyond precious. He had lied for her.
“Oh, dear God,” she moaned aloud. She was overwhelmed. She couldn’t breathe. She forced her attention back to the TV. There was a brief, stunned silence from the media. Then their voices rose, tangled and excited. One was louder and more insistent than the others.
“Where?”
“We’ve been told that it was your hair!”
Jesse’s eyes sharpened as he looked for the person who had last spoken. His gaze was lethal, Angela thought, shivering.
“Apparently, you know a whole lot more about this than the rest of us,” he said too quietly. “Since both my staff and Homicide are actively looking for evidence, perhaps you’d like to step back into my office and share your information with me.”
The man shut up. Melanie whistled. “Hey, I’ll vote for him.”
Angela managed a pained smile.
“There are no DNA results on that hair at this time. We don’t know whose it is. Is there anything else?” Jesse demanded. “If we’re through here—”
“Are we to gather that your office is not going to ask for an indictment against Dr. Byerly?” someone interrupted.
“That’s correct,” Jesse snapped.
“Do you have any suspects in the Chauncy murder other than yourself or Dr. Byerly?” someone dared to ask.
“What an imbecilic question,” Melanie grated.
“We have no suspects, period,” Jesse said shortly. As Angela watched, his palm came up and covered the camera lens. “That’s all, people.”
In the next moment, the screen switched back to the anchor in the studio. Angela let out her breath and covered her face with her hands.
“What am I doing to him?” she murmured.
“Not you,” Melanie answered firmly. “From what Captain Kennery told me. I’d say it’s the jerk who’s orchestrating all this. That’s who we ought to blame. And I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Jesse Hadley’s going to come out on top.”
Angela spread her fingers to peer at the screen again. He’d certainly been strong, arrogant, powerful, just a touch condescending. A true Hadley, if only when it suited his purposes.
Her purposes, she corrected herself.
“Honey, that is one man who knows what he’s doing,” Melanie said consolingly. “And he’s on your side.”
Jesse did not know what he was doing. As he had told Angela earlier, he felt as though he was just spinning his wheels and it infuriated him. He got as far as Eighth and Vine before his cell phone went off. He grabbed it. It was his father.
“Where are you headed?”
“Home,” Jesse said shortly. He didn’t add that he then had every intention of changing and turning around to go back to the city center, to the Four Seasons.
“Come here first,” Ryan Hadley responded. “We need to confer on this.”
Jesse knew that tone and he was in no mood to deal with it. Then he reconsidered. Wendell would almost certainly be there.
“I’m on my way.”
He made a detour to his father’s law offices. Wendell was indeed present. Jesse took the offensive. He felt as though he had been on the offensive all damned day and he wanted the day over with.
“You didn’t remember her?” he immediately demanded of his uncle. He shrugged out of his suit coat, slung it over the back of a chair and took a cup of coffee from the tray his father’s secretary had left on his desk. “Even if she was forgettable, I can’t imagine that Charlie Price was.”
“Charles Price III was innocent,” Wendell said mildly.
Jesse snarled a single word to show what he thought of that.
“The case was in and out of my court in a single afternoon. It was a good many years ago. It was not something that locks into one’s memory.”
“Did his father pay you off?”
Silence. Jesse felt that was telling.
“Did Price pay you to drop it?” he demanded.
“That’s neither here nor there at this point,” his father answered.
Jesse rounded on him. He thought it was pretty damned pertinent under the circumstances and barely refrained from saying so. He realized, stunned, that what hit him just now was the fact that he didn’t particularly trust his own family. Not at this moment.
He rarely had, not emotionally. He rarely spoke to any of them about what was in his heart. And after a while, even he had begun ignoring his heart. It had never bothered him before. Now it left him chilled.
“What I can’t believe is that you didn’t tell me about this,” he said more quietly. He looked at Wendell again. “You must have been burning with the secret when Price announced his candidacy. It sure as hell gives me a way to discredit my opponent.”
“I haven’t been able to reach you all day,” Wendell replied calmly. “And I only learned of his candidacy this morning.”
“Yeah,” Jesse grated. “I spent a good bit of time looking for you.” His uncle had been avoiding him, Jesse realized.
“Mudslinging has never been the Hadley style anyway,” Ryan broke in evenly. “And since Charles was never convicted, this doesn’t give us honorable leverage.”
Honorable leverage. Dear God, was there ever such a thing? Jesse just didn’t know anymore.
“It’s not important,” Ryan repeated. “What’s pertinent—and untenable at this point in time—is your aligning yourself with this woman. For God’s sake, Jesse, why aren’t you bringing charges? You sounded only too eager to protect her!”
His father’s voice had escalated to the roar that had taken more than one witness apart over the years. Jesse stared back at him implacably.
“You’re throwing your reputation right down the tubes along with Angela Byerly’s,” Wendell joined in.
“Are you finished?” Jesse demanded.
Something about his voice alerted his father. With a raised brow, Ryan sat slowly back in his chair. “No,” he said more evenly. “You never mentioned that hair to me. Is it yours?”
Jesse watched him. “Probably.” He had the pleasure of seeing his father’s blood drain from his face. For the first time in Jesse’s memory, Ryan Hadley could barely speak.
“Dear God...did you...it’s not...what—”
Jesse felt more coldness settle over him. “I can’t believe you even have to ask me that.”
“Forewarned is forearmed. I—”
“I don’t know how it got there,” he said, and oh, the anger hurt now, his temples pounding. His stomach was awash in fire. “Needless to say, my office is actively working to find out.”
“Dear God,” Ryan said again, “Price will latch onto this and—” He broke off and got a visible grip on himself, ready to do damage control. “Price is no competition in this D.A. thing. He couldn’t beat his way out of a paper bag. But I got word this afternoon that he’s planning on leapfrogging from the D.A.’s seat into the mayor’s office. And this concerns me.”
Jesse felt his blood chill. Then there was a hot, sudden burst of adrenaline.
Now Price’s panic made more sense. He’d probably had these plans for a while, just as Angela had figured. Then she had come back to town, throwing everything into jeopardy. He wondered what Price might have planned for him, to have gotten him out of the way, if Angela hadn’t complicated the issue. He was sure there would have been something. But she came back, allowing Price to use one of them to destroy the other.
“I’ll be damned,” he said aloud.
“I’m worried that this is going to follow you clear through to the mayoral campaign, no matter whom you run against, and you can rest assured that P
rice will use it in this first election,” Ryan continued as though Jesse hadn’t spoken. “My sources tell me he’s in a very unstable position with the ACLU. Apparently, he botched two cases badly.”
Jesse stared at him. “Nobody gets fired from the ACLU.”
“Which is precisely why Price is trying to move on now before he gets dumped.” Ryan gave an unpleasant smile. “His parents would never be able to hold their heads up in this city again. That boy was always trouble. He’s never come up to their expectations. I imagine that Charles, Jr. and Sr., are putting pressure on him to stop screwing up and make something respectable of himself before it’s too late.”
For an odd, brief moment, Jesse almost felt sorry for the man.
“You’ve got to disengage yourself from this woman now,” Ryan insisted. “Press charges against her, align yourself on the side of justice, and distance yourself from this mess immediately. You’ve had no identifiable involvement yet. There are just rumors. By the time the mayoral campaign begins, people will barely remember that you might have had something to do with all this.”
“I’m not running.”
He hadn’t planned to say it. He was as stunned as anyone else in the room.
Was he doing this to protect Angela? No, he decided, not entirely. He didn’t want to be mayor. He wanted to be the D.A. And dropping out of the mayoral campaign wouldn’t stop Price. The man still needed to run for D.A. His situation was not unlike Jesse’s. Price couldn’t easily get to the mayor’s office without holding an elected post first. He needed to leapfrog. That was why he was changing his colors, both from Democrat to Republican, and from civil liberties attorney to district attorney. So declining to run for mayor wouldn’t take the heat off Angela, unless he declined to run again for the district attorney seat, too. And that he wasn’t prepared to do.
They’d have to beat this bastard some other way. They could do it, he thought, if they did it together.
“I beg your pardon?” Ryan asked. His voice cracked.
“I’m not sure I’m running for mayor,” he clarified. He shot a look at his uncle. And then he knew the real reason. “The day I start selling out and letting guilty parties walk is the day I quit this game, gentlemen. Dr. Byerly is as sane as you or I. On the other hand, I’ve got reason to believe that Charlie Price is a raving lunatic.”
“Even so, you can’t use her old accusation now that he’s announced his candidacy,” Wendell said pointedly. If Jesse had insulted him, it didn’t show. “It wouldn’t look good.”
Jesse felt disgust wash over him. He picked up his jacket and moved for the door.
“You’re making a treacherous mistake here, Jesse,” his father warned.
“What exactly is going on between you and Goldilocks?” Wendell asked harshly. “I admit she’s attractive, but—”
Jesse interrupted him as he opened the office door. “Her name is Angela Byerly,” he said quietly. “Use it.” He shut the door with a resounding crack.
It was a long moment before either Wendell or Ryan spoke. Ryan broke the silence first “We’ve got a problem.”
Wendell got to his feet, bypassed the coffee and went to the liquor cabinet to pour himself a shot of very good Scotch. “Well, you know what I always say. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ’em.”
“Is she unstable?” Ryan asked shortly.
Wendell drank. “I had reason enough to think so at the time.”
“What do you think now?” Ryan asked, because past indiscretions never bothered him.
“It doesn’t matter. Our rising star thinks she’s innocent and he’s refusing to charge her.”
They looked at each other. Ryan finally nodded. “And that’s the bottom line,” he said.
It was nearly seven-thirty before Jesse got home.
He paused in the parlor for his usual brandy. For weeks now, he had been moving under the impetus of emotion, and that was so stunningly unlike him that he couldn’t seem to get his bearings. Today he’d let gut instinct and impulses drive him. It was time to sit down and really look at it all.
When he had finished his brandy twenty minutes later, he did not like the conclusions he had come to.
He admitted, for the first time since Angela had dropped her bombshell on him this morning, that he didn’t want Charlie Price to be Lisette’s killer. It wasn’t that he particularly liked the man. He didn’t. He remembered running into him yesterday morning. He’d seemed impatient to see him, even irritated. Charlie Price always wanted something. And he always wanted it to come cheap.
That the man should turn out to be a rapist and a murderer wasn’t a personal disappointment, Jesse realized. It was a political nightmare.
With or without proof, there was no way he could allow this man to become the next mayor, or even the district attorney. Aside from what was happening now, he believed Angela. The man had raped her fifteen years ago. Even if Jesse did not want the post as badly as he did, it was critical that such a man not take over the job of prosecuting Philadelphia’s criminal element.
With or without proof, he believed, too, that the man had killed Lisette Chauncy.
In the quiet of his home, in the dim golden light of the single lamp in the parlor, Jesse felt sickened. The lamp threw an arc of light over the Cézanne and the fireplace wall, and Jesse stared at it. He wasn’t soothed this time. Too much fit too neatly into place.
Angela had said that Lisette had not put up any sort of a fight until the last possible moment. Probably because she had not believed until the last possible moment that she was actually going to die. And she hadn’t believed it because she had known and trusted her killer.
Yes, Charlie’s face was vaguely visible to the public. Not as a politician or lawyer—the ACLU rarely made it into the news—but as a member of one of Philadelphia’s oldest, and gilded, families. With this election, his voice would become more recognizable, as well. But what unconscionable risks had he really taken with that? He had made only a couple of personal appearances—all at the morgue. Where only Angela was likely to identify him, and if she had, if she had said so, he’d already fixed it so that people would think she was out of her mind. Brigid Cross thought she might, just might, have recognized him, but she couldn’t put her finger on where she knew him from.
Eric and his investigators had finally run Alvin Carper to ground again late this afternoon. The photograph from Langoustier, along with a typewritten paragraph, had allegedly been delivered to the Inquirer’s mail room yesterday morning. No one remembered exactly who had dropped it off. But they immediately called in an expert and the type matched that of the note left on Lisette.
The press conference this afternoon had been prompted by another typed missive left at the desk of KYW-TV. Same thing with the type. But no one had seen who left that, either. And, interestingly. no one had tipped those bloodhounds off to the society-page blurb, and by some miracle, none of them had seen it. Because those reporters would have looked into it more deeply and asked a lot more questions.
Price would not want that to get out. He’d used that blurb sparingly, with only Carper. Jesse suspected, his nerves tightening, that money had to have changed hands here, too. Eric had reported that Carper had seemed tense and skittish when he had talked to him. Jesse would not be surprised to learn that Price had greased his palm to keep that tidbit out. Any good reporter would have dug into it, to find out who Angela had charged. Any good reporter would have checked his facts against public record.
He did not believe Price would have paid the man off in person. Still, Carper would have put two and two together, would know by now that he was playing a high-stakes game with some powerful people.
No wonder he had seemed nervous.
Jesse swore, drained the last of his brandy and rose to his feet He went to his office, got his briefcase and sprang it open.
The first logs that Libby had given him hadn’t amounted to anything, but tonight he had brought home the sets from the end of April, going into ea
rly May. He sat down at his desk, and flipped through them. He found what he was looking for almost immediately, leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.
“Damn it.”
Eight weeks ago, Charlie Price had stopped by his office. He had been helping his wife out with a Cancer Society fund-raiser, had said he was going around to friends and business acquaintances, selling tickets. Jesse had bought two and never used them.
He tried to remember if he had left the man alone that day for any reason, but it was too long ago for him to be sure. It was a safe bet that he had. And that Libby, too, had left her desk at some point during the visit. Jesse imagined that a release form and possibly even some dictation tapes had left his office on that afternoon. Or maybe he had come back for the dictation tapes at a later time.
Either way, it threw a whole new slant on this. It became a matter of premeditation. A lot of planning and preparation had gone into this scheme. And that made the killing of Lisette Chauncy murder in the first degree.
Pennsylvania had reinstated the death penalty last year. It was his decision, as D.A., whether or not to ask for it. It was a decision he did not want to have to make.
Ambition, he thought. It had all been done in the name of ambition, family pressure and desperation to be someone. Unseating Jesse in the D.A. race would be a long shot. So he’d used Angela to muddy his name, discrediting her in the process, as well, killing two birds with one stone. Just in case she talked. Just in case she thought about opening old cans of worms once he announced his candidacy. Which he had done at the last minute. After a good bit of damage had already been done to her reputation.
It wouldn’t give a sane man motive, Jesse reflected. But Charlie Price wasn’t sane. He wanted something for nothing. He wanted to win the easy way, as he had been doing all his life.
There was one more thing Jesse needed to check, just to be sure. He called the medical examiner’s office. Brigid Cross was on call tonight. The night watchman gave him her number and Jesse phoned her at home.
“It’s Jesse Hadley,” he identified himself. “Dr. Cross, I need you to do something. Do you still have this morning’s newspaper?”