by Karen Rose
The receptionist’s smile turned sly. ‘You know that scene in When Harry Met Sally where Meg Ryan fakes an orgasm? I have a feeling I just watched the real thing.’
Gwyn laughed, slightly embarrassed, then even more so when she remembered that Thorne, Alec and Ford were listening to every word of her conversation. ‘Guilty as charged,’ she managed, taking a sip of the champagne to cover her discomfiture. ‘Oh my. This is really good.’
‘Only the best for our clients. Come with me. Angie is ready for you.’
Gwyn was directed to a stylist’s chair behind the wall that provided the clients with privacy from those waiting in reception or anyone walking past the big windows looking out onto the street.
Despite the salon’s elegance, the stylists’ stations looked much like those in more financially accessible places. There was a chair in front of a mirror surrounded by lights. Tucked into one edge of the mirror was Angie’s cosmetologist license, and below that, several photographs. Some of them were of Angie – the woman hadn’t really changed that much from the photo she’d found – but all of them featuring the same young man. Angie was a slender Hispanic woman, her high cheekbones and flawless complexion making her pretty enough to have been a model in her youth. Not that she was old. She’d been in Thorne’s graduating class, so she couldn’t be much older than he was.
The young man, though . . . Gwyn found herself leaning forward to study his face. He was a teenager, a recent high school graduate if the little number dangling from the tassel on his cap was anything to go by. He was startlingly . . . familiar. Blond hair, bright blue eyes and a dimpled smile that managed to be warm and slightly self-deprecating all at once, as if he was uneasy being the center of the photographer’s attention.
‘Hello.’
Gwyn jerked her eyes up to the mirror, where Angie herself stood behind the chair, smiling at her. Gwyn smiled back. ‘Hi. Thank you for fitting me in.’
Angie’s smile grew, and a dimple popped in her cheek. Exactly in the same position as that of the boy in the picture. ‘It was my pleasure, Miss Kelly. I like to have a little hand in happily-ever-afters. Weddings are my specialty.’
‘I’m just Amber.’ Gwyn settled into the chair and fingered the ends of her hair. ‘I want to look princessy, but my guy likes it long, so he made me promise that you wouldn’t cut it.’
‘Then we shall do both,’ Angie said, and draped a cape over her, drawing it around her shoulders to snap it at the back of her neck. ‘Where are you going for your big night?’
My bed was just fine for our big night, Gwyn thought, but she smiled brightly into the mirror. ‘Paris. I’ve never been and I’m so excited!’
Angie was studying her hair, testing the springiness of her curls and the weight of it. ‘When do you leave?’
‘We have an eleven p.m. flight out of Reagan National.’ Gwyn had made sure that the flight existed, just to be on the safe side. ‘We’ll get there in time for a late lunch or an early supper and we’ve made arrangements with a little chapel for an evening service.’
‘So I need to style it so that it lasts at least until then,’ Angie said seriously. ‘Flights are hard on hair. I’ll have to use some pretty strong hairspray. Is that okay?’
Gwyn nodded dreamily. ‘That’ll be fine.’
After a trip to the shampoo bowl, Gwyn was back in Angie’s chair, staring again at the photos of the young man. ‘I can’t help but think that I’ve seen that boy somewhere,’ she said conversationally.
Angie spared a glance at the photos, her expression softening. ‘No,’ she said almost sadly. ‘My nephew lives in Iowa. I don’t get to see him all that often.’
Iowa. Gwyn had to take a breath so that she didn’t reflexively stiffen in the chair. Detective Prew had said Angie had gone out west to ‘some state with corn’ during Thorne’s trial. If her nephew lived out there, she’d probably stayed with family.
‘You look very proud of him,’ she remarked. ‘I can see that you’re related. You have a dimple in the same place.’
Angie smiled again, revealing said dimple. ‘We do.’ She cast another longing glance at the photograph, a glance that was decidedly . . . maternal. ‘Liam is a good boy. I’m proud of him.’
Gwyn knew that look. She’d seen it in her own mirror every time she thought of her ‘nephew’, usually on his birthday, but it was also the look she’d learned to bury whenever anyone said the word ‘son’. Because Aidan wasn’t Gwyn’s nephew any more than Liam was Angie’s.
‘I can see that,’ she said quietly. You should tell Thorne.
About what? Angie’s son or mine?
Both. You know it’s the right thing to do.
And she did know that. She also knew it would be a hard thing to say. My son. She’d never spoken the words aloud to anyone, not even to Lucy, not since that awful day she’d signed the papers so that her beautiful boy could have the life he deserved with parents who could provide for him.
Because she wouldn’t have been able to. Not then. She remembered the scared, unemployed, uneducated young woman who’d foolishly believed the man she’d thought she’d spend the rest of her life with when he’d told her he loved her. Water under the bridge, Gwyn. After all these years, the only thing she had left was self-recriminations, and they never helped.
She wondered what Angie’s circumstances had been and mentally did the math. If Liam had recently graduated high school, he’d be about seventeen or eighteen.
About the same age as Aidan, who’d turned eighteen ten months before. That had been the kicker for Gwyn. The nudge she’d needed to get on with her life. To get counseling so that she could dig her way out of the darkness in which she’d been floundering since Evan. Because Aidan’s parents had promised they’d tell him he was adopted when he turned eighteen, or if he asked, whichever came first.
Hopefully he’d want to meet Gwyn someday, and she wanted to have her life together when and if that day ever came.
Her eyes were drawn to a photo of Angie and Liam together, smiling. ‘How old is he? Your nephew?’
Another wistful smile. ‘Eighteen just last month.’ But she brightened then. ‘He’s coming to Baltimore for college.’ Her whole demeanor changed. ‘He was accepted to Johns Hopkins, into their biomedical engineering department.’
‘Whoa,’ Gwyn said, suitably impressed. ‘He’s a genius.’
‘He certainly is,’ she said proudly.
‘And now you’ll be able to visit with him more often than before.’
‘I will.’ Angie did something magical with her hands, and Gwyn’s hair was suddenly up, delicate curls framing her face and making her look years younger.
‘Oh!’ she exclaimed softly, and Angie beamed.
‘I thought you’d like it this way.’ She tugged and poked pins into the do, murmuring apologies when Gwyn winced. ‘Gotta make sure it stays.’ She winked in the mirror. ‘For Paris.’ She took a step back, surveying her work. ‘I’m going to find the heavy-duty hairspray,’ she said. ‘Just relax for a minute or two.’
When she was gone, Gwyn resumed her study of the photos. Young Liam had turned eighteen a month ago. Right about the time that four hundred thousand dollars had been deposited in Angie’s account. The same month that years earlier the Lindens had given her money for her business.
And then Gwyn knew why the boy’s face was so damn familiar. Glancing around for Angie, she pulled out her phone and studied the photo she’d snapped late Sunday evening while sitting at Phil and Jamie’s kitchen table. It was the photo of the Linden family that Jamie had included in his case file. She enlarged it until Richard Linden’s face filled her screen, then glanced up at the mirror, where an almost identical face stared back. The only difference was Liam’s smile, which he’d clearly inherited from his mother.
‘Angie is Liam’s mother,’ she whispered, hoping Thorne could hear her. ‘An
d Liam is Richard’s son,’ she added, swiping the photo closed just as Angie came back shaking a can of hairspray.
‘Let’s get you fixed for Paris,’ she said.
Gwyn forced herself to smile back. ‘Merci.’
Bethesda, Maryland,
Tuesday 14 June, 6.10 P.M.
Thorne sat back in his seat, stunned. ‘Did she just say what I thought she said?’ he asked Alec and Ford. The three of them had been gathered around Alec’s phone, which he’d had on speaker while recording everything that was said inside the salon.
Thorne had needed to pull himself from his own thoughts when Gwyn had spoken the words so quietly. Liam is Richard’s son.
He’d been stuck back on Guilty as charged, unable to hide his reaction. Not the burning of his cheeks and certainly not the hardening of his cock. But he’d borne it, because he was not adjusting himself in front of the other two.
Luckily, the conversation had shifted to Gwyn’s plans for Paris and what she wanted done with her hair. Still, his pants had remained uncomfortably tight.
‘She said Liam is Richard’s son,’ Ford said slowly. ‘And Angie is Liam’s mother? So . . . Richard Linden and Angie?’
‘If so, then Richard raped her,’ Thorne said harshly, remembering the look of sheer terror on Angie Ospina’s face all those years ago. ‘He treated her like she was his plaything. The timing is right, if the kid just turned eighteen. So the Lindens must have been paying her for more than her silence in refusing to testify on my behalf. They’ve been paying for their grandchild.’
‘How does Gwyn know this?’ Alec asked skeptically. ‘It seems like a huge leap.’
It did, Thorne had to admit, even though the notion made so much sense. He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. We’ll ask her.’
Ford gave a low whistle. ‘Here she comes. Gotta say, Angie is good at her job.’
Thorne could only stare as Gwyn left the salon, a cheerful smile on her face that he knew was completely forced. But Ford was absolutely right. She was gorgeous. She had been before she’d gone into the salon, though.
He opened the side door and helped her climb in. As soon as the door slid closed, the smile evaporated from her face. ‘Did you hear what I said?’
‘That Richard is Liam’s father?’ Ford asked. ‘We heard it.’
‘But we’re not sure where it came from,’ Alec added honestly.
‘What happened that we couldn’t see?’ Thorne asked her gently, because she was trembling. ‘How did you know?’
She straightened her spine. ‘It was how she looked when she talked about the boy. She said he was her nephew. But there is no way that’s the truth.’
‘You sound certain,’ Alec said cautiously, and she shot him a look so . . . hard that Thorne blinked. It was not a look he’d ever seen on her face before. Ever.
‘I am,’ she snapped, then closed her eyes on a sigh. ‘Call it intuition, but I just knew.’
‘Okay,’ Alec said slowly, but his doubt was still clear.
Opening her eyes, Gwyn pulled her phone from her purse. ‘Look at this.’ She showed them the selfie she’d taken in front of Angie’s mirror, the chair spun so that both her face and the back of her hair were visible. She enlarged the selfie, readjusting the placement so that a vertical row of photos stuck in the mirror’s edge was visible. ‘Look at the young man in these photos.’
‘Oh my God.’ Thorne immediately saw the resemblance and was taken back nineteen years. ‘Richard,’ he murmured. ‘Liam could be his twin.’ He shot Gwyn a look of pure admiration. ‘You are very good.’
Her cheeks pinked up at his praise, but the hard look in her eyes remained. ‘I kept thinking I’d seen him before, and then she said he lived in Iowa.’
Ford frowned. ‘Why is that important?’
Thorne understood. ‘Because that’s where they grow corn.’ He told Ford and Alec what Detective Prew had said about Angie going out to visit relatives in Iowa around the time of his trial, and how she’d stayed away for two years. ‘There was about six months between my arrest and my trial. If Angie was raped around the time of my hallway brawl with Richard and his friends, she’d have been showing by then. If she’d already been assaulted – and made pregnant – I can see her being afraid of the Lindens’ threats.’
‘Huh. Wow.’ Alec had pulled up his own photo of Richard from the Internet. ‘There is an incredible resemblance.’
Ford leaned over to see the photo. ‘It makes a lot of sense. Really good catch, Gwyn, but what does all this mean with respect to what’s happening now?’
‘I don’t know.’ She frowned slightly. ‘Maybe nothing. Except that the Lindens knew that Angie had had Richard’s baby. Maybe they didn’t know right away, but they did as of the time of the first loan, when she started the salon.’
‘They paid her for her silence,’ Ford said with a frown. ‘I suppose it could have been some under-the-table child support, but I’m wondering if it’s more likely that they bribed her or she extorted them.’
Gwyn shrugged. ‘Regardless of why they paid her, they did, and without publicly acknowledging that the boy is their grandson. That’s the important part, because if word got out that Angie was pregnant and Richard was the father and that he’d raped her, it would have given the police another possible suspect – Angie’s father, perhaps, or someone else in her family.’
‘But the Lindens were determined that I be found guilty,’ Thorne said slowly, mentally rearranging the puzzle pieces that had been in such disarray in his mind. ‘Enough that Richard’s father lied in court about altercations I’d had with Richard. Why?’
‘Good question,’ Gwyn murmured. ‘Maybe Linden Senior was trying to divert attention away from someone else. Rich people hate scandals.’
‘True,’ Ford agreed. ‘That would make sense if they already knew about Angie’s pregnancy.’
‘Definitely something to consider,’ Gwyn said. ‘I also wonder how many other people had a reason to kill Richard. Could Angie herself have done it, Thorne?’
Thorne shook his head. ‘Whoever did it had to have been able to physically overwhelm him, then cut him open and bash his face in. Angie isn’t tiny, but I can’t see her being physically able to do all that. Besides, the Lindens had as much contempt for her as they did for me. She was a scholarship kid too, and the Lindens never let us forget that they paid our way.’
‘Sound like real assholes,’ Ford muttered.
Thorne nodded. ‘They were. If they suspected Angie was involved, they might have turned on her then too.’
Gwyn bit at her lip. ‘Linden Senior was willing to perjure himself on the stand. That’s desperation. He really wanted you to take the fall. So I think you’re right. If he’d had anything credible on Angie at the time, he would have used it rather than risk the legal consequences of making up stuff about you. But why did he want you blamed for this crime so badly? It’s almost as if he was protecting someone.’
‘So they not only knew Thorne didn’t do it,’ Alec said, ‘but they had an idea of who did?’
‘Or why they did.’ Thorne rubbed his temples, feeling a headache coming on. ‘I keep coming back to the key ring. That is a weird thing to shove into a carved-up body. Weirder to shove into Patricia’s body all these years later. It means something. I guess the question remains: who knew about the key ring?’
‘You mean, who knew about the key ring who’s also still alive,’ Gwyn clarified. ‘The person who put it there knew, either because he was Richard’s killer,’ she said, ticking off on her fingers, ‘or because he – or she – was with Richard’s killer if he didn’t act alone. The EMTs knew, but one of them is too scared to talk and the other is MIA. The ER doctor knew, but he’s dead. The ME claimed not to have seen it, and Lucy has vouched for his integrity. The ME tech knew and he’s dead, his wife living a good life in Chevy Chase.’
Alec scowled. ‘I’d forgotten about her. I meant to run some background and financial checks but I lost the thread. I’ll get on that ASAP.’
Thorne was studying Gwyn. ‘What do you mean, “with Richard’s killer”?’
She shrugged. ‘You said his injuries were extensive. In the trial transcripts, the prosecutor used your size to insinuate you could have done it.’
‘You read the transcripts?’
She nodded. ‘That night at Jamie and Phil’s. I couldn’t sleep, and Jamie left them out on the table. Anyway, the prosecutor put forth that someone huge had to have committed the crime. Jamie countered that it didn’t have to be a single someone. It could have been two people or even more, that Richard was a punk and he treated enough people badly that there could have been others with motive. He even mentioned Angie as one of those people, because Richard had groped her in the hallway, but the prosecutor objected on the grounds that Angie had said that the groping had never happened. It could even have been one or more of Richard’s friends. Even if they weren’t there with him, they might have known why someone shoved a key ring in his gut.’
Thorne nodded again, because he’d been thinking the same thing. ‘Let’s start at the top. Darian Hinman was Richard’s best friend and he doesn’t live too far away.’
‘We’ve been instructed by Clay to remain with you, rendering assistance where necessary,’ Alec told them. ‘Clay wants this whole mess settled so he doesn’t have to worry about Stevie getting shot at again. We’ll take you wherever you want to go. That way the Fed tailing you only has to chase one vehicle.’
‘I’m sure he’d be grateful,’ Thorne said dryly. ‘But we’ll take Gwyn’s car.’ Because there was no way he was making these kids a target. ‘Thanks, guys. I do appreciate your help. I just hate that I’m putting you in harm’s way.’
Ford shrugged and started the van. ‘Sooner we clear this up, the better for all of us.’
‘And don’t worry about trying to lose us,’ Alec added with a smirk. ‘I have the address from Clay. He got it from Frederick, who got it from Jamie.’