Widows-in-Law

by Michele W. Miller

  She watched his wiry back, mesmerized. Normally, she would have averted her eyes, but nothing was normal here on the shoulder of the narrow road, her kidnapper creating a steaming puddle amidst gnarled roots of an oak. After jumping up and down a bit, he walked toward the car. He pulled his pistol from the back of his waistband and opened the driver’s door. Jessica felt a gust of cold wind. A sharp explosion rocked the air. Jordan let loose a sudden humph and flew sideways, falling.

  She gasped back a cry. Her heart sprinting, she threw herself awkwardly over the table between the seats, pulling herself over the driver’s seat toward the open door. Lying flat, the edges of the table digging into her belly, she peered out. Jordan was on the ground next to the car, facedown, blood blossoming around him in the dirt. She couldn’t see the exit wound but it had to be worse than the small hole in the back of his coat. So much blood! Panting, with the side of her cheek against the seat leather, she took Jordan’s wrist and felt for a pulse. None.

  The sound of a car engine approached. They were coming for her. She saw the gleam of the car keys half under Jordan’s waist. The puddle of blood was turning the dirt around him to a ruddy mud. She didn’t see his gun, probably under him. The sound of the approaching car filled the air now. She flung her hand out toward the ground and grabbed for the keys. Getting a handful of wet dirt with the keys, she retreated backward like a retracting turtle.

  The car’s engine snarled, on top of her. It was too late to drive away. She hid her head under her hands, scrunched low, trembling, gritting her teeth against a scream. Then she heard the car speed up and keep going. She peered up, cautiously, and saw the glint of its bumper as it drove away.

  She was alone with Jordan … no, she didn’t know that. The car could have been innocent, just passing. The gunman could still be waiting for her to lift her head up, could be in a tree or crouched low behind a rock. Dammit, she didn’t know. But she had to get out of there. If the killer were still there, she’d be dead if she waited.

  Without raising her head, she put the keys in the ignition and turned on the car. She listened, heard nothing but her own engine. Even the wind was still again. Heart jackhammering, staying low, she sat in the driver’s seat, feeling every hair on her scalp, picturing the top of her skull vulnerable to a bullet. She could barely see over the dashboard. There was enough space ahead for her to go forward, clear the body, and veer onto the road without having to back up. She took a breath, her throat burning with the effort.

  She pressed the accelerator, ready to dive across the seat if gunfire responded to the car’s movement. She held her breath as the car began to roll forward. No shots. The door and back wheels were past Jordan’s body now. Praying, she floored the accelerator in a billowing cloud of dust. The front wheels hit pavement with a swerve and screech. She righted herself in her seat, reached out to grab the door handle, and slammed the door shut.

  She drove away as fast as she could, shouting to the car: “Go, go, go!”

  When she reached a straightaway, she glanced in the rearview mirror. No one appeared behind her.

  At an intersection with a wider roadway, she turned off the lane. After she’d blended into traffic and ridden without incident for miles, her sobs came out, sobs that made the road blur. But she couldn’t allow herself that luxury—not yet. She wiped her tears away with the back of her hand and commanded herself to calm down.

  She found Route 9D, which would eventually bring her back across the Westchester County line. She eased onto it, grateful for its familiarity, and began to process the information she’d received before Jordan’s death.

  A little voice spoke to her, saying: Go to the police, Jessica. Let someone protect you.

  She considered the voice, but deep inside, Jessica knew she had already decided. At her deepest, instinctive, survival level, she knew that none of the old rules applied to her life anymore. Things like this didn’t happen to people like her—their husbands didn’t die, their husbands didn’t have secret criminal lives, their husband’s friends didn’t kidnap people and get murdered right in front of them. But it had all happened, and there was no going back.

  She could either fight for herself with every ounce of her strength, or she could die playing the damsel in distress the way she’d always done. If she chose the old wilting-girl card and called the cops, she would end up dead or as good as dead. She wiped away a tear. If she was going to take that path, she might as well have starved herself to death a long time ago.

  So she drove, fighting off waves of panic that knocked her breath away each time she’d calmed herself down. The nauseating, thick smell of blood filled the car. She tried to keep her shoulder from touching the blood-soaked door as she drove and rolled down all but the driver’s side window. She didn’t want the blood that had gotten on the window getting into the door’s inner workings.

  She forced herself to breathe and think about what she had to do. The first thing was to bring the car home and hose down the door and the window. There was nothing to connect her to the murder and no reason anyone would check her car for DNA. So the car only needed to look clean. Getting rid of evidence had to be a crime, but she didn’t care right now. She had to clean up the car and make her next move before Emily came home from school.

  CHAPTER 22

  At one o’clock, Jessica appeared in Lauren’s office doorway. Lauren turned from the computer screen and jumped to her feet. “Emily. Where’s Emily?”

  “Oh, no,” Jessica rushed toward Lauren, taking her arm. “Nothing’s wrong with Emily.”

  Lauren gasped in lost air, “What are you doing here? What happened to you?”

  Jessica moved closer to Lauren. Jessica’s skin was corpse-white and her eyes puffy and faded without makeup. Her damp hair lay flat against her scalp. Lauren looked up into the frightened eyes of a woman she almost didn’t recognize, so frightened yet so focused.

  Jessica spoke softly, each word electric, “I’m in trouble, Lauren. Emily and you are, too. It’s those real estate deals.” Jessica turned back to the door, closed it, and told Lauren what Jordan had said.

  Lauren’s body vibrated with the shock of it. “You believe him?”

  “What else should I believe? I obviously didn’t know my husband.”

  Lauren leaned back in her seat, trying to calm herself. “I didn’t know him either. He ran with a fast crowd in college, but him owing money to criminals, I can’t even fathom it.”

  “Even if Jordan Connors getting killed doesn’t prove he was telling the whole truth, there is one undeniable fact: Brian was into something with those real estate deals.”

  “And men were searching for something at the building,” Lauren thought aloud. “If we believe the story that the money had to do with illegal gambling payments, Jordan Connors could have used straw companies as buyers and sellers to disguise somebody else’s money. That would be a way to collect and make payouts. But so much money?” Lauren thought it through. Too many pieces were missing.

  “He said a lot of people would kill for that kind of money.”

  “Well, it will be up to the cops to figure it all out now.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What do you mean, what am I talking about? What happened with the cops?” The thought dawned on Lauren: “Why aren’t you still at the police station?”

  Jessica leaned forward. “I didn’t call the cops.”

  “You’re kidding …”

  “Think about it. It’s true what Connors said about asset forfeiture, right?”

  Lauren exhaled harshly, picturing the domino effect of the police finding out about Brian’s activities. They could go after everything he owned. “Whoa, wait. I’m not sacrificing my daughter’s safety for a bank account. That’s out.”

  “Emily has a right to Brian’s money. And there’s your co-op, too, that Brian paid for, remember? We could all land
in a homeless shelter.” Jessica put her hand up to stop Lauren from talking this time. “But worse than that, we don’t have enough to offer the cops. If I went to them and fingered Arena, they would make me set these Arena people up—wire me, get me in deeper, practically paint a target on my back—before they’d put me in the Witness Protection Program. If we’re not killed helping the cops, Emily would have to be hidden away too. If we go to the police, the best-case scenario is that we all end up working in a clothing store in a Midwestern strip mall or something. We’ll live a miserable, impoverished existence, always afraid of the Arenas finding us. And that’s the best-case scenario.

  “Why should we give up everything, our identities, our families, our homes? I’m innocent, we all are, and if those gangsters hadn’t known that, they probably would have killed me when they had the chance. They were tired of Jordan. They only used him to find me and get a message across.”

  “It certainly worked.”

  Jessica closed her eyes angrily before returning to look at Lauren. “That means I have time. We can complete what Brian started. No one will hurt us if I stay calm and cooperate. Jordan said they have one cardinal rule—if you lose their money, you pay them back. Well, I didn’t lose their money. I’m not the one who screwed up or violated their trust. So I have time at least. If I can’t find their money, then we can consider calling the police. I’m doing it for you as much as anything, Lauren.”

  “I don’t want you to do anything for me!” Lauren said. “You don’t have any way to get them their money, and we have no choice but to trust the cops.”

  “There’s another thing, Lauren. Jordan Connors talked about you.”

  “Me?”

  “He mentioned a name that sounded like something out of a 1950s Hunger Games. Someone named Bobby Karate.”

  “What?!” Lauren popped up from her chair.

  Jessica’s eyes widened, taking in Lauren’s reaction. “He said you’d know.”

  Lauren half-whispered, her throat closed with panic. “What?”

  “He said Bobby Karate put a contract out on you. He said this guy, Arena, will buy it back if you cooperate, but otherwise they’ll kill you and collect on the contract.”

  Hyperventilating, Lauren paced in the small space.

  “I don’t understand, Lauren. You need to tell me.”

  It took Lauren a minute before she could speak. “I had a boyfriend. He was a karate champion as a kid, that’s how he got the nickname. He took me off the street, moved me in with him. I was a kid, Emily’s age. He was a mobster, a made man. Do you know what that is?”

  “Yes.”

  “I ran when I realized what he was into. I’d thought he was just dealing drugs.” Lauren put up her hand when she saw Jessica’s reaction to the idea that drug dealing was just anything. Lauren spoke quietly, adrenaline shushing her words. “He was a hit man. A few years ago, a true-crime book came out about him.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “He was way worse than I’d ever known. When I saw a news report about the book, I stopped in Barnes and Noble to look. I couldn’t even read it all—it was so horrifying. It said he wasn’t just a Mafia hit man. He was a psychopathic killer. He robbed women drug dealers and killed them. He did terrible things to them. I almost dropped the book when I read that. I shoved it back into the shelf. I mean, I’m a mom, a lawyer, I’m afraid of terrorism on the subway, just like the next person. That kind of life is not normal for me anymore and, even then, I never had any idea. Not that I wasn’t scared of him when we lived together but I never knew the danger I was in. After I read the book, I had flashbacks about it for a year.

  “I thought I was safe when they gave him a life sentence.” Lauren paced a few steps and turned back to Jessica. “I was eighteen by then. I was relieved I’d never see him again. I can barely believe he was angry enough to put a contract out on me. And why would it still be out there after twenty years?”

  Jessica sat in Constance’s desk chair and stared at Lauren. “Brian told me you did drugs when you were a kid, that you were some kind of wild child from a wild family but …”

  Lauren felt as if she were a teenager again, that the whole world was on the verge of falling down on her. “I didn’t talk about a lot of it, even with Brian. I didn’t want to bring all of that with me.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Did you tell Brian everything about every guy you dated?”

  Jessica gave Lauren a bemused look. “No … but I never went out with a killer.”

  Lauren waved it away, halfway conceding the point.

  “Anyway, I’m in too deep—there’s no going back,” Jessica said. “If I call the cops and don’t let them wire me up and put me in the line of fire, I’ll go to jail for destroying evidence of murder, and Arena will still want to kill me. Who’s going to protect me from mobsters in jail? And if the cops find out there’s a Mob contract out on you, they’ll make you work to get their protection too, if they even thought you were worth protecting. I need to find the money. I almost can’t believe you’d want to trust the cops with your … background.”

  Lauren leaned her elbows against her desk and put her face in her palms. For Jessica’s sake, she didn’t say what she was thinking now—that Brian stashing the money would not have precluded a thief from torturing him for information about its location before Brian died. The money could be long gone. “What is it you propose?”

  “I want to pick up Emily from school, I already have some of her clothes packed. You can keep her for a few days. She’ll never object to missing school. You don’t have an alarm system on your apartment, do you?”

  “Never needed one.”

  “If they didn’t know where I lived, my place would probably be safer. I have a sensor alarm for the lawn and the house is fully wired. I’m going to need it. After I bring Emily to your apartment, I’ll go back home to wait in case they try to contact me. While I’m there, maybe I can find information, emails, receipts that would provide clues to where the money might be. And I can go back to his office if that doesn’t work. Maybe he has the information about it in one of his files. Now that I know what I’m looking for, it could be hidden in plain sight. Bottom line, I’m going to find out where the money is and give it back to those people.”

  “Wait, let’s take this one thing at a time. First, what would you tell Emily if she came back home to me?”

  “I’ll tell her the plumbing is screwed up and that we need to get out while they fix it. I’ll tell her I’m going to stay at a friend’s for a couple of days, and she’ll go to your house. She’ll be so busy celebrating the time off from school, she won’t ask many questions.”

  “Emily will never buy that story.” Lauren massaged her temples, a headache arriving. “But we’ll get back to that. Let’s move on to your next piece of insanity.”

  Jessica glared at her with an expression of furious exasperation that momentarily took Lauren aback.

  “This thing about breaking into Brian’s office,” Lauren continued.

  Jessica’s chest rose, she took a deep breath, visibly calming herself down. “It’s not breaking in. I have a passkey. I sign in and go inside like before. What’s the big deal?”

  “It is a big deal. Steve could have killed Brian. Who was in a better position to know what Brian was doing, and who’s behaving really strangely? It’s dangerous, it’s illegal, and I doubt that Steve thinks of you as just the wife of a partner and friend, given the way he’s been acting. What we need to do is go pick up my kid from school and get her out of there. That’s the best idea you’ve had.” Lauren grabbed Jessica’s arm, feeling as if she needed to physically convey the point to Jessica: “You have no idea what you’re dealing with here.”

  Jessica pulled her arm away. “Maybe I’m not as experienced with danger and dealing with killers, Lauren, but have you ever witnessed someone gettin
g his head blown off? I’ve had my hazing, and I’m going to take care of this. I’m going to make this thing go away.”

  The phone rang. They both flinched at the sudden noise. Lauren lifted the receiver with trepidation. “Hello?”

  She heard the voice of Gary, the bridge officer who managed Judge Quiñones’ courtroom. “Lauren, we’ve got the Winston mom’s attorney here with a 1028 motion for the return of her kids.”

  “What? Her kids aren’t in foster care.”

  “Child Protective Services grabbed them again yesterday. A daycare teacher spotted a burn on the four-year-old. The kids have been talking up a storm. I guess they’ve had all they can take.”

  “No one called me.”

  “You’ve got to draft a petition for placement and get down here before court closes.”

  Jessica signaled, opening and closing her hand in the talk sign. Lauren held up her palm and looked away, trying to listen to Gary and figure out her next move at the same time.

  “The judge is going crazy, wants you in here pronto,” he said.

  “Gary, I’ve got a family emergency. Either I’ll be there, or someone will cover for me.” Lauren hung up and swiveled toward Jessica, her brain spinning with the madness of having to worry about her job and the safety of children she didn’t know when her own kid was in danger.

  “Wait right here.” She squeezed past Jessica. “I have to get someone to cover this case.”

  Jessica grabbed Lauren’s arm. “Please, Lauren, you can count on me. I’ll get Emily and bring her to your apartment.”

  “No.” Lauren’s face felt feverish. She held up her palm. “She’s my kid; you don’t understand. Someone will cover for me.”

  Lauren walked into the hallway, looking in each attorney office. She passed a half-dozen offices, all empty. She kept walking, faster, tears imminent. The people who worked with her were always willing to look out for each other. If Lauren told any of them that Emily was in trouble, they would gladly help if they could. But she checked one office after the next—all empty, not even a supervisor. Everyone had gone back to court for the afternoon session.