The end office in the strip mall bore the name of Stockard Insurance across the windows. Inside, a white-haired woman stood at the counter, straightening a sheaf of papers. Neither her name nor her face was familiar to Kylie, but twenty-two years was a long time, and she’d been just a child. She could have met Mrs. Stockard a hundred times and not remember.
“I’ll wait here,” she said as Jake opened his door.
He looked as if he might object, then thought better of it. “I’ll make it quick.”
“Quick” was relative. Mrs. Stockard was chatty, and she kept the papers, now rubber-banded inside a manila folder, under her control while she talked. When she finally handed them over, she shook hands with Jake, then walked to the door with him, where she patted his arm while saying goodbye. The woman was affectionate.
Or maybe there was just something about Jake that made women want to touch him. Kylie certainly did.
He wore jeans again today that fitted as if custom made for his slender hips and long legs, along with the same disreputable boots and a sunny yellow polo shirt. It was a color she loved but couldn’t wear, but with his dark hair, eyes and skin, it looked incredible.
When he climbed back into the truck, he brought with him a bit of cool fall air and the fresh, musky scent of his cologne. It was an enticing fragrance—strong, masculine, sexy. “What kind of cologne are you wearing?” she asked as he settled in.
He looked down at his shirt and sniffed. “Eau de fabric softener, soap and shampoo.”
Of course. The sexiest scent she’d smelled in ages, and it was all him.
He set the folder on the console, then backed out of the space. “Where would you like to have lunch?”
She rattled off a list of options, leaving the choice to him. He chose Mexican, and they headed back toward Tulsa in silence. They’d turned onto the Creek Turnpike before he finally spoke again. “You can look at it.”
She looked at the folder. She’d been sneaking glances at it for miles but hadn’t reached for it. Had been curious but leery, too. Now she reached for it but for a moment simply held it in her lap.
“Okay,” he said. “You don’t have to look at it.”
His tone was even, without inflection, but it sent guilt flushing into her face. Deliberately she removed the rubber band, opened the folder and read the opening arguments. She would have recognized her father’s—he had a distinctive voice. Tim Jenkins’s statement hardly qualified for the term.
Between reading, she gave directions—Exit on Elm; turn right on Main—until they’d reached a small mall on the bank of the Arkansas River. They chose patio seating, placed their orders, then went back to reading. She passed each page on to Jake as she finished and when she was done she sat back and waited.
He read the final page, tapped them on the tabletop to straighten them, then looked at her. “Nothing much of interest there.”
She shook her head in agreement. The trial had been short, the only witnesses presented by the prosecution. The only motive for the murders—Charley Baker’s affair with Jillian Franklin—had been brought up but not proven. The senator had presented no real evidence against Charley, and Tim Jenkins hadn’t made a single effort to defend his client.
“Tim Jenkins is lucky Mr. Baker didn’t get a new trial based on ineffective counsel,” she said as she idly dipped a chip into salsa. “How did he ever make this the steppingstone to the career he has now?”
“It was a small trial in a small town in middle America. He rewrote history—made it out to be such a solid case that a conviction was inevitable, that the only possible victory was keeping Charley from getting the death penalty. And people believed him. Nobody bothered to see whether his claims were true.” Jake’s grin was cynical. “People lie, Kylie. Lawyers, judges, the guilty and the so-called innocent. Truth and honesty aren’t valued commodities in our society.”
And authors lied, too, she thought as she gazed across the river. They claimed backgrounds they didn’t have and sold as fact stories they’d created out of thin air. But she had no reason to think Jake had lied, not yet.
While she knew her father had.
“Why did Judge Markham destroy the county’s copy of this?” she asked. “There’s nothing here.”
“Except proof that the case against Charley was weaker than they claim. That Jenkins did a lousy job of representing him.” Jake pulled a pair of dark glasses from his backpack and slid them on. “I don’t think the purpose of destroying the transcript was to hide something. They were just screwing with me—trying to dissuade me.”
Her hand was unsteady as she reached for the manuscript. She’d used her father’s word when talking with Jake the night before, and he’d picked up on it. He was observant.
She put the pages back inside the folder, replaced the rubber band and laid it on the empty chair to her right underneath her purse. “Have you always lived in New Mexico?”
If her change of subject caught him off guard, it didn’t show. “No. We moved around a lot. My mother and I settled there after she divorced my father.”
“What about him? Did you see him very often?”
He shook his head. “Not at all until I was grown. She liked to pretend he didn’t exist. When she remarried, she persuaded her husband to adopt me. She didn’t even want me to have my father’s name.”
“Are you close to him now?”
He took a long drink of his tea before his mouth settled into a grim line. “Yeah, pretty much. Though it was hard to make up for the eight years we didn’t have any contact.”
“And are you close to your mother now?”
“I love her, but she’s a little self-centered. Like Tim Jenkins—” he nodded toward the transcript “—she rewrites history. She denies even to herself that the first marriage even happened. She passes me off as my stepfather’s son…which is pretty stupid, considering that they’re both blond-haired and blue-eyed and I’m half Indian.”
When she’d looked up his photograph on the Internet, she’d thought he looked Latino or Native American. Everything about him was so dark…except his grin.
What was it like for him growing up with his mother steadfastly denying one half of his heritage? Knowing that she hated his father so much she pretended he’d never existed?
“Families,” she said with a soft sigh. “Can’t live with ’em, can’t exist without ’em.”
That grin appeared again. “And yet we’ll have one of our own someday.”
We’ll each have one of our own. That was what he should have said. But Kylie couldn’t stop a bit of yearning to hold in her arms a dark-eyed, dark-haired baby with his daddy’s charming grin.
No, no, eye and hair color didn’t matter. It was just the usual maternal longing a woman her age felt—for any baby, not one belonging to any particular man. She had a nurturing spirit and thought she would be a good mother someday. When the time was right. When the man was right.
“Okay,” she said, stubbornly pushing away that thought. “You’re handsome. You have a job you like that I assume supports you comfortably. You believe in monogamy and you want children. Why aren’t you married?”
“I’ve never been in love.” He laid his hand over hers where it rested on the tabletop, his fingers warm and comforting and creating a tingle that was intensified by his next word.
“Yet.”
Heat seeped through her, turning her blood sluggish, parching her lungs, making her want…things. Yet. Him.
Ridiculous. It was one little word…accompanied by one steamy look.
He was a stranger…whom she wanted to get intimate with. Whom she already felt intimate with.
He wasn’t destined to be a long-term part of her life…unless one of them made it so. Unless he stayed or she left. She couldn’t imagine him staying. Couldn’t imagine herself leaving. Couldn’t imagine a future with the man who was going to destroy her father.
And couldn’t stop wondering…wishing…
“That’s not en
tirely true,” he said as the waitress delivered their food. “There was Regina Lyn Broward. She moved in next door one summer and proved there was such a thing as love at first sight. I was twelve and she was fourteen—and she broke my heart when she moved away again.”
Kylie forced a smile. “So you’ve done the heartbreaking ever since.”
He lifted her hand for a casual kiss to the palm before releasing it in favor of a fork. “Yeah. But don’t worry, Kylie,” he said with a grin and a wink, “I won’t break your heart.”
Until then, she hadn’t been worried. Not at all.
Suddenly she was.
Chapter 5
They were just a few miles out of Riverview and had run dry on casual chatter when Jake recalled their conversation from the night before. “You said you live in Oklahoma City and Riverview.”
She nodded. “The senator keeps an apartment in the city for when the Senate is in session. He also prefers to do most of his entertaining there unless—” Her cheeks colored slightly before she went on. “Unless he’s looking to really impress people. Then he invites them to ‘the mansion.’ That’s what he calls it.”
Most people referred to it as the Colby mansion, Jake knew. Obviously the senator saw no need for the reminder that he’d married into the fortune and got no credit for it.
“Mom’s poured a good deal of my stepfather’s money into turning their house into a showplace, but we were pretty poor before him. We lived in some pretty shabby places—trailer houses, rent-by-the-week apartments where we shared the bathroom with strangers, rental houses that should have been condemned.” He grinned. “I’d be impressed with an invitation to the Colby mansion.”
“Showplace is a good word for it,” she said drily. “Along with ostentatious. Pretentious. It’s a beautiful place, but it’s certainly not what comes to mind when you think of ‘home, sweet home.’ But if you’d like a tour, I think that can be arranged.”
He would like a tour—partly out of curiosity. Every time they’d driven past the house when he was a kid, which was just about every time his mother had gone to town, Angela had wondered what it was like to live there. The house had reminded her of all she was lacking and had become the symbol of the unfairness of life.
The author in him would like the tour, too, to compare the luxury in which Jim Riordan had lived all these years to the stark desperation of Charley’s cell.
Most of all, though, the man in him wanted to see where Kylie lived. Where she’d played as a child, where she’d received her training to become the perfect politician’s daughter, where she’d slept, where she’d dreamed. Where she slept now.
“I’d like that,” he said. “I’m guessing you’re talking about before your father returns home from vacation.”
She glanced at him. “You’re guessing he wouldn’t let you set foot on his property? You’re right. However…the house belongs to me. The only say the senator has in who comes and goes is what I allow.”
Surprised, Jake stared at her. He didn’t routinely look into a subject’s assets unless it had some bearing on the story. So Phyllis Riordan, the perfect politician’s wife, had left the family mansion to her daughter instead of her husband. It made him wonder what else she’d denied Riordan in death. Made him wonder whether their marriage had been based on mutual love and respect, ambition, connections…or something else.
And it made him realize that Kylie Riordan was more than just a well-paid political aide. The Colby mansion had been built at the height of the first oil boom, with no expense spared. He couldn’t begin to estimate how much it was worth now, and it was hers.
Good thing his ego was strong enough to not let a thing like a fortune get in the way of what he wanted.
As they passed a sign announcing Riverview City Limits, Derek in his patrol car pulled out of a parking lot and into the lane behind them. “Do you think he sat there all morning waiting for us to return?”
Kylie turned to look, then smiled brightly and waved. In the rearview mirror, Jake watched Derek grimace before backing off a few car lengths. “Our tax dollars at work,” she said with a sniff.
“He’s dating Therese Franklin.”
“Really. I didn’t know. Though I can see the appeal. He’s got this macho need to be manly, and she’s so fragile and in need of protection.”
Jake recalled the way she’d apparently calmed Derek in a matter of seconds at the cemetery. “Not so much in need as you think. Now that she’s out from under her grandparents’ suffocation, she might do just fine.”
“They loved her dearly,” Kylie pointed out, then relented. “But they were a bit overprotective. They made it impossible for her life to be normal.”
Just as Kylie’s parents had loved her but had failed at giving her a normal upbringing.
They were stopped at the red light he’d been ticketed for running the night before when she sighed and looked his way. “What about the tour? Want to do it now?”
“Maybe later.” He swallowed over the sudden knot in his throat. “There are two other houses I need to see now.”
“The Franklin and Baker houses?”
It was hard to pull enough air into his lungs, to force a nod. He stared at the street ahead, seeing not the pavement and buildings lining either side but the dirt road, the Y, the two vastly different houses.
When she laid her hand gently on his arm, his muscles twitched. “Would you like some company?”
Relief rushed through him, but he kept it under control with a wry grin. “Yeah. Sure.”
The three miles passed in a blur, his body warming until he had no choice but to roll down the window, the rushing in his ears becoming too strong to attribute to the breeze coming in through that window. By the time he turned off the paved road his grip on the steering wheel was so tight that his fingers were cramping.
He followed the road until it split, then turned to the right. A rusted gate hung crookedly in the open position, leading into what had once been a manicured lawn. Now it was overgrown with weeds and clover, and clumps of cedars had grown up wherever they could take root.
The driveway was hardly visible. He navigated it as much from memory as by sight. At its end, he stopped. Shut off the engine. Simply sat.
He didn’t want to be there. Didn’t want to remember finding Jillian and Bert Franklin’s bloodied bodies. But twenty-two years had passed, and he hadn’t forgotten yet. He never would.
The house was two stories and had once been painted white, though little color remained but a few graying flecks. The dark green on the shutters was faded, too, to a dull, flat gray. Some hung drunkenly and a few lay on the ground. The gardens Jillian had hired a staff to care for had gone to seed, consisting now of roses grown wild and a few perennials that had managed to survive.
“It must have been a lovely house in its time.”
Startled, Jake glanced at Kylie. She had unfastened her seat belt and her hand was on the door handle, poised to open it and climb out. Clearly she expected him to get out, to go closer, to walk around and look. He didn’t want to, but he did it anyway.
“This is about where Charley Baker parked that morning,” he said as he walked around the truck to her side. “It was a Saturday morning. He and his son, C.J., were going into town. Both their mailbox and the Franklins’ were down at the bottom of the hill. There was a package for Therese that wouldn’t fit inside the box—her birthday was the next week—so the mailman had attached it to the door with a rubber band. It had just started to rain, and Charley tried to be a good neighbor by bringing the package up here so it wouldn’t be ruined.”
C.J. hadn’t cared about being a good neighbor. He’d been anxious to finish the errands they were running because Angela had promised him and his friend a trip to the movies that afternoon if he got all his chores done. He stared at the ground, where part of a flagstone path barely showed through the weeds, and tried again to remember that friend’s name. He drew a blank.
“The Franklins’ cars we
re there.” He gestured toward a somewhat clear area at the rear of the house where paving stones had marked off a parking court in front of the detached garage. “Charley gave the package to C.J. and told him to run it up to the door.”
The rain had been coming down hard, and he’d tried to shelter the box inside his jacket, but it had been too big. In the seconds it had taken him to reach the front porch the ink had smeared Therese’s name and address on his shirt.
He’d rung the doorbell, but no one had answered. While he’d waited, the rain had stopped as quickly as it had come. One second it had been pouring; the next there were just a few sprinkles glinting as the sun came out of the clouds. He had bent to lean the box against the door, where the Franklins couldn’t help but find it, and when he’d stood up again he’d seen it. A dark red smudge, sticky in the morning humidity, out of place on the white door.
“There was blood on the door,” he went on quietly, finally moving away from the truck and following the stone path to the front of the house. “C.J. touched it, and when he did the door swung open a few inches. He heard sounds inside—breathing. Sniffling. He pushed the door all the way open and he saw Therese.”
“In a bloody nightgown, sitting next to her mother’s body,” Kylie filled in for him.
The image had become symbolic of the murders, though no one had actually seen it but him. No one had discussed the killings without mentioning poor little Therese and that blood-soaked gown. Riordan had made reference to it repeatedly in both his opening and closing statements. It was the most enduring memory of the case.
Kylie hugged her arms across her middle and shivered in spite of the afternoon’s warmth. “That poor kid.”
“She doesn’t remember anything.”
“I meant C.J. He was just a boy. What a horrible thing to see. And if the sena—” She broke off and bit her lip before rephrasing it. “If Charley Baker is guilty, he knew what his son would find. He deliberately sent that little boy to discover two murdered bodies.”
More Than a Hero Page 8