Sasha forgot about her coffee. “So, we think our killer saw Tawny at the laundromat, realized Nick wouldn’t be able to resist her, and set him up. Then used the pictures to create marital discord for the Costopolouses and a motive for murder?”
Naya looked at her for a long time.
“What?” Sasha asked.
“The killer. Or someone at Prescott. They stink to high heaven in this.”
Sasha looked back at her. “Or someone at Prescott is the killer.”
“Or that,” Naya agreed.
“We need to talk to Martine Landry,” Sasha said.
Talking to Martine proved to be easier said than done.
It had started out well enough. Although Martine had left Prescott & Talbott before Sasha had started, she knew Sasha’s name. On the basis of their shared lineage, Martine had been inclined to talk to Sasha, even though she was calling her at home at close to eleven p.m. on a Saturday.
Once Sasha got past the condolences on Ellen and Clarissa’s deaths and mentioned that she was representing their husbands, Martine’s goodwill had evaporated.
Martine’s last words, before she slammed the phone down in Sasha’s ear had been both cutting and strangely familiar.
“I hope you can sleep at night, Sasha, doing what you do. I know as well as anyone that everyone’s entitled to a defense, but that doesn’t mean you have to provide it. And, I’m certainly not going to help you. Do what you have to do, and may God have mercy on your soul,” Martine had hissed.
Afterward, Sasha had rubbed her forehead and waited for it to come to her. Martine’s rant had echoed the letter Malcolm Vickers had sent to her and her dead friends fifteen years previously.
Sasha told Naya to go home and get some sleep. Then she fired up her laptop and started the outline for her argument at the preliminary hearing.
The good thing about being crushed with work, she thought, was that when she hit a brick wall on one front, there were plenty of other equally pressing tasks waiting for her.
CHAPTER 48
SUNDAY
Cinco turned away, but it was too late. Marco had already seen him.
It irritated him to no end that Marco, who was neither Episcopalian nor a resident of Fox Chapel, crossed two bridges every Sunday morning to worship at St. Peter’s. Couldn’t he have one day a week when he didn’t have to deal with anyone from the firm?
But every time Cinco complained to Greta, looking for just a smidgeon of understanding from his spouse, she shushed him. Marco’s wife, Lidia, was a Daughter of the American Revolution and a dyed-in-the-wool WASP. Her pedigree trumped her Italian-American husband’s Catholicism as far as Cinco’s wife was concerned.
“Cinco,” Marco bellowed now, hurrying across the narthex to give him a hearty handshake, which Cinco returned without enthusiasm. “Greta,” Marco said, “you look lovely. Wasn’t Pastor Mark’s sermon particularly inspiring and thought-provoking today?”
“It was,” she agreed, offering her cheek for a kiss.
Cinco wondered if either of them had listened to it. He knew he hadn’t. He’d passed the time the way he did every week, marveling at the craftsmanship in the elaborate stained glass windows that gleamed like jewels when the sunlight hit them, imagining the painstaking care that the artists had used to highlight the gold-leaf halo around Christ’s head in the painting over the altar, and admiring the detail work apparent in the marble baptismal font. If there was a God, Cinco often thought, his glory and majesty were in the careful acts that had created such beauty.
Lidia extracted herself from her conversation and moved their way, the picture of old money in her pale pink suit and skirt and perfect blond helmet of hair. After their squealed greetings, Lidia and Greta wandered away, babbling about the upcoming ladies’ auxiliary luncheon.
Marco pounced immediately.
“What’s the status?” he asked in a low voice.
Cinco ignored the flare of disgust that filled him. It was Sunday morning, for chrissakes.
“Sam Davis had found Vickers’s son. But other than that, nothing,” he said.
“That’s something,” Marco said. “What are you going to do about it?”
“Nothing right now,” Cinco answered. He supposed it was too much to hope that Marco would drop the subject.
He was right. Marco grabbed his arm just below his elbow and squeezed it hard.
“What do you mean, nothing? This implicates your old man as much as anyone else, Cinco. Go see the kid and offer him money. Jesus.”
Cinco wrested his arm away. “Get your hands off me. And watch your language. Have you forgotten where you are?”
Marco dropped his hand, chastened, for the moment. Cinco continued, “First of all, I’m not going to make an offer. How many settlements have you negotiated? If the kid’s behind this, and money’s what he wants, he’ll make a demand. I’m not bidding against myself.”
“Of course he wants money,” Marco exploded, “what else would he want?”
“Keep your voice down,” Cinco warned him. “Believe it or not, not everyone is motivated by filthy lucre. And second, don’t bring up my father’s name again. Are we clear?”
Marco rolled his eyes but held his tongue as their wives drifted back toward them.
Cinco gave the women a wide smile and offered up a silent prayer that this ugliness would just vanish, somehow. Before Marco cracked.
CHAPTER 49
Sasha didn’t believe in ghosts—or zombies, for that matter. If she had, she’d have been certain that Malcolm Vickers had killed Ellen and Clarissa.
She’d woken before dawn and had turned on her laptop before she’d even poured her first cup of coffee. She’d spent the morning working at her dining room table in her pajamas. Her Googling had revealed that after losing his son, Vickers had turned to advocacy. He’d been a pioneer in the fathers’ rights movement and in various male-bonding fads that had long since faded from public view. His early posts in online forums and chat rooms made it clear his anger hadn’t dissipated over time but, instead, had hardened into a steel rage.
For years, he’d urged fathers to use “any means necessary” to keep their children in their lives. But he seemed to have stopped posting and organizing rallies after a widely publicized kidnapping by one of his followers had ended in tragedy. The father, fleeing the police with his fourteen-month-old daughter in the backseat of his Taurus, had crossed the median at an estimated eighty-seven miles an hour, smashed into an eighteen-wheeler, and flipped the car. Father and child were both declared dead at the scene, and Vickers fell off the map.
The next mention of his name that she’d been able to find was his obituary. After detailing his advocacy on behalf of fathers and his battle with cancer, the piece ended on the plaintive note that “he is believed to be survived by his only son, born Richard John Vickers, current name and whereabouts unknown, but held in his father’s heart every day of his life.”
Sasha ran several searches on Richard John Vickers, but he had no electronic footprint. She made a note to have Naya try the databases used by private investigators and debt collectors and closed her browser. She couldn’t spend her entire day going down Internet rabbit holes; she still needed to work on her opposition to the district attorney’s motion to have Greg’s bail revoked. Once she had her argument roughed out, she planned to shower and then head to her parents’ house.
Her family would gather there after attending Mass together at Saint Theresa’s, where, as Martine Landry would have been glad to know, they would all have prayed for Sasha’s soul. Given that she was the only lapsed Catholic in a large family, her soul likely garnered more than its fair share of prayers.
Ordinarily, she would skip the McCandless family Sunday dinner on a day before not one, but two, court appearances. Not today. Despite her long to do list, she’d decided to make the time. She recognized her motivation was, at least in part, to prove she wasn’t emotionally stunted and she did value her family, despite what Le
o Connelly might think.
She exhaled. She didn’t have time for this distraction. She pushed thoughts of Connelly and his cutting words from her mind and padded barefoot to the kitchen to refill her coffee.
She watched as the face painted on the side of the mug turned from black and sleeping to white and wide awake as the heat from the coffee activated the paint. Connelly had surprised her with the mug one random weekday morning over the summer. He said he’d seen it and had immediately thought of the way she switched from sleepy to alert with her first sip of morning coffee. Hot tears pricked her eyes at the memory. Damn him.
She abandoned the mug on the counter, coffee untouched, and went into the bathroom to turn on the shower. The opposition would be there later.
CHAPTER 50
Rich turned the hammer over in his palm. It was cold and hard. He needed to be the hammer. Cold, hard, and impervious to outside forces.
The Clarissa situation was still eating at him. He tried not to blame himself. How could he have known she was pregnant when he’d plotted her death? Of course, he wouldn’t have wanted to harm an innocent baby—a fact he’d readily conceded to her.
When he’d popped up from the backseat of her car after she’d parked in her office garage, her screams had pleased him at first. But when she’d broken into sobs and told him she was carrying a baby, his satisfaction had vanished. Gone in an instant. Replaced by uncertainty.
A baby.
He hadn’t wanted to believe her, had wanted her to be lying. But she’d fumbled through her purse with shaking hands and pulled out one of those pictures of the fetus. A sonogram. The thin filmy paper had curled up into a scroll, and the grainy gray blob had looked like, well, a blob, but the computer-generated information at the top of the picture confirmed that this was a blob living in Clarissa’s womb.
Clarissa had looked up at him through wet, black eyes and had pleaded with him to spare her baby. He’d smacked Nick’s hammer against his palm, deliberating while she’d begged.
He smacked it again now, remembering.
He’d had to make a snap decision about this unforeseen circumstance. He’d done the best he could, he told himself. He’d handled it the right way.
And after that hiccup, he’d simply continued on with the rest of his steps as predetermined. He had already dropped off the envelope with the photograph at Prescott & Talbott the night before, because he’d thought it would be too risky to venture into the offices after her body had been found in the garage.
In retrospect, he realized that had been a mistake. If Clarissa hadn’t died, he would have looked like he was bluffing when Prescott opened the picture.
So, this time, he needed to do everything in the proper order: tear Martine and Tanner apart; wait until she took steps to divorce Tanner; then kill her; and, finally, drop off the third picture.
He hit the hammer against his palm once more with a dull thud.
No surprises this time.
CHAPTER 51
“Where’s Leo?” Sasha’s mother asked, enveloping Sasha in a hug and a cloud of Clinique Happy as soon as she walked through the door.
The scent meant Sunday to Sasha. Valentina McCandless loved perfume, but she saved it for church, her birthday, and her anniversary. One year, Sasha had given her a large bottle for Mother’s Day, so that she could wear it whenever she wanted. The bottle had lasted six years.
“Hi, mom,” Sasha said, kissing her mother’s cheek and ignoring her question.
Her brother Sean stepped through the doorway between the dining room and the family room carrying a tray of nachos and cheese dip. Jordan, his wife, followed with the beers.
“Hi, Squirt,” Sean said, nodding his head toward her. “Where’s your boy? He’s going to miss kickoff.”
“Hi, Sean, Jordan. He’s out of town,” Sasha answered.
She hurried to the kitchen in the back of the house to avoid further questions about Connelly.
Riley, her brother Ryan’s wife, sat at the table, chopping vegetables for the salad.
“Hi, Sasha,” she said in her soft voice. She sliced the mushrooms in a quick, precise rhythm. Her uniform pieces would have made Connelly proud.
“Hi. How are you feeling, Riley?” Sasha asked. Riley was, as usual, pregnant.
“Pretty good. A little tired, but that could be from chasing the hooligans around, too. Hey, I saw you on the news yesterday! You were being interviewed about the men who killed their wives,” Riley said, her eyes wide.
“Allegedly,” Sasha said.
“What?” Riley blew her long bangs out of her eyes and kept slicing while she talked.
“Nevermind. Nothing. So, what did you think?” Sasha said as she walked to the refrigerator and looked inside, out of habit more than hunger.
“I liked your suit,” Riley said.
Sasha’s mother walked into the kitchen and closed the refrigerator door. “You’ll ruin your appetite,” she told Sasha. Then she turned to Riley. “What suit?”
“Sasha was wearing this really cute dress and jacket on television,” Riley explained, waving the knife for emphasis.
“You were on television, and you didn’t tell your mother?” Sasha’s mom said. “Dad and I would have recorded it, honey.”
“It wasn’t a scheduled thing, Mom. I just got nabbed by a reporter who had some questions about a case. It was no big deal, really,” Sasha explained. She gave Riley a long, meaningful look.
Riley nodded, wide-eyed, to let Sasha know she understood. She’d been married to Ryan long enough to know that Valentina would not view murderous husbands, alleged or otherwise, as appropriate pre-dinner conversation.
“Where’s Ryan?” Sasha said to change the subject.
“Out back with your dad and the kids,” her mother answered, turning her attention to the two plump, naked chickens destined for the roaster.
Sasha watched through the small window as her father threw the ball in the general direction of the knot of grandchildren at the far end of his backyard and they tumbled after it like puppies.
Ryan caught her eye and waved. She waved back.
“Do you need any help, Mom?” Sasha asked.
“From you? Heaven forbid. I wish Leo were here, though. I wanted to get his recipe for the potatoes. You don’t happen to know it, do you?” her mother said over her shoulder, with her hands inside a chicken.
“Uh, the roasted ones? Rosemary, sea salt, and olive oil,” Sasha said, impressed with herself for remembering.
“Amounts? Temperature? Time?” her mother responded.
“Oh, yeah, I don’t know,” Sasha answered.
Behind her, she heard Riley swallow a giggle.
Valentina just shook her head and said, “Go outside and get some sun. You look pale.”
Sasha didn’t argue. She stepped out on the big back deck and settled into the teak glider.
“Hi, doll,” her father called from the yard.
“Hi, Dad,” she answered, rocking the glider back and starting its gentle motion.
Her oldest nephew, Liam, turned at the sound of her voice.
“Aunt Sasha!” he whooped and took off running toward her.
Siobhan, Colin, and Stefan were right behind him, squealing and laughing as they raced across the yard. Daniella lagged behind, pumping her chubby toddler legs as fast as she could. They thundered up the stairs and piled onto the glider in a tangle of arms and legs.
“Hello, five little monkeys,” Sasha said, reaching to tickle five bellies.
Ryan and her dad stayed in the yard and gave the football a few last throws. Even at sixty-four, her dad’s arm could still send a bullet whizzing through the yard. Padric McCandless had quarterbacked the Central Catholic high school football team. He’d handed each of his three sons a pigskin as soon as they’d been able to stand without assistance and, to his wife’s dismay, had seen no reason to treat their peanut-sized daughter any differently. Sasha had a framed picture in her office of the two of them. She could
n’t have been much older than a year, dressed in a lacy pink dress and white shoes. Her father crouched beside her, correcting her form as she tried to throw a regulation-size football to one of the boys.
Sasha watched them toss the ball and listened to the kids talk over one another in a rush to fill her in on school, sports, and the eight-and-under social scene. With their excited voices in the air, the sun on her skin, and Daniella snuggled on her lap, she took in the moment and gave no thought to dead lawyers, broken marriages, or demanding boyfriends.
Then Sean appeared in the doorway.
“Dad, Ry, come on! Game’s about to start,” he called.
“Go, Steelers!” Colin yelled, and the entire mass of wriggling children slipped off the glider and swarmed into the house.
Sean stepped down onto the deck to let them pass. He looked at Sasha and took a swig from his beer.
“How’s Leo feel about your representing the Lady Lawyer Killers?” he asked in a deliberately neutral voice.
Sasha glanced up at him, shielding her eyes from the sun with one hand. His face was blank.
“I wouldn’t know. I don’t consult him about my work,” she answered, matching his tone.
Ryan and her father clomped up the steps and stood beside Sean.
“No Leo?” Ryan asked her.
“Not today,” Sasha said.
“Maybe he doesn’t approve of Sasha’s choice of clients,” Sean said.
Don’t take the bait. De-escalate.
“He’s out of town on business,” she said, looking at Ryan and her dad.
9 More Killer Thrillers Page 49