by H. P. Bayne
He waited a moment, watching Sully’s face for a change.
“Anything?” he asked when Sully didn’t comment.
“He’s less pissed. But he’s still here. Thanks for trying, Dez.”
Great. It wasn’t bad enough he was sitting here stewing over his uncle. They were now going to have to deal with the stalker ghost of a murderer to boot.
Lachlan had been unusually quiet during the exchange, and he chose that moment to speak up. “There’s no way for Montague to find out more about the shooter for us, is there? I mean, he’s uniquely positioned to be able to go places and do things none of us can.”
“He wouldn’t know where to start, and I don’t know where to point him,” Sully said. “Anyway, like I said, he blames me. In my experience, ghosts who’ve been murdered tend to be fairly one-track in their thoughts. The only way I’m going to get rid of him is to find the person who actually killed him and make sure they face justice. If he can see the person and hear them say they acted alone, that will probably be enough.”
“Right,” Lachlan said. “So all you need is for the assassin to come forward and provide a statement acknowledging everything he did and promising to plead guilty in court.”
Dez snorted. “You really see that happening?”
“Nope. I’d say it’s pretty obvious this was a professional hit. Someone paid a pro to take the judge down. And I don’t think I’m reaching by saying it has something to do with this Circle.”
“Maybe it was Lowell,” Sully said. “He knows his way around guns. And it was his name Montague brought up to police. If word got back to him somehow, he might have decided he’d have to shut the judge up.”
“You’re suggesting a leak inside the department,” Dez said.
“Not necessarily. Maybe someone went over to question Lowell about it, hoping he’d say something.”
“Maybe,” Dez said. “But it would have been a dumb thing to do, if that’s what happened.”
“Not every cop is as good as Dad was.”
“Fair point. In that case, might be worth asking Raynor if he decided to jump the gun on that one.”
“I can’t see it,” Lachlan said. “Every cop worth his salt, and even most of the dumb ones, know better than to confront a suspect without some evidence to back your play. Fallout could be a complaint against you to the department or sending your suspect underground. Either way, any chance at catching a smart criminal at something illegal could easily be diminished or eliminated altogether. And something tells me Lowell Braddock will make for one smart criminal.
“One thing’s for sure. Much as I’d love to get my teeth into this whole who-shot-the-disgraced-judge thing, the police won’t let us anywhere near that one. It’s an open investigation, and one they’re going to be loath to share info on. Plus, we’d be letting ourselves in for obstruction charges for trying to stick our noses in. We’re better off focusing our efforts on the Lowell problem. If we can take him down, maybe we’ll be lucky and solve Montague’s murder at the same time—if you’re right and Lowell was the one behind the gun. Does he have any ability to act as a sniper?”
“Like Sully said, he knows his way around guns,” Dez said. “He used to take part in competitions here and there when he was younger. It might be he still heads out to the range to practice. Fast cars and extreme sports, that’s Lowell.”
“Smart,” Lachlan said. “Really smart. He’s behind several murders and attempted murders that we know of, and only one—Betty Schuster—involved a gun. He drowned his nephew, injected his brother with epinephrine and cut Sullivan’s wrists. Avoiding a specific MO makes it harder to connect the homicides, or the person responsible—if the deaths were ever discovered to be homicides in the first place.”
“I was thinking,” Sully said. “If we want a way in with Lowell, the Circle might be the way to get there.”
“If you’re thinking undercover work, something tells me they’re not going to be keen to let any of us in. It’s a society for wealthy or soon-to-be wealthy men and women. Anyway, the last thing they’ll want is a private investigator in their ranks, and you’re supposed to be dead, so….”
“Not what I was getting at. I was thinking more along the lines of using someone already within their ranks.”
“Such as?”
“Roman Gerhardt.”
Dez sensed where his brother was going. “Sully, no. We talked about this.”
Sully met his eye and shrugged. “Just wanted to put it out there for Lachlan, see what he thinks.”
Lachlan’s gaze flitted from Sully to Dez and back again, lifted eyebrows suggesting interest. “What?”
No getting around it, Dez explained his brother’s earlier thought. “Sully reminded me Gerhardt has been intent on finding his kid, a six-year-old boy who went missing from his backyard. Gerhardt has been questioning psychic patients about it, but he’s never gotten to the bottom of it. He mentioned to me a couple of years ago that a patient told him his son was with him or something. We now know that patient was Sully’s birth mother.”
“How long after the disappearance did Lucienne Dule come into his care?”
“Fifteen years, he said.”
“Sullivan’s twenty-four now, so add that to fifteen—you get something around forty years since the disappearance. I’ll do some digging, see what I can find. It was before my time on the force, but I should be able to pull some strings and get us a look at the file.”
“What’s the point?” Dez asked. “Where are we supposed to go with this exactly?”
“I told you,” Sully said. “We might be able to use this to our benefit. Gerhardt knows what Lowell is, and he’s in a position to go to the police and have them believe him. It sounds bad saying it like this, but we can dangle his son’s case like a huge carrot to get him to help us bring Lowell down. Trade info on the son for info on Lowell.”
Lachlan pointed an index finger toward Sully and grinned. “Bingo.”
Dez crossed his arms. “And as I already told you, I don’t like it.” He turned to Lachlan. “We can’t do anything that risks exposing Sully.”
“Who said anything about exposing him?” Lachlan asked. “Near as I can see, we’re just two private investigators offering to solve the case for him. It’s perfectly true I worked for a woman purporting to be Lucienne Dule, and I can tell him she mentioned having seen his son’s ghost.”
“Except it wasn’t Lucienne. It was her crackpot sister you were dealing with. And since their mother was a patient of Gerhardt’s, he’s bound to know that.”
Lachlan rolled his eyes. “I realize that, thank you. Moving on. I mentioned a couple of minutes ago how tipping off a suspect can make them go to ground. It can have another effect though. Sometimes it can trip a suspect up, get them making mistakes and taking chances out of panic. In Gerhardt’s case, he’s obsessed—understandably—with finding his son and laying him to rest. That makes him both highly driven and emotional, which is a good recipe for screwups. It also makes him more easily manipulated by anyone with information he’ll see as helpful. If I had a nickel for every time a poor, grieving mother paid some fake psychic for supposed information on her missing child, I’d be a wealthy man. Parents will leave no stone unturned, and I normally wouldn’t play on that sort of grief. But this is Roman Gerhardt, a man we know isn’t above torturing defenceless patients to achieve his ends. My sympathy level is lessened significantly. If we can use this to our advantage, why wouldn’t we try?”
“He won’t talk to me,” Dez said. “He hates me, and he knows how much I hate him.”
“He’ll talk to you if you have information he wants. I can’t hide the fact you’re working for me, Braddock. There will be times I’ll need you to check into certain things on your own, and it’ll raise his suspicions unnecessarily if he hasn’t been made aware of you ahead of time. We’ll just have to nip your joint dislike in the bud.”
“So that’s it?” Dez asked. “We’re doing this? I don’
t get a say in the fact we’re about to open one massive can of worms?”
“Every investigation is a can of worms, Braddock. You know that.”
Dez rubbed at the back of his neck. Going after Lowell was one thing, and it was something he was increasingly eager to do. But poking at Gerhardt to do it felt like a line they were safer not crossing. Sully would have to be involved in this investigation. How long would it take before Gerhardt, naturally eager for involvement in the case, saw him? The loss of his first son was tragic, but discovering Sully of all people was also his son would no doubt result in a catastrophe.
And Sully’s involvement in this was risky on a whole other level. If he got into this and found out he couldn’t handle it, where did that leave them? Sully wasn’t violent, far from it. But this was the man who had raped his mother and who had confined and tortured him. He’d confronted Lowell over Flynn and had nearly died doing it. If Sully fell into the chasm that ongoing proximity to Gerhardt would no doubt open, Dez wasn’t sure he’d be able to pull him free. Not before his brother’s life was forever shattered.
“If we’re doing this,” he said, “I’m keeping close to Sully. I’m not gonna risk this going sideways and something happening we can’t reverse. He’s already been traumatized because of Lockwood. Last thing I want is him falling under the weight of a severe PTSD flashback or something else when I’m not around to hold him up.”
“I’ll be okay, Dez,” Sully said. “I’m better prepared this time. Anyway, I need to face this. And at some point, I’ll need to face him. It’s the only way I’ll find any peace. If we can get him to turn on Lowell, to provide info to the police, I won’t need to be in hiding anymore. Best case scenario, he’d back my story and make it so I can provide a statement of my own, one the police might actually believe. If I had a way to come forward so people would believe me, we’d have him, just like that. After everything that happened to Dad and Aiden, you want that, too, don’t you?”
“Of course I want that. But not at your expense. We find a way to take him down that doesn’t destroy you in the process, I’m all-in. But Sully, this thing starts taking you down too dark a path, I’m calling it, you hear me?”
Sully smiled and Dez took some comfort in that, as well as in his following response. “I hear you.”
7
Through heavy sighs from Lachlan, Dez ran a careful visual scan of his SUV, relieved to find no dings or scratches to suggest his concussed boss had lost track of the road.
“Happy now?” Lachlan grumbled.
“I’d be happier if you hadn’t driven in the first place.”
“I miss driving. As much fun as it is to be your backseat driver, I like not needing to rely on you for everything.”
“Talk to your doctor. Get him to clear you. Please.”
Lachlan seemed to find that funny, judging from the closed-mouthed chuckle that rumbled from his chest.
Dez wasn’t keen to share in the joke. He had something on his mind, something he didn’t think he could put off for much longer.
“Are you planning to talk to someone at the police department about getting you a look at Gerhardt’s son’s file?” Dez asked.
“Yep. I’ll put in the call right away. Usually doesn’t take my buddies long to dig things up for me.”
“Good. Then I’m going to drop you off at home in the meantime. There’s something Sully and I need to do.”
“What do we need to do?” Sully asked as he let Pax into the backseat.
“We’re about to start digging into some stuff we hope will lead us to taking down Lowell,” Dez said. “We need to talk to Mom. She doesn’t know any of this, and we need to fill her in before the pieces start to move.”
Sully’s shoulders slumped. “I hadn’t even thought.”
“Doesn’t surprise me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know what it means.”
Dez hadn’t meant to start up another argument, but there it was. His emotions were all over the place these days, and the anger bubbling inside him was constantly threatening to boil over. Sully, close in both proximity and to being the source of the problem, would end up bearing the brunt of it unless Dez could get a handle on things.
That wasn’t going to happen today.
“Boys, boys, play nice,” Lachlan said. “Eyes on the prize. Whatever’s going on between the two of you needs to be dealt with or put on hold. We all need to work together if we’re going to get this thing sorted.”
Lachlan had a good point, enough to get Dez to leave the argument alone and drop into the driver’s seat. He held his tongue during the drive up to Lachlan’s, Sully doing the same from the backseat. Anything else was an impossibility anyway, Lachlan having located a classical music station he decided he wanted to listen to on high volume.
By the time they reached Lachlan’s house, he, at least, was in a good mood. “I’ll give you a call once I get the file,” he told Dez. “Keep your phone turned on.”
“I always keep my phone on. Might be on silent from time to time, but I check it.”
Lachlan looked like he had a retort burning a hole in his tongue but, thankfully, he held onto it. He settled for an inoffensive “See you later” before getting out of the vehicle and heading for the house.
Dez waited until Lachlan had let himself inside, in part because he expected Sully to get into the front passenger seat.
He didn’t.
“You’re not moving up?” Dez asked without turning.
“I’m fine back here.”
Dez wondered how true that was, given Pax took up a large part of the seat and was rarely a still passenger, but he left it alone.
Dez sent a quick text to his mom, ensuring she was home before hitting the road. She used to have an office in the city where she’d counselled families in trouble, but she’d gone on stress leave after her own family situation took such a tragic turn. She was home most of the time now, a fact that was subject to change once she learned Aiden hadn’t accidentally drowned in the creek out back. Whether she’d be able to stay at the acreage once she knew the truth remained to be seen.
It was nearly three quarters of an hour from here to the acreage, and Dez was content to make the drive in silence.
Sully, it turned out, wasn’t.
“I know you’re pissed at me, and I get it.”
“You’ve got every right to be pissed at me too.”
“Maybe, but I’m not. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. We need to put all of this on hold, okay? Mom’s going to need our support, and we can’t give that to her if we’re at each other’s throats.”
“We aren’t at each other’s throats. I’m mad, not homicidal—at least as far as the situation with you. Don’t worry. Once we get there, I’m there all the way.”
Sully remained quiet a few minutes but broke it with a further statement. “I didn’t mean it the way it came out. About Mom, I mean. Of course I thought about it. I just didn’t—”
“I know, okay? Honestly, it was the same with me. I got caught up in what I was going through, and I forgot she didn’t know yet. I lost track of stuff outside myself. I’m sure it was the same with you. I shouldn’t have said what I did to you.”
“It’s okay,” Sully said. “I understand.”
This time, the silence that followed was a little more comfortable.
The SUV’s tires crunched gravel as Dez crawled up the drive toward the house.
He’d tried to think through how best to tell their mom the truth but had yet to come up with the right words inside his own brain. Of all the people in the world he wanted to avoid hurting, she was up there near the very top of the list; what he was about to say would leave her shattered.
“Dez?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll tell her, okay? I’m the one who held all this back. I should be the one to say it.”
A wave of relief washed over Dez. Sully was no conversationalist, but he was better at cal
m and empathetic. “Thanks, man. I can’t think of the words.”
“Neither can I.”
“You said them to me.”
“And look how that turned out.”
There was an argument to be made about the fact it wasn’t the way Sully had said it so much as the fact he’d gone so long without saying it, but he left it alone. The last thing they needed right now was another argument. Breaking the news to their mom would be challenge enough.
She didn’t make it any easier by answering the door with the beaming grin that formed the moment she saw them.
“I’ll never get tired of this,” she said as she let them in. “Seeing the two of you together again.”
The reason was obvious as she enveloped Sully in a tight hug. Until only recently, she’d believed him dead. Dez’s heart sank as he looked into his mother’s face, the picture of contentment, like her world had been righted. He and Sully were about to shake it off its axis all over again.
She turned to Dez next, wrapping her arms around his middle, her head barely making it to his chest. He tried to meet Sully’s eye but his brother was staring at the wall, the tight expression on his face suggesting he was deep in unpleasant thought. He could have been deciding on the right words or picturing their result. Either way, today’s outcome wouldn’t be good.
Dez suddenly regretted not waiting until Eva could be here with them. She was always better at this sort of thing.
Mara pulled away, at last giving Pax the playful head scratch he’d been waiting on. “You too, Pax. It’s lovely to see you again, sweetie.” She headed for the kitchen, Pax trotting along at her heels. “Come on. I’ll put on some coffee.”
Sully at last met Dez’s eye, raised eyebrows and a grimace providing the answer Dez had looked for earlier. No, he wasn’t looking forward to this any more than Dez was.
Mara busied herself with the coffeemaker while Dez slid onto one of the stools at the island, Pax settling himself into a puddle of fur next to him.