“There’s no way in hell I’m going to—”
“Of course you are. This is where free choice comes in. You get the money, or you can wave bye-bye to … what’s his name?” He glanced at the paper before refolding it and putting it back in his pocket. “Austin. Did Robin pick that out?”
When Wade didn’t respond, Hugh pushed up from the chair. “So how ’bout we get back together right here in about”—he paused to look at his watch—“oh, let’s make it around seven tonight. We can make this little transaction smooth and easy. Or I can have the state’s child services down here to look into this little mess.” Hugh looked toward the back room. “Take good care of my son for me. And tell pretty Steffie I’ll see her later.”
Hugh got to the door and stopped. “Oh, and don’t even think about leaving town with him, MacGregor, because I will go to the police and tell them you kidnapped him. Can you imagine how embarrassing that’s going to be for Dallas? Can you imagine the scene, cop cars screaming all around you, the boy being wrenched from your hands? That’d be enough to scar that kid for life, don’t you think?” He shook his head as if genuinely concerned about Austin.
“What a dilemma to be in, right? On the one hand, I can tell that you’d like nothing more than to kill me right here and now and just dump my body in that Bay out there. I can’t say that I blame you, all things considered. But the way I see it, you’re going to have to decide what means more to you. Revenge could be very sweet, I know. On the other hand, I figure you have to have grown attached to the boy. You can’t have both, Wade. You can pay the money and keep him, or you can blow the whistle on me and spend the rest of your life wishing you hadn’t.”
Hugh went out and quietly closed the door behind him.
Wade sat at the table for a moment, trying to push through the cloud of anger that completely filled every cell of his body and consumed him until he literally saw red.
“Wade?” Steffie stepped out from the back room, Austin in her arms.
“You heard?” he asked without turning around.
“Yes. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.” He stared at the opposite wall, trying to gain control.
Stef sat next to him, Austin on her lap playing with an empty ice-cream bowl and two spoons.
“Daddy, eem.” Austin leaned over to offer his father an imaginary treat and Wade almost lost it. There was no way in hell he was going to hand over this child to Hugh Weston or whoever he was. There was no power on earth strong enough to take him away. And yes, Wade acknowledged, he could have killed Hugh this morning. Clay had a boat; they could take him far out into the Bay and toss his evil body overboard.
But that would, of course, lead to other problems.
“I have an idea …” Stef told him. “Let’s see if Dallas can keep Austin company for a while. Then we’re going to take a walk.”
Thirty minutes later, Wade and Steffie were sitting in Jesse Enright’s office.
“Start from the beginning,” Jesse told him.
Wade told him everything.
“Let me make sure I’ve got this right: this guy embezzled your company into bankruptcy and stole personal funds from your partner, and now he’s back here to extort money from you to keep quiet about Austin’s paternity.” Jesse tapped a pen on his desktop.
“That sums it up.” Wade nodded.
“Is there any chance that he is not Austin’s father?”
Wade shook his head. “None.”
“This is a really tough place to be in,” Jesse told him. “I’m assuming he never signed away his parental rights.”
“He didn’t know about Austin, never knew that Robin was pregnant. He still wouldn’t have known if it hadn’t been for those damned photographs.” Wade ran an anxious hand through his hair. “Doesn’t it matter that he robbed Austin’s mother blind, destroyed her company, and then bolted out of town without looking back?”
“Not as far as establishing paternity is concerned. There’s no way anyone could predict the outcome of a case like this. A lot will depend on the judge.” Jesse was clearly giving the problem some thought. “Though I’m not sure if the law is more favorable in Maryland or in Texas. I’m going to have to research that in case we need to file some quick motions. Unfortunately, he didn’t give us much time.”
Jesse opened his laptop. “I’ll see if I can get my sister, Sophie, to work on that.” He typed for a moment, then turned back to Wade. He was about to speak when his intercom buzzed.
“Jesse, Chief Beck and Mr. Shields are here to see you and Mr. MacGregor.”
Jesse looked across the desk at Wade. “Were you expecting …?”
Wade shook his head no.
“Send them in, Liz.” Jesse shrugged. “Let’s see what’s up.”
Beck and Grady Shields came through the door as it opened, and immediately pulled up chairs to join the conversation.
“How can we help?” Grady asked.
“Officially or unofficially, whatever it takes, Wade,” Beck assured him.
“How did you …?”
“I called Vanessa while you were dropping off Austin at Berry’s,” Stef admitted. “I knew she’d call Beck, and when we were talking, Grady walked into Bling. We thought it was a sign.” She paused. “Well, Ness thought it was a sign.”
“It was the right thing to do, Wade,” Beck told him. “From the little my sister told me—damn, but that woman can talk fast when she’s revved up—there’s a lot at stake here, and you’re only going to get one chance with this guy. Once he goes for the DNA test, that part is over. If he can prove he’s Austin’s father, things are going to get real complicated real fast. Let us help you.”
“I appreciate the thought, guys, but I don’t know what either of you can do.”
“Start by filling in some blanks for me,” Grady said. “When I was in the Bureau, I was real good at working my way around tough situations. Let’s see if I’ve lost my touch …”
“I feel like we’re in a remake of High Noon,” Steffie told Wade as she watched out the window. “Like we’re waiting for the gunslinger to show up.”
Moments later, the doorknob turned and Steffie cleared her throat, then stepped back as the bell rang and Hugh entered. When he smiled at Stef, she pretended not to have seen him. She turned the OPEN sign to CLOSED and locked the door.
“Maybe you should leave,” Wade said to her.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she replied.
“Well, suit yourself.” Hugh sat opposite Wade and smirked. “Hey, maybe I’ll walk out of here with your girl and the five million.”
“What makes you so sure I’m going to pay up?” Wade asked.
“Well”—Hugh looked around the shop—“I don’t see the kid.”
“You don’t have any interest in Austin and you know it.”
“Not beyond the pleasure I’ll take in knowing how much it’s going to hurt you every day for the rest of your life not to know where he is. How he is. Is he still alive, even. You never know what can happen to a kid these days. I don’t live in the best of neighborhoods.”
“I’d think you’d be able to afford a great neighborhood. You stole what, two million dollars from KenneMac? Plus whatever you stole from Robin.”
“The easiest three and a half million I ever made—plus what I got from Robin—but who’s counting.” Hugh laughed.
Grady and Beck came out of the back room.
Pointing to Grady, Beck said, “He’s counting.”
“Who the hell are you?” Hugh demanded.
“Some interested friends.” Beck sat on one side of Hugh. “Interested in that three and a half million dollars you stole from Wade’s company. Plus the money from Robin’s personal account.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Hugh shook his head.
“You got that little recorder I gave you?” Grady asked as he sat on Hugh’s other side.
Wade nodded and took it from his pocket, sat it on t
he table, and pushed play.
“You stole what, two million dollars from KenneMac? Plus whatever you stole from Robin.”
“The easiest three and a half million I ever made—plus what I got from Robin—but who’s counting.”
“You think blackmail is going to work?” Hugh turned to Wade. “Like I said, you can send me to prison for that one job in Texas; first offense, I won’t spend much time there. I don’t really care how many people know that Austin is my son, but I’d have thought you’d have wanted to keep it quiet.” He looked first at Beck, then at Grady. “And I’m not impressed with your posse.”
“Maybe you’ll be impressed with this.” Grady opened his briefcase, took out a folder, and began to read. “ ‘Hugh Weston. Aka Henry Willis. Aka Harry West. Wanted in four states—’ ” Grady looked across the table at Wade. “I guess that’s five now—for embezzlement. He’s made a career of ingratiating himself with women who have come into large sums of money and finding ways to separate them from their cash.” Grady turned to Hugh. “That ‘first offense’ was long ago and far away, my friend.” He went back to his file. “All those nasty little embezzlement charges pile up, you know? Enough to put you away for a good long time. But you know what’s going to do you in, Hugh?”
Grady slid a piece of paper from the bottom of the pile.
“There’s this assault case up in Maine that’s been hanging around for the past five years. You picked up a woman in a bar—Christine Davenport; let’s not be cavalier and forget who she was. You smacked her around in the parking lot, drove her to New Hampshire, where you kept her in a motel for three days. I don’t suppose there’s any doubt as to what you were doing with her for those three days, right?”
Hugh sat back in the chair, his arms folded over his chest, his expression lethal.
“Now, here’s the thing. You take someone anywhere against their will and hold them—again, against their will—and that’s pretty much the definition of kidnapping. You take them across state lines, and it becomes a federal case. Add in the fact that she was coerced at gunpoint, and we’re looking at … well, shall we add it all up?”
“Who is this guy?” Hugh pointed to Grady and tried to look amused.
“Sorry. I forgot my manners. Meet former FBI Special Agent Grady Shields,” Wade told him, then pointed to Beck. “Our chief of police here in St. Dennis, Gabriel Beck.”
Hugh tried to look indifferent, but Wade knew the exact moment that he began to realize that the sand might be shifting.
Grady took his iPhone out of his pocket. “I love these gadgets that multitask, don’t you?”
He whistled. “Wow, that many?” He turned the iPhone in his hand to show Hugh the number on the screen.
“I don’t know what kind of a clever game you guys are playing here, but I’m done with it.” Hugh looked across the table. “You know what the deal was.”
“The deal’s changed, Hugh,” Wade told him. “It might be different if embezzling from KenneMac had really been your first offense. Nice bluff there, by the way. But we all know that KenneMac wasn’t anywhere near being the first, and we know—thanks to Grady’s family and friends at the FBI—that it wasn’t your last. You may have been slick about getting out of town, but you always left prints behind.”
“You can leave now—just walk away and don’t look back. Or you can keep going with this and I can guarantee you won’t live long enough to serve out all your time,” Beck told him.
“You’re forgetting something real important here, MacGregor.” Hugh’s bravado was beginning to wear thin. “I can prove that boy is mine. I can go to court and get an order for DNA testing that will prove he’s my son. I can still—”
“You can still save your ass,” Beck told him. “Or I can take you into custody right now, hold you till the FBI gets here.” He turned to Grady. “What time did your brother say he’d be here?”
Grady turned his wrist to look at his watch. “He said he’d be here in time for dessert. So any time now.”
Hugh looked from one face to the next, trying to decide, Wade figured, whether or not they were bluffing.
“No five million dollars, Hugh,” Wade said. “Just one long prison sentence. Oh, sure, it would just about kill me not to know where Austin is; you’re right on the money there. But just how much satisfaction will that give you when you’re spending every day in a five-by-eight cell with some guy who calls you ‘Peaches’?”
Grady took one last sheet of paper from the folder. Wade reached across the table to pick it up.
“Now here’s the only deal you’re going to get, and I’m only going to say it once, so listen up. You sign this and then you walk out of here. These”—Grady held up the reports he’d been reading from—“will go back into those cold-case files they’ve been sitting in for the past couple of years, and as far as I’m concerned, I never heard your name.”
“If you think I’m going to sign a confession …” Hugh scoffed.
“It isn’t a confession.” Wade handed him the paper.
Hugh scanned it, then glanced at the faces of the other three men at the table. He appeared to think for a long while before finally asking, “Got a pen?”
Grady signed as witness, then tossed the pen on the table. “As someone who spent a good part of my life in law enforcement, it makes me sick to say this, but go ahead and leave.”
Steffie, silent throughout the entire scene, got up and unlocked the door, held it for him. Hugh left without a backward glance and Stef closed the door behind him.
“Guys, I don’t know how to begin to thank you.” Wade looked from one man to the other, both his friends. “I know it has to go against everything you believe in to let him walk out of here.”
“I’m not gonna lie, Wade,” Beck told him. “I can’t believe I let him leave. The only consolation I have is in knowing that Austin is staying where he belongs.”
Grady nodded, then added, “And the fact that every move he ever makes from here on will be very carefully watched. The next time—and there will be a next time—he won’t go free.”
“I feel terribly conflicted about that woman from Maine, though.” Steffie sat next to Wade. “She deserves justice for what he did to her. Not that the others don’t, but there’s a difference between what he did to the others—the money he took—and what he did to her. I would have liked to have seen him pay for that.”
“He will, but not in this lifetime, I’m afraid,” Grady told her. “Christine Davenport died in a car accident two years ago. I wouldn’t have let him go on that if she was still alive.” He looked at Wade apologetically. “I don’t know how we would have handled it, but I couldn’t have let him walk.”
“I understand.” Wade nodded.
“And I feel confident that he’s going to pay for it all anyway,” Beck said. “All those notes that Grady has were compiled by a friend of his at the FBI.”
“My father always told me to never burn a bridge behind me when I left a job,” Grady said.
“Who are you kidding?” Beck laughed. “You called your brother who’s an active agent.”
“No, I didn’t. I called a friend of mine who is the best computer geek the Bureau has. He called the police department in Texas that investigated Wade’s case. They had Hugh’s prints and they’d gotten them into the system. By the time I called my buddy, all these other matches had popped up, all cases similar to Wade’s. Then we found the case in Maine, and I knew we had a guy who is a serial offender. He’s going to steal again. It’s his nature. He’s slick, I’ll give him that, but next time, he’ll be caught.”
“And when that time comes, and he points back to tonight?” Steffie frowned. “How are you going to explain your part in this when he talks about how you two law enforcement types went along with this deal?”
“What deal?” Grady got up and stretched his legs. “I just came in to witness Hugh’s signing away his parental rights to Austin.”
“I just came in for ice cream.�
� Beck walked to the counter. “Stef, you got any of that stuff left over from Dallas’s party …?”
WHAT just happened here?” Steffie sank into the chair next to Wade. She’d stayed quiet through the entire ordeal, but now she was starting to shake. “Seriously? Did those two just …?”
“Yeah. They did.” Wade nodded, his face still unreadable.
“Has it occurred to you that you might not have heard the last of him?” Even her voice was shaking. “What if he comes back and threatens you all over again? Then what? Aren’t you worried?”
“It has occurred to me, but Grady feels pretty sure they’ll have him in custody for something else by the time he decides to try again. He studied behavior when he was in the FBI and I believe he knows what he’s talking about, but it doesn’t take an FBI profiler to see that this guy has made a living off of conning people out of their money one way or another. Given his history, it isn’t likely that he’s going to go into some legitimate business now. Both Beck and Grady think he’ll go on from here to extort money from someone else. The difference now is that he’s being watched but doesn’t know it.”
“But what if he comes back and says that he was coerced at gunpoint or something into signing that waiver of his rights?” Stef bit a fingernail, something she hadn’t done since she was in her early teens.
“I think he’d be hard-pressed to prove that with four witnesses who’d testify to the contrary, one a police chief, the other a former FBI agent.” Wade shook his head. “I’m all right with this for now. I have to be all right with it.”
“How can you be sure Hugh really left?”
“Beck was going to have a couple of cruisers follow him all the way to Route 50. I think just seeing a cop car next to you and another one in your rearview would be enough to keep you going for a while.”
“I still don’t trust him.”
“Neither do I, but I’d have agreed to anything to keep Austin safe. The thought of my boy being raised by that bastard makes me sick. I’d never have handed him over, you know that, right? Not even by court order. I would have taken him and run. That was Robin’s biggest fear, but I never believed she had anything to worry about. I never really thought he’d come back.”
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