“Alright,” Darren said.
“Also, I think this pretty woman on your hip should come on with me.”
Beside him, Issabella stiffened and said, “Not a chance. I’m staying with Darren.”
Joe smiled at her.
“That’s damn sweet. But this is a big ass house and I don’t know my way around it. Also, I can’t walk for shit. I need someone to lean on and I think the Fletcher boys have a hell of an argument to hash out. So be a doll and help me hobble on out of here.”
As he said it, Joe’s eyes slid over to Darren and his eyebrows rose into arches, as if to say, Are you buying the clue yet, buddy, or do I have to say it out loud?
Darren looked at the gun in Joe’s hand and he understood. The bruised and beaten heap of muscle in front of him had all but spelled it out with the way he resented Luther’s command and the sympathy he’d shown for Darren’s rage: if sides were being chosen, he was somehow on theirs. He was a man with a gun who was trained to use that gun, and he was offering to keep Issabella close to him.
She came to the same conclusion a second before him, because she rolled her eyes and said, “Right. Of course. The protective thing. Got it.”
“Izzy goes where she says she goes. It took a little while for that to penetrate for me, too. We’re partners.”
“Like I said, that’s sweet. But, still.”
Issabella sighed, stepped forward, and slipped her shoulder under Joe’s arm until she was positioned to ease some of his weight off his injured leg. She smiled sardonically at Darren.
“Just so we’re clear, I’m aware of the irony that your saying I do what I want brought me around to doing what you want.”
“Is that ironic?”
“I don’t know. I always use that word wrong.”
“Everybody does. Maybe that’s ironic.”
“Ooh. I like that.”
Joe looked from him to her and back again, his face growing more incredulous each time.
“You two done?”
Darren stepped aside to allow them through the doorway. As Issabella passed he whispered, “Just the front door and back. Right?”
“Right,” she agreed and disappeared out the door.
Darren stared down the length of the room at his brother.
“Is James Klodd here?”
“That dead man on top confirmed he was during an earlier phone conversation, yes. From the way he spoke, I suspect Reginald Chalmers the Third is locked inside a secure room somewhere in the house.”
“The Senator?”
“No. The Senator’s only son, Darren.”
There was a chair near the library window. Darren walked over, picked it up, and carried it over to the other side of the desk from Luther. He sat down. There was nothing on the desk between them but a landline phone, a large, hardbound dictionary, and a glass ashtray that looked to have never been used.
None of it interested him, so he looked at his brother.
Sometime during Darren’s exchange with Joe, Luther had taken on a calm and stoic demeanor. Darren felt himself sneering. His brother was retreating into his most comfortable role—the passionless executive behind his desk.
He didn’t want Luther calm or confident, so Darren pulled Gil Sharps’s gun out of his pocket and held it loosely in his lap. He watched Luther’s eyes widen and saw the doubt his brother had been hiding rise to the surface.
“Time to come clean, brother,” Darren said.
* * *
Once they were around a corner and headed down the hallway that lead to the foyer, Issabella felt Joe Link pull away from her. He continued to limp, but only slightly.
“So, that was a lie,” she said.
“Aw, maybe just a fib.”
“Then why did you want me to come with you?”
“Just a hunch. I thought maybe if your man was alone with Luther he’d have a better chance of getting the truth out of him. Luther’s first instinct is deception. One set of ears instead of three might get around to honesty quicker.”
They stepped into the foyer and Joe stuck his gun in her hand.
“Be a sweetheart and hold that a sec,” he said and grabbed both of the door handles. He pulled and neither door budged in the least. Joe positioned his feet further apart and this time heaved on the doors. Again, it earned him nothing.
“Well, that’s what I thought,” he said. “Of course, it begs a knotty little question, don’t it?”
Still alarmed at having a gun shoved into her hands, Issabella nevertheless knew the answer to that question as soon as it was spoken.
“Who unlocked the door?” she said. “And who opened the front gate before that?”
“Yup.”
“I think I wanted to say thank you.”
“Okay. You want to keep that?”
She looked at the gun, then at him.
“No. I don’t like them,” she said and handed it back to him.
“Thank me for what?”
“I remember you,” she explained. “Darren and I were down in Saint Lucia two years ago. You were wearing an obnoxious Hawaiian shirt and leering at every girl around the pool. Darren pretended to want to go take a walk by himself. As soon as he left, you got up and followed him. The next day, I’m pretty sure he burned down the house my father was hiding in.”
Joe took it all in stride, his expression never betraying surprise. He didn’t bluster out a denial. Instead he scratched at his chin and said, “Those pool girls were practically naked. A guy shouldn’t have to apologize for staring when the dress code is dental floss and nail polish. Just my two cents.”
“Not really the point,” she said.
“He didn’t kill your old man, if that’s what you’ve been thinking.”
“I know that. Darren’s not capable of murder. I wouldn’t have suggested we come here if I thought he was. Anyway, when I saw you in the library it all kind of came back to me. Darren must have asked you to locate my father, right?”
“Yeah. The same night he got free from your Dad’s pal, the nut job who tried to kill him. He asked would I use the Fletcher Group’s resources to find out where your Daddy ran off to with Darren’s money. Luther told me it was fine, so I did it. Why? Does your man know you figured all this out?”
Issabella felt herself smile and she shook her head.
“God, no. It’s that protective thing again. I think he felt it was his duty to make sure my Dad couldn’t ever come back and bother me again, but he doesn’t want me to know he went to those lengths. That’s fine. I’m fine with that. I just needed to confirm it with you.”
Joe looked skeptical.
“You think it’s romantic he shot your old man in the knee and burned his house down?”
“He shot him?”
“Oops.”
“I didn’t know he shot him!”
Joe held his palms up in the air and stammered, “Hey...slow down...look, I shouldn’t have said that.”
Shot him? Darren? She’d seen him brandish a gun only once, and in that instance it had been empty of bullets, a hollow prop meant to gauge a killer’s real nature. The thought of Darren actually shooting someone, never mind if it was her wretched and deserving father, had never occurred to her. He was a man who’d chosen to spend his life defending people in court.
But even as she thought it, a whisper of skepticism crept in.
Not always court. Darren’s never seen court as anything more than an option. If he thinks he can get better results outside of it, he doesn’t hesitate to do so, does he? How many degrees of separation are there between the willingness to burn a man’s house to the ground and the capacity to shoot a man? Not many, if any at all.
Even so, she found it difficult to imagine him pointing a firearm at
another human being and pulling the trigger.
“You know what,” Joe urged. “Let’s table that. Let’s just put that on a back burner and focus on what’s important right now.”
Issabella heard the words, and knew they made sense. She was trapped in a house where two men had already been killed.
“Where’s James Klodd?” she said. “That’s question number one, I think. Where is he and how do we get out of here?”
Behind her, footfalls sounded softly down the hallway. A wave of fear crashed through her and as she turned, she had the awful certainty that James Klodd would appear in the foyer. She saw the mismatched eyes of the photograph in Gil Sharps’s suitcase, the wild beard and dead stare. She ground her teeth down and had no real idea what she would do if the child killer materialized.
Instead, a small, short-haired woman in a man’s suit appeared.
Carmen, Issabella thought. With Joe. She’s with Joe.
“Who’s this?” the woman said.
“Luther’s brother’s partner. Don’t make me explain it right now. Issabella, Carmen. Carmen, Issabella. What’d you find out?”
“No easy egress points,” Carmen said.
“So we’re stuck.”
“For now. Also, every room has an intercom plate somewhere inside it. One floor up is a surveillance room. Right now, it’s broadcasting the library. John Krane was watching us and listening to us the whole time you were explaining how you came to be here and how you meant to beat him to death.”
Joe smirked and let out a weary sigh.
“I guess that’s your way of saying this is my fault.”
Carmen arched a brow and said, “No. I think Dick is dead and we’re trapped here because of Luther. He doesn’t trust his people with the truth. If he’d briefed us properly, I wouldn’t have agreed to any of this. If he’d briefed you, you never would have been taken hostage and Gil would still be alive.”
Issabella started at the mention of Gil’s name.
“You know who killed Gil Sharps?” she said.
“Hold on,” Joe rasped as if all the air had been knocked out of him. “Gil ain’t dead. What the hell are you saying?”
Carmen showed no reaction in the face of their excitement and Issabella thought the slight, olive-skinned woman seemed utterly implacable.
“I wasn’t certain until Issabella just confirmed it,” Carmen answered. “So, yes, Gil is dead. He was sent to Detroit when you went missing and then he, in turn, went missing last night.” She turned to Issabella and added, “I assume John Krane killed him. But, again, I haven’t been told the truth about much of this.”
Issabella’s hope for an easy answer to Theresa’s legal plight soured in her chest and a dreadful suspicion returned. She had been carrying it with her ever since opening the file inside Gil’s suitcase. That unthinkable and depressing suspicion had prompted her to tell Darren she didn’t want to be a lawyer anymore, but not to tell him why. She’d kept it to herself ever since, for fear of speaking it aloud and somehow making it true by doing so.
“Alright,” she said. “We have to go force the truth out of Luther. We have to find James Klodd and turn him over to the authorities. And we have to figure out who killed Gil Sharps because a very good friend of mine is going to prison if we don’t.”
She looked at Joe for confirmation, and found it there in his brooding stare. He was agreed. When she looked at Carmen again, the woman was still placid, still unreadable.
“You should follow me,” Carmen said. “I know where to find James Klodd.”
Chapter Fifteen
“You kept getting tangled in my business,” Luther said, an accusation. “Like some bad penny that you’d toss away, only to find it in your pocket again the next day. When I learned you were associated with that business on Lake Erie last year, I decided to stop ignoring you, Darren. So I sent Joe to keep tabs on you. While you tried to get every agency in the country to join your goddamned quest to see me ruined, Joe was watching.”
Luther’s lip curled around the word quest, and Darren was reminded how contemptuously his brother’s letter had dismissed his attempts to bring the Fletcher Group to justice.
“Joe would find out who I was contacting,” Darren said. “He’d relay it to you and the Fletcher Group would make sure to quash any investigation before it could get started. Is that it?”
“In the proverbial nutshell.”
“And Gil Sharps? He was following me, too?”
“I thought you had his work materials.”
“I do. I have records of bank accounts and the names attached to them. I have his laptop. I have his gun, but you can see that for yourself.”
“You aren’t going to shoot me, Darren.”
Darren felt himself smile.
“The way I feel, I don’t know what I’m going to do, Luther.”
“If you have what you say you have, then you know Gil wasn’t here to follow you. He was conducting business and he was looking for Joe.”
“Why? Why was he looking for Joe? What does any of this have to do with James Klodd?”
Luther seemed to consider the last question, and his face grew long and somber. His eyes pulled away from Darren’s, as if he couldn’t look at him and confront the answer at the same time.
“Luther...”
“A drink,” his brother said, and stood up. On the wall to his left, amid the rows of books, was a shelf that contained liquor bottles and drinking glasses. Luther began picking through the bottles, finally selecting what Darren recognized as a particularly high-end whiskey.
Luther poured two glasses. When he sat, he set one of them in front of Darren and took a sip from his own. He swallowed and a wry smile replaced some of the weariness on his face.
“When was the last time we shared a drink? I can’t even recall.”
“When I passed the bar,” Darren answered. “You bought us dinner at the Lion’s Head. You told me we’d run the Fletcher Group as equals and keep the family business strong. I told you I despised the family business and was moving to Detroit to be a defender. You called me...what was it?”
“A juvenile tragedy.”
“That’s right. Then you walked out. So I had three more drinks on your tab and tipped the waitress four hundred dollars.”
Luther’s eyes widened just a bit and they stared at one another in silence. Then he laughed and shook his head.
“I didn’t know that. I never check the charges.”
“You’ve been hiding James Klodd all this time.”
“No,” Luther said. He set his glass down and looked Darren squarely in the eye, seemingly bolstered by the whiskey. “There is no Klodd. There’s only Reginald Chalmers the Third. The Senator’s son. A severely broken boy who’d been committing severely disturbing acts from a young age. Acts that would forever keep him from any sort of public office. At some point his father admitted to himself that his heir would never step into his shoes. So his father used his sway to try and build a suitable life for his son. A new identity was forged, one distinctly free of past blemishes. A suitably educated and upstanding identity. James Klodd.”
Darren stood up and paced away from the desk. His mind was suddenly running in a frenetic gear and he could not stand to be still.
“Put the gun away, Darren. I plan to tell you what you think you want to know.”
“Fingerprints,” Darren said. “University transcripts. Credit history. Luther, he was charged with kidnapping. They combed over every inch of—”
“Old fingerprint records from his youthful indiscretions were expunged. Transcripts bought. Credit dummied. You can’t be this naïve, Darren. Do you think there is some limit to deceit if there is no limit to the money buying it? Reginald Chalmers was erased so James Klodd could fill the cutout left behind. A des
perate hope of an old man. If he could create a new identity and force his son into it, maybe his horrific compulsions would not follow. Maybe he would learn to be a middling university lecturer, an average and unremarkable citizen content and free of revolting appetites.”
Darren stared out the window at the blanketing darkness of evening.
“That’s insane. Sickness like that doesn’t just get turned off.”
“Of course not. But a father can be forgiven false hope, I suppose.”
“Not this one.”
“Darren, come sit down. It’s time to talk about a way out. For both of us.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Neither of us needs to walk away with less than we want,” Luther pressed, and Darren saw then that his brother had truly become an expert dealmaker. It was in his easy assurance, the confident way he offered a result that would please all parties.
Darren turned away from the window and sat back down in his chair. He reached out and picked up the glass of whiskey.
“What we both want?”
“Exactly,” Luther said and settled loosely back in his chair, appearing comfortable now that they were on some sort of common ground. A grin touched his lips and he folded his hands over his stomach while he watched Darren raise the rim of the glass to his mouth.
Darren paused, then slowly straightened his arm out to the side and poured the whiskey onto the library’s carpet. He let the empty glass fall and smiled when it made a low thumping sound.
“What I want is for Shoshanna Green to be alive,” he said. “But that’s impossible. So I’ll settle for you and the Senator and his deplorable spawn to all rot in prison cells until you’re bald, blind and insane. What do you think? Does that work for you, too?”
Luther’s calm shattered and his cheeks flushed red with rage. He stabbed a finger at Darren and shouted, “I was protecting you! If I’d left his case in your hands—if you’d failed Reginald in even the slightest measure—you’d be dead. I didn’t save that girl’s killer, Darren. I saved you.”
A pernicious feeling wriggled to the fore of Darren’s mind. It had been there, unformed and indistinct, ever since Issabella had handed him the lists of names and bank accounts. Not so much a suspicion, only an undifferentiated sense of dread. He hadn’t poked at it. He’d left it alone and barreled ahead, to this moment.
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