Sacred Trust

by Meg O'Brien

  “Who was I supposed to trust?” she said simply. From her almost paranoid tone, I realized that this was probably a hangover from her days on the streets. Trust no one in authority.

  In addition, Marti had asked her to simply keep Justin safe until she herself could bring matters to a head.

  “Why did you bring me the photograph, then?” I asked her.

  “I was furious with you—and afraid for Justin, after Marti was murdered. I wanted you to know what you’d done by helping to place him with those people—that father.”

  Driving into Carmel, I realize my body is not doing especially well. I’m still sore all over from that nosedive, though not complaining. If not for Kenpo and a bit of luck, I might have died from a fall like that. All it would have taken was my neck twisting the wrong way when I struck that stone floor.

  So the person who pushed me over probably wanted me out of the way, permanently—not just out of commission for a while.

  Jeffrey? Jeffrey, all this time?

  It’s the only thing that fits. Sending the Ryans away, kidnapping Justin and hiding him out—even reporting to the president about it.

  I recall now that Jeffrey’s been disappearing more than usual these past two months. He claimed to have been traveling back and forth to Washington, but he could just as easily have been in the Santa Cruz mountains, holed up with Justin.

  But when Justin got away from him—then what? Jeffrey must have died a thousand deaths, waiting for Mr. Squeaky-Clean’s son—if that’s who Justin is—to turn up and go to the police. Especially if he thought Justin could identify him.

  But when Justin ran and then didn’t turn up?

  Marti’s son, missing, must have been a sword over his head—a sword that could come crashing down at any moment.

  And to make things worse, Marti must have confronted him. She had to have known, from the legal briefs that were filed, that Paul Ryan was the lawyer handling the suit designed to close The Prayer House and bankrupt Lydia, thus forcing her to sell. It would be only one more step from there to figure out that Paul wasn’t the type to handle anything that dirty without some heavy persuasion—thus, Jeffrey must be holding something over his head.

  What could that be, Marti must have wondered, other than Justin?

  Unless I’ve got Paul figured wrong, and he did it for the money, then chickened out, and was only too happy to disappear to Jeffrey’s little hideaway in Sao Conrado.

  So let’s say Marti confronted Jeffrey, who then got rid of Marti—and last night it was my turn.

  Did Harry Blimm tell him I was on to his little real-estate scam? Was Jeffrey already in the valley killing Rick Stone when I drove to The Prayer House last night?

  And why would he kill Rick Stone? Did the randy Realtor turn on him?

  I can’t know that. But Jeffrey was seen in the area of the real-estate office last night. That certainly put him in the right place to hop on over to The Prayer House and do me in. He wouldn’t even have had to navigate the flooded roads from Carmel.

  With all this in mind, I am more cautious than usual as I approach Windhaven, looking up and down Scenic for Jeffrey’s car in case he’s in the neighborhood watching for my arrival.

  There seem to be only the usual tourists and locals about, either parked in their cars enjoying the scenery, or out walking their dogs. I pull into my driveway and press the garage remote, relieved not to see the Mercedes here, either.

  Taking out my keys, I let myself into the pantry area through the connecting door in the garage. It’s when I enter the kitchen that I sense something is wrong.

  Standing stock-still, I look around, checking. What is it? What’s not like it was before?

  “Murph?” I call out. “Murph, I’m home.”

  No responding patter of feet, and I remember that Frannie picked him up the night before.

  Then I see it—the casement window is open, not shut tight the way I left it, and the bottles I’d lined up on the sill are standing upright on the floor. A sound issues from my office, as if someone is moving about. It’s followed by a click and the sight squeak of my desk chair.

  Picking up one of the wine bottles by its neck, I move quietly down the hall to my office door. The hairs on my arms stand on edge, and I’m wishing I were in better shape. Whoever’s in there can’t be up to any good, or they would have shown themselves when I called for Murphy.

  Karen again?

  No. She wouldn’t have any reason to loot my office.

  Jeffrey, then. He could have parked up on the street above Scenic and walked the rest of the way. Isn’t that what someone would do who planned to kill his wife? He wouldn’t drive up to the scene of the crime in a Mercedes. And he wouldn’t let himself in the front door with his key, in full view of the neighborhood. He’d have come the back way, through the patio.

  By the time I reach my office, the fear is so heavy in the pit of my stomach, I feel ill. With Murph gone, there’s no help there. And if Jeffrey is armed, I won’t be able to get close enough to use my martial arts.

  I stand to the side of the door quietly, listening. Another small squeak of my office chair. I’ll have to do something—no good just standing out here.

  “Who is it?” I say in as firm a voice as I can muster. “Jeffrey? Is that you? I’ve got the cordless, and I’m calling the police.”

  No answer. I remember, too late, that I left the cordless phone on my desk the last time I used it. He knows I’m bluffing.

  I hear the way the chair sounds when someone gets up from it. Footsteps come toward the door. I raise the wine bottle to swing.

  But it isn’t Jeffrey who appears. “Easy, Abby,” says Tommy Lawrence, holding his hands palm out. “Easy.”

  He’s in the hallway now, and I’ve still got the bottle raised. “Move back,” I say, motioning with my head. “Get away from the door.”

  He raises his hands as if I have a gun on him. “Sure, Abby, sure. Hey, it’s okay. I’m harmless.”

  When he’s clear of the doorway, I step into my office. I see now that he’s been at my desk, and my computer is on. I walk to the desk and ease myself around it, still watching the door. Tommy starts to step inside, and I tell him to get back.

  “Do it!” I say when he doesn’t move. He takes a step backward.

  “What the hell have you been doing?” I demand.

  “I…I was waiting for you,” he says. “I’m sorry if I startled you. I thought you might not mind if I signed on as a guest, so I could pick up my e-mail on Yahoo.”

  “Bull!”

  I look at the computer screen. Along the top of the screen is a document name: Dervish. My shock is complete. “You’ve been going through my journals! My personal journals!”

  He has found the way in, breaching the laborious subdirectories I set up to protect my privacy from Jeffrey. The page he’s on is about Marti and my feelings about Justin and the way she gave him up. My disappointment with her decision lies on the page like an accusation, a reminder that I did not always understand.

  When she was alive, that seemed reasonable. Now that she’s gone forever, I feel like a traitor.

  “How could you do this?” I demand. “What right have you to pry into something this private?”

  My dictionary is on the desk, and I don’t remember putting it there. I shove it aside and find hidden beneath it the slim packet of Marti’s letters to me over the years.

  “My God! It was you in the attic—maybe not the day I was up there, but the day Frannie heard something. Just how long have you been in Carmel? And how long were you stalking Marti this time?”

  Tommy pales. “You don’t understand. I wasn’t stalking her, honest to God, I wasn’t. I just still cared about her, and I thought if I could find out more about her, it wouldn’t be like I’d lost her all over again. So, yeah, it was me your housekeeper heard that day. I figured you might have some old letters of Marti’s, and I wasn’t really meaning to break in when I came here, just talk to you. But then
when you weren’t home—”

  “You just thought, oh, well, I might as well let myself in?”

  He flushes. “Something like that, I guess.”

  I am starting to calm down and get my balance back. “You broke into my house,” I say, “and stole private property. I suppose you know that’s against the law.”

  “I was going to give the letters back,” he argues. “That’s why I brought them with me today.”

  “Yeah, right, and while you were at it, you thought you’d just take a little peek into my private files.”

  He gives me that embarrassed, barefoot-boy smile, but it’s not working this time.

  “I don’t know who and what you really are,” I say, “or what you’re doing here. But I don’t want you around anymore. I’m calling the police.”

  I grab the cordless phone from my desk.

  He comes toward me. “No, wait. Abby, you really don’t want to do that.”

  “Like hell. Get away from me!”

  “Abby, put the phone down!”

  I punch in the 911 number with one hand, still holding the bottle with the other, and move back.

  “You’re going to ruin it all,” he says. “Everything I’ve been working for.”

  “I said, get away!”

  He reaches for the phone, and I swing. The bottle glances off the side of his head, but it takes him down for the minute I need to run from the office and yell into the phone that I’ve got an intruder and need help.

  The dispatcher starts to tell me to stay on the line, but by this time the police have already arrived.

  “Well, that was fast,” I say as Ben busts through the front door.

  He stands there puffing and red-faced, as if from running.

  “You know the Carmel P.D.,” he says. “Always on the job. Now where is that sonuvabitch?”

  Arnie, Ben’s partner, has caught Tommy trying to leave by the garage door. He drags him in, handcuffed, reads him his rights and pushes him down on a kitchen chair. Tommy looks sullen, and in fact angrier than one might expect an arrested felon to be. I would have guessed he’d act more cowed, from what I thought I knew of him.

  I stand by the table with my arms folded. “So I guess you two were following me again?” I say. “And when my call came through to dispatch, you were Johnny-on-the-spot.”

  “I hope that’s not a complaint,” Ben says, sinking into a chair. “We get enough complaints without yours, too. Kids in trees, somebody sitting in a car, cats on a roof…”

  “No,” I say. “Not a complaint. But we do need to talk.”

  “How about if we have a little conversation with your visitor first?” he says, looking at Tommy.

  “Be my guest.”

  Ben takes out a small notepad and pencil, but before he starts to write, he reads from the notepad.

  “Okay, let’s begin, Thomas Jefferson Lawrence. This is what we know about you so far. You’re up to your neck in debt and have not been staying at the La Playa at all, but rather pretending to. You make appointments to meet people there in the bar, telling everyone you’re registered there, and even have an arrangement with the desk clerk to take your messages. In reality, though, you’re staying at the Travelodge on Fremont in Monterey. And you’re even about to be kicked out of there for not paying your room rent.” He looks up at Tommy. “Have I got that right so far?”

  Tommy shrugs, but flicks an uneasy glance at me.

  “Point two,” Ben says. “About that debt. You’ve been supporting yourself on credit cards, and they’re about to run out—no thanks to your recent trip to Rio.”

  Ben casts me a look.

  “Okay, so you know everything,” I say, annoyed. “Get on with it.”

  “Point three, you do have the possibility of some rather excellent income in the near future—but only if you turn a certain book in to an interested publisher within the next month. And then, only if it’s approved.”

  I break in at this point. “What book? And why do I have a feeling it’s not one of those thrillers you mentioned writing, Tommy?”

  He just looks at the floor.

  “The book in question,” Ben says, “is true crime. According to his editor, it’s all about the crucifixion and murder of one Marti Bright. It includes, by the way, the reaction of her friends and family. Which explains—”

  “Why he’s been so intent on hanging around me,” I finish for him, “even to the extent of following me all the way to Rio.” I can’t hold back the snort. “Just how much money do you expect to get for this book, Tommy?”

  When he doesn’t answer, Ben says, “Enough to pull himself out of debt for a long, long time. For that matter, enough to have thought this all out way ahead of time.”

  “Meaning?” I say.

  “Well, let’s suppose he had it in for Marti for some reason—like maybe she’s been rejecting him for years. So he kills her out of rage and in a monstrous way that’s guaranteed to bring all the media out of the woodwork. Then he goes to his agent and says he’s an old friend of Marti’s and has an inside track with family and friends. It’s a big story, not every day somebody gets crucified. Especially in a town like Carmel. So his agent negotiates a major deal. Seven figures, a Hollywood movie, all kinds of trash TV…”

  “My God.” I stare at Tommy, at a loss for words. This is something I never would have guessed, not in a million years.

  “I didn’t kill her,” he says obstinately. “I did not kill her.”

  “You might want to hold off on any statements till you’ve got a lawyer,” Arnie suggests, turning a chair around and straddling it.

  “I don’t need a lawyer! I’m telling you, I did not kill her. I loved her!”

  “Love, passion…first and foremost on the list of reasons to kill,” Arnie says.

  “No, I wouldn’t. I never could. Marti was everything to me!”

  Ben looks at me.

  “He was obsessed with her in high school,” I say. “She hardly knew him.”

  Tommy sends me an angry look.

  “It’s true, and you know it. For God’s sake, Tommy, you had to come here to my house looking for letters she wrote! That’s how little you knew about her. And she never gave you a second thought.”

  He doesn’t answer, but I can’t help wondering when tears fill his eyes. What did he really feel for Marti? How deep could it have gone?

  Deep enough that he killed Marti in some mad moment of revenge for not returning those feelings? Is Ben right?

  And did he set it all up beforehand, to get out of debt? Is Tommy Lawrence, when it comes down to it, nothing but a cold-blooded killer?

  “Well,” Ben says, heaving himself up from his chair with a weary sigh, “it doesn’t look like we’re getting anywhere here. Let’s take him in.”

  Arnie stands and pulls Tommy up. Tommy doesn’t resist, but says, “You’re making a big mistake.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Arnie says. “So sue me.”

  “Don’t think I won’t!”

  “Shit, if I had a dime for every perp who’s said that, I’d be rich right now,” Arnie says.

  He turns and looks at Ben, who says, “Go ahead, take him in. I’ll be along.”

  “Hey, Chief,” Arnie says on the way out the door, “you think I could write a book about all this?”

  “If you do, leave me out of it,” Ben says. “And easy on the Chief thing. I’m not there yet.”

  With Arnie and Tommy gone, Ben turns to me. “What do you think?”

  I sit in the nearest chair, as my legs are not supporting me well. “Do you mean, do I think he killed Marti? I don’t know. There’s been something about him from the beginning that didn’t feel right. Too many secrets. But, Ben, what about Jeffrey? I’ve been thinking he must have killed Marti.”

  I tell him finally about the real-estate scam, which makes him mad as hell.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this at The Prayer House when I told you we were after Jeffrey for Rick Stone’s murder?”
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  “I didn’t think of it, dammit. I wasn’t exactly in the best of health, you know.”

  “Even so, if you’d leveled with me about a lot of things from the beginning—”

  I rub my face. “Look, are we really going to argue? Now? You just nabbed Marti’s possible killer, which, if he’s found guilty, will assure your upcoming Chief-dom. Besides, I’m still recovering from last night. I could use a good night’s sleep.”

  He sighs. “Okay, but we still have to talk.”

  “Sure, right. We’ll talk. When?”

  “As soon as I’ve got a minute. First I’ve got to do a formal interrogation with Lawrence back at the station, and then there’ll be reams of paperwork—”

  “See?” I interrupt. “It’s never that easy, is it?”

  “For you and me, you mean?” He takes my shoulders, and I turn away. “Abby…hey, Abby, are you having second thoughts about us?”

  “More like second, third and fourth.” I am, in truth, tired of men running off on me to take care of business.

  Still, at his disconcerted expression, I can’t help softening. “Go, Chief. Go do your thing, lock up your man.”

  “You know I’d stay if I could.”

  “Yeah, sure, wonderful. Go.”

  “Just one thing,” he says, hesitating. “As long as Jeffrey’s running around loose, I’m putting an officer out front. I’ve got a sheriff’s deputy from the task force at my disposal, and I’ll call him from my car. I won’t leave till he shows up.”

  “Fine. I can deal with that.”

  “And, Abby—I want you to be especially careful.”

  “I will. Go. Don’t worry. I can take care of myself.”

  He looks at the open casement window and the bottles on the floor. “Yeah, you’re a regular Jesse James, you are.”

  “Jesse James?”

  “Detective novel I just read. Jessica James, a female crime reporter. You remind me of her.”

  “Really? Anything specific?”

  “Well, the mean mouth, for one thing. And then, there’s that ornery attitude.”