Harper Ross Legal Thrillers vol. 1-3

by Rachel Sinclair

  Axel walked over to me. “Okay, lass, finish your thought here. Why does that matter?”

  “Because, Axel, Father Mathews told me that he never met Jack. He told me that. Now, how did Mick know that Father Mathews had tattoos or if he was hot if the two of them never met? I mean, Mick was right on both fronts – that priest is very good-looking and he does have two arms filled with tattoos. He does. Either Mick is a darned good guesser, and I don’t know how that’s possible, because I wouldn’t imagine that many priests have a lot of tattoos, or he actually did know Father Mathews and Father Mathews lied about knowing him.”

  I nodded my head. “Why would he lie about that? Why?”

  “Now, lass,” Axel said. “Slow down before you try to go over and accuse Father Mathews of killing Father Kennedy. You don’t have a motive for him. Even if Father Kennedy confessed to him, Father Mathews, that he knew that Jackson was murdering children, I hardly think that this would be reason enough for Father Mathews to off Father Kennedy. Think logically.”

  “No, maybe not, but I would like to know why he would lie about not knowing Jack. Not meeting him when he clearly did.”

  I grinded my teeth, which was a bad habit I tended to have when I was under a lot of stress. “There’s a missing puzzle piece,” I said. “And I’m going to have to figure out just what it is.”

  DESPITE WHAT AXEL had warned me about not going over and harassing Father Mathews, I decided to do just that. I showed up at the church service on Sunday, and after the service, I asked if I could speak with him.

  “Sure,” he said. “I have time to speak with you. If you would follow me back to my office after I greet my other congregants, I’ll be happy to talk to you about anything you need to know. I want to find Kelly’s killer as much as you do.”

  I grimaced, wondering if that were true.

  And then immediately felt guilty that I was questioning him.

  AFTER FATHER MATHEWS finished greeting the congregants, I followed him to his office and sat down. “Now,” he said. “Ms. Ross, what questions can I answer for you?”

  I took a deep breath. “Father Kennedy. Did he do any confessions of his own?”

  He nodded. “Yes, of course. Father Kennedy confessed his sins on a regular basis. I do as well, so does every priest I know. We all do. Why do you ask that question?”

  I bit my lower lip. “Okay. Then who does he confess to?”

  “That’s privileged.”

  “No, actually, it’s not. The content of his confessionals are privileged, but it’s not privileged to answer the question about who he actually confesses to.” I crossed my arms. “Please tell me who Father Kennedy confessed to.”

  Father Mathews suddenly looked troubled. “Kelly confessed his sins regularly to me.” He looked down at the floor. “But I cannot tell you the contents of these confessions, of course.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you about the contents. I think, however, I already know what they are.”

  He nodded his head. “You do.” That was a statement, as opposed to a question, so I didn’t feel that I needed to elaborate further.

  “Yes. Now, I need to ask you another question. Why did you say that you never met Jack Calhoun, or Mick Calhoun, when you certainly have met him before?”

  He shook his head. “Because I never met him. I told you I never met him, and I can tell you that I have never met him.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Then why did Mick tell me that he thought that you were good-looking and how did he know that you had tattoos?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “How would I know why he would say those things? Maybe he came to one of our games and somebody pointed me out to him. Who knows? I stand out like a sore thumb at our basketball games because I’m a priest with a lot of tats.” He was staring at me, and I was trying to assess if he was telling me the truth.

  It seemed that maybe he was.

  I nodded my head slowly. Was my theory crumbling before my very eyes? No, it wasn’t. I was just going to have to find the missing puzzle piece. That was what I always did. Theories rarely come together like a recipe out of one of my celebrity cookbooks. There was always a variable that I would overlook, but, if I looked hard enough, I would find it.

  It was then that I saw, over Father Mathews’ shoulder, a picture. It was three young boys. They all looked about the same age. All good-looking kids with dark hair and dark eyes, and they all looked like they were about five years old. Maybe six. They were standing by the side of a creek, and one of the boys had a fish on a pole in front of him.

  I furrowed my brow. “Is that you? When you were a young kid?”

  “Yes,” he said, handing me the picture. “This is me.” He pointed to the kid the furthest to the left. “And this my brother Ryan and my other brother Raymond. You met Raymond. Raymond and Ryan were identical twins.”

  I nodded my head. “You guys were cuties.”

  “Yes. Thanks.” He smiled. “Well, is there anything else I can help you with? I hope that I answered all your questions.”

  I looked out his window at the birds who were eating on the little patio right outside his office. “Sure,” I said uncertainly.

  I walked out the door, went down the hallway and stopped and turned around.

  Dammit. I was going to ask him another question, but it escaped me.

  I uncertainly went back down the hallway and went out the door and found my car.

  Did I find out anything more from Father Mathews? Something that would help me solve this case?

  Or was that just one more dead-end?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  A few nights later, it hit me. I was right in the middle of watching a movie with the two girls, relieved that, for the time being, everything seemed to be going smoothly. Rina was in the middle of an extended period where she didn’t seem to hate me every other day, and Abby was happier than ever. As Rina told me, Abby was enjoying newfound popularity after this whole rumor stink was revealed to be a big hoax. And, of course, James’ status had plummeted. Both of these developments seemed to make Abby a happy girl.

  “Is it bad that I’m happy that James is unpopular now?” Abby asked me while she helped me put the dishes away in the dishwasher after supper.

  I chuckled lightly. “No. The adults have a word for what you’re feeling – schadenfreude. But you might also learn the word Karma – what goes around, comes around.”

  Abby laughed. “What was that first word you said? I think that I’ve heard the word Karma, but I’ve never heard the word schada-“ She grasped for the word. “Schaden…”

  “Schadenfreude. Basically, it’s when you’re happy that somebody else is miserable. Usually because that somebody else, who is miserable, is not such a great person. So, go ahead and be happy that James is miserable, because, in this case, that misery that he’s feeling is richly deserved.”

  She nodded her head. “What language is that?”

  “German.”

  “I’ll have to look that up.”

  I wrote the word down on a piece of paper and she studied it. “Thanks, mom,” she said. “Now I don’t have to feel bad because I feel happy that James is unpopular.”

  Rina came into the kitchen after hearing our conversation. “James is a tool,” she said. “And that, Abby, is all you need to know. Tools aren’t popular in our school for very long, just because kids don’t like a liar. And he made himself look like such an idiot by lying about you like that. Just imagine if he would have put that stuff on Facebook about you.” Rina shook her head. “I would have had to gone ninja on him.”

  “Do you want to help us clean up the kitchen?” I asked Rina, knowing the answer to that question. It wasn’t Rina’s turn to help clean up, so she wasn’t going to help.

  “Nah,” she said. “It’s my turn tomorrow. I just wanted to come in and tell you what I think.”

  After she left, Abby said, in a low voice, that “Rina is actually really mad at James, too. She’s pa
rt of the reason why everybody hates him. Rina is one of the popular kids, and she told all her friends to hate on James because of what he did. What she says pretty much goes.”

  That worried me. I didn’t want Rina to be a dominant mean girl, but it seemed that she maybe was. “What other things does Rina tell her friends to do?”

  Abby shrugged. “Not much. I mean, she doesn’t want geeks to be picked on, because I’m kinda a geek. And she always sticks up for kids who are special needs. She never lets those kids get picked on.”

  “What about gay kids? And trans kids?”

  “What about them? Nobody cares if a kid is gay anymore or trans. I told you that before.”

  “Okay. You did. I was just checking.” I cleaned the counter. “Now, if Rina changes, if she starts picking on kids for no reason, and she gets her friends to do the same, you’ll tell me, right?”

  She shrugged. “I guess, but she doesn’t do that.”

  “Good.” I examined the kitchen. “Well, it looks like it’s pretty clean, now. The dishes are all done and the counters are clean. You can go and do whatever it is that you have to do, homework-wise, and get Rina to do the same, then you can both have free time. I, however, have to go upstairs and do some research.”

  “What kind of research?”

  “It’s just something that I’m following up on. I have another one of my hunches. Or maybe it’s not even a hunch. It might be something that my brain is trying to piece together from some of the clues that I’ve come up with.”

  Abby gave me a look that showed me that she had no clue what I was talking about, and I knew why – I was rambling on like a loon. I knew that.

  That was just fine, though. My brain was scrambled like an egg, but I knew that I was getting close to showing that somebody else killed that priest.

  I went upstairs to my computer. When I was washing dishes, something struck me. Something that Father Mathews had said to me was suddenly flashing like a neon light.

  He told me that Ryan and Raymond were twins.

  Were. Past tense.

  I had no idea why it was that I didn’t pick up on that right away, but, somehow, I didn’t. I kicked myself for not picking up on that, because I needed to follow up on it.

  Or maybe I didn’t.

  I accessed the news articles about Steven Heaney, feeling guilty and bad knowing that the actual Steven Heaney had nothing to do with these murders. It was wrong, however, that everybody thought that he was serial killer. I hated that, because Steven was not only kind, but he helped me immensely.

  I looked through the newspaper articles, looking for the one that recounted the victims of Jackson Heaney. There were several articles, spread out over a period of seven days, and each of these articles did an in-depth profile of five victims. It made me sick, knowing that there were 35 different victims that were known to have been murdered by Jackson.

  35 young lives who were no longer on this earth, just because one crazy guy decided that he was going to snuff out their lives. I shuddered as I thought about how they must have suffered. I knew how much Jack had suffered, and I knew that these kids must have suffered just as much.

  I read about them, one by one, my heart breaking with every word. They were kids who were typical for that particular time – this was an era of relative innocence. Kids walked home from school, because parents didn’t worry about them being snatched off the streets. They played kickball in front of their homes. They climbed trees and explored the woods. Kids of today didn’t know the joys that these kids knew – the joys of having fun by being free. They weren’t necessarily going to organized sports like soccer and baseball. Their every minute weren’t tightly scheduled like the kids of today.

  But these kids, these 35 children, paid for that freedom with their lives. It was ironic, really – serial killers weren’t a thing back then, at least, they weren’t called by the word “serial killer,” so the parents felt safer letting their kids be kids. These parents couldn’t have known that a predator like Jackson was lurking.

  I closed my eyes and tried to get into these parents’ heads. What was it like to have your child go missing? What was it like to find out that his or her bones were found in this old house? And when the stories hit the paper – the stories that were found out about what this monster did to these kids – how would you react? The parents had to have been devastated beyond measure. Their families were probably never the same. There was a hole that was left in the middle of these families, a hole that would never be filled.

  I couldn’t imagine what these families went through. My mother knew. Her family went through that, but her family was lucky. Uncle Jack made it home whole, but not well.

  But these other families weren’t that lucky.

  I went down the hall to see Rina and Abby. I looked in on both of them in their rooms. Rina was talking to somebody on her cell phone. She rolled her eyes when I went into her room, so I walked out and went down to Abby’s room and knocked. She opened the door, and I gathered that she was reading a book on her bed.

  “What’s going on, mom?” She asked me.

  “Nothing, nothing.” I shook my head. “I just wanted to tell you that I love you.”

  She smiled. “I love you too.”

  As I walked away from her room, I realized that I wanted to tell Rina and Abby both that I loved them, because I thought about all those parents who didn’t get that chance with their kids. These parents never dreamed that their kids wouldn’t make it home that evening from school. They never dreamed that they would let their kids out of the house to play kickball, only to be searching for them frantically hours later. That thought must have never crossed their minds.

  Did they get into a fight with their kids the day the kids disappeared? Did they say something that they never got the chance to take back? I had a friend once who had a fight with her mother and wasn’t on speaking terms with her for months. Her mother died before the two could make amends, and that haunted my friend for years. The guilt feelings, the lack of closure…I never wanted to feel that way with my girls.

  And I knew one thing – if anybody ever hurt either one of them, I would hurt that person.

  And if anybody ever killed either one of them, then I would kill that person.

  I went back into my office and looked through the newspaper article, until I settled on the profile that I was looking for.

  Ryan Mathews.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  “Ryan Mathews,” read the article, “was only 5 years old when he was taken from a playground in Mid-Town. He had an identical twin, Raymond, and a younger brother, Kenneth. Ryan was a precocious child who was known by others as being very inquisitive and verbal, with a sunny disposition and a ready smile. His mother, Colleen, said that Ryan was a child that was what she considered to be ‘easy,’ due to his mild temperament and readiness to share. The Mathews live on a tree-lined street in Hyde Park, and Colleen stated that she wished that she could have seen Ryan climb some of those trees and just be a kid. His father, Thomas, did not comment for this interview and it was said that he was no longer living at the home. ‘You don’t know what a tragedy like this can do to a family,’ Colleen said. ‘It will either tear you apart or bring you together. In our case, it tore us apart. Thomas has not been able to look at our other two boys without thinking about Ryan, and it’s especially difficult as they really look like triplets.’”

  I read on about the family and how devastated they were and I knew.

  I didn’t think that Father Mathews was the culprit. He seemed too genuine in his willingness to help. I didn’t see any stonewalling whatsoever from him. He seemed open and honest and eager to give me any kind of information I was seeking.

  No, I was going to have to go another way with this.

  I WENT to see Mick the next day. I wanted to find out what he knew about Raymond and Father Mathews, and see what he meant when he talked about Father Mathews’ tattoos and how he knew about them.

&n
bsp; “Hello, doll,” he said to me as I approached the house. He was, once again, sitting on the front porch, a cocktail on the little table in front of him. “Claire is finally allowing me cocktails,” he said. “Hallelujah!”

  I had to laugh just a little. “Okay,” I said as I sat down. “I need to ask you some questions.”

  “Shoot,” he said. “Go ahead, ask away. Ask away.” He took another sip of his martini, which was in a martini glass with three olives. “Dirty martini,” he said. “And I like these martinis like I like my men. Dirty, dirty, dirty.” He chuckled.

  “That’s great, Mick,” I said. “Listen, you said something to me the other day when I was taking you to court. I don’t know if you remember saying it, and I barely remember it. I mean, it didn’t register with me at all when I heard it, but then it suddenly hit me that you said it.”

  “Don’t you hate it when that happens?” Mick asked me. “It’s right there on the tip of your tongue, and you just can’t think of it. Then you sit up in bed, right before you go to sleep, and you shout out whatever it is you were trying to think about earlier.” He shook his head. “Happens to me all the time, love.”

  “Yes, I hate that,” I said impatiently. “But you said that you thought that Father Mathews was hot and you loved his tattoos. I don’t know why that didn’t register with me at the time. I guess because I was so upset about us running late. I need to ask you when you saw Father Mathews and how you know about his tattoos.”

  Mick smiled. “Oh, wouldn’t you like to know?”

  “Don’t play coy with me. I need to know. How did you know about Father Mathews’ tattoos?”

  “I seen him playing basketball,” he said. “Talk about a silver fox. The man is fifty years old and he has the body of somebody half his age. Imma go all Thornbirds on his ass.”

  “Great, great, great, but since when do you like basketball?”

  “Since I saw Father Mathews in shorts, that’s when.”