Say No More

by Hank Phillippi Ryan

  Marsh was frowning, too. Why was that? Was Jake not really okay?

  “Jane?” Marsh asked. “Did you tell Brogan about Devane? Who he was? And how you knew?”

  “I told you not to tell anyone.” McCusker shot Marsh a look. “Could have blown our entire case.”

  Were they kidding? Jane’s brain flared into overdrive. This was bull. The terror of the morning, the escape, the results, the exclusive, all circled the drain as the two men questioned her. About her ethics? Her judgment?

  “There was a hostage situation.” Jane kept her tone as courteous as she could. “I knew a police officer was in potential danger. I knew I had information that might help him. And you’re suggesting I should have—that I shouldn’t have—”

  She stopped. She would not defend herself for making a perfectly rational, reasonable, not to mention correct decision. “I did not tell Detective Brogan how I knew who he was.” Jane heard the sarcasm leaking into her voice. “I told him only who he was. Without explaining how I knew it.”

  She paused again in the silence, reining in her anger. Failed.

  “There was hardly time for explaining, was there?” she went on. “What with potentially an entire hospital in danger?”

  Marsh and the DA exchanged looks. Jerks. She should—no. She was not going to quit. They should apologize. They should reward her, actually. No one was going to order Jane to keep quiet when the man she loved—and hell, a whole hospital full of people—was under siege. Not even a news director could believe that would be the right thing to do.

  “We’ll discuss it later,” Marsh finally said. “Maybe it’ll be okay.”

  “But I do have some good news.” McCusker’s tone changed. “Your Rourke Devane turns out to be the weak link. Nobody likes the thought of prison, right? He told us Sholto ordered him to kill Grady by ramming that second Gormay van, figuring everyone would think someone was targeting Gormay, making Grady the unlucky, but random, victim. And—self-preserving paragon that he is—before his lawyers arrived and put legal duct tape over his mouth, Devane told us he also saw Clooney Sholto in Boston the day of his wife’s murder. And the best part—he says he has evidence, something about a complicit housekeeper—he told us that Sholto himself killed Violet.”

  Jane blinked once, twice, then again. She heard the buzz of the lights, the hum of the air conditioner, the stubborn metal hinges of McCusker’s chair creaking as he fidgeted. Rourke Devane had ratted out Clooney Sholto. So what Jane had witnessed on O’Brien Highway—the hit-and-run that had given the lie to a bad guy’s alibi—now maybe it didn’t matter?

  Jane dug into her tote bag. Searching. The second “SAY NO MORE” note. Did she have it? She did. She stood, leaning across the table to hand the note and the envelope—now in a plastic sandwich bag—to Marsh and McCusker.

  “It was in my lobby,” she said. “At my apartment. This one also arrived the day of the hearing. But I didn’t see it until last night.”

  The news director reached for it, but the DA took it, turned it over and back again.

  “Another one, huh? It’s not misspelled, so it wasn’t from Devane,” McCusker said, almost smiling. “But it’s a nail in the coffin for someone, that’s for sure. We’ll make good use of it. Ten years in the state pen, law says, for witness intimidation.” He slid the bagged note into the inside pocket of his suit jacket. Patted it. “Guess you weren’t intimidated, Jane.”

  “But I’m not going to testify, I got that,” she said. They wanted her to keep quiet? Darn right she would. “Marsh, right? Forget about it.”

  “Frank, we’ll have to—” Marsh began.

  “Understood.” McCusker put up both palms, interrupting, accepting. “Bottom line? Doesn’t matter what Jane saw. Sholto’s being arrested even as we speak. Ratted out by his own bigmouthed lackey. And you, Jane? You don’t have to say another word.”

  61

  JAKE BROGAN

  “So you had it wrong,” Willow Galt was telling Jake. She sat in the big chair in the victim room, her husband standing protectively behind her.

  Jake had the folding chair. And his notebook. Finally he was getting the whole story. Almost.

  “Olive Brennis called me,” Willow went on. “And that’s why—”

  “You can understand why we wouldn’t say anything,” her husband added.

  Jake tried to process this. Thought of the hours of concern, the hours of uncertainty, the hours of police work that could have been used to a better purpose if this woman had simply told the truth from moment one. But if he had her pegged right, the word “simply” wasn’t in her vocabulary.

  She’d been on the verge of tears, every moment, as she sat in the same chair her husband had occupied when he, distraught, had reported her missing. Now he stood silent—almost—as she’d revealed what she’d seen but had decided not to tell until now.

  You’ve got company, Ming-Na’s text had pinged on Jake’s phone when he arrived at HQ twenty minutes earlier. The receptionist, thank God, always tried to warn him if there were land mines awaiting him.

  Jake had been trying to call Jane to find out how she was. What the hell had that girl with her been trying to tell him about Trey Welliver before their lives were interrupted?

  Trey was still in custody, some hotshot lawyer apparently en route from Connecticut, and if Trey hadn’t killed Avery Morgan, well, that would be a bridge to cross. But Jane hadn’t answered his calls. He hadn’t left a message, because who knew who might be listening or looking at her screen when she retrieved it—another dilemma in their ongoing charade. Maybe she was on the air? That made sense. Hard to decide which of their lives was crazier.

  Jake had left Grady in the protective custody of Noonan and Palmeri until the cops could staff their own guy as sentinel. Jake had asked for T’shombe Pereira. He’d trust Shom to check on DeLuca, too, though Kat McMahan and a tiny white dog in a clandestine carrier stood sentry in that hospital room. Last update from the doctors was, “It’s still in the balance” and “Detective DeLuca is doing the best we can hope for.”

  Which Jake tried to believe was promising.

  Jake slammed the door of the cruiser and headed to the elevator. Texting Ming-Na as he walked. “Company? Who?”

  “Galts” appeared on his screen. Ming-Na had met Tom Galt when he’d reported Willow missing. Ming-Na was still typing. “And a Tarrant?” appeared on Jake’s screen.

  She didn’t know Tarrant. “10-4,” Jake typed. “Tnx. Stnd by. 2 mins.”

  By the time he reached the squad room, he’d figured out what to do. Nodding to Tarrant, he approached the Galts. As he entered, they’d been on the couch, and then stood, bumping into each other.

  “Come with me.” He’d pointed them toward the victim room. Then he turned to Tarrant. “Five minutes,” he said. He read the impatience on Tarrant’s face before the guy wiped it off.

  “Certainly,” Tarrant told him.

  He’d made Jake wait two days ago. Now the waiting was on the other foot.

  But Jake would never have predicted what he was hearing now. Yes, Willow had seen what happened. But victim Avery Morgan was not an informant. Though they refused to discuss it further, the Galts admitted they were the ones hiding their past. And now, as Willow haltingly explained, those secrets had compelled her to keep another secret. Until her conscience, and her husband, changed her mind.

  “I saw her hit the water,” Willow said, eyes focused behind him, as if a script were written on the wall. “I couldn’t see it all, but then, the dog was barking, I could only see him running, part of the way. Then she—Avery—didn’t get out of the pool. Not that I saw. And then another person was there. A woman, with curly white hair—all I could see, I’m so sorry but that’s all I could see. I didn’t see Avery again. Then I thought, maybe she got out, but I hadn’t seen it. But then, the dog kept barking, and barking, and then…”

  Popcorn. Jake’s gut twisted, remembering. Popcorn, now permanently renamed Rocco, had been officia
lly “relocated” to DeLuca’s house. Witness protection, K-9 version, D had said. Rocco could be there to greet D when he came home. If he came home.

  “It’s fine, Mrs. Galt. Take your time,” Jake said. He had to focus.

  “Willow doesn’t exactly know what happened,” her husband said. “But she did see—”

  “A woman, with curly white hair,” Willow repeated. “I turned away, expecting to see Avery get out of the pool. I knew she didn’t like the water, she’d told me that. She laughed that it was a waste her house had a pool. But she’d fallen in, and I expected…” Tears came to her eyes. “If I’d have called sooner, maybe she could have been rescued.”

  Jake didn’t answer right away. No use to make this woman more miserable than she was. “Drownings happen very quickly,” Jake said. Weak, but all he had. The truth.

  “I know,” Willow said.

  “Would you recognize the woman?” Jake asked. “Do you know who she is?”

  “She doesn’t know,” Tom Galt answered.

  “Mrs. Galt?”

  “Maybe.” She almost whispered the answer. “Maybe I’d recognize her. But I cannot testify. I can’t, I can’t, I—”

  “Detective Brogan.” Tom Galt stepped in front of his wife, as if Jake might yank her away. “As she says, it would be impossible for us to—”

  “Sir?” Jake interrupted. The Galts’ voices had grown more taut, more terrified. He had to stop this escalation of fear. “We’re simply talking now. Okay? Your wife did nothing wrong. So, Mrs. Galt? The woman with white hair. She didn’t help Ms. Morgan?”

  This was a quagmire. A fricking law enforcement morass, where the law was about to get in the way of justice.

  It wasn’t illegal not to help a person in trouble. If a person jumped off a bridge, a bystander wasn’t required to leap in and try to save them. You didn’t—legally—have to yank a suicide off the train tracks. Swim out to rescue a person in a rip current. Or save Avery Morgan from drowning in her backyard pool. It was only a crime if the “bystander” had a duty, like a parent, to help them. Or. If they actively caused the danger. Jake didn’t want to put words in this woman’s mouth. But he had to ask.

  “Willow? Do you know if the woman pushed her? Even in fun?”

  “Am I in trouble for not calling nine-one-one sooner?” she asked.

  Jake knew the answer to that, too, and though it might help the Galts, it wouldn’t help him bring the white-haired woman to justice.

  “No.” Jake shook his head. “In Massachusetts, there’s no legal requirement for most eyewitnesses to report anything but certain specified crimes—murder, attempted murder, armed robbery, rape. And in those cases, you’d be fined, not sent to prison. So again. Did Avery Morgan fall into the pool? Or did the woman push her?”

  EDWARD TARRANT

  Cooling his heels. Waiting for Godot. Stranded in a Kafka novel. Edward, refusing to sit on that disgusting couch in the homicide reception area, might have worn a pathway in the carpet outside the homicide squad’s office by now. He’d passed the time by mentally listing the ways he’d been “disrespected,” as the students often complained. Three times, perhaps more, he’d considered simply leaving this place, abandoning his idea, and allowing law enforcement, such as it was, to fend for its arrogant self.

  But the specter of those harpies—those students, those women, those obsessive hoarders amassing their so-called evidence of his activities—forced him to swallow his pride and self-respect. He had to make this one last move to ensure his continued freedom and autonomy.

  Many, he was certain, had prevailed through worse. Patton, and MacArthur, and Churchill, suffered trials and unfair condemnation, disparagement from a public that did not understand the responsibilities of a leader. That the rules, so simply printed on paper, were not, in real life, as clear-cut as they appeared. That someone, someone with authority and experience, with the heightened knowledge of the exigencies of reality, had to sometimes make a decision that—

  “Mr. Tarrant?” The girl’s voice from the reception desk.

  He masked his impatience. “Yes?”

  “Detective Brogan will see you now.”

  That couple had not emerged, so perhaps there was a back exit. No matter. The receptionist stood, waving him—no respect here whatsoever—to follow her to a door marked only “A.” She opened it to reveal a long metal table. Dingy linoleum floor. A fake plant, leaves dust-coated off-green, listing in one corner. Hardly welcoming, but then, it was most likely frequented by criminals. Of which he was most assuredly not one.

  Detective Jake Brogan, in one of two folding metal chairs, stood as Edward entered. His sidekick, DeBuca, something along those lines, was not to be seen.

  “Thank you for your patience.” Brogan pointed him to the other chair. It screeched across the linoleum, fingernails on chalkboard. “What can I do for you?”

  “It’s what I can do for you,” Tarrant began. “In the matter of Avery Morgan’s death.”

  “I see,” Brogan said.

  “I’ve acquired some new information,” he said.

  “We can use all the help we can get,” Brogan said. “And?”

  “Well, that’s the … quandary,” Edward began. This would be the delicate part. To say enough, but not too much. “That’s the … dilemma, if you will.”

  “I understand ‘quandary,’” Brogan said. “Harvard, Class of 2000.”

  “I see,” Edward said. Brogan did not look as interested as he’d hoped. But the cop would be interested soon. “Let me begin by outlining to you the responsibilities and jurisdiction of a person in my position.”

  He laid out, piece by piece, his role, the students and families who had come to him, the network—he’d chosen the word carefully—of helpful students who’d report to him when they heard about infractions or rule-breaking. “It works, in a way, like your network of confidential informants. They help me, I help them.”

  Edward smiled; they were two of a kind. “A distasteful but necessary part of our lives, correct?”

  “Go on,” Brogan said.

  “Sadly…” Edward took a mental deep breath. This was the moment he had to set the hook. “Sadly, young Trey Welliver was the, shall we say, helper? Who informed me of Avery Morgan’s death. And when you arrested him, I thought that made sense,” he lied. “In a disturbing way, certainly, but made sense. Trey Welliver had—well, I can say no more about that. But suffice it to say he was not the most well-behaved young man, especially when it came to his relationships with young women. In fact, I’d been working with him, and his family, to make sure some questionable … ‘activities’ he’d been involved in with those young women would not come to the attention of the—”

  “Are you covering up rape, Mr. Tarrant?” Brogan’s eyes had narrowed. “As you know, in some circumstances it can be a crime not to report that.”

  “I understand. Completely.” Edward had to get on with this part of his presentation. “But I was not a witness, nor did I have direct knowledge of what really happened. I assure you of that. Which brings me to what I want to tell you.”

  Brogan tapped a toe of his loafer on the linoleum, a pen in one hand and a notebook in the other. “I’m listening,” he said.

  Edward could almost feel the room getting smaller, more oppressive. The tattered beige wallpaper, the wheezing ventilation, the water-stained ceiling. But this was not the moment to be faint of heart.

  “It appears that a few female students have now decided they are unhappy with the way I handled some of their concerns,” Edward said. “But if you and I can discuss those cases, say, together, including a way to ensure that the young women are satisfied with my handling of their … issues…”

  The detective was in full frown now. Maybe he wasn’t used to negotiating, Edward thought. Which meant Edward had better get to the point. Some people would rather one just laid it on the table.

  “Trey Welliver did not kill Avery Morgan,” he said.

  Ha. And th
ere he had him. Brogan’s face changed, certainly. Exactly the reaction he was hoping for.

  “Exactly,” Edward said. “And not only that. The real killer confessed to me. And if we can work something out vis-à-vis my—well, the situation I described? Then I can give you everything you need to know about Ms. Morgan’s death.”

  Brogan nodded, then stood, fiddling with the zipper on his leather jacket, yanking it up, then pulling it down.

  Edward waited. Happy to wait. Happy to let this dullard cop think it through. This could only be good news in the making. So wonderfully ironic that all his admonitions to students to stay silent, keep quiet, say nothing, had brought him to this pivotal moment where he’d saved his own career, his own marriage, his own reputation, his own, yes, life—by telling.

  62

  JAKE BROGAN

  “What young women?” Jake yanked his zipper one last time. Which reminded him of Jane. Which reminded him that the young woman she’d brought to the hospital had indicated exactly the same thing, that Trey Welliver was not guilty of murder. Was she—what was her name?—one of the young women this pompous Tarrant was talking about?

  “I’m sure that’s impossible for me to say.” Tarrant shook his head as he refused. “As you and I first discussed when you came to visit me at Adams Bay, the strictures of privacy prevent me from giving you names.”

  “Ah,” Jake said.

  “But I can give you the name of Avery Morgan’s killer.” Tarrant leaned forward, elbows on pin-striped knees, a gold watch glinting from under his starched cuff. “And I can tell you this, before we even have our … agreement. It isn’t Trey Welliver. You have arrested the wrong man. Embarrassing, no? To have an innocent person in custody? And I can tell you exactly who called you about him.”

  “Funny,” Jake said. This guy was a piece of work. “I was just talking to a person who wondered about their responsibility to tell the police if they know something terrible has happened. And about their responsibility to try to rescue the person, or, if that’s impossible, to report the situation.”