“The trust was set up by Roman’s father, would be my guess,” I said.
Or maybe it was blood money. Or both.
From outside came the sound of approaching sirens. “Cavalry’s here,” Phillips said and disappeared back into the hall.
The second room Clyde and I entered must have been Raya’s. It held plain pine furniture—a single twin bed, dresser, nightstand, and a child-size desk. Movie posters were thumbtacked to the wall along with pictures of Meryl Streep, Jack Nicholson, and Jodie Foster. There was a framed photo of Raya as Guinevere in Camelot.
And on the desk was a single sheet of paper, once creased but now spread smooth, with a chunk of fool’s gold glittering in the center.
A California birth certificate for Roman Quinn.
He had been born in February of 1979 in the city of Los Angeles to an eighteen-year-old Raya Quinn. The place for the father’s name had been blank. But in slashing black ink, the pen pressing down hard enough on the paper to have punched through in places, someone had written in a name.
Hiram Davenport.
I should have been surprised. But by this point I was so desperate to find Lucy, I was more relieved than anything. The pieces were starting to collide.
The bastard, I thought. Pretending to know nothing of Raya. A picture began to form of a lost child realizing just how much he’d lost. A picture of grief and jealousy and rage. A father who wanted nothing to do with his son. A half brother who got all the love, a job, and a fancy office. Maybe that was why Roman had tried to destroy Ben—to punish him for having what Roman longed for.
I took out the gloves I’d grabbed from the truck when we first arrived and snapped them on. Underneath the birth certificate was a stack of five eight-by-ten photographs. I spread the pictures out on the desk.
All of the photos looked recent. They were casual, unposed. In all but two, the subject of the shot appeared unaware that he was having his picture taken.
The first showed Hiram Davenport in a suit, entering a bank or office building. The next was of Hiram and Ben together at a swank restaurant, the white-clothed table sparkling with silver and crystal, a dark-paneled wall beyond them. The third had been taken while Ben Davenport stood outside the door of the Colorado Historical Society, his tall body caught in a casual stretch, his eyes squinting into the sun, as if he’d just stepped outside to get some air.
In each picture, the subjects’ eyes had been slashed with a razor.
The fourth picture showed Samantha Davenport in her studio. She sat cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by giant flower pots that I recognized from her website. She wore blue jeans and a sleeveless white blouse and was looking at someone who stood off-camera. The camera had caught her laughing, her mouth open wide, her head tilted back and her throat exposed. It was a gesture that was both confident and vulnerable. She had her right hand up, beckoning to someone. A child, maybe—Samantha’s posture made me think she was showing her subject how she wanted him to pose.
An X had been slashed across her throat.
I flipped the picture over. At the top, someone had written, TO JACK, YOU’RE THE BEST. XO, SAM
Beneath that, written in a very different hand, were the words, IF I CANNOT AROUSE LOVE, I WILL DESTROY IT.
The final picture was of a man standing in front of the kilns at the Edison Cement factory. He had dark hair and eyes as cold and pale blue as arctic ice. Hiram Davenport at thirty years old. Only it wasn’t. Bleach the hair and add green contact lenses, and I’d seen this man just yesterday, standing near the overpass at Potters Road, holding a book of poetry.
“Jack Hurley,” I said aloud. “Samantha’s assistant.”
Clyde heard the urgency in my voice and scrambled to his feet.
“Jack Hurley is our killer.”
CHAPTER 25
All of us are bruised in places no one can see.
—Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.
I ran down the hall to Esta’s room. The paramedics were tending to Esta, and Mac had stepped into the hall to give them room. Through the windows on the other side of the house, the lights of emergency vehicles strobed against the glass.
I touched Mac’s arm as Clyde and I hurried past.
“Let’s go!” I told her. “I’ll explain on the way.”
I punched in Cohen’s number as we went down the stairs and left him a message to call me ASAP. He was out-of-pocket somewhere. My calls were piling up like cops on free-donut day.
Through the front door I saw an ambulance idling, its rear doors open. The yard was filled with Weld and Adams County law enforcement vehicles. Deputies from both counties worked around the house or talked on their radios. A crime scene van was just pulling in as Clyde and I ran outside, Mac right behind us. I found Phillips and told him that we had to head back to Denver, and asked him to be in touch with whatever he found.
“There are photographs and a birth certificate on the desk in the boy’s room upstairs,” I said. “I need to know as soon as you get those fingerprinted.”
“Will do. Pleasure meeting you.” He nodded at both of us. “Come back anytime. This is the most excitement we’ve had around here.”
As I drove, I filled Mac in on what I’d found in Roman’s bedroom. The birth certificate, the photographs of Hiram, Ben, Samantha, and Roman.
“The photo of Samantha was taken in her studio. I recognized it from her website. On the back, she’d signed it to Jack. Below that was another quote, written by someone else. ‘If I cannot arouse love, I will destroy it.’”
“That sounds like our killer.”
“There was another photograph. One of Roman at the cement factory. He looks just like his father, in case we still had doubts about his paternity. But here’s the real knife to the heart. Roman is Samantha’s assistant, Jack Hurley.”
Mac grabbed the oh-shit bar as I went around a tight curve. “He was with them all that time?”
“Keep your enemies close. What I still don’t understand is what made Roman decide to go after the Davenports now. What was the catalyst?”
“I think I can answer that one. Lancing Tate.”
I braked as I entered another curve, then accelerated. “What?”
Mac shot me a triumphant look. “Esta told me a lot while I was sitting with her.”
I was pushing the speed limit, the truck slopping through the mud. I kept a wary eye out for any deer or pronghorn that might come leaping out of the cornfields.
“Go on,” I said.
“According to Esta, Lancing Tate visited her five months ago. He told her that after his father’s stroke, he’d been going through Alfred’s papers and found a journal.”
“And?”
“And what Alfred wrote in his journal suggests that Hiram murdered Raya.”
“What do you mean, ‘suggests’?”
“From what Lancing told Esta, the journal wasn’t definitive. Alfred was suspicious of Hiram, but not certain. He knew about Hiram and Raya’s affair and he wrote that Hiram sent Raya to LA to have an abortion, which clearly she didn’t do. Alfred claims that the night she died, he saw Hiram drive away from the scene just as he was approaching it. Then, forty-five minutes later, Hiram arrived again, pretending it was for the first time.”
“Maybe Alfred Tate wrote that in case someone found his journal, hoping to put the blame on Hiram.”
“I thought of that, too. Shame we can’t ask him directly.”
“So why did Lancing go to Esta with this news instead of the police?”
“She said he wanted her to be the one to report it. My guess is he thought it would look better if the request to open the case came from her, allowing him to stay above the fray. Lancing hadn’t counted on Esta being quite so crazy. Nor could he have known that if Hiram has been paying her all these years, she likely already knew what he’d done. She’d stayed silent about her daughter’s death and accepted Hiram’s blood money twenty-eight years ago. Why would she suddenly agree to kill the goose that l
aid the golden egg?”
“So Lancing goes to her with this story, and maybe Roman overhears it. Did she say if Roman was there?”
“The three of them sat down together at the kitchen table. According to Esta, prior to Lancing’s arrival, Roman didn’t know that Hiram was his father. It must have come as a terrible shock. All these years, and his father is living only fifty miles away. Then he hears that his father may well have killed his mother.”
“And he goes a little crazy,” I said.
“He must have decided to take Hiram’s family away from him, just as Hiram had taken his. Once he realized that his grandmother has been accepting blood money all these years, he went after her, too.”
My stomach rolled at the thought of the rage and rejection Hurley must have felt in order to extract such a brutal revenge. “He got to the Davenports by worming his way into the family and gaining their trust. Jack was hired only a few months ago. Maybe he tried to sleep with Samantha as part of Ben’s punishment. But she didn’t go for it. Another rejection on top of the news about his father.”
“There’s more,” Mac said. “During the middle of this, I got a call back from my team in Ohio.”
“They talked to the mother of the man murdered there?”
“They couldn’t. Betsy King died two weeks ago. Natural causes. She had a heart attack at work. But they found a friend of her son’s.”
“And?”
“His mother never married his father. Nor did she tell him his father’s name. Just that he was the son of railroad royalty. William King was an alcoholic, which is how he ended up homeless. But at some point, he was sober enough to put up a website. He called himself King of the Road and claimed that he was the son of a railroad magnate.”
I tapped my brakes at a four-way stop, took a quick glance along the tall rows of corn, and powered through. “Roman assumed that William King was Hiram’s son. He’s killing off Hiram’s family.”
“Seems like he’d have more reason to commiserate with William than kill him. The two bastard sons.”
I shook my head. “He wants to wipe out every trace of Hiram Davenport.”
Mac sat calmly, but I sensed the pressure building in her. “And now,” she said, “all we have left is Hiram himself. And Lucy.”
My stomach made an ugly flip-flop. “Damn it. I was standing closer to him than I am to you right now. The guy turned on the aw-shucks show, and I fell for it. Mac, tell me that he didn’t kill himself and Lucy last night.”
“He didn’t,” Mac said. “When she said he was in the ground, she was speaking metaphorically. He lives in his own hell.”
“She told you that?”
Mac remained silent.
“So he could be dead,” I said.
“It’s better to not think that way.”
“So why did he take Lucy? Why not kill her the way he killed her mother and brothers?”
“I’ve wondered that from the beginning,” Mac said. “My guess is that he wants to use her to lure out Hiram. I think he has something planned for them both.”
“Something . . . like what?”
Mac shook her head. “God only knows.”
I was working my way through a scalding, boiling stew of rage and grief when my phone buzzed. Cohen. I put him on speaker and breathed out his name.
“Sydney?” He heard the panic in my voice. “Are you all right? I just got your message to call.”
I told him everything, the story spilling out in a toxic rush. The torture of Esta and the wolf dog prints and that Raya and Hiram had a son who’d grown up to be a killer—a man named Roman Quinn.
And the biggest news of all—that I was certain Roman was Jack Hurley.
There was a pause of two breaths while Cohen took that in, and I could imagine his expression—one of surprise shifting instantly to anger. I’d seen that expression on his face before, a look as close as he ever got to moving in for the kill.
“I’m sorry, Sydney. Hold on.” His voice moved away from the phone while he talked to someone else. I heard Bandoni’s rumbling voice in reply.
“We’ve got uniforms en route to Hurley’s address,” Cohen said, when he came back on. “But we’ve lost Veronica Stern. Our patrol car was still out front, keeping watch like we’d promised her. The uni knocked on the front door to let her know her stalker had turned up dead, but Stern was gone. She must have gone out the back, probably a couple of hours ago. The bathroom’s been emptied of toiletries, and she rearmed her security system, so we’re figuring she walked out of her own free will. There’s an alley out back. She must have had a friend pick her up.”
“So okay. She decided she’d be safer somewhere else.”
“Here’s the important part,” Cohen said. “According to what we found on Vander’s computer, Stern and Hiram have been in a relationship for more than two years. Vander had taken hundreds of photos of the two of them together, along with some shots of Stern going to see an ob-gyn. It’s likely you were right about her being pregnant. And thanks to our stalker, Hiram looks like the only candidate for father.”
“Hiram. Not Ben.”
“Right.”
“We missed it. We were so focused on Ben that we missed it.” The panic surged to a crest. “Cohen, Roman tortured and killed that man in Ohio. And the man was probably Hiram’s illegitimate son. Stern is in danger.”
“We’ve already got a BOLO. We’re talking to her neighbors and coworkers.”
“What does Hiram say about his relationship with Stern?”
“We’re having a little glitch there, too. Can you hold on again?”
More voices in the background; now they sounded alarmed. Cohen said, “Fuck all,” and a bunch of other stuff, and a minute later he came back on the phone.
“Hiram’s gone, too. They found one of his bodyguards outside the building’s service entrance. His head was blown off with a large-caliber weapon. And—big surprise—Jack Hurley isn’t home. Girlfriend says he’s been gone all day.”
Roman was very much alive. And on the move.
I pulled into FBI headquarters to drop off Mac so she could rejoin her team. We made plans to reconnect later.
“Stay above it all, Sydney,” she said as she got out. “That’s how you stay sane.”
“I will if you will.”
I let Clyde in the front seat, then headed toward DPC headquarters. If Stern had left home of her own free will, maybe there was something in her office that could point us in whatever direction she’d flown.
I was pulling into the parking lot when Dan Albers, the engineer who’d directed me to the Royal Tavern, called.
“I got damn taggers doing their dirty on my train,” he said without preamble. “My train was sitting on the line for all of an hour, and some a-hole nails me.”
The world slowed and contracted to a single point. “Tell me.”
“It’s some creepy shit. Not like our usual taggers.”
“I know you wouldn’t call unless it made you twitchy. What does it say?”
“It says, and I quote, ‘Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned.’ Whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. The damn paint hasn’t even dried.”
“Where are you?” I backed out of the parking spot and headed toward the exit.
“I’m in the intermodal yard. My train’s parked for the night. Walters and I had left and I was halfway home when I realized I’d left my damn phone in the rear DPU. When I went back, I spotted the tagging. Bastard had to have hit in the half hour I was gone.”
“Did you see anything else?”
“I didn’t see his skinny punk ass, if that’s what you’re asking. I’ve been walking all over trying to find him.”
“You’re still in the yard?” Adrenaline shot through my system. “You need to get out of there. Head east. I’ll meet you at the overpass.”
“Like hell. I’m gonna find the son of a bitch.”
Albers would have no idea who he was dealing with—the graffit
i found at the Davenports’ home and in the kiln had been kept from the press.
“Not a chance,” I said. “I’m pulling rank. You’re not safe there. Get the hell out. Now.”
On the way over, I called Cohen.
“Roman Quinn just tagged one of our trains in the intermodal yard within the last hour. I’m on my way there now.”
“Sydney, hold on. I’ll call some units and meet you there.”
“Do that,” I said. “But my engineer is in the yard. I’m going to pick him up. We’ll wait for you there.”
I hung up before he could protest.
I spotted Albers as I soon as I pulled into the yard. He’d leaned his six-foot-four, 250-pound frame against the bridge’s concrete abutment and was enjoying a smoke as if he hadn’t a care in the world. At least until I got close enough to see how pissed he was.
I pulled in, then hopped out with Clyde.
“Let’s go,” he said. “I’ll show you.”
I shook my head. “We’re going to wait for the cops.”
“You are the cops. He’s just a tagger. C’mon. He could be off spraying some other part of my train. Let’s nail his ass.”
“We wait.”
He gave me a funny look. “What’s going on? Why’d you call the cops over a tagging?”
“It’s part of a bigger pattern. We’ll let them handle it.”
He muttered something that sounded like pussy, but I ignored it. My nerves were on fire, but Cohen was right. Even though I doubted that Roman had waited around once he’d left his message, I couldn’t risk getting Albers in his line of fire.
Albers held up something that flashed briefly in the light. “One good thing. I found this while I was looking for the tagger. I figure I’ll give it to my girlfriend. Maybe she’ll quit holding out on me.”
I leaned in for a better glimpse.
It was a necklace. A silver heart with a solitaire diamond at the center and a ruby offset to the right. It was similar to the one Raya had been wearing when she died. But it was exactly like the one I’d seen around Stern’s neck in the interview room.
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