“Now, here’s the thing. You take someone anywhere against their will and hold them—again, against their will—and that’s pretty much the definition of kidnapping. You take them across state lines, and it becomes a federal case. Add in the fact that she was coerced at gunpoint, and we’re looking at … well, shall we add it all up?”
“Who is this guy?” Hugh pointed to Grady and tried to look amused.
“Sorry. I forgot my manners. Meet former FBI Special Agent Grady Shields,” Wade told him, then pointed to Beck. “Our chief of police here in St. Dennis, Gabriel Beck.”
Hugh tried to look indifferent, but Wade knew the exact moment that he began to realize that the sand might be shifting.
Grady took his iPhone out of his pocket. “I love these gadgets that multitask, don’t you?”
He whistled. “Wow, that many?” He turned the iPhone in his hand to show Hugh the number on the screen.
“I don’t know what kind of a clever game you guys are playing here, but I’m done with it.” Hugh looked across the table. “You know what the deal was.”
“The deal’s changed, Hugh,” Wade told him. “It might be different if embezzling from KenneMac had really been your first offense. Nice bluff there, by the way. But we all know that KenneMac wasn’t anywhere near being the first, and we know—thanks to Grady’s family and friends at the FBI—that it wasn’t your last. You may have been slick about getting out of town, but you always left prints behind.”
“You can leave now—just walk away and don’t look back. Or you can keep going with this and I can guarantee you won’t live long enough to serve out all your time,” Beck told him.
“You’re forgetting something real important here, MacGregor.” Hugh’s bravado was beginning to wear thin. “I can prove that boy is mine. I can go to court and get an order for DNA testing that will prove he’s my son. I can still—”
“You can still save your ass,” Beck told him. “Or I can take you into custody right now, hold you till the FBI gets here.” He turned to Grady. “What time did your brother say he’d be here?”
Grady turned his wrist to look at his watch. “He said he’d be here in time for dessert. So any time now.”
Hugh looked from one face to the next, trying to decide, Wade figured, whether or not they were bluffing.
“No five million dollars, Hugh,” Wade said. “Just one long prison sentence. Oh, sure, it would just about kill me not to know where Austin is; you’re right on the money there. But just how much satisfaction will that give you when you’re spending every day in a five-by-eight cell with some guy who calls you ‘Peaches’?”
Grady took one last sheet of paper from the folder. Wade reached across the table to pick it up.
“Now here’s the only deal you’re going to get, and I’m only going to say it once, so listen up. You sign this and then you walk out of here. These”—Grady held up the reports he’d been reading from—“will go back into those cold-case files they’ve been sitting in for the past couple of years, and as far as I’m concerned, I never heard your name.”
“If you think I’m going to sign a confession …” Hugh scoffed.
“It isn’t a confession.” Wade handed him the paper.
Hugh scanned it, then glanced at the faces of the other three men at the table. He appeared to think for a long while before finally asking, “Got a pen?”
Grady signed as witness, then tossed the pen on the table. “As someone who spent a good part of my life in law enforcement, it makes me sick to say this, but go ahead and leave.”
Steffie, silent throughout the entire scene, got up and unlocked the door, held it for him. Hugh left without a backward glance and Stef closed the door behind him.
“Guys, I don’t know how to begin to thank you.” Wade looked from one man to the other, both his friends. “I know it has to go against everything you believe in to let him walk out of here.”
“I’m not gonna lie, Wade,” Beck told him. “I can’t believe I let him leave. The only consolation I have is in knowing that Austin is staying where he belongs.”
Grady nodded, then added, “And the fact that every move he ever makes from here on will be very carefully watched. The next time—and there will be a next time—he won’t go free.”
“I feel terribly conflicted about that woman from Maine, though.” Steffie sat next to Wade. “She deserves justice for what he did to her. Not that the others don’t, but there’s a difference between what he did to the others—the money he took—and what he did to her. I would have liked to have seen him pay for that.”
“He will, but not in this lifetime, I’m afraid,” Grady told her. “Christine Davenport died in a car accident two years ago. I wouldn’t have let him go on that if she was still alive.” He looked at Wade apologetically. “I don’t know how we would have handled it, but I couldn’t have let him walk.”
“I understand.” Wade nodded.
“And I feel confident that he’s going to pay for it all anyway,” Beck said. “All those notes that Grady has were compiled by a friend of his at the FBI.”
“My father always told me to never burn a bridge behind me when I left a job,” Grady said.
“Who are you kidding?” Beck laughed. “You called your brother who’s an active agent.”
“No, I didn’t. I called a friend of mine who is the best computer geek the Bureau has. He called the police department in Texas that investigated Wade’s case. They had Hugh’s prints and they’d gotten them into the system. By the time I called my buddy, all these other matches had popped up, all cases similar to Wade’s. Then we found the case in Maine, and I knew we had a guy who is a serial offender. He’s going to steal again. It’s his nature. He’s slick, I’ll give him that, but next time, he’ll be caught.”
“And when that time comes, and he points back to tonight?” Steffie frowned. “How are you going to explain your part in this when he talks about how you two law enforcement types went along with this deal?”
“What deal?” Grady got up and stretched his legs. “I just came in to witness Hugh’s signing away his parental rights to Austin.”
“I just came in for ice cream.” Beck walked to the counter. “Stef, you got any of that stuff left over from Dallas’s party …?”
“What just happened here?” Steffie sank into the chair next to Wade. She’d stayed quiet through the entire ordeal, but now she was starting to shake. “Seriously? Did those two just …?”
“Yeah. They did.” Wade nodded, his face still unreadable.
“Has it occurred to you that you might not have heard the last of him?” Even her voice was shaking. “What if he comes back and threatens you all over again? Then what? Aren’t you worried?”
“It has occurred to me, but Grady feels pretty sure they’ll have him in custody for something else by the time he decides to try again. He studied behavior when he was in the FBI and I believe he knows what he’s talking about, but it doesn’t take an FBI profiler to see that this guy has made a living off of conning people out of their money one way or another. Given his history, it isn’t likely that he’s going to go into some legitimate business now. Both Beck and Grady think he’ll go on from here to extort money from someone else. The difference now is that he’s being watched but doesn’t know it.”
“But what if he comes back and says that he was coerced at gunpoint or something into signing that waiver of his rights?” Stef bit a fingernail, something she hadn’t done since she was in her early teens.
“I think he’d be hard-pressed to prove that with four witnesses who’d testify to the contrary, one a police chief, the other a former FBI agent.” Wade shook his head. “I’m all right with this for now. I have to be all right with it.”
“How can you be sure Hugh really left?”
“Beck was going to have a couple of cruisers follow him all the way to Route 50. I think just seeing a cop car next to you and another one in your rearview would be enough to keep you goi
ng for a while.”
“I still don’t trust him.”
“Neither do I, but I’d have agreed to anything to keep Austin safe. The thought of my boy being raised by that bastard makes me sick. I’d never have handed him over, you know that, right? Not even by court order. I would have taken him and run. That was Robin’s biggest fear, but I never believed she had anything to worry about. I never really thought he’d come back.”
Stef shifted uncomfortably in her seat. At one point over the past week, she’d thought that maybe Hugh—or Greg—had been drawn to St. Dennis because of the spell Vanessa had cast—or thought she’d cast—to find Stef’s soul mate.
Note to self: Remind Vanessa to be careful when she tosses that net out into the universe: you never know what might get caught in it.
He reached over to take her hand. “Stef, I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to thank you for being here for me through this. Not to mention the fact that you did what I should have done.”
“All I did was tell Vanessa.”
“Knowing she’d pick up the phone and call Beck. I should have done that the minute Hugh walked out of here this morning.”
“I imagine having him show up like that must have been a bit of a shock.”
“For a moment, when he first walked in, I thought I was hallucinating. A couple of times over the past few months I wondered what I’d do if somehow he found out about Austin and came for him, but like I said, I never really thought it would happen.”
“It was just one of those really bad coincidences: the photographers following us around the day after the party, the photos all over everywhere, Hugh seeing them, and seeing himself in Austin.” She averted her eyes. “I hate to say it, but there really is a strong resemblance between Hugh and Austin that’s pretty hard to miss.”
“That, and knowing what happened to Robin, and given Austin’s age, I guess it was inevitable that Hugh would put two and two and two together and figure out that this was …” Wade grimaced. “I can’t bring myself to say ‘his son.’ ”
“What are you supposed to do with that paper Hugh signed?” she asked.
“Jesse said under ordinary circumstances, you’d use it in adoption proceedings. But he thinks we should just sit on it for now and only go that route if we ever have to. In the meantime, my name is on Austin’s birth certificate and I was married to his mother. We’re going to leave it like that.” He ran a hand through his hair. “God, Stef, I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to tell Austin that I’m not his father. That his real father is a criminal who used his mother—”
“Wade, Hugh is not Austin’s ‘real’ father.” She took his face in her hands. “You are his father. Someday, when he’s old enough to understand, you’ll tell him the truth, but do not ever refer to that man as Austin’s real father, because he isn’t. He hasn’t done a damn thing to deserve that honor.”
“I wonder if Austin will ever be able to understand what happened.”
“You’ll know when the time is right. Besides, you’re going to raise him with love, and he’ll be a confident, strong boy because of you. He’ll understand that what you did was the right thing.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“Of course I am.” She forced a smile. “And look at it this way. The worst has happened and it’s behind you. You met Robin’s biggest fear and you and Austin survived. Now you can start your new life in Connecticut.”
“I need to talk to you about that.” His phone began to ring in his pocket and he pulled it out to check the caller ID. “It’s Dallas,” he told Stef.
“Hey, Dal … what? Oh. Right. I can explain that.” He looked slightly chagrined. “I’ll be home in fifteen minutes and I’ll tell you all about it. Just … stop shouting, okay?”
He disconnected and slid the phone back into his pocket.
“Hal just called the house and told Dallas that Austin was asking for his daddy and while he—Hal—didn’t mind keeping him, he just thought I should know that Austin was getting antsy,” Wade said. “Needless to say, she wanted to know why Austin was at Hal’s and what the hell was going on and if I needed someone to watch Austin, why didn’t I ask her.”
“I guess you should go get him and take him home.” Stef glanced at the wall clock. “It’s late anyway, past Austin’s bedtime, I guess. You go on. I’ll close up here and—”
“You’re coming with me,” he told her. “We’ll get Austin and put him to bed. And then maybe later you can put me to bed.”
“Would you like to explain why you took that baby to Hal’s instead of leaving him here with us?” Dallas demanded.
Stef and Wade had arrived with a sleeping Austin at the house on River Road, and Dallas had met them at the front door.
“For one thing, you weren’t here when Austin and I got in today from Connecticut. I drove past the house and there were no cars in the driveway, so I went straight to Scoop. Then Hugh showed up and everything sort of snowballed from there.”
“Hello? Phone?” Dallas reached across the kitchen table for her cell. “And who is Hugh?”
“Austin’s birth father.”
“What …? You mean the guy who embezzled …”
Wade nodded. “Things happened so fast, Dallas. One minute, Stef and I were sitting there and Austin was eating ice cream; the next minute, Hugh was coming through the door,” he explained. “When I stopped back here this afternoon, Berry was here alone with Cody and she wasn’t sure what your schedule was. Besides, if something had gone terribly wrong, I didn’t want you or Cody or Berry to be caught in the cross fire. Besides, I thought he’d be safer at Hal’s. It was bad enough that Stef was—”
“What are you talking about? What cross fire?” Dallas interrupted. “Damn it, Wade, start from the beginning.”
Still holding Austin, Wade sat on the edge of a chair and told his sister everything.
“You’re telling me this guy wanted five million dollars to just go away and never come back?” Dallas stood and began to pace the length of the kitchen.
“Right.” Wade kept his voice low, with Austin asleep in his arms. “But Beck and Grady thought the chances of him not coming back were—”
“You didn’t even tell me about this? Someone is threatening to take Austin and you don’t even tell me?” Dallas appeared to be just winding up.
“What would have been the point?” Wade frowned.
“The point would have been that I’d have gone to the bank and requested the withdrawal, which would have taken more than a day because you can’t walk into a bank and say give me that much money and have them just hand it over and you walk out with it. There are regulations about such things. There’d have been an investigation. And he’d be behind bars right now.”
“Behind bars and demanding a DNA test to prove that he’s Austin’s birth father,” he whispered his reply. “He’d have taken us to court, Dallas. Jesse said there’s a very good chance he’d win.”
“I could call on a posse of lawyers who could—”
“Who could have pounded on their chests all they wanted, and he still probably would have won. He has the matching DNA and has not surrendered his parental rights. He held the cards, Dallas. Grady said he could have made allegations that Robin and I conspired to withhold the knowledge that he had a son—which frankly, we did.”
She sat as if stunned, as if it had never occurred to her that “this guy” had any rights or any points in his favor.
“The only way to get around him was to get him to sign the waiver of his rights and make him leave town. The only way to do that was to muscle him with his own criminal past. And I could not have done that without Beck and Grady,” Wade explained. “Grady had a friend of his from the FBI run Hugh backward, forward, and sideways through the system, and they found enough on him under different names that he was facing a lifetime behind bars. I had to make the decision to let the two of them set him up. Hugh had to make the decision to walk.”
“You could have
told me.”
“It all happened so fast. He only gave us a few hours. You weren’t around when I got back here today and I didn’t know if you were in meetings or something, and I didn’t want to tell Berry.”
“I don’t know how he thought anyone could have gotten their hands on that much cash in a few short hours,” she said, “unless it was in a wall safe or under a mattress.”
“I don’t think he was thinking of the logistics. All he was thinking was ‘Hey, rich movie-star aunt will fork over the money.’ ”
“Rich movie-star aunt would have.” Dallas gently stroked the sleeping boy’s back. “In a heartbeat. No one’s going to take him away from us. He’s our little guy.”
She patted her brother’s shoulder and said, “We’ve missed you this week. You and Austin both. It’s not right around here without you. Cody’s been very unhappy.”
“We’ve missed you, too. As a matter of fact …” Wade appeared about to say something else, but Austin stirred in his arms. “I’m going to get this guy changed and into bed. Stef, want to give me a hand?”
Stef, who’d wisely kept out of the family discussion, nodded. “Sure,” she said, and followed Wade up the stairs.
“He sleeps in here.” Wade pointed to the door, three down from the second-floor landing. Wade changed Austin and got him into his pajamas by the faint light of a lamp on Wade’s bedside table. When Austin stirred, Wade picked him up and held him for a moment to settle him, then placed him in his crib and covered him.
He turned to find Stef sitting on the side of his bed.
“You didn’t need me for that,” she whispered.
“I needed you to be here with Austin and me so I could just savor the fact that we’re together. I came very close to losing him. It’s just starting to sink in how close. This day could have ended in a total nightmare, but instead, I’m here with my girl and my son, and I can’t remember ever feeling that my life was more right than it is at this moment.”
“I can make it righter.” She played with the buttons on his shirt.
“I’m counting on it.” He pressed his lips to her throat.
The Chesapeake Diaries Series 7-Book Bundle: Coming HOme, Home Again, Almost Home, Hometown Girl, Home for the Summer, The Long Way Home, At the River's Edge Page 90