by Edie Claire
At long last, Sheridan seemed slightly intrigued. He reached up a hand and fingered his thin beard thoughtfully. "And may I ask, Ms. Koslow, what makes you so certain this individual is in fact the heir in question?"
"Mrs. Murchison told them herself before she died," she answered simply.
He offered a patronizing smile. "Indeed?"
"Why would they lie?" she argued. "I already told you, they don’t want the money."
The lawyer fingered his beard again. "I’m afraid I would have to doubt that as well, Ms. Koslow. Did it ever occur to you that this individual might just be using you to help them garner information?"
Leigh’s face grew warm. She hoped it did not look red as well. She would hate for him to mistake her fire-hot wrath for embarrassment. "Did it ever occur to you that I might have uncovered proof myself that this individual is indeed Mrs. Murchison’s biological child?" she said slowly, struggling to keep her voice down.
He glared at her. "No."
"Well, I have!" she raged, giving up. "Lilah gave birth to another baby when everyone thought she was pregnant with Dean. I have confirmation on that!" She was thinking of Becky, Dean’s biological mother, but she had no intention of telling Sheridan that. If he was so damn smart, he could gather his own information.
He was silent for a moment, looking at her, and she imagined that his estimation of her had suddenly sprung up a notch. Finally, he spoke. "Your information is correct, Ms. Koslow, but only to a point. Mrs. Murchison did adopt Dean immediately after a legitimate pregnancy."
Leigh waited.
"But the infant she herself gave birth to was stillborn."
The words that had been on their way out of her mouth caught fast. Stillborn? Not possible. Even if that was what Becky had always believed. Where was Sheridan getting his information? "You said at the will reading," she began, flustered, "that Mrs. Murchison didn’t tell you any of the details about Dean’s birth."
The lawyer had the nerve to shrug. "I lied, Ms. Koslow. If you remember the tenor of that occasion, you should be able to see why. You should also be able to see that you’ve been royally had. Whoever has told you that they are the legitimate heir, I assure you, if they are basing that claim on the fact that they are the same age as Dean Murchison, they are lying."
Rain pounded hard on the Town Car, and Leigh’s wet limbs felt cold. Nancy couldn’t be lying—she couldn’t. She hadn’t wanted to admit being the heir in the first place. And what about that shock of baby hair? It all made perfect sense. Could it be possible that Mrs. Murchison had somehow double-crossed Nancy, too?
Leigh looked hard at Sheridan.
"You know who the real heir is, don’t you?" she accused. "Lilah Murchison told you. You’ve known all along."
To her surprise, he shook his head. "That isn’t true. She went to great lengths not to tell me."
"Then how do you know that the heir isn’t twenty-five years old?" Leigh asked skeptically.
"Because she told me that the other child was born prior to her third marriage," the lawyer responded, his tone growing wearied again. He checked his watch. "Your time is up, Ms. Koslow. I trust you will not be imposing further on my good nature."
Leigh took a deep breath and counted to five again. She had accepted a lot of curve balls since all this craziness started, but this was one projectile she couldn’t quite handle. Either Lilah Murchison had lied to her own lawyer, or Sheridan—for whatever reason—was bluffing. She chose to believe the latter.
"I trust you are not so stupid as to believe everything Mrs. Murchison told you," she said carefully, plotting her strategy as she went. "If she was hoping to humiliate her true heir by refusing to acknowledge them, she should have covered her bases a bit better."
She cleared her throat, checking to make sure she had Sheridan’s attention. She did.
"For instance, she should have told Peggy Linney to keep her mouth shut about the baby switch. That poor old woman was only too willing to tell me everything."
She watched Sheridan’s eyes carefully for signs of panic, but what she saw was closer to hostility.
"Rubbish, Ms. Koslow," he responded flippantly. "Peggy Linney never admitted anything of the kind. You know full well that she insisted she had delivered Dean from Mrs. Murchison herself." He looked at the watch once again. "Now, I have been more than patient with your ramblings, but I really must insist you leave. Don’t you have a dinner to prepare, or something?"
A dinner? Enough was enough. This man was toast.
"I’ll prepare my dinner right here if you don’t lose the attitude and start listening to me!" she railed, eyes blazing. "I’ve seen proof, don’t you understand? Lilah Murchison’s proof, from her own memento box. I have a hair swatch from the baby she gave away, and it matches this individual perfectly. I have a will, dated 1982, leaving a large sum of money to the woman Lilah paid to raise this individual. And I have—"
"Damnation!" Sheridan cried, a hand flying up to cover his right eye. "These accursed contacts. Where are my glasses…" He leaned over and began rummaging around under the passenger seat, bumping Leigh’s ankles with a roving hand. "Move your feet, blast you!"
Leigh shifted her legs automatically to one side, wishing Lilah Murchison could have chosen a more normal human being for her legal work. Sheridan’s attitude was unfathomable; he had to be lying about not knowing who the heir was. Of course he knew. Why wouldn’t Lilah tell him? He just didn’t want Leigh to know.
Which, obviously, she did. The evidence she had just given was real, even if Peggy Linney’s confession had not been. But somehow, Sheridan the smug had known that.
Lightning flashed outside, and with it a spike of fear shot through her stomach region. How had he known what Peggy Linney had or had not told her? He had also visited Peggy on the last day of her life, but he had arrived before Leigh, not after. Yet the way he had just spoken, it was almost as if—
"There!" he said proudly, sitting up straight. There were no glasses either on his face or in his hand.
Almost as if he had been there.
The spike of fear repeated itself, and Leigh looked down sharply to see why she had just felt such a strange sensation on her ankle.
It didn’t take long to figure out.
He had handcuffed her foot to the car.
Chapter 23
"What the hell are you doing?!" Leigh screamed, jerking her foot up wildly. She fingered the cuffs, but they were latched tight. One ring to her left ankle, the other to the spring under her seat. "Are you crazy?"
Sheridan’s face was scarlet, and his eyes had lost all traces of equanimity. "I am not the crazy one," he shouted back at her. "I am not the one who cannot leave well enough alone. I am not the one who can take months of careful planning and destroy it with a few days of nosing around in other people’s business!"
Leigh stopped pulling at the cuffs. That was pointless. So was opening the car door. For one thing, only half her body would make it out. For another, it was still pouring rain, and not a soul was around to either see or hear half a body sticking out of a Town Car.
She faced the rattled lawyer, and the wheels in her brain began to turn. "You were there, weren’t you?" she said calmly, even though her heart was striking her sternum like a mallet. "You were still at Peggy Linney’s apartment when I visited her."
The lawyer didn’t answer.
"She knew you were there," Leigh continued. "That’s why she wouldn’t tell me anything."
He still said nothing.
"If she was cooperating with you, why did you have to kill her?"
"Will you shut up!" he ranted, little veins popping out on his ruddy forehead and neck. "I’m trying to think!"
Leigh stared at him. He was guilty. Guilty of something major. And what she had just so brilliantly succeeded in doing was convincing him that she knew enough to be a threat.
Fabulous.
She decided to backtrack, and quickly. "Look," she placated, keeping her voice as agreea
ble as possible for one whose leg was shackled, "you don’t have to freak out about this. So you and Peggy had words. She got stressed; she had a stroke, a heart attack, whatever. She was going to die anyway. It doesn’t matter to me."
The lawyer turned his head toward her slowly. "Well, aren’t we bright," he drawled sarcastically.
Stay cool. "Excuse me?"
"It’s a nice strategy, Ms. Koslow, but it’s too late to play dumb. We both know that you know that Nancy Johnson is the legitimate heir."
Leigh shuddered a little. This was bad. "Nancy Johnson? No…I was thinking about Nikki Loomis—"
"Enough!" he snapped forcefully. "It insults us both." He paused a moment, great beads of sweat breaking out around his receding hairline. "How could I have predicted that Mrs. Murchison would leave copies of old wills lying around? She never even asked for a copy of the latest one, convenient as that was…"
He mumbled the last words, then glared at her again. "Miss Johnson has been far too scared to talk. You must have cornered her with some evidence she couldn’t refute. So, she swore you to secrecy. That’s why she sent you to me—she didn’t want to confess herself even to an attorney unless she could be certain her name wouldn’t get out."
Leigh said nothing, and Sheridan’s thin lips curved up slightly. "I judged her well. Some people respond to personal threats; with others, the self-sacrificing types, you have to threaten people they care about. It was unfortunate that Miss Johnson didn’t have family to threaten, but I figured that in her case, even the guilt of causing a co-worker’s death would be too much."
His face shone with pride. "I was correct."
His gloating reverie suddenly ceased, and he turned to Leigh with a scowl. "Then there are other people. People who are so infernally stupid that no reasonable threats can even begin to penetrate their thick skulls." His beady eyes narrowed at her. "What are you getting out of this, anyway? You barely know these people!"
A variety of responses spun through Leigh’s mind, most having to do with justice and the triumph of good over evil, but she didn’t say any of them. They sounded too much like a Superfriends cartoon.
She tried another tack. "I’m no vigilante," she informed him defiantly. "Detective Maura Polanski is one of my best friends. I’ve been helping her. I’ve been updating her regularly, in fact. Very regularly."
Sheridan threw her another shrewd glance. "Nice try, Ms. Koslow, but I don’t believe you. I know your type. You want to be a hero. And heroes work solo."
"Not me," she said immediately. "Maura knows all about the chest, and the old wills. She knows everything I know. Nancy refused to talk to her—you’re right about that. But I told her myself."
Sheridan started looking more worried, and Leigh pressed on. She tried not to think about the fact that the small-boned, relatively harmless-looking man sitting next to her might very well have already been responsible for two murders. The upshot was, he was dangerous. And if he thought that getting rid of her would accomplish something, there wasn’t a doubt in her mind that he would go for it.
He breathed out angrily. "You’re lying. You’re lying to save your own skin. You confronted Miss Johnson as soon as you found the will, and then you rushed right out here to see me. I had no other appointment, by the way. I just wanted to get you someplace…private. Didn’t think of that, did you?"
Leigh fought hard to beat back the chill that was creeping viciously up her spine. She could not panic. Sheridan was not a big man; in height and weight, they were probably evenly matched. He hadn’t pulled a gun on her, or any other weapon, for that matter. He had the upper hand at this point only for two reasons. One: she was in his car in a deserted location in the middle of a downpour. Two: her foot was shackled.
She rallied her strength. This man might have killed twice, but with all due respect to the deceased, they had not been difficult targets. Peggy Linney was practically an invalid. Lilah Murchison might have looked fine, but she was terminally ill. Leigh Eleanor Koslow was neither of those things.
She stole a glance at the handcuff that bound her ankle, and swallowed. It didn’t look like the ones she had seen Maura carrying. It was almost…decorative. A vision of the leather whip that had been used to strangle Lilah popped unwillingly into her mind. There was a theme here, and if she was going to keep any pretense of a cool head, she had to pretend otherwise immediately.
Who was Sheridan really, and what were his motives? If she was going to battle him with her wits, she would have to know.
She cleared her throat and looked straight at him. "Maura and I," she began carefully, "knew all along that whoever was threatening Nancy had to have inside information. Who knew about the will before it was read? And how could they have known?"
Sheridan smiled broadly. "You obviously didn’t think of me, though, did you? People never think of the lawyer. We’re rather like invisible servants, skulking around the corner, pretending not to listen." He relaxed a little for a moment. "Of course I knew everything. Mrs. Murchison told me the whole story from the beginning. Why wouldn’t she? I was her attorney, for heaven’s sake. It was all completely confidential."
His grin was positively snide. "It was the perfect setup."
"You must have changed the name of the heir in the envelope, then," Leigh suggested, fishing. She realized now that somehow, some way, Sheridan’s motive in all this had to be collecting the money for himself. Her crazy "fake heir" theory had been right all along.
To her surprise, he chuckled. "My foolish Ms. Koslow," he said grimly. "You have no idea. I changed everything. Additions, deletions, rewordings—by the time Mrs. Murchison signed the final copy, she was too sick of the document to even look at it. She had no idea. She wanted to give Nancy the option of anonymity, yes, but the cloak-and-dagger stuff was all at my suggestion. The sealed envelope, the formal proof of identification—I convinced her to do all of that. For her own protection, of course."
Leigh felt a successive wave of urges to smack the arrogant look off the lawyer’s face, but she resisted them all. "I’m guessing then that Mrs. Murchison did leave Nancy a personal note, with instructions about how to claim the money, as well as proof of her identity. I’m guessing you never gave it to her."
"You would guess correctly." He seemed to be lost in thought for a moment, then he sat up straighter, his features grim. "And the strategy is still sound. Provided that no one ever discovers that Nancy Johnson is Mrs. Murchison’s biological child."
He looked at her with a coldness that chilled her limbs. "And with you gone, no one will. I will tell Miss Johnson a frightening story about how you left my office in a mad rush to see someone…yes, that will do. As long as she stays ignorant of the perpetrator, she’ll stay too afraid to come forward, as well. Your 'disappearance’ should rattle her nicely."
Leigh fought a rising panic again as Sheridan looked her over, clearly mulling his options. She could only guess what was going through his mind. How exactly could he kill her? Strangulation? A blow to the head? And how could he hide the body? If it was found, would there be anything to implicate him?
He turned the windshield wipers on high and peered out, first at the pavilion area, then at the Cavalier. He smiled.
In the driving rain, the young woman apparently lost control of her car… Or, better yet: A North Park pedestrian was killed earlier today when she was mysteriously run down from behind by her own vehicle...
No! She pushed the visions forcefully from her mind. No matter what he was thinking, she would not be easy either to kill or dispose of, and he was smart enough to know that. He would be in for one hell of a fight—with no guarantee of success. There had to be room for reason.
"Don’t be stupid. There’s no way you could ever get away with killing me," she said, mustering every ounce of fake self-assurance possible. "I’m not an old woman and I’m not frail, and my disappearance will raise more questions than you could ever imagine."
Sheridan avoided looking at her. She took this
as a good sign. "Maura Polanski is probably at the vet clinic right now, interviewing Nancy," she continued. "She knows that I went to meet you. When I don’t show up… Well, have you ever heard the expression 'no brainer'?"
He clenched his fists on the steering wheel and swung his face back towards her angrily. "And what do you propose as my alternative? Am I supposed to believe that if I let you saunter off back to your car, you will not run back and tell the police that I have murdered two people and threatened two more? Not that I’m admitting that, mind you," he tagged on, his legal training resurfacing. "But what do I really have to lose here? What are three murder raps compared to two? I don’t believe you’ve told your detective friend everything you say you have. If I let you go, I lose for certain. If I kill you, I might still lose. But then again, I might not."
He glared at her malevolently. "It’s a no brainer."
Leigh’s heart beat faster, and her mind raced furiously. He was right, of course. He had nothing to gain from letting her go, because she would turn around immediately and pin his scrawny butt to the wall. It was the right and only thing to do. But then, people like Sheridan didn’t understand the meaning of the word "right."
They couldn’t comprehend it.
A coy smile spread slowly over her own face. "All right, Sheridan. You win. The money would never have gone to Dean and my father anyway, would it? You would have gotten it first."
The lawyer’s eyebrows arched. He said nothing.
"Of course you would have. So the strategy changes."
Still, he said nothing.
"Oh, come off it, Sheridan," she derided. "You don’t really believe I’m some superhero wannabe. People like that don’t really exist."
His eyes widened with interest, and she surreptitiously took a deep breath, which she sorely needed to maintain her blasé tone. "There are people who uphold the law for a salary, like my friend Maura Polanski. But we both know that people like her never, ever get ahead."
She rapped her fingers on the Town Car’s armrest. "You’re right. I haven’t told the detective squat. It’s more the other way around. I’ve been using her to get my own information."