But she sensed that discretion was her best course of action at this point. If the man was dead, he’d still be dead tomorrow and the day after that. One thing she knew for sure, if the man was alive and in need of help, he’d make it to a phone.
And if he was alive and unconscious? And her decision not to call for help cost him his life?
Going around to the back of his house, Erin looked for signs of distress, of struggle or illegal entry. She’d been to enough crime scenes during her career to be fairly confident in her abilities to catch at least the basics. Nothing was out of place. There wasn’t even an interesting smudge in the dirt.
There were two windows with blinds partially raised. Erin felt no compunction at all about peering inside.
And wasn’t surprised when the inside of Thomas’s home was as pristine as the outside. As unmarked.
The garage behind the house had a window, too. An uncurtained window. She had to park her car to the side of the garage to stand on, but once she did, she was glad she hadn’t called the sheriff. Thomas’s truck was gone.
She hoped to God the man hadn’t skipped town.
That he wasn’t gone for good.
Running was a sure sign of guilt.
And if he was guilty, Erin couldn’t help him.
Technically Brady Cardington hadn’t died. Jack Dunner had. And since Jack and Brady shared a body…
Finding Jack’s grave wasn’t hard. The mound of dirt in the Colorado cemetery was still fresh enough to stand out from the otherwise perfectly manicured green grass surrounding it. Rick had been told that Jack had killed himself.
Burnout. Couldn’t stand the strain that was inherent in the things he’d been required to do.
One night, alone in his room in the boarding house Jack called home, Rick’s buddy had taken his legally purchased hunting pistol and shot himself in the head.
An autopsy had confirmed that the wound had been self-inflicted.
The man who’d sent word of the incident to Rick had confirmed it, too. Rick had been somewhat detained back then. Or rather, Tom Harkins had been. Locked in a jail cell in Arizona, the result of a job gone bad, the only time in his fifteen-year career he’d been caught red-handed. So he’d been unable to get to Colorado.
The autopsy had also shown a heavy dose of painkiller in his friend’s system.
Rick should never have accepted his source’s word about the incident. He’d turned a blind eye for one reason only.
He’d wanted out. He’d made his plans while sitting in that Arizona hellhole. His thoughts had been on Steve. On building a future out of a nonexistent present.
He should’ve known it wouldn’t be that easy.
You couldn’t do the things Tom had done and simply walk away. Not with the number of angry people he’d left in his wake.
Someone had found him. Charles’s death was his warning. He spared a moment to feel pity—and guilt—about that. Another unnecessary death…
If he was going to live, he had to find out who’d killed the security officer. And get to him before he got back to Rick. Before he struck again. Because one thing Rick knew: whoever had killed Charles would strike again.
The obvious place to start the search was with Brady. With Jack’s death. His friend was dead for a reason. Rick had to learn what that reason was.
A year later, it was going to be a little harder to get to the truth. Not impossible. But harder.
Which meant more time.
Something he didn’t have.
Erin tried to listen. To focus on the sincerely offered, heartfelt message the pastor was delivering with a grace and humbleness that should have held her attention.
Instead, sitting between seventeen-year-old Caylee and her father, Ron Fitzgerald, she had to concentrate just to keep herself in place. Noah’s youngest sister and her father hadn’t spoken a word since they’d all taken their seats. Instead, they both stared straight ahead.
Mrs. Fitzgerald sat on her husband’s other side. And Daniel, Caylee’s intended, flanked Caylee. He clutched the slender fingers of her left hand, not letting go even to hold the hymn book—as though, if he just held on, he wouldn’t lose her.
Erin wanted to tell him that if he didn’t want to lose her, he needed to let her go.
She’d never been much of a churchgoer. Kind of hard to do regularly when it was just you and a dad who cared more about football and horse races than the existence of any being higher than the bookie who owed him. Or, more typically, whom he owed.
But Valley Christian Church had been as much a home to Noah as the house in which he’d grown up. From before he was born his family had attended Sunday morning services together. Married siblings, their spouses and children, met in the Fitzgerald pew, which had grown to a Fitzgerald section, every single Sunday. Without fail.
As soon as the final hymn was sung, Erin turned to Caylee.
“I guess you told them?”
“Only Dad and Daniel,” the girl leaned over to whisper. And then, as Daniel rose, stood with him. “I didn’t tell them I talked to you.”
She turned back as traffic cleared, allowing Daniel to exit the aisle, pulling Caylee behind him.
“You coming over for dinner?” Ron asked Erin as he followed her out of the pew.
She hadn’t planned to. She had a list of questions to write for Clyde Sanderson’s restraining order hearing in the morning. And a recalcitrant client to attempt to reach.
“It’s been a couple of weeks since our last Sunday dinner together. I think it would do Mother good to have you.”
“Sure,” she said, promising to be over within the hour. But first, after changing out of church clothes and into the jeans she loved and only got to wear on weekends, she was going to take another trip out to Rick Thomas’s place. If the man was even half as smart as she’d given him credit for, his truck would be parked in plain sight, letting the world—and anyone suspecting him of anything—know that he was right where he belonged.
Letting them know he had nothing to hide. Nothing to run from.
The grave existed. Or at least a headstone did. Tom Watkins asked the yard keeper what he knew about the man who’d been laid to rest there. As a grieving friend, he wanted to hear anything the man could remember about the funeral. The people in attendance. If he’d seen the casket. Or, better yet, if there’d been a graveside service where the casket had been open.
Luckily for Rick, the graveyard keeper took pride in his job, a position he’d held for more than forty years. He took responsibility for every soul resting there. And he specifically remembered Jack Dunner because he’d been buried on what would’ve been the old man’s fortieth wedding anniversary had his wife survived the pneumonia that had taken her the year before that.
“Kinda felt like it was me and him together that day,” the wrinkled and weathered little man said. “He was leavin’ the world mostly all alone, and I’m livin’ in it that way. He was goin’ to join my Greta and I figured maybe she’d know he came from my yard.”
The kind of love the old guy wanted Rick to sympathize with simply wasn’t in his realm of understanding. He tried to believe it really existed. Acknowledged that it did for some. But he never quite got there himself.
Rick had been born into the real world. It didn’t include romance and fairy tales.
But he humored the guy. And then asked, “Why do you say he was going out of the world mostly alone?”
The guy shrugged, his flannel shirt at least one size too big for shoulders that were stooped with age. “Didn’t have no service, just a graveside wake by Peter, the guy that runs the place. And only two folks showed up.”
“What folks? What did they look like?”
The elderly gardener studied him, frowning. “Who’d you say you was?”
“Name’s Tom. Tom Watkins. Jack and I…we’ve been like brothers since we were kids.”
He’d thought himself an adult at eighteen, but compared to what he was now, he’d been such
an idealistic kid back then.
“I was out of the country and didn’t hear about his death until recently.”
The man didn’t look any less aged when the wrinkles of doubt left his lined face.
With both hands on the handle of his shovel, he leaned on it. “Rotten luck,” he said, nodding pensively. “Them two folks who was here? A man and a woman. Didn’t seem to know each other. The guy was like one of them folks who’s always in charge of somethin’. Big guy. One of them buzz haircuts like in the army. He stood there real still, almost like he was the dead one.”
Kit? “Did he have a tattoo on his neck?”
“Nope. No necktie, either. Just a jacket and slacks.”
“Was the jacket black and the slacks beige?”
“Yeah, how’d you know?”
Sarge. Rick breathed his first truly easy breath since he’d faced Huey Johnson on the side of the road Thursday night.
“The guy’s a friend of ours,” he said now. Sarge didn’t wear a tie—ever. He’d been captured in Kuwait, held with his hands tied behind his back and a noose around his neck. The rope had hung in front of his face, and during his many days alone, naked in captivity, he’d managed to work through it with his teeth.
Eventually he’d escaped and made it to the American embassy.
And the man who’d been Rick’s sergeant for most of his time in the service always wore a black jacket with beige slacks. Though Rick had ribbed him about it a few times over a beer, he’d never found out why.
The old man leaned over, yanked up a couple of weeds not far from Brady’s grave. “And the woman?” Rick asked.
“Sixty or so. Said she was his landlady.”
“You spoke to her.”
“She was pretty broke up,” the man said. “I see a lot of that and figured I could help.”
“Did she tell you how he died?”
“Nope. Didn’t tell me nothin’. I told her about me and Greta’s anniversary. She cried some more, then left.”
A couple of minutes later, Rick left, too. But he didn’t cry. Not for the loss of the only real friend he’d ever had. Not for himself or the life they’d lived.
Grieving didn’t accomplish anything. Didn’t solve problems or accomplish the business of living. It didn’t undo what had been done.
8
There was no truck in the driveway Sunday afternoon, either. Or in the garage. Jumping down from the hood of her car for the second time in two days, Erin climbed back inside her Lexus and considered her options.
Her newest client wasn’t answering her phone calls. Or her knock at his door.
She could hang on. Wait to hear from Rick Thomas.
Or drop the case.
Thomas was a free man. He could come and go as he pleased.
But he was also a suspect in a murder case.
The two of them should be going over details, solidifying alibis, lining up proof of his innocence to offset the arrest warrant they knew would be coming in a matter of days.
If he had alibis. If he was innocent.
She warred with herself all the way to the Fitzgerald home—a stately mansion on Main Street. But once inside the beautifully decorated house, she forgot about Rick Thomas for a while.
Janet Meadows, a tall, husky woman, didn’t seem to let advancing age slow her down any. As soon as Rick introduced himself—as Tom Watkins—she pulled him inside, then had him sitting in a worn but clean and comfortable parlor with a cup of tea he didn’t want in one hand.
“You’re the only person Jack ever talked about,” the landlady told him, sitting, legs crossed at the ankles, in a wooden rocking chair that was easily as old as the house. Her dress, a heavy, colorful material, hung down nylon-covered calves that rasped when they brushed each other. “At least, the only one he ever spoke of by name.”
Rick told himself that Tom liked tea as he sipped a liquid he’d never been able to acquire a taste for. The cup gave him an excuse not to speak.
He could have closed his eyes and described his surroundings. All these rooming houses were carefully chosen and basically the same. The layout might differ some. The front room could be to the left of a foyer entry. Or the right. The kitchen was always in the back. And all the bedrooms upstairs. The quality of mattress might change. The linens and curtains were different. And the fabric on the worn, upholstered couches in the front room.
But the basics were the same. Escape plans were the same. There were certain things a guy had to know, no matter who he was. He had to be able to get out immediately, no matter where he was.
Mrs. Meadows, a childless widow for thirty years, told him about Jack fixing a loose banister rail, and coming home one night after a couple of months on the road, with a brand-new kitchen sink and drain, which he’d put in for her. Her old drain had started to rust through, but the bucket she kept underneath the stained and chipped sink had worked just fine.
And Rick heard about the mouse Jack caught when her cat hadn’t seemed the least bit interested in doing so.
“The best, though, was the dining room light,” the woman said, the smile on her face not quite eradicating the sadness in her eyes. “My Walt and I picked it out together and when, after forty years, it shorted out, I felt like I was losing the final piece of him. And then I come home from the grocery one afternoon to find Jack in there, the light down and in pieces, all lined up in meticulous order across the table. I hadn’t seen Jack in over a month. Had no idea he was going to be home. But there he was. And by the time I needed the table to serve dinner to him and the others, that light was back up where it had always been. And it was shining upon us once again.” The hint of moisture in her eyes was Jack’s eulogy.
Rick sipped. And nodded.
“I’m telling you, that Jack, he could do anything,” Janet Meadows said.
Yes, he could. Which was why he’d been in the line of work he had. And why it didn’t make sense that the man had taken his own life. Regardless of the problem, regardless of what had gone wrong, the Brady he’d known would’ve discovered a way to fix it.
Rick set his empty cup on the side table. “Who found him?”
“I did.”
Her lips trembled and she clasped her hands in her lap.
Rick waited.
“He hadn’t come down for breakfast.” Her shaky voice drifted off. And then started again. “Jack was always on time for meals. Always.”
“He liked to eat.” There’d been an unofficial pancake-eating contest the last week of boot camp. Brady had consumed more than thirty flapjacks to ensure that the twenty-dollar pot the guys had collected went into his pocket.
Years later, Rick had still been talking about that morning, ribbing the man about feeding his appetite. And that was where the name Jack had come from. Brady, the flap-jack king.
“He’d just come in the night before so I hadn’t seen him, and when I knocked on his door several times that morning and he didn’t answer, I sensed that something wasn’t right. I went for the spare key….”
“Had anyone seen him that morning?”
“No. Only Bettina was living here then. She’s a school-teacher, third grade. She was just leaving for work.”
“Is she still here?”
“Yes. Bettina’s like me, alone in the world. She’s been here over twenty years. She’s family now. Just like Jack was…”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Three weeks before he died. I know for certain because he gave me six months’ rent when he left, and I always log in the payments.”
Six months’ rent. It would’ve been in cash. And it meant that Jack was planning to be around. To continue working.
If his buddy had planned to get out, as Rick had, if he’d been having doubts about the job, he’d have saved that cash. Although he’d made enough money over the years to keep him for life, Brady was still that young kid who’d consumed thirty pancakes for a twenty-dollar pot.
“Three weeks.” Rick focuse
d on the task at hand. “You said he’d come home late the night before you found him?”
“Around eleven. He was quiet, but I heard him. I’d had the TV on in my room.”
“So you have no way of knowing if he was alone.”
Mrs. Meadows frowned. “No, I guess not,” she said slowly. “But…he always was. Jack didn’t ever…well, if he did…not in my house. He…never brought visitors here.”
“Did you hear him coming up the stairs? Hear his key in his lock? Or did you just hear his door shut?”
“I heard him coming up the stairs. Bless his heart, he skipped the second-to-the-top stair, like he usually did. It squeaks.”
“And it didn’t squeak that night.”
“No.”
“So you listened to him climb the stairs.”
“Yes. I counted the steps. And waited to hear his key in his door. I had to make sure it was Jack. A woman can’t be too careful these days, you know.”
“So you would’ve been able to tell if there were two sets of footsteps.”
“I think so, yes.”
“Did you hear anything else?”
“The plumbing in his bathroom.”
“And then what?”
“I fell asleep.”
“You never heard a gun go off.”
“The police, they said he’d…used…one of those…silencer things. And…a pillow.”
Rick couldn’t think about his friend’s brains blown all over a pillow.
“Could you tell if he’d been carrying anything? Did you hear him set down a suitcase when he stopped to unlock his door? Did the keys rattle? Or maybe there was the rustle of a bag, like he’d been to the store or some fast-food drive-through?”
“Jack always carried a duffel, slung over his shoulder. I heard it brush against the wall as he came up the stairs. And his keys—I only ever saw the two I’d given him. One for the front door and one for his room. He kept them on separate strings. I gave him a key chain one Christmas, but I never saw him use it. He didn’t have a car, you know.”
The Third Secret Page 6