Irrevocable Trust (Sasha McCandless Legal Thriller Book 6)

by Melissa F. Miller

  He stepped close and gathered her into his arms.

  “I know,” she responded, stretching onto her toes. The reality, of course, was that wasn’t a promise he could truly guarantee, and they both knew it.

  He bent his head, and covered her mouth with his.

  The rest of her questions evaporated, along with her capacity for rational decision-making, and she leaned into his warm chest.

  He bent her backwards and scooped her up, headed for the stairs to the bedroom.

  And then his phone bleated in his pocket, insistent and shrill.

  She knew that ringtone. It was Hank.

  She sighed as he deposited her on her feet and fumbled for the phone.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I know.”

  They shared a wistful look, then she walked up the stairs to give him some privacy for his call.

  She was in the bathroom taking off her jewelry when she heard him jog up the stairs.

  She walked to the doorway.

  “Can you help me with this clasp?” She gestured toward her necklace.

  “Sure.”

  She turned around and lifted her hair with both hands while he unhooked the tiny spring-ring clasp securing the chain around her neck. His hands were hot against her back as he lifted the necklace. She shivered.

  She spun around to face him, and he dropped the chain into her palm, then he scrubbed his face with his hand.

  “Uh-oh,” she said. “That’s not a good sign.”

  “What’s not?”

  “That face thing you do. What’s wrong?”

  “I have to go out.”

  She stole a glance at the clock.

  “Now?”

  “Now. I’m sorry.”

  “When will you be back?”

  He shrugged and reknotted his tie. “I don’t know. Not tonight. Probably tomorrow evening.”

  He walked over to the closet and grabbed a bag from the shelves above the clothes bars with one hand and a clean shirt and suit with other.

  She wriggled out of her suit dress and hung it on its hanger before throwing on a t-shirt and yoga pants and following him.

  He was tossing boxers and socks from his dresser drawer into the bag.

  “Can you tell me where you’re going?”

  “Please don’t make me lie to you.”

  She looked at him for a long moment.

  Then she reached over and selected a gray and blue striped tie. “Here. Don’t wear the same tie two days in a row. It’s gross.”

  He bent and kissed her then ran a hand over her hair and turned to leave.

  She stood there, rooted to the bedroom floor, while he banged around downstairs.

  Only after she heard the front door close and the lock engage, did she move.

  She trudged down the stairs and bolted the deadbolt.

  Her heart was racing. She’d never be able to sleep now. Her eyes swept the too-still, too-quiet condo in search of a distraction and stopped at her laptop resting on the kitchen island.

  She powered on the computer and did some stretches while she waited for the machine to boot up. She might as well put her insomnia to productive use.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Hank watched as Office Fornier pawed through yet another stack of files on his gray metal desk.

  He did not consider himself an impatient man. He’d spent his youth first on watch duty in the Army, then on stakeouts with the Bureau and, later, on deep undercover assignments with Homeland Security. He knew the value of waiting. And as he’d risen in the ranks, he’d discovered patience was more important than any other attribute he possessed.

  But this small-town police officer with his Barney Fife routine was testing him.

  “Uh, I’m sorry. I know it’s in here somewhere …” Officer Fornier trailed off.

  Hank gritted his teeth.

  “Listen, I just need to step out into the hall and make a phone call. You keep looking and I’ll be right back, son.”

  “Will do, sir.”

  Hank walked out into the institutional corridor, which could have passed for a hallway in any small police station in America and pulled out his phone. He hadn’t planned to ask Leo to join him on this visit, mainly because he hadn’t wanted to put him in a difficult spot with Sasha. But if Vince Fornier was what passed for local backup, he needed someone reliable. Leo would just have to work out the vagaries of newlywed politics on his own.

  As soon as Leo picked up, he rattled off instructions, waited for Leo to confirm his understanding, and then ended the call.

  He reentered the messy office hoping against hope that Fornier has made some progress in his search.

  But Fornier looked up from under his shaggy bangs—too long for regulation, as far as Hank was concerned—and gave Hank a sheepish shrug. “Sorry.”

  Hank forced his lips into an approximation of a smile.

  “Why don’t you just tell me what you found instead of looking for your report?” he suggested.

  “Tell you?” Fornier blinked.

  “You were the responding officer, weren’t you, son?”

  “Uh, yeah. I mean, yes, sir.”

  “So, talk me through it. What did you find when you reached the scene? Don’t worry about the official report. Once it’s loaded up to the national database, I’ll be able to access it.”

  Fornier threw him a panicked look at the mention of the database, but he waved it away.

  “We can get someone to walk you through it. It’s easy. Just focus on the scene.”

  The officer cleared his throat and let his eyes drift up toward the ceiling as he recalled the morning’s activities.

  “It must have been a little before eleven a.m.—um, oh eleven hundred hours, sir—”

  Hank cut him off right there. “Just tell it to me like a story, officer. In a conversational way, if you will.”

  The young patrolman relaxed visibly. He lowered his stiff shoulders and flexed his tensed jaw.

  “Sure. Okay. So, it was a little before eleven in the morning. I was out chattin’ with Patty, our secretary and dispatcher.” He pointed through a narrow doorway to the desk just inside the entrance to the station. “We were tryin’ to decide if we should call in an order for lunch at the Pancake Palace. They don’t just serve breakfast, you know.”

  Hank nodded, suddenly regretting the suggestion that the young man tell him a story. “Sure.”

  “Well, Patty had decided she was gonna go on and eat the salad she packed, when just then the call came in.”

  “And it was the neighbor who called it in, correct?”

  “That’s right. Lilah Stokes called it in. Now, you gotta understand that everybody in town knows Lilah is a busybody, and it’s been makin’ her crazy, the fact that this new family had been living next door since the beginning of last year and she didn’t know any of their personal business. And it wasn’t for lack of trying—or, more like, prying.”

  Fornier laughed at his own joke, but he was warming to his story, now, and Hank had no need to prompt him to continue.

  “Rightly or wrongly, Patty was rollin’ her eyes at Mrs. Stokes’ concern. But it was a quiet morning, like most of them are, so I headed over to check it out.”

  “What exactly did Mrs. Stokes report?”

  “She said she was weeding her begonias—that’s the flower bed closest to the Bennetts’ place.” He paused and gave Hank a meaningful look.

  “She was spying on her neighbors?” Hank asked.

  “Probably.”

  Hank tried not to grimace at the news that WITSEC had placed a family next door to a nosy neighbor. “Okay, sorry to interrupt. Go on.”

  “She said she just happened to notice a woman’s foot and leg sticking out from behind the sofa. And, before you ask, no, you can’t see behind the Bennetts’ sofa from her flower bed. At least I couldn’t, and I have 20/20 vision and about eight inches on Lilah.”

  “Are you saying she was blatantly peeping in their windo
ws?”

  “More or less had to be,” Fornier confirmed. “Anyhow, she said she rapped on the window and then rang the doorbell and nobody responded.”

  “But she didn’t hear anything—no fighting or screaming?”

  “She says no. She said she’d been shampooing her parlor carpet earlier and that the machine makes a good bit of noise. While the carpet dried, she figured she’d go outside and do some gardening until lunch.” He shrugged as if to say what are you going to do?

  “So no one saw or heard the attack or the attacker?”

  “Right.”

  “And the kids were fishing?”

  “Yep. They said they left before sunrise and came back when they got hungry. Thank the Lord they weren’t home.”

  “Amen,” Hank replied automatically, although he’d be willing to bet that if they’d been home, there’d have been no attack. He’d bet a tidy sum that Mrs. Stokes hadn’t been the only person watching the Bennett house.

  “And I told you the rest on the phone. I entered the residence through the unlocked back door and found the victim.” He blanched at the memory.

  “Bad, huh?” Hank empathized.

  Fornier swallowed hard before answering. “I’ve never seen anything like that before. I mean, we don’t have a lot of violent crime in Sunnyvale. I just … I can’t even describe it. Someone really worked her over.”

  Hank was silent for a moment to let the kid pull himself together.

  “Any defensive wounds?”

  “The coroner says she probably didn’t have much chance to struggle. He thinks she was running from the guy and tripped over the fringe on her area rug and went down. Most of the blows came after she fell. He probably climbed on top of her and went to town.”

  “Weapon?”

  “Fists. And a garden trowel. Matches the rest of the set in her shed. He used it to bash in her skull.”

  “Where’d you recover the weapon? Near the body?”

  Fornier shook his head. “No. It was weird. It was in the shed right where it belonged. I found it when I checked to make sure the premises were secure. He put it back, but he didn’t bother to wipe the blood off it. Who does that?”

  A highly disciplined, self-appointed leader who also happens to be a sociopath, Hank thought. He’d be willing to bet a paycheck that Bricker had conditioned his family and followers to always return tools to their designated spot after use.

  “The shed was unlocked?” he asked.

  “No lock on it.”

  “And you checked the house top to bottom?”

  “Yeah. I swept the first floor before I called the body in. I had to wait until the coroner came out to bag her to do a more thorough search of the property. I was pretty busy trying to keep the oldest boy out of the house.”

  The boy.

  “Let’s talk about the boy. What exactly did he say when he asked you to call me?”

  Hank had to assume the kid had been in a panic and had blurted out that the family was in the witness protection program.

  The officer scrunched his face up and thought. “Let’s see. He got rid of the sister. He sent her to put the fishing equipment away—”

  “In the shed?” Hank wanted to know.

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact.”

  “She didn’t notice the trowel?”

  “Apparently not. It was pretty dark in there. It looked like she hung up the rods, dumped the rest of the gear, and rolled. The fishing equipment was along the back wall. The gardening tools were all arranged on a potting bench in one corner. Why?”

  “Just trying to picture it, son. Go on.”

  “Once she walked away, he got this stony look on his face like he was trying to man up. He asked if his mom was dead and before I could answer, he pulled out your card and said if I thought she was murdered I needed to call you.”

  Hank considered this piece of information.

  “And that’s what I did,” Fornier said.

  “Who else have you reported this to?”

  Fornier shot him a confused look. “No one. Who else would I report it to?”

  “Well, your chief, for one?”

  “Sure, ordinarily. I didn’t, though, because he’s out of town.”

  “Business or pleasure?”

  “Uh, vacation. I haven’t bothered him. Should I?”

  “Not yet,” Hank said.

  He tried to hide his excitement. If WITSEC had bothered to tell anyone in Sunnyvale that they’d placed a witness there, it would have been the local chief of police. Who would have been sworn to secrecy. So if Fornier didn’t know—and he didn’t appear to—and he delayed telling his chief, Hank could just maybe get a handle on the situation before WITSEC even learned about Anna Bennett’s death.

  “So, that’s pretty much it.” Fornier shuffled from side to side and tried not to make it obvious that he was looking at the wall clock.

  “Your shift ended a while ago didn’t it, son?”

  “About two hours, sir. But I’m in no hurry,” the kid lied.

  “You’ve had a rough day, Officer Fornier. I’m going to turn in for the night, myself. You should go home and kiss your wife if you have one. We’ll pick it back up in the morning,” Hank lied right back to him.

  “Yes, sir. Do you need directions to the hotel?”

  Fornier was packing up his duffle bag as he spoke.

  “I’m all set. Thanks.”

  They walked out together. Fornier paused to say good night to his replacement, who was lurking around the reception area waiting for them to finish up and get out of his office.

  Hank stepped up his pace. No need for the kid to see him driving the opposite direction from the hotel and start asking himself questions.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  “I’m on my way to the airport now. I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Leo said. He couldn’t remember ever hearing Hank so agitated.

  “That’s not soon enough.” Hank’s voice boomed through the Bluetooth connection.

  Leo checked his speed. Seventy miles an hour was about as fast as he was willing to drive through Downtown Pittsburgh, even if it was deserted at this hour.

  “Why don’t you fill me in while I’m en route?” he suggested.

  “I’m a little busy at the moment. There are six of them, remember? They were eating dinner when I got here, but now they’re all wound up and they won’t go to bed.”

  Despite himself, Leo grinned—Hank’s sense of urgency was beginning to make sense. Here was a man who had walked right into a rumored al Qaeda safe house without waiting for backup, but leave him alone with six kids for a couple of hours and he was already cracking.

  “I could have brought Sasha. Then we’d only have been outnumbered two to one.”

  Hank’s voice grew serious. “You didn’t tell her. Tell me you didn’t tell her.”

  “Relax. I didn’t tell her. I still don’t agree with the decision, but we can fight it out later—after the half-dozen criminal masterminds wear down your defenses.”

  In the background, he could hear a girl squealing. “Piggyback, Uncle Hank!”

  “I have to go,” Hank said. “Just hurry.”

  “Sure thing, Uncle Hank.”

  Hank disconnected the call, and Leo laughed aloud at the image of Hank cavorting around in a dark suit and a tie with a freckle-faced kid clinging to his neck.

  The laughter was short-lived, though, because Hank and the Bennett kids were in a dangerous situation. If the local police were as an inept as Hank had claimed when he’d ordered Leo to fly down, then Hank really was an army of one. Which was fine if Bricker had slunk back into the ooze, content to have gotten his revenge on the woman who helped convict him.

  But trying to tease out the motivation of a madman was, itself, an exercise in madness. Bricker could be lurking somewhere nearby, preparing to strike again.

  Hank’s decision to sit on the kids himself was valiant, but it was no kind of plan.

  And Leo was a man who l
iked to have a plan.

  He switched on the classic rock station, turning the volume way up to drown out his thoughts. He pressed his foot against the gas pedal and rocketed across the Fort Pitt Bridge, leaving the city behind.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  It was close to eleven o’clock when Leo nosed his rental vehicle into the Bennetts’ driveway. Every other house on the block was dark, the blinds drawn and the exterior lights extinguished for the night. The Bennett house was the sole exception. Lights blazed from every window.

  As he neared the front door, he could hear the babble of kids’ voices.

  He gave the doorbell a short jab and waited.

  After a moment, Hank’s silhouette filled the doorway. A porch light flickered to life, and Leo shielded his eyes with his hand.

  The door swung open.

  “Took you long enough.”

  “My trip was fine. Thanks for asking,” Leo said, edging past Hank and into the hallway.

  Hank pushed the door shut and secured the deadbolt.

  Leo started toward the back of the house, where he could hear kids jabbering and laughing. Hank put out a hand and yanked him back by his arm.

  “Wait. Let me fill you in on the situation,” Hank said in a low rumbling voice.

  Leo stopped. “Okay.”

  “When I got here, they seemed to be holding up pretty well. But I think the shock’s wearing off and they’re starting to really understand that Mom’s not coming home, ever. The little ones get worked up off and on. One of them will start to cry for mommy, and it has a domino effect. The oldest two are pretty good at calming everyone down, but I see in their faces that the reality is hitting them now, too. And the middle ones are scared, just straight-up terrified. I rented some Pixar movie online and let them eat a bag of chocolate chips, but I’m out of ideas.”

  “They probably need to talk to someone—a counselor or something.”

  “I guess so. If there even are any in this weak excuse for a town.” Hank jerked his hands through his short hair.

  “Why are we staying here, anyway?”

  Hank stared at him.

  “Where else do you want to go?”