Other dads…did other things.
“I should go.”
His head fell back against the couch. “Please don’t. Then it’ll be me and that closed door. If she comes out, I don’t know what the hell I’m going to say.”
“You say the truth. That you love her, you’re worried about her, and there are some things a father just has to do for his little girl.”
“Your father never said those things to you, did he?”
“No, he did.” JoJo always knew that was what made their relationship PJ—post-Julia—that much more heartbreaking for her. Once upon a time he had been a father who loved her and worried about her and checked the closet for monsters. Julia had been the one who was afraid of monsters, but JoJo liked how it made her feel when he did his little search of the shelves. So she pretended to be afraid, too. Then Julia was taken and the only monster in the room as far as her father was concerned was her.
“Then what happened?”
“You know what happened.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“No, it doesn’t, does it?”
“Listen, about what I said before, about learning from the mistakes your father made to help me with Sophie…I didn’t mean to make light of anything. I didn’t—”
“You didn’t know.”
“So tell me.”
JoJo shook her head. There was no reason to tell him the story. There was certainly no reason for her to relive it. And he was still holding her hand.
“Mark, you need to let me go.”
He glanced at where their hands were joined and deliberately released her. “Sorry.”
“Don’t sweat it.” JoJo bounced up and tried to pretend she hadn’t been affected by his touch. “I should go.”
The doorbell rang, startling both of them.
JoJo checked her watch. “It’s too early for Nancy.” She walked to the door and looked through the peephole. When she opened the door, she smiled at the earnest violinist. “Bay, right?”
“Yes, and you’re JoJo. She said you were like her bodyguard. I didn’t really believe that until today. You were pretty fierce.”
“Yeah, well it’s a lesson in not underestimating small women. I take it you’re here to see Sophie.”
“I just wanted to check on her.”
“Pretty gutsy thing you did to get him to back off.”
Bay ducked his head. “Not really. I let a fifteen-year-old girl shake me off. I think the guts belong to you.”
“You do know she’s still fourteen. Not fifteen for another few months.” Mark came up behind JoJo.
“Uh, yes. I knew she had a birthday coming up, Mr. Sharpe…I mean, Mark.”
“Just wanted to make sure that was clear. You’re eighteen. She’s fourteen.”
“Yes, I know, sir. You’ve made it perfectly clear. I also wanted to let you know that I never thought for one second that Sophie was in any real danger. Romnasky is all bluster. He yells and shouts and waves his hands but that’s all it is. More ego than anything else. I think Sophie pushes his buttons because she’s as good as she is. He’s looking for a flaw to correct, and she isn’t giving him one.”
Mark nodded and JoJo stood back. It was up to him to decide whether or not to grant Bay permission to see Sophie. Because odds were, if he did so, that would require letting Bay enter her bedroom.
“Why don’t you go say hi? It will probably help her mood.”
Bay nodded. “Are you going to pull her from the performance? I’m not asking because I’m worried about my job. I would understand if that’s what you decided. Romnasky doesn’t deserve any less.”
“No, I’m not pulling her yet. I am going to talk to this guy. Sophie is not happy with that course of action so when you open the door you might want to identify yourself quickly. No telling what heavy objects might be thrown in your direction.”
“Got it.” Bay smiled and headed down the hallway.
They watched as he cautiously knocked on the door, let her know who it was and then entered quietly, closing the door behind him.
Mark winced. “Did I really let him inside her bedroom?”
“He’s a good kid. I can sense it.”
“I was a good kid, too. And at that age I also wanted to nail anything that walked.”
JoJo snorted. “I bet. You have to trust Sophie.”
“Trust Sophie? Of the two I trust her the least. She’s in love. Nothing worse than a girl in love.”
“True. It’s why I made it a point never to be that girl.”
JoJo could see Mark’s frown and for the second time that day she wondered why she felt it necessary to tell him, of all people, the story of her life.
Her new motto with Mark was going to be: Zip It!
CHAPTER EIGHT
MARK LOOKED AT the case folder and frowned. He was making no progress with the notes involving Sophie, or Sophie herself for that matter. It was driving him insane. Which was why he pulled out the Anderson file and began to flip through the case again. Something else he hadn’t been able to let go of because he hadn’t found an answer he wanted.
Mark was obsessed with answers. When they eluded him, it could drive him to distraction.
“So how did it go with Bay after I left?”
Mark glanced at JoJo, taking in the dark pencil skirt and turtleneck that made her look like a librarian. She looked so prim and uptight, she should have had bifocals hanging from a chain around her neck. But there was the nose ring and the crazy hair.
She was still part punk rocker.
A man should have a conflict about being attracted to a freaky librarian.
“He lived. I must trust him.”
In an effort to make amends with Sophie, he’d called off JoJo for the day. He’d driven Sophie to practice, where she was now with Bay. They were both under strict orders not to leave the studio for any reason. In thirty minutes he’d pick them up and take them to rehearsal himself. Then he’d have his chat with Romnasky. Depending on how things went he’d either stay to watch her performance, or he’d pull her from the show, essentially canceling it.
With time on her hands, JoJo had taken on a potential client interview, hence the business attire. He wasn’t sure what good it did her. Sometimes it amazed him to watch how much of a chameleon she could be. The woman standing in front of him now was nothing like the person who had sat on the couch with him last night. This woman was all business.
That woman had been… It was hard to say. Vulnerable?
Unfortunately both women turned him on. He shifted in his seat and tried to focus on work.
“Did you sign the client?” he asked.
“Signed, sealed and delivered. Nothing too sexy. Just a cousin everyone in the family has lost touch with. An aunt died leaving a small estate and they want to make a good-faith effort to find him.”
“Ah, an honest client. How…rare.”
“What are you doing?”
“Looking at the Anderson file for the hundredth time. I’ve put together a list of all my closed cases. There are only four that involved sending someone to prison or to their death.”
“You didn’t send Anderson to his death. He offed himself. That’s on him.”
“He ended up dead. That’s all that matters, or might matter to a person seeking personal revenge. I don’t know very many people in Philadelphia unless Ben Tyler is secretly out to get me. Which, considering some of the run-ins we had, is a possibility.”
“From what I know about Ben, if he wanted you in pain, you would be in pain by now.”
Mark frowned. “Then I guess it’s a good thing we’re friends now. No, it only makes sense that if someone did want to hurt me through Sophie, they would have been impacted by the cases I’ve worked.”
“Unless we’re dealing with a complete crazy. Sophie has some professional fame. Why have you ruled out a stalker?”
“I haven’t. Not entirely. Nothing is ruled out. I just get the sense that if this were a stalker, the notes would be
more about Sophie and less about the impact on me.”
“Okay, give me your cases.”
“You haven’t read through them?”
“Of course I have. I simply want to hear your perspective.”
“Two were insurance frauds, Lane and Dunlap. Both are serving their sentences. Lane’s in for just a few months.”
“Yes, but did you hear Lane’s wife filed for divorce?”
“You talked to her?”
JoJo’s eyes widened as though shocked by the question. “Duh, of course I talked to her. You told me to look into this. You didn’t think I’d cover every angle?”
Right. Sometimes he was so busy telling himself how much he wasn’t attracted to her, he forgot the real reason he’d actually hired her. She was the best there was.
“Sorry.” Mark considered that development. “So maybe Lane wants revenge? A wife for a daughter. He’d have to arrange for the notes to be delivered—not the easiest task since my personal information isn’t accessible online. Also neither Lane nor Dunlap were violent men. Just cheats.”
“What about Paula?”
Paula Smith was a grifter with no family connections. She’d pulled off a sting by taking an elderly gentleman for several hundred thousand dollars by cashing blank checks and then disappearing into the ether. After being hired by the man’s family, Mark had found her in three weeks. Paula was still serving her sentence. Hard to imagine anyone wanting to take revenge on her behalf. She also didn’t seem violent. Merely greedy.
Still, he couldn’t ignore any options. But it was when he considered the Anderson case that one niggling little doubt he had in the back of his mind surfaced. The answer he didn’t have.
“You never found the source of the anonymous tip.”
“Stop doing that,” Mark grumbled.
“If it makes you feel any better I’m not reading your mind, I’m merely predicting your thoughts.” As JoJo sat in the chair across from him, she crossed one perfect leg over another, which tightened her skirt around her hips and legs. Holding up her hand, she rattled off her points. “Assuming this isn’t from your days in the CIA—”
“It most likely isn’t.” Mark had already asked his contacts still at the Farm whether there was any chatter related to him. There had been nothing. No names on the watch list had attempted to leave Afghanistan or Pakistan. Two of the more bitter Taliban lords he had faced were still squaring off against American military forces. It didn’t seem logical. There would be a footprint somewhere.
“Okay, then going with the theory that it might be tied to your casework, you have three nonviolent criminals—all still in jail—albeit one who has a bitter soon-to-be ex-wife—”
“How do you know she’s bitter?”
“That did not require a lot of investigation. It oozed out when I made the mistake of calling her Mrs. Lane. Her bitterness is directed at him. Not at you for catching him. She’s got enough on her plate with the divorce, figuring out her finances and how she’s going to raise her kids as a single mom. I didn’t get the sense that concocting a revenge plot was big on her list of priorities.”
“A sense… You do that a lot, don’t you? Rely on your sense of things. It’s not exactly analytical.”
“My gut, my sense, is observation plus logic and reason. It makes for a pretty good algorithm. I’ve never been duped.”
No, it was easy not to fool a person who was highly cynical and overly suspicious of all people.
A woman like JoJo wouldn’t consider falling in love and having her heart broken as part of the natural ebb and flow of romance. Rather, she would say she’d been duped. Purposefully misled into giving her heart up only so it could be crushed. It explained her sometimes prickly treatment of him. He wondered if there had ever been any man who had gotten behind the barbed wire.
Not. Your. Business.
He’d told himself that about a hundred times last night while lying in bed thinking about how brave JoJo was to protect his daughter. It was sad to him that her bravery didn’t extend into her personal life.
“Okay, gut-girl. What is your sense about the Anderson case?”
“I definitely don’t like the anonymous caller.”
“Not a caller. A letter.” A plain white envelope sent to his office along with a copy of the autopsy report. A typed letter. A single sentence.
“Right. Anyway, Anderson goes free for years after killing his daughter. Why the delay? What triggered the letter? Most important, who did it?”
“I looked,” Mark admitted. “For a long time. There was nothing. No prints, nothing identifiable in the paper or the ink.”
“Just like the notes about Sophie.”
“Just like those notes,” he repeated. The coincidence wasn’t lost on him, but neither was the fact that anonymous tips were, by nature, supposed to be unidentifiable. “I would have dismissed the letter outright if the facts in the autopsy hadn’t been so overwhelming. When I confronted the family and was immediately stonewalled, it was more than enough to pique my curiosity. So I looked at the police report. It was regrettably sloppy. Hell, exhuming the body was just a formality. The chemicals that poisoned her were all right there on her blood report. All I had to do was find the younger brother and break him.”
“You’re sure it wasn’t the brother who sent the autopsy report?”
“Positive. He’s a fisherman who crabs off the coast of Maryland. He was out on a long haul when I got the package. The stamp date confirmed it had been mailed while he was out at sea. He would have needed a partner, which didn’t seem likely. He was genuinely surprised by my arrival and questioning.”
“People can be pretty convincing actors.”
“You’re going to doubt me? I’m a trained CIA caseworker. I spent the first part of my adult life gathering information and extracting intel from people who didn’t want to give it to me. Trust me, I know when someone is lying. Sean Anderson didn’t like me looking into the case at all. He was pretty young when it all went down. There was a significant age gap between them, but still I think he knew what his father had done to his sister. The sexual abuse. I truly don’t think he knew about the murder. He cared about protecting his mother, who was alive, more than his sister, who was dead.”
“Protecting a mother who didn’t protect his sister from being raped?”
“Regina claimed she didn’t know what her husband had done to Sally.”
JoJo snorted. “Do you really believe that?”
Mark considered how to answer. “Yes and no. In her mind, she was telling the truth. She chose not to know her husband had been molesting her daughter for years. So, to her, it wasn’t really happening. Denial is a really powerful method of mind control. You would be amazed at what the human brain can trick itself into not knowing.”
“She knew it, but couldn’t deal with it, so she shut it down.”
“That’s what I think.”
“Then what happened? Why did he kill Sally?”
Mark shook his head. “Who knows? Maybe she grew old enough to want it to end.”
“You think he killed his daughter because she was going to tell people the truth?”
“Again, supposition. I only know that Sean said he’d always believed it was suicide. He never wondered why she would have taken the drugs that killed her. And if he knew or suspected what his father was doing to her, then suicide might have made sense. Since we know she didn’t take the poison that killed her, we can suppose that she confronted her father. Told him it was done. Told him if he didn’t stop she would tell others. Jack died before anyone could find out.”
“It’s sick.”
“It is. For years Jack and Regina lived as though grieving the tragic loss of their daughter. Sean couldn’t live with the hypocrisy so he left as soon as he could. Once I found him, and showed him how unlikely it was that Sally had killed herself, suddenly protecting his mother took on new meaning.”
“I called him,” JoJo said.
Nothing sur
prised Mark at this point. He’d bet she’d called every person connected to every one of his case files.
“He wasn’t happy to hear what I was calling about.”
“I imagine.”
“A brother lost his sister, then his father kills himself. His mother’s currently resting at a mental health facility. It’s not inconceivable to think he’d hate the man who brought down the house of cards.”
“Nope, it isn’t. It’s why I checked him out, too. After he placed his mother in the hospital he took off for Alaska. He signed on with a fishing barge to search the Bering Sea for bigger crabs.”
“Well, I confirmed he’s in Alaska. Staying at a motel until the ship leaves port. It would be hard for him to send anonymous notes without postage from that distance. He’d have to be working with someone in the area. Even if he was behind the threat, he’s certainly too far away to act on it. Revenge by proxy doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
“You’re saying he’s off the hook?”
JoJo wrinkled her nose. “Did you just make pun?”
“Maybe.”
“Was that supposed to be clever?”
“Obviously not.”
“I think that might have been the lamest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Give me a break,” Mark said, defending himself. “It was fish humor. Get it—fishing…hook.”
“Oh, my God, now you’re trying to explain it.”
Mark stood. “I’m leaving to pick up Sophie. Find someone else to abuse.”
“Oh, I’m coming with you.”
“You don’t need to, I’ll be with her.”
“And miss Sharpe taking on Romnasky? Not a chance.”
*
IN THE END the confrontation was anticlimactic. JoJo sat next to Bay in the theater seats while Sophie sat very still on her piano bench. Mark was onstage with one hand on the maestro’s shoulder speaking quietly into his ear.
In Russian.
“Is that Russian?” Bay asked, an awed tone in his voice.
JoJo nodded.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever seen that expression on the maestro’s face. I think it might actually be fear.”
“I imagine Mark isn’t pulling any punches.” More likely he was informing him what might happen to a man’s hands if a former CIA agent conducted a clandestine nighttime raid on a conductor’s hotel room should he ever touch his daughter again.
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