Murder Once Removed

by S. C. Perkins

  Ugh. His words made me want to shrink back and throw up at the same time, and with that cajoling drawl, it just made it worse. His turn of phrase reminded me of Agent Ronten, when he didn’t know I was in the storeroom behind him at Flaco’s. He’d been trying to sweeten up his Jessie the same way.

  I went still. Using the exact same words, in fact.

  Mentally, I put a picture of my attacker’s face side-by-side with Mark Ronten’s. While they didn’t look exactly alike, Mark and this man had many of the same features, from the shape of their eyes to their narrow jawlines, which formed an inverted triangle. Even their smiles were similar, though Agent Ronten had nice teeth while this guy needed a good whitening toothpaste.

  Winnie’s face flashed in my mind. I recalled having dinner with her a couple of years earlier, where we agreed we both loved that genealogy wasn’t just names, birth dates, death dates, and whether a person’s cousins were first, second, third, or some level removed. It was also physical traits, mannerisms, personality quirks, and even ways of speaking. Winnie had said she thought of those familial quirks as the little stems where a leaf connected to its branch.

  “They serve as connectors to the branch as a whole,” she’d told me as she’d swirled her glass of pinot noir, “and tend to be more visible on a tree the closer you get to the branch itself.”

  Winnie’s analogy had been spot-on, as usual. Now that I was closer, I saw my attacker and Mark had many similar “stems,” including a Southern accent that I’d bet dollars to doughnuts was from North Carolina. Could Agent Mark Ronten and my attacker be related?

  My conversation with Mark outside the capitol came back to me. Just before the APD officer had taken me to the station for my statement, I’d teased Mark about Jessie, and the federal agent had looked upset … until I’d referred to Jessie as “she.”

  I understood now. He’d relaxed because I’d gotten it wrong. Not Jessie, with an “ie.” Jesse. Mark Ronten hadn’t been talking to a woman, but to a man. And the soothing voice he’d used? He’d been placating a loved one, not a lover.

  Somehow, I just knew. This was Jesse.

  I recalled the other thing Mark had said the day of the senator’s lunch.

  “I don’t know what to say. Things just went sideways.”

  Was he mixed up in this somehow? Could the “things” that went “sideways” be the fact that Jesse had failed the night before to extract from me the location of Jeb Inscore’s missing letter?

  I didn’t want to believe it. Mark was an FBI agent, one of the senator’s trusted protection detail, for pity’s sake, and he’d pushed the senator out of the way when the attacker … Jesse … had come at Senator Applewhite with a knife.

  I thought how Mark had seemed troubled yesterday when we talked. Was he involved in Jesse’s plan, and beginning to regret his role? Or was his good-guy thing all an act, with his heroic deed of pushing the senator to safety just a ruse to keep himself from looking suspicious?

  I was snapped out of my racing thoughts by the sneer on Jesse’s face as he tucked my iPad under his arm and unrolled the poster from the Archives librarian. He was reading Winnie’s name with disdain and I felt my fists clench. He gave the poster a little dismissive shake, and the Battle of Gonzales flag, with its lone star and little cannon, seemed to ripple, cueing me as to what it represented: continuing to fight against the odds.

  Whether it was prudent or not, my fear left me.

  I yanked my tablet away from him. “Don’t touch my stuff.”

  “No problem,” he said, flinging the poster onto my desk and holding his hands up as I slid my iPad back into my handbag’s depths. “You can’t send out anything on it anyway,” he said, shaking his cell phone back and forth a couple of times. “I’ve jammed the signal.” Then faster than a snake, his right hand shot forward and pinched the back my neck between his thumb and first finger, freezing me with pain where I stood. I heard the flick of the stiletto blade shooting out of its handle again, and my insides curled as he gently ran the tip of the blade along my cheekbone.

  “But if you try anything, Lucy, you’ll wish all I was doing was touching your stuff. Got it?” I nodded mutely. Picking up his canvas bag, he pushed me forward. “Let’s move. And if you try to escape when we go downstairs, I’ll kill you and the senator. Now that I’ve done it once, the next couple of times will be easy, right?”

  Finally, he released my neck only to throw his arm casually around my shoulders as a boyfriend might, pulling me along against my will, yet effortlessly, toward my office door. He unlocked it, looked around, and we were walking downstairs before I’d even caught my breath—or thought to scream. Though if I did, would anyone hear me?

  As if he read my thoughts again, he whispered in my ear, “I’ve already made sure your buddy Mateo and his two guys are out on calls.” I jerked my head away from him in disgust. I didn’t hold out much hope to see the forensic accountants on the first floor. Serena, Jo, and I mainly saw them in the parking lot in the morning. We’d wave, they’d wave, and they’d vanish into their first-floor office before we made it to the bottom of the stairs. They were like a bunch of polite, number-crunching moles.

  Instead, I replayed the merest note of regret I’d heard in his confession. I didn’t pity him one little bit, but keeping him talking would be a good thing, right?

  “You didn’t mean to kill Winnie,” I said as we made it to the second floor and turned to take the next flight. We passed by Mateo’s door. My attacker turned to look if anyone could be seen beyond the frosted window and I once again caught sight of the tattoo creeping up the back of his neck. While it looked like a bird’s wing from afar, up close it looked like part of a feather, curled over. Like a plume. If I were right, I had a feeling I might know what the whole tattoo looked like and what it symbolized.

  “No, I didn’t,” he said, his coppery eyes going hard, “but she fought with me, and I fought back. It was as simple as that.”

  We made it to the first floor. No accountants in sight. Still, with his casual attitude about Winnie’s death ratcheting up the boiling point of my emotions, my lips parted to yell for help, just in case the moles were listening, but he slammed his hand over my mouth.

  “I wouldn’t do that again,” he hissed in my ear. I hated it, but a shot of returning fear and the thought of his stiletto made me nod my head that I wouldn’t.

  He looked at his phone again and tapped the screen.

  I glanced at the corner, knowing there was a security camera Mateo had installed.

  “You can stop doing that,” he said mildly as he ushered me outside and to my car. He waved his phone back and forth once more, indicating whatever jamming app he used had come in handy again. “All the cameras will have had a temporary outage, as they did right when I flipped the latch on the fire escape and walked right up to find you’d left your balcony door unlocked.”

  I ignored the self-satisfied look on his face. “I take it your nifty app is also the reason there’s no clear footage of you at the Hamilton Center the day of Winnie’s death, either.”

  He winked at me. “That’s right, sugar pie.”

  My heart sunk even as my mind whirled, trying to think of any way I could help myself, and it put me into robotic mode, following his every direction without question. It’d be at least another forty-five minutes before Flaco would come to get me. Serena and Jo were out for the afternoon and convinced I was in safe hands, and Ben and Detective Dupart were so preoccupied with the senator’s safety that Flaco or my officemates would have to raise the alarm with them first before anyone would notice. I looked around at our little parking lot. No one was conveniently driving in or getting out of their car. Out on Congress Avenue, cars were whizzing by. I didn’t even have the help of cars sitting at the stoplight, where someone might turn and see me looking like I was being abducted.

  “Keys,” he ordered, holding out his hand as we walked.

  Sighing, I opened my roomy tote bag. I could see my keys imm
ediately, lying beside my iPad, which lit up when my thumb accidentally hit the home button. It sparked an idea.

  He wasn’t the only one with a nifty app.

  I pretended to keep rummaging for my keys while allowing my thumb to settle over the home button and its fingerprint recognition. The tablet opened immediately and I tapped the screen once on my voice recording app and another time within the app. I might not be able to send anything out since he was jamming the signal, but I could at least record it for if … I didn’t want to think about ifs.

  “Now,” he said, snapping his fingers.

  “No need to get impatient,” I said, pulling out my keys while pressing the button that would darken the tablet’s screen at the same time. Tilting my open tote toward him so he could see inside, I asked, “Do you not know how much this tote can hold? I usually can’t find them this fast even when I’m not having my life threatened.”

  He snatched the keys from my hand. Using the button on my fob, he opened the passenger-side door.

  “Get in.”

  I swallowed hard, but did so, keeping my tote bag close to me on my lap. He locked me in and moved swiftly around to the driver’s side, tossing his black bag onto the back seat while starting up my car.

  I spoke clearly for the sake of my recording app, but hoped I sounded all casual-like, as if we were out for a Sunday drive.

  “You know, I overheard Special Agent Ronten talking to you on the phone the other day. I thought he was talking to a girl and breaking up with her. But he wasn’t, was he? It was you. You’re Jesse. And you and Mark Ronten are in on this together.”

  He didn’t reply, except for the slow grin spreading across his face as he pulled out onto Congress Avenue and headed south.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Damn, now he decided to be the silent type? I had to get him talking again. Glancing at the back of his neck, I thought again about his tattoo and what it might represent. My theory could be out in left field, but I was going to jump on it anyway.

  “So, Jesse, I’m curious. From which daughter of Mary-Eliza Ayers and Albert Tanner do you descend?”

  He smirked and I knew I’d scored a hit. “Congratulations on finally figuring it out.”

  “I don’t call my company Ancestry Investigations for nothing,” I quipped. “Still, if you hadn’t used the Halloran family as your patsies, then I would have put more focus on the Ayers and Applewhite families a long time ago. I’d have found Albert earlier, and the fact that he’d married Cantwell Ayers’s youngest daughter. I’d have researched their descendants, and I would have eventually found you. So I guess you should be congratulated, too, for throwing me off your trail for so long.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, finding the website you did for the Hallorans with all their family information really helped. Using that family motto was freaking genius on my part.”

  “That’s a private website,” I said hotly.

  “And it was so simple to hack,” he replied.

  I blinked in realization. “Like you tried to do with my computer the other day. Only you didn’t get in because the router got shut down.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “I have to give your guy some props on that one.” He shrugged. “Though I didn’t really think I’d find anything on your computer I didn’t already know.”

  As we cruised through a green light, I said, “But I have to confess. It wasn’t through genealogy that made me realize you’re an Ayers relative.”

  His eyes slid my way. Time to push my luck on theories.

  “It was mostly from observation and listening. Did you really think I wouldn’t notice you and Agent Ronten have similar facial structures and North Carolina accents? You even use some of the same turns of phrases. You two could be descended from one of three men—Seth Halloran, Caleb Applewhite, or Cantwell Ayers—but only one of those three men ended up having a line of descendants in the Tar Heel State. In effect, you gave yourself away. What are y’all, brothers? Cousins?”

  I could feel the anger in his silence, but he turned his smiling face to me and his jaw dropped into the familiar point. Boom. I was right.

  “First cousins. My daddy and his are brothers.”

  “So you’re Jesse Ronten.”

  He glanced at me with those amber eyes. “But you should know better than to assume that we both come from the Ayers line. Mark comes from the other side of my family.”

  I stared at Jesse, puzzled. “Mark isn’t descended from Cantwell Ayers like you?”

  Why would Mark be involved in this ridiculous scheme if he weren’t?

  “Nope,” he said. “But he grew up more with my family than his own, so it’s almost the same. Regardless, Cousin Mark owes me a favor. Big time.”

  Before I could ask why, he answered my original question.

  “Since you asked, I’m the eldest great-great-great-grandson of Mary-Eliza’s daughter Elizabeth, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that Mary-Eliza’s no-good husband Albert lost every bit of the money she inherited from selling her father’s land, leaving my four-times great-grandmama and the generations that came after her to scrape for every cent they had.”

  He wanted me to feel pity for him, but I wasn’t impressed. Blaming an ancestor from the nineteenth century for his current financial circumstance was downright ludicrous.

  Still, while I intended to deny him the right to frighten me again, I didn’t want to tick him off.

  I said, “I don’t know when Mary-Eliza married Albert or where, but I know she sold her father’s Texas lands before moving to North Carolina. Land was about four dollars an acre, but that was good money back then and Cantwell owned thousands of acres. She would have been the equivalent of a millionaire.”

  “She was a millionaire, and then some,” he snarled as we waited at a light. “That jackwad gambled it all away in under five years, leaving Mary-Eliza and her daughters in the poorhouse. He left her with thousands in debts and no way to pay it off.”

  I was turned toward him and looked out his window to see if trying to signal to someone would be worth it. A car with a college-aged girl inside pulled up next to us. Hope leaped up within me. I prayed she’d catch my eye and I could mouth, “Help!”

  No dice. The moment she came to a stop, she picked up her phone and started scrolling, ignoring everything else around her. Reluctantly, I focused on my captor once more.

  “That’s terrible about Mary-Eliza,” I said, deliberately softening my voice. “She trusted Albert, bore his children, and he did nothing but take advantage of her and squander away the money she’d gained from selling her father’s land. That must have been such a hardship for her and her daughters.”

  “For the generations after her, too,” he said again.

  There wasn’t a point in arguing with him, so I said, “That doesn’t explain why you want to kill Senator Applewhite.”

  His tone changed to one of genial conversation. “You know, it’s not really that I wanna kill him. I just wanna hurt him real bad. Bad enough that he knows I’m a force to be reckoned with and he should do what I ask. I’ll only kill him if I have to.”

  “Yes, but why?” I repeated.

  “Because he has what I deserve.”

  “Which is?” I prompted when he didn’t continue. “Please do explain. I mean, it’s not like I’m going anywhere. After all, Jesse, you’ve kidnapped me and you’re driving my car.”

  “Getting testy, are we?” he said, glancing at me in amusement.

  “You’re damn right,” I replied.

  “Fine,” he said. “The senator owns my ancestral Ayers family lands.”

  Oh my god. Land.

  Jeez, of course … It was and often still is more valuable than money. In the back of my mind, I knew Jesse’s motives weren’t in justice for his family. They were firmly rooted in what could help him, and only him, in the present.

  I realized we were driving over the Ann W. Richards Congress Avenue Bridge. Briefly closing my eyes, I decided if I got
myself out of this mess, I was going to come back, drink champagne, and watch the bats fly out in their nightly spectacle. My eyes popped open again with the sound of Jesse’s voice.

  “I did try to get my lands returned the gentlemanly way at first, of course. Three years ago, I was hired to do IT work for a political fundraiser in Raleigh. The senator was there and, when I met him, I told him he owned my family’s lands and I’d like them returned to me. You want to know what he did, Lucy?”

  I gave him the interested look he expected.

  “He slapped me on the back, said, ‘Son, believe it or not, that’s not the craziest thing I’ve heard all day,’ and walked off.” Jesse’s eyes glittered as he recalled the perceived slight. “That’s when I decided to handle it my way.”

  “What lands are we talking about that you want back?” I asked. “I seem to recall from his bio that Cantwell owned property all over the southern half of Texas.”

  “We should get all of them back,” he shot back.

  “Okay, okay,” I said, putting up a calming hand. “But Senator Applewhite inherited them. It was Caleb Applewhite who bought them from Mary-Eliza, and he did so legally.”

  Cantwell Ayers’s five-times great-grandson slammed his palm on my steering wheel, making my tote nearly fall to the floorboards as I jumped in my seat.

  “Legally?” he snapped. There was nothing legal about it. The senator, his daddy, granddaddy, and great-granddaddy all inherited my lands—my lands—” his voice got louder and he jerked his thumb in two angry strokes at his chest as he repeated the words, “because Caleb forced Mary-Eliza to sell them back to him in 1865.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “What?” I asked, genuinely surprised. “How was she ‘forced’ to sell her lands to Caleb?”

  “Mary-Eliza inherited a small amount of money and all the Ayers land,” Jesse said, his eyes still ablaze with anger. “She used the money to open a shop in San Antonio. Selling bolts of fabric and crap like that. Caleb said he would make sure no one would do business with her if she didn’t sell her dad’s lands to him.”