“What, then?”
“Emerson mentioned the lawyer by name—Burleigh.”
“Who is Burleigh—oh, wait. Is that the lawyer who is going to fly up here to have you sign some legal papers as soon as you’re free?”
“The very same.”
“So it looks like Xavier’s father will probably try to make sure you don’t get that twenty-five-thousand-dollar bequest.”
Cabot shrugged. “Easy come, easy go.”
“You don’t care about the money, do you?”
“Got to admit it would have come in handy. But, no, I don’t give a damn about the money. The bequest means that, in the end, the old man decided not to disown my mother.”
“It means more than that,” Virginia said. “It means that your grandfather acknowledged you as a full member of the Kennington family.”
Cabot drank some more whiskey.
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess it means that, too.”
Virginia smiled. “Whether or not you want to be a member.”
Cabot grimaced. “There is that part.”
“But that’s how it goes with families, isn’t it? Sometimes you get a choice but most of the time you don’t.”
He looked at her. “And when you don’t get a choice?”
“You deal with it.” Virginia paused a beat. “Helps to have some family on your side, though.”
“I’ve got plenty on my side,” Cabot said. “Anson, Max and Jack.”
“True. And now you’ve got Xavier, too.”
Cabot thought about that. “The kid’s okay. He kept his head today.”
“I think he’s decided who he wants to be when he grows up.”
Cabot eyed her warily. “Who?”
“Got a hunch he’s going to pattern himself after his long-lost cousin Cabot.”
Cabot groaned. “His parents won’t like that.”
“No,” Virginia said. “But that’s only because at this point they don’t know how lucky they are that Xavier is choosing you as a role model.”
“I don’t want to be anyone’s role model.”
Virginia swirled the wine in her glass. “You had one.”
“Anson.”
“Yep. Looks like it’s your turn.”
Cabot turned his head and fixed her with his intent gaze. “Something you should know.”
“What?”
“By now the cops will have searched Fleming’s house. They’ll have tagged and bagged almost all of the Quinton Zane memorial crap that I found in the closet.”
“Almost all?”
“I discovered Abigail Watkins’s journal in a file cabinet in that closet.”
Virginia took a breath. “You didn’t tell the cops about it, did you?”
“No. They don’t need it to build a case against Tucker Fleming. But we do need it.”
“Because it might give us more background about Quinton Zane,” Virginia said. “Judging by the photo we found in Rose Gilbert’s nightstand, Abigail Watkins knew Zane at least a couple of years before he founded his cult.”
“Which means she probably knew more about him than anyone else we know who is still alive. And we need all the information we can get.”
“Where is the journal now?” Virginia asked.
“Anson stashed it in his safe-deposit box at his bank along with your mother’s math book. We don’t have time to study it now. Got to wrap things up with Tucker Fleming first. Still a lot of loose ends.”
“Do you think that Abigail Watkins was Tucker Fleming’s mother?”
“I think that’s a very real possibility,” Cabot said. He paused for a beat. “It fits with everything else that’s happened, and the timing works. Fleming is twenty-four, according to the cops. That would mean that he was born a couple of years before Zane founded the cult.”
“Abigail never mentioned having a child—which would make sense if Zane forced her to give the baby up for adoption.”
“That would definitely explain a few things,” Cabot agreed. “Still leaves us with the interesting question of just how Fleming discovered the truth about his biological father.”
Virginia mulled that over for a moment. “Tell me again about how he thinks he’s been getting messages from Quinton Zane.”
“I told you everything I know. The one thing I’m sure of is that Zane was not sending messages to Tucker Fleming.”
“Really? What makes you so certain?”
“He’s too smart to risk exposing himself by sending messages about a missing inheritance to a son he’s never even met.”
“Don’t be too sure. After all, if Tucker Fleming really is his son—”
“Fleming may actually be Zane’s son,” Cabot said. “But Zane is a card-carrying sociopath. He wouldn’t give a damn about anyone else, including his own offspring.”
“Unless he thought he could use Fleming as a stalking horse to find the money that our mothers hid all those years ago,” Virginia said.
“I don’t think so. Tucker Fleming is the working definition of a loose cannon. I don’t think a cold-blooded strategist like Quinton Zane would have wanted to take the risk of trying to manipulate him in order to carry out such a delicate task. Fleming is just too unpredictable and impulsive.”
“Maybe Zane assumed he had no choice and went with the best available option.”
“Maybe, but it doesn’t feel right. I need to keep looking.”
“We,” Virginia said.
“What?”
“We need to keep looking.”
Cabot was silent for a few seconds. She knew he was going into his zone. She waited, willing him to understand.
After a moment he raised his hand and touched the side of her face. His eyes got a little hot.
“Yes,” he said. “We need to keep looking.”
“If you don’t mind, I would like you to come to bed with me tonight,” she said.
“Is this an experiment?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t have to do this, you know,” he said.
“I want to sleep with you,” she said.
She took his hand and led him down the hall to her bedroom.
CHAPTER 59
Tucker Fleming stood at the end of the private dock and watched the small boat cruise cautiously toward him. It was close to midnight. He was wearing a heavy jacket, but the cold wind coming off the night-darkened waters of Lake Washington was as sharp as a knife.
The vessel was running without lights, but the night was clear and the moon cast a swath of silver across the water. Tucker used a flashlight to give the person at the wheel the all clear.
Several hours had passed since the disaster at the Wallerton house, but he was still shaky, still edgy. The least little noise caused him to start violently. He could not believe that everything had gone so wrong. He had been the master of the game, but now he was on the run, his grand project in smoking ruins.
Looking back he realized things had begun to come apart the night Hannah Brewster jumped to her death. That was the turning point. It had been one bad outcome after another. Today he’d been tracked by a teen with a phone and a low-rent private investigator.
For a time this afternoon he’d allowed himself to hope that Sutter and the kid had not made it out of the burning house. But it wasn’t long before he realized he hadn’t caught a lucky break. He’d ditched the car as soon as possible and used his fake ID to rent an anonymous Ford, just as he had when he’d made the trips to Lost Island. Seemed like a lifetime ago.
He’d considered heading for Canada—the border was less than three hours away and there were places he could cross without having to risk dealing with the authorities. In the end he’d pulled into the vast parking lot of a busy shopping mall where the Ford was just one more car in a sea of vehicles.
He’d gone into the mall, bought some coffee at a Starbucks and sat down at a table. He’d spent an hour trying to come up with a plan of action, some brilliant new move that would allow him to regain control of the game. But he could not seem to think clearly. Bizarre schemes—each more implausible than the last—danced erratically through his head.
At last he had forced himself to face the truth. He had only one viable option. Sending the emergency code was the last thing he wanted to do, but he had no choice. When you needed help, you turned to the only people you could really trust—family.
He had sent the emergency code.
The answer did not come immediately. The wait had been excruciating. He hadn’t been able to catch his breath, and his pulse beat so fast he wondered if he might do something really crazy like faint right there in front of Nordstrom. That would have been the end. He would have awakened in an emergency room and there would have been a cop waiting to take him into custody.
Just when he had begun to wonder if Quinton Zane was going to turn his back on his son, the message came through. He had been given the address of a house on the shores of Lake Washington and told to wait on the private dock at a quarter to midnight. A boat would pick him up and take him to the one person who could help him—his father.
The house was located on a secluded stretch of waterfront property. There were no lights in the windows. A discreet For Sale sign had been planted in the front yard. Dad thought of everything.
This wasn’t how he had wanted to meet Zane. He had wanted to show up with the money that the old man had lost all those years ago, wanted to prove that he had inherited Zane’s ambition, talent and raw nerve. More than that, he had been determined to succeed where Zane had failed. That dream had gone up in the flames of the Wallerton house.
But it wasn’t as if Zane had been any more successful, he reminded himself. Zane had allowed himself to be conned by a few members of his own organization—a bunch of women, no less. They would have gotten away with it, too, if they hadn’t been betrayed. Zane had taken his revenge, but by then the money was long gone.
I’m as good as you ever were back in the day, Zane. Hell, I picked up the trail of the money that you lost, didn’t I? It’s still out there. Doesn’t look like Virginia Troy and Sutter have found it yet. You and I might be able to get to it first if we work together. We’d make a hell of a team.
A father-and-son team.
He liked the sound of that. All he needed was a new identity and a fresh start. Working together, he and Zane would be unstoppable. They would set the whole damned world on fire.
The boat glided to a stop at the end of the dock. The pilot was a dark silhouette behind the wheel. Tucker clambered aboard. He had been instructed not to ask any questions. He was to get into the boat and keep silent until the craft reached its destination.
The boat took off, slowly at first, and then at speed. The chill of the wind got a thousand times worse. Not much longer now, he thought. He wondered which of the expensive houses on the lake belonged to Quinton Zane.
The boat eventually came to a halt at the end of another dock in a secluded cove. The pilot cut the engines.
“About time,” Tucker said. “It’s damn cold out here on the water.”
The pilot emerged from the small wheelhouse. The moonlight glinted on the gun in his hand.
Only then did Tucker realize that he had made a terrible mistake.
“No,” he yelped.
He struggled frantically to scramble out of the boat and managed to get one foot on the dock.
The first shot caught him squarely in the back with such force that he was flung facedown on the wooden boards. He was vaguely aware of the pilot stepping up out of the boat.
His last conscious thought was that, like his father, he had been conned.
He never felt the second shot, the one to the head.
CHAPTER 60
Virginia awoke with a suddenness that told her something had changed in the atmosphere.
For a moment she lay still, trying to get oriented. There had been no nightmarish dream of fire, no fierce surge of urgency bordering on panic.
It took her a couple of seconds to realize that Cabot was not in the bed beside her. It came as a distinct shock to realize that after so many years of sleeping alone, she had already become accustomed to the comforting awareness of a lover sleeping next to her.
Not just any lover. Cabot.
She opened her eyes and saw him. He was at the window, looking out at the glowing night. His sleek, strong frame was silhouetted against the city lights.
I’m falling in love with him.
That brought on a deep sense of wonder. So this is what it feels like.
Her first instinct, honed by years of failed relationships, was to use logic to dampen her sense of delight and astonishment. Don’t get carried away here. Okay, we have some old childhood history and in recent days we’ve been through a lot together. He understands me and accepts the bad stuff in ways that no one else ever has. And I understand him. I trust him. And, yes, indeed, there’s a strong physical attraction. That doesn’t necessarily add up to the real thing.
Oh, yes, it does.
She pushed the covers aside and glanced at the clock. It came as no surprise to see that it was one thirty in the morning.
She got to her feet and went to join Cabot at the window. He put an arm around her shoulders and hugged her close against his lean, warm frame. She wrapped her arm around his waist.
“Thoughts?” she said.
“It’s the money angle that’s bothering me,” he said.
“Why? Seems to me that it makes a crazy sort of sense that a whack-job like Tucker Fleming would have become obsessed with what he came to think of as his inheritance.”
“It’s not that,” Cabot said. “The problem is the other money trail.”
It took her a second to realize what he meant.
“Are you talking about the rumors of embezzlement at Night Watch?” she asked.
“What are the odds that we stumbled into two unrelated financial scams that somehow got tangled up in the same case?”
“I have no idea. But you said yourself, embezzlement goes on all the time. It’s a fairly common crime.”
“True, but it rarely turns violent. Most embezzlers prefer to keep a low profile. It’s hard to conduct a profitable skimming operation when the cops are asking questions about a murder.”
“Where are you going with this?”
“There’s a connection between the embezzlement at Night Watch and the murder of Hannah Brewster.”
“I’ll bet Tucker Fleming is the embezzler,” Virginia said. “He was working his scam at Night Watch before he found out about his connection to Zane. He decided to go after that money, too.”
“I think you’re right,” Cabot said. “But that still leaves questions.”
She turned and put both her arms around him.
“You’re convinced there’s someone else involved in this thing,” she said.
“The person who posed as Quinton Zane and sent the messages to Fleming.”
“Maybe Fleming really is delusional,” she warned.
“Yes.” Cabot framed her face with his hands. “But I think we’ll know very soon if there is someone else involved in this business.”
“When the cops pick up Fleming? That probably won’t take long. As you said, he’s a loose cannon, and loose cannons have a problem keeping a low profile. Once they arrest him we’ll get all the answers.”
“If I’m right, Fleming is not going to be around long enough to talk.”
She went still. “Do you think he’ll escape?”
“I think he’ll try, but he’ll be in a state of raw panic. I doubt if he had a solid backup plan. The only good news is that whoever tried to use him to find the money will b
e frantic, too.”
“Why is that good news?”
“Because he or she will also start making mistakes.”
CHAPTER 61
Cabot’s phone rang just as he and Virginia were finishing breakfast. He glanced at the screen and got a rush of certainty mingled with anticipation.
“It’s Anson,” he said.
Virginia put down her fork and waited, watching him with somber eyes.
“What have you got?” he said into the phone.
“Just had a call from my best friend in the Seattle PD,” Anson said. “Schwartz told me that a jogger discovered Tucker Fleming’s body on a private dock on Lake Washington early this morning. The house is on the market. Owners are gone. It’s a very secluded location. No one heard the shots.”
“Shots? Plural?”
“One in the back and one in the head.”
“Starting to see a pattern here.”
“You bet, ace detectives that we are,” Anson said.
“I did some thinking last night.”
“Got a plan?”
“I’m going to talk to someone who knows all the players in this case, a person who might have had a lot to lose if Tucker Fleming had been captured alive and started talking.”
“Who?” Anson demanded.
Cabot told him. Then he ended the connection and told Virginia what he intended to do.
“I’m coming with you,” Virginia said.
“Not a good idea.”
“If you’re right, you’re going to need me.”
CHAPTER 62
Laurel Jenner was in a bathrobe when she opened the door. Virginia watched the expression on her face change from bewilderment to deep wariness.
“I know who you two are,” Laurel said. “Josh warned me about you. What are you doing here?”
“Tucker Fleming is dead,” Cabot said.
Laurel seemed genuinely startled. “Did the police shoot him? I heard he was wanted for arson, kidnapping and attempted murder. The evening news last night made it sound as if he was more than a little crazy.”
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