by Amy Vansant
“Did you set the fire?” asked Charlotte.
Corentine’s attention whipped to her. “What fire?”
Declan caught Charlotte’s eye, hoping she could see in his expression he believed Corentine was as confused as she appeared.
“Who knows about your past? The storm killings?” he asked.
“Just the marshals. I swear. I had to tell them. I couldn’t make all these deals just to end up in jail for something else.”
Charlotte frowned. “You must have had some awfully good testimony for them to drop murder charges.”
She nodded. “You have no idea. My testimony probably saved a dozen people. I was already reformed... It had been years...” She took a beat and then added, “Still in therapy. But good. Really good.”
Charlotte hung her head. “But the person setting you up had to know about your past. Both deaths were made to look storm-related.”
She nodded. “More than that. It’s how two of my setups worked. A fake ladder fall and asphyxiation.”
“What about the third?” asked Declan.
Corentine’s pupils bounced in Charlotte’s direction. “She already said.”
Charlotte gaped. “A fire.”
“Yes.”
“Only the marshals knew? You’re sure?” asked Declan.
“That means Jamie knew,” interjected Charlotte.
Corentine shrugged. “Sure. But she’s in jail.”
Declan and Charlotte exchanged a glance and Corentine took a step back, seemingly panicked.
“She’s out?”
Charlotte nodded. “She might be. There are rumors.”
“But, but...why would she come here and try to frame me?”
“That’s a good question.” Declan pulled out his phone and held it up for Charlotte to see. “I’m going to call Stephanie. Corentine, sit, please. We’re not after you.”
“Apparently,” added Charlotte.
Corentine wrung her hands together. “Can I borrow your bathroom?”
Charlotte hesitated and then stepped back to clear the way to the hall. “Sure. First door on the left.”
Corentine headed to the back of the house and Charlotte took a step back to give herself a clear view of the hall.
“Keep an eye on her,” said Declan.
“Make your call outside. Make sure she doesn’t climb out the window.”
Declan nodded and stepped outside to call Stephanie. She answered as if in a panic.
“Declan? What is it? I was just about to call you.”
“Why?”
“For starters, I was tailing Mom until you ran her into the lake.”
“You were following us?”
“Following her. At first. Until you both took off at a thousand miles an hour. I didn’t figure out where you went until I heard the story about the car in the lake. How did that happen?”
“She drove in there. I never actually saw her. She never came up.”
“She’s dead?”
“No. The car was empty. She got away.”
Stephanie sighed. “Okay. That makes more sense. She checked out of her hotel. She’s in the wind.”
Declan frowned. He didn’t like the idea of Jamie being anywhere. “I have a question for you. We think she’s been setting up one of her WITSECs.”
“How so?”
“She’s been calling this person to murders mimicking the way this person used to, uh, do things.”
“She’s copying the witness’s old murders?”
“Yes.”
There was a sharp knock on the glass sliders behind Declan and he jumped.
“Tell her someone dropped off a fingerprint, too,” said Charlotte through the glass before hustling back to her post near the hall.
Declan nodded. “Someone left the witness’s fingerprint with the sheriff, too, like they wanted them captured.”
Declan heard a low growl on the other side of the line.
“Stephanie?”
“That bitch.”
“Who? Your mother?”
“Yes. I’m going to kill her. She hedged her bets.”
“What do you mean?”
She tried to hit you with a sniper last night.”
Declan gaped, remembering the rifle crack he thought he’d heard in the parking lot. “At the restaurant?”
“Yes. Nearly did it, too. He got off one sloppy shot.”
Declan closed his eyes.
The lamppost.
His eyes popped open again as Stephanie’s words repeated in his memory.
“Wait, how do you know all this?”
“Don’t ask.”
“You were there?”
“Don’t ask. The important part is I made her promise not to kill you, so she took me super literally and hired someone else to do it.”
“But she didn’t ask Cor—, uh, this person to kill us.”
I don’t think. He realized he’d never asked Corentine that specific question.
“She didn’t have to,” said Stephanie. “She’s implicating her. If hiring the shooter didn’t work, she planned to kill you herself, but blame it on someone else.”
Declan shook his head. “If Charlotte and I were killed, by a sniper or some accident, wouldn’t that be a heck of a coincidence? You’d never believe she didn’t have a hand in it.”
“She’d have plausible deniability.”
“In what world?”
Stephanie sighed. “Bottom line, you’d be gone and I’d have choices to make.”
Declan rolled his eyes. “You might as well tell her to go ahead and kill us if all it takes for your forgiveness is the tiniest whiff of innocence.”
“Hey, I’m the one giving you a fighting chance.”
“Gosh. Thanks. So you don’t know where she is?”
“No. Where’s this witness?”
“Here.”
Stephanie laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“Don’t you see? Mom’s work is done. If you end up dead, the witness has already been seen at your house.”
He raised his hand to his forehead. “Plausible deniability.”
They’d unwittingly made Jamie’s life easier.
“She’s coming for you. Be—I gotta go.”
The line went dead and Declan lowered the phone.
That was abrupt.
He slid open the slider to reenter the house. Corentine had returned to take her place on the sofa.
“What did she say?” asked Charlotte. “Anything useful?”
Declan focused on Corentine.
“You need to go. Far away. Drive somewhere hours away and check in. Make sure people see you. Get seen on camera as often as possible. It’s your best chance of this not getting pinned on you.”
Corentine stood. “This?”
Declan sighed. “Our murders.”
Corentine grabbed her bucket and hustled past Charlotte.
“I’m sorry,” she said, throwing open the door and disappearing into the rain.
Charlotte watched her go and then turned to Declan.
“What’s going on?”
Declan slipped his phone in his pocket. “All the murders were Jamie, setting up Corentine so Stephanie wouldn’t be mad at her when we were killed.”
Charlotte closed the front door. “So Jamie is going to kill us?”
Declan sighed. “Not if I can help it.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Snookie took a moment to review the thumb drive at her desk and then, her box of work-related memories and a stapler she liked already packed, said her goodbyes and went home to change. Her apartment was already stuffed into the trunk and the back seat of her fifteen-year-old BMW.
She lived light.
In front of the mirror included with her furnished apartment, she’d worked on a character developed to get close to Stephanie Moriarty. Then, satisfied she’d nailed it, drove an hour and a half south to Charity.
It felt good to be in the field again, even if
it was her last hurrah. She’d been confined to desk duty the month before her retirement, wearing a dark suit every day in Tampa, Florida like some sort of masochist.
She’d been reprimanded there. It seemed the FBI didn’t like it when an agent voluntarily went undercover as a waitress to stop a robbery ring. Then it was all, that’s not one of our cases, and you can’t use federal resources and isn’t that guy your boyfriend, did you really do this to catch him cheating on you?
Ridiculous.
Though sending her cheating boyfriend to jail for robbery made it all worth it.
For her meeting with Stephanie, she’d decided to dress down. Her costume included polyester shorts with an elastic waistband she found disturbingly comfortable, a simple white t-shirt featuring a painting of a cat in the moonlight and flip-flops so old and cheap the noise they made when she walked was more like flip flerp. She’d picked the name Tammy Whynot as her cover, though she’d have to change that on the fly if Stephanie actually asked for a last name.
Snookie pulled into the law office’s gravel parking lot and looked around. Stephanie’s office nestled in the corner of a small shopping center containing the usual strip mall shops—a nail salon and a dry cleaner’s. According to the information Macha had given her, Jamie’s daughter spent most of her time getting bad guys out of prison time. No shocker there. Probably some deep-seated need to forgive her mother for her crimes. Absolution by proxy.
Cracking her neck, Snookie flip-flerped to the door and walked into a cube of air-conditioning masquerading as Stephanie’s tasteful waiting room. A pile of People and Popular Mechanics sat on the sofa’s side table, all of them over six months old. Snookie peered down the hall where a door remained half-opened and scowled at what looked like a cot with a pillow on it.
Who sleeps back there?
“How can I help you?” asked Stephanie, appearing at the door of an office adjacent to the lobby. Snookie recognized her from her photos on the thumb drive. Good-looking girl, tall and blonde and thin as a rail. Snookie already hated her.
“Hi there,” she said, thrusting out a hand. “I’m Tammy. You’re Stephanie Moriarty like the sign says out front?”
“I am.” Stephanie kept a smile plastered to her face, but Snookie could see she wasn’t impressed with the sixty-year-old trailer-trash who’d walked through her door. Still, in Stephanie’s business as a defense lawyer, Snookie wasn’t the sort of character she could afford to blow off, which is why she’d created Tammy Whynot.
“I came to talk to you about my son.”
Of course you did, said Stephanie with the beginning of an eyeroll she nipped before it became too obvious.
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No. Did I need one? You got a shop here so I just figgered...”
Stephanie looked at her watch. “No. It’s fine. I’ll make some time. Come inside.” She motioned for Snookie to follow her into the office.
They both took seats, Stephanie behind the desk and Snookie in a chair clearly designed to make her feel ill at ease. Snookie shifted the chair around to the side of the desk to sit closer to Stephanie, who frowned and rolled her chair back a few inches.
Snookie took Stephanie’s fidgeting as a chance to look around. Three-fourths of Stephanie’s office felt normal. All the usual lawyer books sat stacked in a dark wooden bookshelf, a file cabinet occupied one corner. She saw everything she’d expect to see if someone were building a television film set for a lawyer’s office.
Then she looked to her right.
On the right wall hung various types of weapons; a katana, an old pistol, a bowie knife mounted on a piece of polished wood, and some sort of medieval torture device made out of pocked metal. That wall was an odd choice. Maybe it impressed her probably mostly male clientele? Maybe it symbolized her strength? Represented a willingness to fight for her clients?
Snookie looked at Stephanie through new eyes.
This one is interesting.
“I knew a Stephanie, but we all called her Staphanie,” said Snookie, giving herself more time to study the office.
“Mm hm,” mumbled Stephanie, looking at her laptop screen as if she wanted to finish something before engaging.
“You want to know why we called her Staphanie?”
The blonde looked up and closed the laptop. “Sure.”
“Because she gave Rick a staph infection.”
Stephanie offered a humorless smile. “Ah. I should have guessed. Very funny. Is Rick your son?”
“Rick? Naw. Rick’s a guy in our park. Honestly, the staph infection was probably good for him. Probably killed whatever else he had at the time.”
She barked a crude laugh and Stephanie’s lip curled a bit. Snookie watched her try and hide it by continuing.
“We should probably get to why you’re here. You said your son needs a lawyer?”
“Yeah. Well, we got a complicated relationship. He don’t listen to me and he gets himself in trouble. I can feel he’s about to get picked up.”
Stephanie shifted in her chair, visibly annoyed.
“If he hasn’t been picked up, he doesn’t need a lawyer.”
“Oh, he will. Kid doesn’t have the brains God gave a worm. I want to be prepared. I can give you a, whaddya call it, retainer right now.”
Stephanie straightened in her seat at the mention of money. “Very well. What’s he up to?”
“If I tell you that, are you allowed to tell the police?”
“No. It would fall under attorney-client privilege.”
“Right. I heard that on the TV. That sounds right. Okay. He’s a drug dealer. Steals cars. Robs houses. Pretty much anything that comes up looks like easy money, he’s good to go.”
“Hm. Well, Mrs...?”
Snookie grimaced, realizing she’d never come up with a name other than the one she’d picked to amuse herself. Her eye fell on a ceramic mug on the desk.
“Cerama.”
“Well, Mrs. Cerama, I’m not sure petty theft and drug dealing is the sort of case—”
Snookie leaned forward across the desk and Stephanie recoiled to avoid being touched. “But you’re my only hope of keeping my boy out of jail.”
“I don’t know that I’m your only hope—”
“But I knew you’d understand because of your momma.”
Stephanie’s expression twitched. She’d been caught off guard.
Snookie snatched a couple of tissues from a box on the corner of the desk and dabbed her eyes. She could cry on demand, a talent she’d used many times in the past to great success. If the FBI handed out FBI Oscars, she imagined she’d be the Meryl Streep of the bureau.
“Mrs. Cerama—”
“You can call me Tammy.”
“Tammy. I don’t see—”
“I imagine you don’t give your momma the sort of trouble my boy gives me, what you being a fancy lawyer and all. But you understand what it’s like to have family go to jail.”
Stephanie frowned but didn’t rise to the bait.
Snookie wanted to ask her the last time Stephanie saw her mother, but no. Too obvious. She peeked over her tissues and realized Stephanie’s expression had shifted from annoyance to something more like...
Suspicion.
Snookie lowered the tissues and tracked Stephanie’s attention to her wrist, and the watch the office had given her for her retirement. The watch didn’t feel like old Tammy Whynot.
Stupid. How’d I miss that?
“He gave me this,” she said stroking the watch as Stephanie’s gaze shifted to hers, searching for duplicity, no doubt. “He can’t afford no watch like this.”
“He probably stole it.”
Snookie pointed. “See? That’s what I’m sayin’.”
Stephanie plucked a business card from the holder on her desk. “Tell you what, Mrs. Cerama. You take my card. I can’t do anything for you until your boy gets himself arrested. When that happens, you give me a call and we’ll talk retainer.”
&nbs
p; Snookie took the card. “Okay. ‘Bout how much does something like that usually cost?”
“Depends. I’d keep five thousand aside.”
Snookie grunted. “I don’t have that kind of money.”
She watched Stephanie fight to keep from snarling as she stood and rounded the desk. “Well, if your son is as prolific a thief as you say he is, maybe he does.”
“He’s a pro, all right,” muttered Snookie, feeling like the use of the word prolific had been a test to see if she knew what it meant.
She let Stephanie usher her to the door and looked back down the hall as they entered the waiting room.
“Is that a bed back there?” she asked.
Stephanie’s cheeks colored. “I’m on a big case. I sleep here sometimes.”
“Ah.” Snookie couldn’t help but wonder if the cot was for Jamie, though hiding out in her daughter’s office wouldn’t be the smartest idea.
“Can I borrow your bathroom before I go?”
“It’s broken.” Stephanie gave her elbow a shove towards the door. “Just give me a call if you need me.”
Snookie frowned.
So much for slipping back there to look around.
She allowed Stephanie to herd her toward the door and walked out into the heat, squinting into the sun.
“Talk to you later.” Stephanie whipped back inside and Snookie thought she heard the door lock.
She turned. Looking up, she spotted a camera hanging from the eaves.
Being watched.
She returned to her car and pulled out at an angle so Stephanie and her cameras wouldn’t see her Florida plates were issued in a different county.
Snookie drove aimlessly for a few minutes, tapping her finger against her front tooth. Her interview with Stephanie hadn’t provided her with anything solid, but her mind kept circling back to one thought.
That girl is up to something.
She had acted too suspicious. The watch had set her off, but maybe the mention of mother-daughter relationships didn’t help. Either way, she seemed on edge.
Snookie decided she’d stick around another day or two. Maybe watch Stephanie’s office.
But first...
She drove by Declan Bingham’s pawn shop to find a sign on the door announcing it was closed for the hurricane.
So much for that.
