by Jule McBride
But the father he’d never known was now dead.
Murdered.
Dylan tried not to think of the grisly descriptions of how the father he’d never known had dragged himself from room to room, wallowing in his own blood. Vague, nebulous uneasiness uncoiled inside Dylan. He knew his mother well, and he loved her. But even more, he trusted her. Without just cause, she’d never have lied about his father being dead.
But now Dylan’s father really was dead.
Was there a connection between his and his mother’s flight from LA. years ago, the events at the wedding, and Lang Devlyn’s murder? And why had Dylan always been so haunted by visions of the lake at the Devlyn estate? It was far-fetched, but years ago, had his mother been fleeing from the same man who’d recently killed Lang Devlyn? Had that man killed Jan? Dylan sighed, wishing his mother was well enough to talk. As it was, she’d only offered Alice a few disjointed, rambling sentences.
Santiago said, “If you didn’t know Lang Devlyn was your father, and if you had no contact with him, then who raised you?”
Dylan tried to look offended. Hell, what was he supposed to say? That he’d been raised in Rock Canyon, Wyoming, as Dylan Nolan? That Nancy Nolan was his mother? Hardly. If Santiago knew that, Dylan would be on the next plane back to Sheriff Sawyer—and probably wearing handcuffs. He’d be immediately arrested on suspicion of Jan Sawyer’s murder. Dylan avoided Alice’s eyes. “My life is very private.” It was hardly a decent explanation for why he wouldn’t talk, but it would have to do.
Santiago’s gaze narrowed a fraction, but his voice remained light. “Right now, I can find no record of your life. No record of taxes.” He paused. “Hmm. Well, I suppose your life will get private now that you’re heir to an estate worth millions, huh?”
The air was squeezing from Dylan’s chest, making him feel vaguely panicked. “Is that an accusation, Detective? Do you think I’ve done something illegal?” Lord, was he going to wind up a suspect in yet another murder? First Jan and now this. Not to mention tax evasion....
In order to defend himself from such an accusation, he’d have to admit he was also Dylan Nolan. Yeah, it sure might seem as if he’d killed his father to get hold of an inheritance, too. Millions made for a strong motive. Especially since he and his father were estranged. “Am I under suspicion?”
Beside him, Alice sucked in an audible breath. Somehow, the sound made Dylan recall the fear in her eyes when he’d driven up to Cat’s Canyon. It was unsettling to realize she might have moments of doubt. Maybe she’d never love him again, but surely she didn’t think him capable of murder. Or did she? Had she ever thought he’d killed Jan? And what did she make of the fact that there’d been a ticket from L.A. in the blue bag that was supposedly his?
Suddenly something seemed to crawl across Dylan’s nape; the feeling was so intense that he lifted his hand and rubbed the spot This whole situation was making his gut tighten into a knot. He knew damn well that the blue bag wasn’t his. But whose was it? And why had Clarisse sworn he’d checked into the Blue Sage Motel carrying it?
She said she’d seen him. That was the most unsettling thing. Was it possible that Dylan was doing things of which he was unaware? Had he been in L.A.? Had he checked into the motel? Was it possible that he was having memory lapses? Blackouts of some kind?
Was it really possible to commit murder without knowing it? Could he have killed Jan Sawyer...?
Get a grip, Dylan. You didn’t kill anyone!
Feeling uneasy, Dylan shifted in his chair as if to ground himself, then he stared at Santiago, who was still considering, now gazing down at his legal pad and worrying his lip between a thumb and index finger. Hell, maybe the detective meant for this long silence to unnerve Dylan and Alice. If so, Dylan decided, his tactics were working.
Finally, Santiago said, “No. You’re not under suspicion, Mr. Devlyn. But that plane ticket in your bag does place you in L.A. at the time of the murder. Look, I can’t make you answer any of my questions, not unless I’m charging you, which I’m not So far, there’s nothing at the scene of the crime—at your father’s house,” he amended, “that indicates you were on the premises. I haven’t Mirandized you, and since you don’t know me from Adam, you know you don’t owe me a thing. But still, uh, let’s just say your hesitation is more than a little unusual.” The sensible plea in Santiago’s dark eyes was nearly irresistible. Dylan guessed he was a good cop. “C’mon,” Santiago finished, “what do you have to lose by helping me out here? If I can’t get information voluntarily, I will have to resort to other means.”
Dylan’s eyes slid to Alice’s hands, which were resting on her knees. What he wouldn’t give right now to thread his fingers through hers and squeeze, and to feel her squeeze back.
Santiago sighed. “Okay. Have it your way. Mind taking a look at this?”
Dylan’s heart skipped a beat as the detective slid a faxed page from a Rock Canyon High School yearbook across the desk. “As you both know, the Rock Canyon sheriff is still looking for this man.” Santiago glanced at Alice. “I believe he was your husband?”
Alice’s features remained masked. “Yes. Uh, the marriage was annulled.”
Dylan’s chest constricted. Under the circumstances, he didn’t blame her for that. Probably her parents had pressured her to annul the marriage. But it still hurt. Dammit, Alice was supposed to be his. Until death us do part.
“That’s a picture of Dylan Nolan,” she clarified.
Santiago nodded. “And he’s still at large.”
Alice’s eyes slid to Dylan’s again. She cleared her throat. “I...don’t know. I—I always thought Sheriff Sawyer should have investigated further, that something might have happened to Dylan.”
Santiago stared deeply into her eyes. “Something?”
Alice nodded. “Something bad. That he could have been murdered, the way Jan Sawyer was.”
Dylan decided it was bad enough to be sitting here under the circumstances, but did Alice really need to elaborate on their marriage? Or his disappearance? Still, she was throwing Santiago off the scent, which was good. After all, the detective kept glancing curiously between Dylan and Alice as if he knew there was more to the relationship than met the eye. Dylan bit back a sigh. He only wished there was more to it. But maybe the events in their lives had driven an irreparable wedge between them. Alice seemed intent on rejecting him.
Santiago said, “Uh, Mr. Devlyn, do you know Dylan Nolan?”
Dylan tried to look casual, but staring down at the picture did strange things to his insides. Hard to believe the boy with the fleshy, cherubic cheeks and golden windblown hair was him, and that Santiago didn’t realize it. Somehow, Dylan expected the man to see similarities, maybe to recognize the eyes. But even Dylan himself was shocked when he looked into mirrors now and saw a stranger staring back. No, the boy in the picture didn’t resemble the dark-haired man with the chiseled face whom Dylan had become.
“Recognize him?” Santiago prodded.
Dylan could barely believe he was being asked to identify himself. His voice was deceptively even. “No. Any reason I should?”
Santiago paused a long moment, his dark eyes assessing Dylan’s. “We think...he might be your brother.”
“What?” Dylan felt as if the wind had been knocked out of him. Beside him, Alice looked equally stunned. Now Santiago was convinced that Dylan was his own brother! This was so ludicrous. “As far as I know, I don’t have a brother.” But then, he hadn’t known he’d had a living father, either.
“A brother?” Alice now echoed.
Santiago nodded. “A woman in the hospital in Rock Canyon, a woman who’s been living there for years and going by the name Nancy Nolan is really Lang Devlyn’s estranged wife.” Santiago nodded at Alice. “I’m talking about your ex-mother-in-law. As you know, she worked on your family’s ranch. Now, as near as we can tell, she fled Los Angeles a little over twenty years ago, though we don’t know why. And she took one of her and Lang Devlyn’s sons.”
One of them?
Dylan kept his expression unreadable, but his mind was spinning. What was going on here? Would he ever be able to untangle this web of lies?
“Mr. Devlyn?” prompted Santiago.
“Sorry,” Dylan managed to say. “But this is all so painful to listen to.” Suddenly he wished he could tell Santiago that he was Dylan Nolan and that Nancy was his mother. Maybe Santiago could help. But more likely, Dylan would wind up in jail, being charged with Jan Sawyer’s murder. And then Alice might further endanger herself by deciding to play sleuth on her own.
Not that Dylan blamed her. Every strange thing that had happened was connected: Jan and Lang Devlyn’s murders, the attack on Dylan’s mother, the phone calls Alice had gotten and the defiled picture in her locket.
Dylan could feel it in his gut. So could Alice. It was why she’d been hell-bent on accompanying him here. Otherwise, she was hardly speaking to him. He’d been watching her profile as they landed in L.A., and he’d seen something so uncompromisingly regal in it that he still hadn’t shaken the bone-deep hurt. Why couldn’t she accept that he’d left for her own good?
“I’m very sorry to have to ask these questions,” Santiago was saying now.
“It’s all right,” Dylan said.
In the next long silence, Dylan glanced through a window. From the ground, L.A. looked beautiful. Bright sunlight filtered through the fronds of palm trees and countless sprinklers were trained on blooming flowers and lush green grass. From the air, it was another story. Looking past Alice’s profile as the plane landed, Dylan had been staring into a layer of brown haze. Haunted skyscrapers were shrouded in brown mist. They’d looked like his own life felt—hidden and mysterious. On the ride from the airport to the hotel, Dylan hadn’t been able to keep his eyes from the oleander that was planted along the freeways, to keep wild animals from running onto the roads. Just looking at the plants made Dylan shudder.
He realized Santiago was still surveying him, looking cautious and puzzled. “All we have that identifies you—and it’s plenty—are your fingerprints. Your father put them on file with us years ago, in case you were ever kidnapped.” He shrugged. “As Sheriff Sawyer probably told you, it’s pretty common around here.”
“Lots of rich, famous people in the neighborhood, huh?” said Alice, sounding vaguely relieved that Santiago had introduced a new topic.
“Bel-Air’s definitely got its share.”
“I can’t imagine living that way,” Alice said, a soft twinge in her voice. “I mean, fearing a ransom call. I guess a lot of celebrities have to worry about that”
Santiago shrugged again. “Yeah. Anyway, it seems that Dylan Nolan was also the son of Lang Devlyn. At least that’s my guess, since Nancy Nolan was married to Lang, and they did have two sons.” He nodded at Dylan. “Stuart Devlyn. And Niles Devlyn. Of course, we’ve got no way to find out if the boy who Nancy raised as Dylan Nolan is really Niles Devlyn. We can hardly check Dylan Nolan’s prints against the ones Lang left in our file, since...”
“Since Dylan vanished?” Alice finished.
Santiago nodded. “Sheriff Sawyer had Dylan Nolan’s prints on file, but they moved offices a while back, and have misplaced the files. Apparently, Dylan was fingerprinted after a boyhood prank, but the files weren’t stored with those of more serious crimes. Sheriff Sawyer’s still looking for the files.”
Dylan’s gut clenched. It was bad enough that Sawyer might soon find his fingerprints. But in addition to the father he’d never known, did Dylan also have a brother? He could still barely register the information. “Lang Devlyn definitely had two sons?”
Santiago nodded. “Yes.”
“You’re sure?” prodded Alice.
“Sure am.”
There was a long pause. Santiago tried again. “Uh, you’re being truthful when you say you have had no ties to your father, is that right, Mr. Devlyn? You really didn’t know he was your father?”
Dylan sighed. He supposed the detective was trying to wear him down. “I’ve told you the truth.”
“So who was your mother? Who raised you?”
Dylan said the only thing he could. “I’ve answered enough for now.”
Alice sounded offended. “Like he said, he’s a very private man.”
Santiago’s eyes zeroed in on Alice. “What possessed you to travel here with a stranger you only met the night before last? Mind telling me that?” When she didn’t answer, Santiago shifted his gaze to Dylan and continued, “As I said, we know your father was once married to Nancy Paul aka Nancy Nolan. Paul was her maiden name. Anyway, we’ve now established that she’s been living in Rock Canyon, which is where we found you yesterday. She raised a son there who vanished after a murder that occurred on his wedding day...”
Whatever Santiago was digging for, Alice wasn’t about to let him have it. “Maybe when Ms. Nolan is well, you’ll get some of your answers, Detective.”
“I’m sure I will,” murmured Santiago, suddenly sounding absent. For a long moment, he stared down at his pad again, then he abruptly glanced up, his eyes searching Dylan’s. “I really need to know more about you—where you grew up, who raised you, what you were doing in Rock Canyon.” His lips pursed. “And I will get the information. Right now, I’m just trying to make things easy for you.”
Dylan really didn’t know what to say. He knew he sounded like a broken record. “My life is very private.”
“You said.” Santiago tapped a pencil against the legal pad. “And as of today, you’re a rich powerful man in Los Angeles, too, which means I don’t want to step on your toes.”
There was a touch of awe in Alice’s voice. “Rich?” she murmured, her voice barely audible.
“It’s hard to believe.”
Santiago nodded thoughtfully. “The information I asked Sheriff Sawyer to convey is correct. Stuart’s inherited the bulk of the Devlyn estate. In fact, there’s a lawyer—” Pausing, Santiago scribbled on a corner of the legal pad, ripped off the paper and pushed it at Dylan. “His name’s Ben Rose. He wants to meet you at the estate when we’re done here, which I guess we are.” Santiago didn’t look too happy about the small amount of information he’d received, but he wasn’t the type to waste his time. He turned to Alice again. “It really was so nice of you to come here with Mr. Devlyn.”
She smiled coolly. “I do pride myself on being a nice person.”
Everything in Santiago’s eyes said he knew there was more to her motives than met the eye. “Do you?”
“Yes, Mr. Santiago.”
“Then maybe you’d like to stay just one more minute, and tell me whatever you can about the woman you knew as Nancy Nolan. The sheriff tells me that you married her son...” And that he vanished after your wedding, the day of Jan Sawyer’s murder.
The unspoken words hung in the air. “We never knew anything about her background,” Alice said calmly. “I can tell you that much. When she took the job at the ranch, working for my father, she told him she’d had other kinds of work experience. Waitressing, clerking in a clothing store.”
“She didn’t seem out of place in Rock Canyon?”
Alice suddenly stared down. Fidgeting a moment, she finally folded her hands in her lap. Dylan didn’t know, but he thought she might be remembering that day, years ago, when they’d met outside the general store. “Nancy Nolan did seem a little out of place in Rock Canyon,” Alice continued. “She was glamorous somehow. But we never would have guessed she’d been a singer out here in L.A.”
Nor could Dylan. His eyes strayed to an album cover on Santiago’s desk. The detective had told them that, apparently, in 1969, when his mother was only seventeen years old, she’d been a backup singer with a little-known group called the Micro-Velvets. By then, Lang Devlyn had already faded into relative obscurity. His own singing career was over, and it was while he was scoring movies and producing records that he met, and married, Nancy Paul. He’d backed the two albums the band had produced. But what happened to the couple aft
er that was still up for conjecture.
“Is there any evidence that my father was abusive to...” My mother? “To Nancy Paul Devlyn?” Dylan asked.
Santiago shook his head. “No.” He shrugged. “The marriage dissolved a long time ago, but we’re doing our best to interview people connected to Nancy and...” Santiago paused. “Your father.”
Father. Even now, it sounded so strange to Dylan.
Santiago lifted eyes that were deceptively patient. Come hook, crook or nail, Santiago was going to get his answers. Oh, for now, he’d let Dylan and Alice walk away, but he’d solve his case. And he’d find out where Dylan—aka Stuart Devlyn—had spent the last years of his life.
“Your mother and father had a very private relationship,” Santiago said thoughtfully, “far outside the public eye. It wasn’t even really public knowledge that your father married. In fact, he may well have had other secret marriages for all we know. Sometimes stars are married outside the country, and don’t have U.S. records. Near as I can tell, so much money was, and is, being made off the Lang Devlyn image—” Santiago paused and shrugged, as if he’d suddenly grown bone-weary of Los Angeles celebrity types. “He was the quintessential lone-man, a rebel without a cause. And re-releases of his old records on CD are still selling briskly. So, from a marketing standpoint, keeping private affairs out of the limelight was key. After he and Nancy were married, they seem to have cut off other relationships. Nancy quit singing with the Micro-Velvets....”
Dylan didn’t say anything.
For the first time, Santiago looked genuinely frustrated. “Christ, c’mon,” he suddenly muttered. “I’ve been trying to follow every lead possible in solving your father’s murder. If you won’t tell me everything you can, how can I find out if someone from the past might want him dead? How can I—”
Santiago suddenly quit rambling. His eyes seemed to shift, to become more sharply focused. “Sheriff Sawyer found the ticket from L.A. in your bag, Stuart. So please. One more time. We’d like to know what you were doing in L.A.”
Stuart. Hearing the name spoken out loud was jarring.
