Chapter 45
“Is it true that you’re going to fund a new center, near the old one?” Esther asked from the back seat of the BMW.
Tex Hunter drove through the traffic, racing through the orange lights, speeding through the backstreets, trying to keep ahead of any trailing media vans.
“While waiting for the trial, I adjusted my will to leave them one million dollars, so that they could set up a new center.” Robert Sulzberger sat nervously in the front seat, sweat starting to build under his arms. “And I’ve sold all my shareholdings. I have the cash to help them, so I will. It’s the least I can do.”
“I even heard that some people are happy that you were innocent. It’s going to be a good write-up in the Tribune tomorrow,” Ray Jones called from the back seat, next to Esther, his hand holding onto the bar above the window.
“Some people are quick to forgive.” Hunter looked up and down the street before screeching his tires forward again. “And some people aren’t. Some of the men and women won’t talk to Robert ever again, but that’s not why he’s donating the money to them. He’s doing it because helping those veterans is the right thing to do.”
“The right thing to do?” Esther teased him. “Now I’ve heard it all—Tex Hunter telling the world that he has some sort of moral compass.”
“I didn’t say I had a moral compass. I’m only interested in the truth.” Hunter smiled. “I’ll leave the morality for other people to grapple with.”
“But you’re correct.” Sulzberger bounced in his chair as Hunter raced over another bump in the road. He was clearly breaking the speed limit. “It was the right thing to do. I got into politics to help people, and I’m no longer in politics now. I’m done with that. I want to try and help people outside of the paperwork in City Hall. I’ll buy the place nearby, and the veteran support groups can use that for their new base.”
They were closer now.
“I read about Cindy Mendel.” Jones checked over his shoulder for any trailing media vans. “She had a large write-up in the paper only a few weeks back. She lived a pretty tough life.”
Only three blocks to go.
Straight from the courthouse, once the hours of administrative papers had been signed off on, Sulzberger made the call that he had been waiting to make for months.
“I was sorry to hear it was her.” The nerves started to grow in Sulzberger’s stomach. “But it all made sense to me. Everything she did, everything that happened; I should’ve known it was her.”
“She was a cold-blooded murderer, Robert. Don’t be too sorry.” Hunter pushed the BMW faster.
“I know.” Sulzberger shrugged. “But still, she always tried to do good in the world, didn’t she? That was always her motivation.”
“She also punched Esther in the back of the head and tried to kill you in your apartment. That’s not doing good in the world,” Hunter stated. “She had seen a lot of hatred in her life, a lot of pain. That’s got to come out somehow.”
“What about the thief? The prosecutor, Michelle Law. What happens to her? Does she just get away with what she did?” Esther asked.
“Robert got away with stealing; why shouldn’t she?” Hunter turned another corner.
Two blocks now.
“I didn’t get away with it.” Sulzberger’s voice was shaky. “I lost my job. My reputation. My entire life has been turned upside down, and I could never return to the City Council after that. But not X’s life. She defied every ethical standpoint for a lawyer, laughed in our faces, and you’re just going to let her go back to the same everyday life that she led before?”
“That’s probably painful enough.” Jones laughed, holding on tight as the car raced faster. “For me, her life would be worse than prison.”
One block to go.
“Tex, just because she’s your old-school alumni doesn’t mean she should get away with it,” Esther argued. “She played you the whole time. She betrayed the entire justice system just so that she could see Robert on the stand. He dumped her, and she took us all for a ride. There’s got to be a part of you that wants to take her down?”
“I don’t want to take her down, even with her distinct lack of ethics, but I will hit her with some truths. She won’t get away from this without a reaction from us,” Hunter responded. He looked in the rearview mirror at Jones. “Did you get those DNA samples I asked for?”
“I did. I still have them.” He looked at Hunter quizzically. “But the case is over.”
“This isn’t over yet. Who do you know in the DNA field?”
“I have a few good friends everywhere. But what do you need it for?”
“A hunch.”
*****
The nerves of a young child are like nothing else.
Waiting on the front steps of her home, Lucy Sulzberger couldn’t stand still. She hopped from foot to foot, staring at every car that drove past, her eyes filled with tears. Her body was completely consumed by nerves, starting from her belly, reaching out to drench every limb in anxiety.
She hadn’t seen her father in months, and she didn’t want to wait another second. She didn’t know if she could. All she wanted was to hug the man she worshipped.
At four years old, she saw none of her father’s faults or mistakes. Even after her mother explained where her father had been, all she knew was that she wanted to feel his hug again.
The black sedan screeched to a stop at the side of the street.
Lucy stopped bouncing.
The door to the sedan opened.
“Daddy!” She spotted him in the distance. “Daddy!”
A child doesn’t care about her father’s issues. They don’t care about his problems. They don’t care about the arguments he has with their mother.
All Lucy cared about was if her father was there for her.
There to hug her, to read to her.
Dazed by the Chicago sun, Robert Sulzberger stepped out of the front seat and looked up at his house. His eyes lingered for a second before his focus went to his daughter running to him, crying, arms wide open.
He knelt, the force of her hug almost knocking him backward. The connection was an explosion of emotion, tears, and love.
She cried.
He cried more.
He held her tight for the first time in months.
This was his moment.
His second chance at life.
He had faced death, looked it in the eye, and his only thought was about his family. His daughter.
The people he loved.
Holding his daughter, holding her so tight, he never wanted the moment to end.
This was everything to him.
When Lucy finally pulled out of the hug, the shoulder of his shirt was soaked in tears. He wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist, not wanting his daughter to see him as such a blubbering mess.
He didn’t know what to say.
“Where have you been, Daddy?” Lucy held onto his arm, desperate not to let him go again.
“I’m sorry, sweetie. I’m so sorry that I haven’t been here. I’ll be here more. I promise.”
“You’d better make that promise to me too.” Kim Sulzberger stood behind them, arms folded across her chest, not sure how to feel.
Sulzberger nodded. “I will. I’ll be here. I want to be here. I want to try again. With us, as a family. That is if you’ll let me stay?”
He looked up at her with wet eyes.
She looked away. Sniffed back a tear.
“Please?”
“I would like that.” Her response was quiet, but it was her truth. “I would like that a lot.”
Tex Hunter walked around the front of the car, provided Kim a nod, and Lucy a smile.
“Thank you, Tex.” Sulzberger stood with Lucy attached to his left hip as he held out his right hand. “You saved my life.”
“Helping you felt like I was helping my father. After he was arrested, nobody assisted him, nobody helped him search for the truth.” Hunter shook Sulzberger’s hand fi
rmly, and nodded. “I have to go.”
He stepped back into the driver’s seat, started the engine and drove away, desperate to avoid the picture of a happy family.
Chapter 46
The walk through the cemetery still filled his stomach with nerves. It always did.
The grass was perfectly manicured, the path well trodden, and fresh flowers lay at the foot of a few gravestones. But this was not where Tex Hunter was going to stop. He was headed to the back of the yard, where the grass was long, the path unkempt, and flowers were a rarity.
This is where they buried a convicted serial killer.
After he had dropped Esther and Jones back at his office, he made the drive to the Queen of Heaven Cemetery in the suburb of Hillside, a yard Hunter had thought was secure enough to protect his mother’s gravestone. Although her gravestone had been spray-painted with words of hate twice, he was content with the choice of resting place.
Next to the trees, near the fence, well out of the way of any foot traffic, Patrick Hunter stood in his best suit, looking down at the grave, hands clasped in front of him, saying a few quiet words.
Hunter patted him on the back when he arrived.
“Nice flowers.” Hunter laid his bunch of white lilies at the base of the small gray headstone, next to a smaller bunch of purple chrysanthemums. He had to go to four different headstone makers before one would agree to engrave his mother’s headstone, and they were out of state. “You don’t usually bring flowers.”
“They’re not mine.” Patrick’s voice was cold.
Hunter stood, turned, and looked down at his older brother.
“Purple was Natalie’s favorite color.” Patrick was in no mood for niceties. “She must have left them here this morning.”
“Natalie’s back?” Hunter’s voice rose. “Have you heard from her?”
“No, Tex. And I don’t want to hear from her.” Patrick kept his eyes on his mother’s grave. There were no graves beside their mother’s; no one wanted to be buried near a person with her criminal record.
“She’s your sister, Patrick. If she’s in town, if she’s in the country, we have to find her.”
“No, we don’t.” Patrick’s voice was calm now. “She left a decade ago, and I’m glad she did.”
“You could forgive her for what she did.”
“Never. I will never forgive her. If you see her, don’t tell me about it.” Patrick knelt, kissed the top of the gray stone, and then nodded to his brother.
“She’s your family, Patrick.”
“She’s not my family.”
“How can you say that?” Hunter stood tall.
“Family is the people you choose to love. It isn’t always blood. Family is the people you choose to do anything for, the people you want to protect. Natalie, our father; they’re not my family. They betrayed me. Betrayed us. They pretended we lived an average life. They were always smiling. Laughing. They waved to the neighbors. Dad even coached the junior basketball team. But behind closed doors, they were killing people. Cutting their throats.”
“You don’t know if Natalie had anything to do with it.”
“I don’t care if she did anymore. She’s not my family. You, Maxwell, our mother…” Patrick paused. “You’re my family. You’re the people that I hold here.” He tapped his chest.
“I saw Maxwell.” Hunter was direct.
“What?” Patrick’s voice softened. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m telling you now.” Hunter turned to look at his brother again. “He came to me for work and said he had stopped using. I gave him some work, but right now, he doesn’t want to talk about what happened. Not to me, and not to you.”
Patrick’s mouth hung open, unable to respond.
The cold breeze blew around them, the leaves rustling overhead. The sun struggled to find a gap in the clouds, but when it did, at intermittent times, the warmth of the day jumped higher. The weather was as confused as the look on Patrick’s face.
“Family is the world’s greatest masterpiece, Patrick. You have to accept that one day. You have to accept that all this is your family.”
“Long ago, I accepted that our father is a convicted criminal. Tex, you have to stop fighting this.”
“I’ll never stop fighting for the truth.”
Patrick exhaled, shook his head, and walked away.
Hunter waited, watching his brother walk down the path with his head down and his hands in his pockets, and then turned back to the gravestone. He bent down and rested his hand on the ground, feeling the damp earth. He drew a long breath and sighed.
“Mom, if Natalie’s here, I’ll look after her.”
He stood, dusted the grass off his knees, and blew a kiss to his mother.
“I’ll come back soon, Mom, but right now, I have some important news to deliver.”
Chapter 47
“What have you come to do?” Michelle Law took a sip from her water bottle, placed it back in the bottom drawer so nobody else would see that it was vodka, and then stared at Tex Hunter. “Whatever it is, make it quick. I’ve got too much work to get through. I’ll be here until midnight even without this meeting.”
“I’ll be quick.” Hunter shut the door behind him.
The feeling in Law’s office was frantic, instantly tightening his shoulders. Law sat behind her large desk, everything perfectly organized but almost overflowing with files. She had three computer monitors on one side of the desk, all open with different documents, and large paper folders rested underneath. There were no family pictures in her office, no personal touches—not even a nice cup to drink coffee from.
“But, Michelle, you should clear your calendar for a few days, maybe weeks. This may take a little longer for you to work through.”
“You’re going to try to nab me for stealing with Robert? No chance. I don’t have time to deal with that.” She waved him away and then looked back at her computer screen. She attacked the keyboard frantically, the noise from the tapping keys filling the room. “I still have my own midlife crisis to deal with, thanks.”
Hunter stood in front of her perfectly organized desk, waiting for her to stop typing.
After a few moments, she stopped, unable to ignore his presence any longer.
“You broke the law, Michelle. You’re a prosecutor, the symbol of justice, and you repeatedly broke the law.”
“We were only stealing small things,” she reasoned. “And we didn’t hurt anyone.”
“But what’s next? Bigger items? More stealing? Or perhaps you’ll move on to a more serious crime.”
“I’m not the son of a killer. Killing people is not in my DNA,” she snapped.
“Maybe it is.” Hunter held a file in his hands, not quite sure what to do with it yet. “I was sad about Cindy.”
Law relaxed her shoulders, leaning back in her chair. “So was I.”
“You were close, weren’t you?”
“She was the closest person I had in my life. We met more than twenty years ago, and she’s been in my life ever since. Always there for me when I needed advice. She was like my family.” She held her emotions back. “But I guess, in the end, she was a cold-blooded killer. A felon.” She tried to shrug it off. “There isn’t anything more I can say about that. I can’t justify what she did just because she was my mentor.”
“I told my brother today that family is the world’s greatest masterpiece, and I truly believe that even after everything we’ve been through.” Hunter looked at her more intently. “Did you tell Cindy about your relationship with Robert?”
“I told her that we were dating in secret, but I didn’t tell her about the things we did.” Law shook her head, and the sadness in her eyes was clear. “I turned to her when he broke it off with me. I was truly heartbroken, and I had to talk to someone, but she was the only person I ever told. I cried, a lot, and she comforted me.”
“Has she written to you since the charges were laid against her?”
“She’s w
ritten letters, but I haven’t read them.” She blinked back a tear. “And I don’t intend to. She’s gone. Like everyone else in my life. They all go away.”
Hunter let the silence sit in the room.
“What is it that you wanted, Tex? Did you come to gloat that you won in court? Because the killer is behind bars—that’s a win for me too. There’ll be no gloating here. And if you’re going to try and pin the stealing on me, you’d better be prepared for a fight.”
“My investigator took your DNA from a water bottle that you used at the gym.”
“What?” She laughed. “Are you trying to prove that I stole with Robert? You must know that’s inadmissible evidence.”
“I know it is, but at the time, we wanted a lead for the case. We thought that you, the mystery woman, X, would provide that, so we took your DNA.”
“Why tell me that now?” She closed a paper file on her desk. “Why would I need to know that?”
“Because the result of your DNA sample is about something bigger than this case. This is something that you should know.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There’s a match to your DNA. It was a hunch of mine, and it turned out to be true.”
Her mouth hung open.
“There’s more than just a resemblance between you.” He tapped the file in his left hand. “Maybe everyone didn’t abandon you.”
“Tex.”
“You must have known. You must have had an idea for all these years.”
“Don’t say it.”
“Did you know? Somewhere, deep down, you must’ve known. Maybe subconsciously. I think it was obvious to everyone else.”
“Don’t do this, Tex. Don’t do this.”
“We ran a test on the DNA and matched it with another DNA sample that we took from the night that Robert was almost shot.”
“Tex.”
“Your mother has been by your side for all these years.”
“No.” She shook her head. “No.”
“People do strange things for their families. She knew who you were and she wanted retaliation for what Robert did to you. She wanted revenge for you. That’s why she went after Robert. It was all for you.”
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