“Yeah, yeah, keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”
“You didn’t have a problem with it then.”
“I thought we were discussing one meal. A couple hours of your time. Coy tells me it’s been a hell of a lot more than that. Exactly what is it you think you can accomplish by hanging out with this guy?”
“I’ll know what he knows.” I’ll find out whether you’re the man I always believed you were or if you’re no better than the common criminals you used to prosecute.
Her father had always been her hero. He’d come from nothing, pulled himself up, gained power and influence. As district attorney, he’d upheld the law; as senator, he’d made the law, and he’d done it all for the greater good.
At least that was the story he and her mother had told her.
The first part was definitely true. He’d come from nothing, had been the first in his family to graduate from high school, had put himself through college and law school with the G.I. Bill, scholarships, loans and working more jobs than any three people could have handled. Then he’d married into the Colby family. It was easy to gain power and influence when your in-laws had it in spades.
The upholding-the-law part…it appeared that was questionable.
He didn’t look very heroic this morning. His gray hair was neatly combed, as always. He wore a conservative white shirt, steel-gray suit and burgundy tie—practically a uniform for him-that fitted as if custom-made, which, tie aside, they were. He was clean-shaven, and his skin had a healthy glow after days in the Florida sun.
But he looked worried. On edge. Trying, as always, to hide it but failing. Jake’s purpose in town concerned him.
Because he had something to hide.
“Norris has an agenda.”
“Of course he does,” she said evenly. “He’s here to research a book, to gather as much information about the Charley Baker case as possible—a task that you’re not making easy for him.”
The senator’s brows arched. “Me? I’ve been out of town.”
“And in regular contact with Judge Markham and Chief Roberts.” She sat straighter in the chair, her expression bland, her voice emotionless. “Chief Roberts has been abusing his authority by assigning officers to harass Jake. Someone removed the old newspapers from the library archives and persuaded the publisher to make his copies unavailable. Judge Markham says you told him to destroy the trial transcript. And Therese Franklin never asked you to stop this book.”
The temperature around the desk dropped a few frosty degrees as her father stared at her. His mouth opened and closed a few times, then settled into a harsh line. “I cannot believe my own daughter is sitting here in my study, in my house, saying these things to me. I don’t control Coy Roberts’s every move. If his officers are harassing Norris, then I can only assume that Norris has done something to warrant it. I don’t know what’s going on with the newspapers and I would never condone the destruction of court records. If Hal Markham told you I did, he’s a damned liar.”
Kylie gazed at him, stiff and still. Some part of her had hoped the senator would deny everything, but in her fantasy she’d believed him. Now, for the first time in her entire life, she didn’t believe him. She wanted to. He certainly sounded indignant enough to be telling the truth.
And what he said made sense. Chief Roberts was a grown man, capable of independent thought and action. There were plenty of explanations for the disappearance of the microfilm from the library—mischief, theft, misplacement. The newspaper owner sending everything to Houston could just be coincidence. And Judge Markham could have lied, could be senile, could have misunderstood. But…
“What about Therese?”
His blue gaze, always alert, sharpened. Was he trying to remember exactly what he’d said to her about Therese on Wednesday? She could help him. She remembered it verbatim. She pleaded with me, Kylie. She begged me to not let Norris do this, and I told her I would do my best to dissuade him.
The senator apparently decided to bluff it out. “I told you—she called Hal about Norris, all upset and asking him to put a stop to Norris’s snooping around. He asked me for help, and I told him I would do what I could to persuade Norris to drop it.”
Ice crept through Kylie. He sounded so sincere that if she hadn’t taken part in the conversation herself, she would have believed him. Her lungs tightening in her chest, she murmured, “Dissuade.”
Her father frowned at her. “What?”
“You said you would dissuade him. Not persuade.”
“You’re right. That sounds more like me.” He gestured impatiently. “You remember the conversation. Why are you asking me?”
“You said she pleaded with you.”
Shadows passed through his eyes, along with the slightest hint of guilt, but both were gone so quickly she might have imagined them. “No, I didn’t. I haven’t talked to that girl since her grandfather’s funeral.”
You said it to me! Kylie wanted to shout. You lied to me! And he was lying again, boldly, well aware that she knew it and not caring.
If you repeat something often enough, people will begin to believe it. More of her mother’s words of wisdom. Did he think if he denied the conversation she would ignore what she knew for fact and accept his version instead?
“You’re letting that bastard stir up trouble, Kylie,” her father went on. “Worse, you’re helping him. You say you’re ‘keeping your enemy close’—” derision curved his mouth “—but I don’t believe you. You’re infatuated with this man and you’re helping him destroy innocent people all for the sake of his dirty little book. Has he seduced you yet? Has he told you how beautiful you are, how special you are? Because I guarantee you it’s coming. He’ll get you into bed and twist you around his little finger, and you’ll believe his lies and forget all about the people who matter. I forbid you to see him again.”
Kylie stood, smoothing her skirt, filling her aching lungs with air before giving him a thin smile. “I’m not a little girl, sir. You can’t forbid me to see anyone. As a matter of fact, I’m meeting Jake for breakfast this morning and I’m already late. As Lissa told you, I’m taking a few days off, so I’m not going in to the office today, but I’m sure I’ll see you soon.”
Leaving him flustered and openmouthed, she walked to the door, then turned back. “By the way, sir, you don’t have to worry about him seducing me. I seduced him last night. Three times. Right there in my own bed.” With another chilly smile, she walked out, down the hall and the stairs, through the house and to her car. She waved at Alberto as she passed, exited the gate and drove on autopilot to the Pancake Palace.
There she started shaking. She couldn’t shut off the engine. Couldn’t release her grip on the steering wheel. Couldn’t catch her breath. Shivers wracked her, but sweat popped out on her forehead. Her chest was tight, her vision tunneled, and rushing filled her ears, drowning out everything but the pounding of her heart.
A second beat joined in, louder, more solid. Eyes shut, she tried to block it out, but it was persistent. So was the voice calling her name. Jake’s voice.
She managed to turn her head and saw him bent beside the car, rapping on the window. His gaze was worried, his mouth moving in words she couldn’t comprehend. It took her several tries, but eventually she stabbed the button that unlocked the door, and he jerked it open.
“Kylie, are you all right? What’s wrong?” he demanded, crouching beside the car, reaching in to peel her fingers from the wheel.
The panic receded, the quaking slowing to occasional tremors. She drew a shaky breath, wiped the sweat from her face, then turned off the key. “I—I—”
“Come here, darlin’.” He undid her seat belt, then lifted her from the car and into his embrace. One arm settled around her waist; his other hand stroked slowly, reassuringly, up and down her spine. He murmured soft words—It’s okay, you’re all right—that meant little but sounded good. Nothing was okay…except this. His arms. His comfort. His voice.
/> After a time, she lifted her head, calmer, steadier, and gave him a wobbly smile. “I’m sorry I’m late.”
“Hey, no matter. It gave me time to mainline a gallon of coffee.” He studied her, his dark gaze intense, then snuggled her to his side. “You need food.”
She considered it a moment. Yes, she did. Food might fill that gnawing, throbbing emptiness inside her.
Inside the restaurant, she felt a moment’s relief that no one was paying them undue attention…and a moment’s regret that Jake had dropped his arm from her waist when they’d walked in the door. He gestured toward a booth along the front window where a cup of coffee cooled between two menus, and she gratefully slid onto one bench. Her feet bumped his backpack on the floor.
The waitress brought another cup, filled it with strong black coffee and took their orders before Jake spoke again. “What happened?”
She stirred sweetener and powdered cream into the coffee, then grimaced. “My father came home this morning and he looked me in the eye and he…” She felt disloyal even thinking the words, doubly so for saying them out loud.
“He lied.”
“Jillian Franklin was a bitch.”
The pronouncement came from Serena Whitley, on whose porch they sat. It didn’t take Jake by surprise—in his experience, people often spoke ill of the dead—though it made Kylie blink.
“I thought you were friends.”
“Oh, we were,” Sheila Browning said. “But that doesn’t change the facts. She was greedy, manipulative—”
“The biggest flirt you ever saw,” Paula McCormack chimed in. “She loved being the center of attention.”
“Male attention,” Serena clarified drily.
“And she made sure she got it. She dressed provocatively—”
“Behaved provocatively.”
“Looked at every man as if she just might devour him.”
“Did devour more than a few, according to rumor.” Serena lifted her coffee cup in salute to her friends, and all three women laughed.
Jake imagined the women knew exactly what kind of look they were talking about. In fact, the newly divorced Paula had looked at him as if he were dessert more than once.
So these were Phyllis Riordan’s best friends since high school. They were lovely, spoiled and pampered, and he’d bet their tongues could be more lethal than any weapon known to man. There was a brittleness about them, a subdued meanness that simmered just below the surface. Was that how Phyllis had been? Probably, which meant poor Kylie had struck out with both parents.
“How was her marriage?” he asked, forcing his attention back from Kylie, sitting at his side.
The women exchanged glances, then shrugged in unison. “Bert was nearly twenty years older than Jillian,” Serena said. “How do you think it was?”
“Was she his second wife?”
“No. He was a confirmed bachelor until she decided he wanted her. How does that saying go? He chased her until she caught him?”
“She had affairs?”
Another group look, another group shrug.
Jake gazed across the lawn to the street. Was that where Riordan and Roberts had come up with the theory that Charley was having an affair with Jillian? Because according to rumors she’d had more than a few? “Do you know who she supposedly slept with?”
Look, shrug, then Paula said, “It was rumor, honey. Frankly I didn’t want to know.”
Had her husband been one of them? In filling him in on the way over, Kylie had briefly covered Paula’s recent divorce—after thirty years of infidelity and insults, she’d taken her husband to the cleaners. He’d managed to hold on to his family home and his name, but that was about all.
Jake shifted in the wicker chair, making it squeak. “What about Charley Baker?”
Serena’s smile was sultry. “He was a handsome man. Tall. Dark. Muscular. He was Indian—I guess we’re supposed to call them Native American now.”
She’d managed to surprise him. He would have guessed that the people who lived in these few blocks of Riverview never knew the common folk existed. “You knew him?”
“Oh, no. He worked for my husband—Jack used to own the glass factory—and I saw him at the trial. I can see how a woman would be tempted.”
“Was Jillian tempted?”
“Coy Roberts said so. Kylie’s daddy said so.” Paula’s apple-red lips pursed, then relaxed. “But she never said so. I don’t think he was her type.”
“Because he was Indian?” Jake asked.
Leaning forward, Paula brushed her hand seductively over his knee. “Don’t be silly. Because he didn’t have any money. Jillian loved money. She married for it. Rumor had it that when she died, she left a whole lot of it in an account in her name only at First Security Bank.”
And that was significant because Bert had been president of First National. “Where did rumor say this money came from?”
“Nobody knew,” Sheila replied.
“Maybe it was family money,” Jake suggested.
Serena snorted. “Her family didn’t have any money. That was why she married Bert in the first place. He had plenty of money, and she was all too happy to spend it for him.”
“Maybe she was saving money that he gave her,” Kylie said. She’d been pretty quiet all morning—pretty shaken by her run-in with her father.
Jake felt guilty for the disillusionment he’d seen in her eyes more than once through breakfast. He wasn’t to blame for whatever Riordan had done, but he felt as if he was. He only hoped Kylie didn’t blame him, too. Didn’t come to hate him.
“He gave her a lot of money,” Serena agreed, “but she spent a lot. There’s no way she could have saved that much. We’re talking six figures.”
“Saving for a rainy day?” Jake asked drily.
Serena gave him a cynical smile. “Honey, with money like that, she was saving for a damn global flood.”
After a moment’s silence, he looked at each of the women in turn. “Do you believe Charley Baker killed her?”
This time the women didn’t exchange glances. Serena sipped her coffee. Sheila examined her manicure. Paula gazed off into the distance. Finally, though, came the shrugs, first from Serena.
“I like to think he did. Better to have someone locked up than to never know.”
Next Sheila, who nodded in agreement.
Then Paula. It took her a moment to refocus her gaze, first on Kylie, then Jake. “I think other people had better reasons to want her dead…but I’m not a cop or a district attorney. What do I know?”
Her hunch was probably better than the cops’ or the D.A.’s. After all, she didn’t have something to hide—at least, he was guessing, nothing criminal.
He thanked the women for their time, stood and followed Kylie to the steps. Halfway there, she turned back. “I remember going to the Franklins’ house. Is that something my family did a lot?”
Once again there was no shared look or shrug. The others let Serena answer, and she did so with a studied level of indifference. “No more than the rest of us, I suppose. Most of that summer, we were all out there once a week or so for cookouts in the backyard, letting the kids swim in the pond, drinks by the fountain.”
Most of that summer, Jake mused. “What happened to stop the visits?”
Serena met his gaze, hers steady and sharp. “They died.”
With a nod, he took Kylie’s arm and walked to the car with her. She fastened her seat belt, waited until he’d pulled away from the curb, then spoke his thoughts aloud. “They died in late September. That’s not summer.”
To most mothers—and all three of those women had children—summer ended when school began, a full month before the murders. Had Jillian and the others had a falling-out before her death? Something like…oh, getting caught with one or more of their husbands?
Could that possibly be all Jim Riordan was hiding? An affair?
How much would it have cost him? Possibly his marriage. His father-in-law’s support. His wife�
��s fortune. His political ambitions. Was that incentive enough to send an innocent man to prison?
Jake tried to consider the question without his dislike for the senator coloring the answer. Whether he succeeded, though, was questionable, because he kept reaching the same conclusion. Yes. For a man like Riordan, whose own daughter came second to his ambition, absolutely yes.
“What now?” that daughter asked.
“Where would we find Therese Franklin?”
“Turn right at the corner. She does transcription for the local hospital, and when her grandparents got so frail, she began working from home. Even though her grandfather died and her grandmother’s in an assisted-care facility, she still works there.” Kylie’s voice softened. “I wonder how hard it will be for her to learn these things about her mother.”
“She doesn’t remember her parents at all. She doesn’t feel connected to them.”
“But they’re still her parents. That must mean something.”
A familiar tickle of guilt edged along his spine. “She wants to know.”
For the first time since he’d left her house at dawn, Kylie’s smile was genuine. “I’m not suggesting you should back off or sugarcoat the truth for her. I’m just wondering.”
“Maybe someone who’s learning a few tough things about her own parents can help her adjust.” He regretted the words as soon as they were out, because her smile faded and the somber expression returned.
Grateful that Therese’s house was so close, he pulled to the curb a moment later. As they got out of the car, a police car turned onto the street at the far end of the block and approached them at a crawl. The driver—Chief Roberts himself—rolled the window down and fixed a steely stare on them. Jake stared back for a moment, then stepped onto the sidewalk and started across the yard. Realizing that Kylie wasn’t following, he backtracked, found her returning the chief’s scrutiny glare for icy glare, caught her hand and pulled her along with him.
As Jake rang the doorbell, he swore he could feel the moment Roberts turned the next corner—could feel the anger and animosity evaporate once he was out of sight, though he was still well aware of Kylie’s own anger and animosity. His hand throbbed from her grip. He gave it a shake, drawing her attention back from the now-empty street, and said mildly, “Hey, I write with that hand.”
More Than a Hero Page 13
