“Sorry,” she murmured and let go as Therese opened the door.
“Jake,” Therese said with real pleasure. “I was hoping to see you again. And Kylie. This is a surprise. Come in, please.”
The house was located in the right part of town, but was half the size or less than its neighbors. It had good bones, but everything Jake saw on the way to a small, sunny room at the back looked as if it was home to someone still living in the 1940s. Her grandparents, apparently, hadn’t seen reason to change a thing over the years, and now that she lived there alone, neither had she.
Therese, looking like a wingless fairy in a swirly pastel dress that reached practically to her ankles, offered them coffee or tea, but they declined. She saved the files on the computer that occupied one corner, then perched on an ottoman in front of the sofa where he and Kylie sat. “I didn’t realize you two had met. Though it’s logical, of course. Surely you would want to speak to the senator, and to do that you have to go through Kylie.”
“I haven’t spoken to him yet,” Jake said drily. “Can I ask you a personal question?”
Therese smiled. “You’re writing a book about my parents’ murders. I can’t imagine any other kind.”
“What kind of estate did your parents leave?”
“The house. Some commercial rental property in Oklahoma City. Stocks. Life insurance. Some jewelry that had been in my father’s family for generations. Some cash.”
“Were you their sole heir?” The first rule of a murder investigation, his cop friend had told him, was to look at who would profit from the death. Obviously a three-year-old was beyond suspicion, but if someone else had benefited…
“Yes, I was. My father’s close family was gone, and my mother apparently saw no reason to share with her family.” Her face turned pink as she hastily continued, “Not that my grandparents would have wanted to inherit anything. It broke their hearts when she and my father died. They were named my guardians and were allowed access to the money to support me, but they never used any of it. Granddad continued to work and pay the bills right up until his death.”
“He worked all his life at the glass factory, didn’t he?” Kylie asked. At Therese’s nod, she went on. “Did he know Charley Baker?”
“I have no idea. My guess would be yes—it’s not that big a place—but he and Grandmother never discussed what happened.”
“How was your inheritance set up?” Jake asked.
“My grandparents had control, with a court-appointed trustee overseeing, until I turned twenty-one, when everything came directly to me.”
“Do you know if there was money from a bank account of your mother’s?”
Her gaze turned distant as she considered it. “There was a lot of money. I honestly don’t know where it all came from. But my grandparents’ lawyer must have a copy of the will and records on the various accounts. I can ask him.”
“Who is it?”
“Tim Jenkins. They’d been using him since long before he became a big criminal lawyer.” Abruptly she seemed to realize that it was her parents’ murder that had made Jenkins a big criminal lawyer and shuddered.
Jake felt the weight of Kylie’s look and met her gaze. How convenient. Of course, Jenkins should have given Therese a copy of all the records regarding her parents’ estate. What had he told her? Don’t worry your pretty little head. I’ll take care of everything? Had he suspected four years ago that problems might arise in the future or had he just been extraordinarily cautious? Or extraordinarily guilty?
“What about your parents’ personal papers? Bank statements, bills, receipts—the sort of thing we all keep?”
Before she could answer, the phone on the desk rang. “It’s probably just my boss at the hospital,” she said with a dismissive gesture. “The machine will get it. As far as I know, everything is still—”
The answering machine clicked on, and Derek West’s voice floated into the room. “Pick up the phone, Therese…come on, I know you’re there. I know who else is there, too. Damn it, Therese, I told you—” He broke off, then exhaled loudly. “Sorry. I didn’t mean— Look, just call me as soon as you get this message. Okay?”
After the machine disconnected, an unnatural silence settled over the room. Therese was blushing, but there was also a hint of annoyance beneath the color. Jake kept his voice low, his tone conversational. “What did he tell you?”
“Not to talk to you. To just forget about all this.” Her smile was unsteady. “People have told me what to do and what to forget my whole life. I didn’t even know my parents had been murdered until I was in high school. I’m not going to spend the rest of my life knowing nothing about them or why they died just because everyone thinks I’m too fragile to handle it.”
Define everyone, Jake wanted to request. The chief? The senator? Judge Markham? Tim Jenkins?
“I’ve been through this house, taking care of my grandfather’s affairs, getting my grandmother’s in order, and there’s nothing of my parents’ here. I know the furniture, the clothing, the dishes—all that stuff is still at our old house. Once the sheriff was finished with his investigation, Grandfather locked up that house, and as far as I know, no one’s ever been inside since.”
“Do you have the key?” Kylie asked.
Jake’s muscles stiffened as he half hoped Therese would say no. He didn’t want to go back to the Franklin house, didn’t want to go inside and remember that Saturday morning all too clearly. The house had smelled of death, and in his imagination it still would. He would still see the blood, still feel the evil.
But if Therese gave them access, he would go inside and smell the smell, feel the feelings. For Charley, he would do anything.
She sat motionless for a long time before rising from the hassock and going to the fireplace mantel. She brought back a carved wooden box, set it on her lap and lifted the lid. On top was a photograph that she held a moment or two before handing it to Jake.
Bert and Jillian Franklin, standing on the dock at the pond out behind their and the Bakers’ houses. He wore shorts and a T-shirt that showed a paunch, and the sun lit the gray strands in his hair. She wore a bikini that showed not one extra ounce of fat and she held Therese, maybe two years old and in a kiddie bikini of her own, on one hip. Jillian was smiling for the camera, lovely, sultry, provocative. A bitch, her best friends had called her. Always rude, Angela had said, often in more colorful terms. Unfaithful to her husband and apparently guilty of some underhanded activity to fund her secret bank account.
And Therese’s mother. It was easy to lose sight of that.
He passed the photo to Kylie, who studied it. “I remember…” Her voice trailed away, her forehead wrinkling as if she’d lost the distant memory she’d been seeking.
Next Therese removed a set of rings—the man’s band plain gold, the woman’s gold with a row of small diamonds, the engagement ring with small diamonds flanking a rock in the center. She took out a small gold cross on a delicate chain, a silver lighter engraved with Bert’s initials and, finally, two keys looped together with a wire tie. “I always thought…someday I might go out there…after my grandparents were…”
With a sigh, she clutched the keys tightly for a moment before offering them to Jake. He wrapped his own fingers tightly around them. As Kylie handed the picture back, he asked, “Can I get a copy of that?” He had pictures of both Jillian and Bert, both dead and alive, but none that included Therese. He wanted the reminder that whatever else Jillian had been, she’d also been a mother who’d loved her daughter.
“You can have that. It is a copy. The original’s upstairs in my room.” She gave it to him, and he slid it inside his backpack, then stood.
“If Derek or anyone asks, tell them you gave us your permission to be there.” He wouldn’t put it past Roberts to have them thrown in jail just for the harassment value.
“I will.” She smiled faintly. “I hope you find something of interest.”
Jake was sure they would.
&
nbsp; Chapter 8
“Tell me about C.J.,” Kylie requested as Jake made a tight U-turn, then headed for Main Street. Listening to Therese, seeing the photo of her with the parents she couldn’t remember, had made Kylie blue enough. Might as well get really down by hearing about the other child whose life had changed forever twenty-two years ago.
Jake kept his attention on the street ahead except for frequent glances in the rearview mirror. She didn’t bother to twist around and look. If they were being followed, she didn’t want to know. Didn’t care.
“He’s grown,” Jake said, using that distant voice again. “He’s not married. He sees his mother a couple times a month and his father three or four times a year. Not that a maximum-security penitentiary is an ideal place for family reunions. He likes his job, he travels a lot and it would mean everything to him to see his father cleared.”
“What was it like for him after his father was arrested?”
Finally Jake spared her a wry glance. “What do you think? It was the best time of his life.” He signaled to turn west onto Main. “It was a tough time. He had nightmares about discovering the bodies. He didn’t believe for an instant that his father was guilty. His mother lost her job the same afternoon Charley was arrested. The kids at school made life miserable, and he got his ass kicked a couple times trying to defend Charley. His dad was in jail and wasn’t getting out, they had no money and no hope of getting any and pretty much everyone in town wanted them gone. So they left.”
Who was to blame for all that? Certainly not C.J. The boss who’d fired Angela. The kids who’d targeted C.J. Their parents for not teaching them better. The school for not protecting him better.
The senator and his associates.
Or were they accomplices?
“Do you ever get depressed by all this?”
Jake looked at her long enough to send the car drifting across the highway’s center line. When she gestured, he steered back into their own lane, then shrugged. “It’s other people’s lives. Other people’s sorrows.”
She knew he was pretending uninvolvement. She’d heard his voice, expressionless and removed from the moment, when he talked about events. She was convinced it was how he protected himself, because it was something she’d learned to do, too.
“But don’t you get worn down? You can tell the story. You can get the truth out there and give your readers an understanding of what happened, of what these people have gone through, but in the end you can’t change any of it. The victims you write about are still dead. Their families are still mourning them.”
“But I tell their stories and that’s enough. And, on one lucky occasion, I did change things.”
The new trial, the acquittal. Surely that was what Charley Baker, as well as his son, was hoping for—to clear his name, to get back the life taken from him twenty-two years ago. And it looked as if that might actually happen.
At the cost of the senator’s career.
Jake well might give C.J. Baker his father…while taking away Kylie’s. Already their relationship had been damaged. No matter what eventually happened, she and the senator couldn’t go back to life as usual. He couldn’t climb back onto that pedestal she’d put him on, couldn’t regain the respect he’d thrown away in the past few days.
Could she continue to work for him? Did she even want to? She honestly didn’t know. She’d worked for him nearly half her life, had gotten a college degree that he could use, had gone straight from her part-time job during school to a full-time career without considering any other options. Now she might be all out of options. She might have no choice but to find a new job, a new home, a new town.
“You’re looking kind of worn down,” Jake commented as he turned off the highway onto the road that led to the Franklin house. He slowed to a stop, then twisted to face her. “Do you want to go back to town? I can do this by myself.”
His last words didn’t sound very positive. She didn’t blame him. She wasn’t looking forward to spending time inside that house and she knew less about the case and the people involved than he did. She’d never met Charley Baker…though she thought she would like to. She would like to judge for herself what kind of man he was.
As if she had any expertise at that.
“No,” she said, and relief flashed through his dark eyes. “It’ll go quicker with two of us. I want to go. It’s all just…sad.”
As he pressed the accelerator, he mused, “I wonder how much money Therese has. Sounds like a lot, but you’d never guess it to look at her.”
Kylie feigned an indignant look. “I’m not sure whether that’s a compliment or an insult or how it applies to me. Do I look like I have money?”
He grinned. “Darlin’, you look rich from the top of your head to the tips of your pink-painted toes. I took one look at you in the senator’s office and thought you were way too well paid for a mere aide. Of course, that was before I knew who you really were.”
“That was your first thought?” She smacked his forearm. “That I looked overpaid?”
“Actually, my first thought was that you looked like a goddess. And that I have a real weakness for brown-eyed blondes. And that you have damn fine legs. I didn’t get to ‘overpaid’ until after you damn near froze me with your haughtiness.”
“I wasn’t haughty,” she protested but not vehemently. She had learned haughtiness from the best teacher in the world—her mother.
“I didn’t know which I wanted more,” Jake went on, “to tweak you or kiss you.”
“You’ve managed to do both quite nicely over the past few days.” Gazing out the window, she recognized the place where the black SUV had run them off the road the day before. Jake was right. They’d chosen the safest place to do it. But something still could have gone wrong. He could have been injured or killed. Would the senator have felt even a moment’s guilt then?
Or did he have prior experience with involvement in a person’s death?
The closer they got to the Franklin house, the thicker the air in the car became. It came from Jake and wrapped itself around her, making her wish they could turn around, go back to her house and spend the rest of the day having hot sex instead. But she didn’t make the suggestion and neither did he.
The gate still stood open. The house still stood empty and abandoned. He parked where Charley had parked, and they followed the path that C.J. had followed to the porch, where Jake stopped at the bottom of the steps.
Kylie stopped, too, and watched him stare at the house. Other people’s sorrows, he’d said, but they touched him, too. A certain level of empathy was required in his job; if he didn’t care about the people he wrote about, how could his readers?
She didn’t know how long they stood there—long enough for her to grow warm under the midday sun. Five minutes? Ten? It didn’t matter.
Finally Jake straightened his shoulders and fished the keys from his pocket. He raised his foot to the first step, and wood splintered above them, accompanied by a small crack.
She raised her gaze to the small hole in the wall next to the door, for an instant too puzzled to realize what she was looking at. Then came another crack, and another hole, and Jake shoved her to the ground. She hit hard, jarring her shoulder, weeds and paving stones scraping her bare legs, his weight squeezing the air from her lungs.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered as he half crawled, half scuttled to the end of the porch, dragging her with him, and around the corner into the scant shelter where the porch met the house.
“What the—”
A third crack interrupted her, followed rapidly by a fourth, and understanding dawned. Dear God, someone was shooting at them! With a gun!
The tremors started in her belly and worked their way out until she was shaking from head to toe. Jake’s body pressed hers against the concrete foundation, and she pressed her face to his back, murmuring—whimpering—a frantic prayer. Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God.
The fourth shot was followed by silence, then moments later th
e distant sounds of an engine revving, of tires squealing. Long after the sound faded away, Jake rolled over to face her, gathered her in his arms and just held her.
He was shaking, too, she realized and felt better for her own reaction. She burrowed closer to him, trying to crawl right inside him, and held on tightly until her fingers went numb and her muscles began to ache.
“They tried to kill us,” she whispered.
Slowly Jake sat up, looked toward the woods from which the shots had come, then eased to his feet. He helped her up, too, supported her until her legs were steady, then brushed the dirt and dead grass first from her, then himself.
“I don’t think so,” he said at last.
“They took four shots at us!”
“And missed by a yard every time.” He pulled her back to the steps and climbed the porch without hesitation this time. “This one—” he pointed to the first hole “—was a couple feet above our heads. This one was six feet to the right. When we moved to the right, he fired the next two several feet to the left. He wasn’t trying to hit us.”
She stared at the evidence. “Just to scare us,” she murmured. “Well, he did a damn good job. I’m scared.”
Jake turned once again to stare at the woods. “We weren’t followed when we left Therese’s.”
“You’re sure?”
He gave her a dry look. “I’ve had enough run-ins with cops lately. I’m sure.”
“So…did they just guess that we would come back here?”
“I doubt it. Remember what Derek said in his message to Therese? ‘Call me as soon as you get this.’”
And Therese, who’d been told her entire life what to do, had probably called him as soon as they’d walked out the door. And if Derek asked, Jake had told her to tell him she’d given them permission to search her parents’ house. Even without being asked, she wouldn’t have thought twice about sharing the information. She never would have believed he might take a few shots at them.
More Than a Hero Page 14
