“What did Mickie have to do with the case?”
“She worked for the prosecuting attorney’s office. She’s the one who brokered the deal.”
In this context, the word sounded ominous. “Deal?”
“I was young, struggling. A public defender with no money and no reputation. The county prosecutor wanted this one put to bed quickly. I agreed to help them, in exchange for a fee and for select favors to be specified later.”
“You threw the case.”
“The evidence wasn’t strong against Valencia. I just helped it along some. A misfiled brief here, an alibi witness discredited there. All subtle and all virtually undetectable but enough to do the job.”
The implications—such gross, flagrant abuse of the judicial system—chilled her. “When did you all realize Valencia wasn’t guilty?”
“When three other little girls were murdered in California in exactly the same manner while Valencia was awaiting his execution date. It was too early for DNA in those days but, funny thing. Turns out fingerprints from the California crime scenes matched unidentified prints also found in little Jenny Monroe’s bedroom.”
“You were his defense attorney. That should have made your day.”
“You’d think. But this case was different. California didn’t even have a suspect. We had a bird all ready to be plucked.”
“An innocent bird!”
“You didn’t know the mood of the public at the time,” he answered, panting as they continued their ascent. “There would have been a huge outcry if Valencia walked free. The parties involved all decided we’d be better off to let this one ride.”
Dismay and horror churned through her. “You let an innocent man be executed! How could you have done that?”
“Believe me, no one was happy about it, but what else could we do? By that point it was too late to go back. For thirty years we’d lived with it. Mickie was dying, though, and she wanted to come clean. She didn’t care that in her quest for atonement, she would have destroyed the rest of us.”
“So you killed her.”
“I didn’t plan to,” Martin answered, in what he probably thought was a reasonable tone. “I went over to talk some sense into her, but she wouldn’t listen to reason. Things started to get a little loud and a little physical when Dru came in with a gun.”
“Hunter’s gun.”
“Yeah, Hunter’s gun. Lucky break for me. I knew at that point I would have do something. As Valencia’s defense counsel, I was most culpable for what we had let happen. I would have been destroyed—disbarred at the very least, most likely arrested. My reputation destroyed, everything I had worked for… I couldn’t let Mickie ruin everything I had spent my whole life building. It was easy enough to take the gun from a pregnant woman.”
She shivered from the cold, dispassionate way he described killing two women and a fetus. How could such evil lurk inside someone she had known all her life? Someone who had been close friends with her father, someone she and Hunter had both trusted with his life?
A lucky break, he had said about Dru coming in with Hunter’s weapon. He must have known Hunter would be a logical suspect in the murders of Dru and her mother. Everyone knew her brother’s relationship with Dru had been a stormy one, and despite his record on the police force, she knew he had enemies in the department who had been all too willing to believe him capable of murder.
She’d learned enough in two years of law school to know how a corrupt attorney could taint the judicial process. As Martin had said, it could be as easy as a misfiled brief.
Despite the fear pulsing through her veins at the gravity of her situation, she was aware of a deep, throbbing anger. Because of Martin James, her brother had endured hell for the past thirty months. She had been through hell, had lost friends, a career she loved—her entire house, even.
The thought jolted her and she stopped in her tracks. “You burned down my house,” she exclaimed.
He prodded her with the gun to keep going. “A distraction attempt that unfortunately didn’t work. I was trying to frighten you off. The minute you started working with McKinnon, I knew the two of you would be trouble. I sent you a crime scene photo as a warning and, when that didn’t work, I torched your house. You were supposed to be so distraught at finding yourself suddenly homeless that you wouldn’t have the time or energy to work on the appeal. I didn’t give enough credit to your stubbornness, though.”
They had reached another steep part of the trail, so vertical that all Kate could see below her off the trail in the waning light was a carpet of treetops.
If he planned to do this before dark, he would have to move soon, she thought. Panic and terror gripped her, and it took all her concentration to keep from giving in to them. She didn’t want to die here. She wanted to live to see this man brought to justice for what he had done to so many lives.
“So now what? To cover up your thirty-year-old crime, you’re going to kill me…and then how many more? There are others who know as much as I do, who will be able to connect the dots after I’m dead.”
“McKinnon? I’ve done my homework. I saw you two the night of the fire. He’ll be so distraught after your death he’ll forget all about an old murder case.”
She almost corrected him but decided to leave the man his illusions. If Martin succeeded in murdering her, she knew Wyatt wouldn’t be distraught. Oh, she knew he wouldn’t be cold and dispassionate about her death—he would probably mourn her as a friend, someone he cared about—but he wouldn’t let his mourning distract him from the book.
She could find comfort from that, she decided. Wyatt would continue looking for the truth after she was dead.
No, she wasn’t going to die, she vowed. She would fight, do everything she had to.
“This is as good a spot as any,” Martin said.
Whenever she walked Belle on this trail she tried to be cautious of the loose shale and treacherous footing. The mountain sheared off steeply on the other side of the trail, with a drop of at least two hundred feet.
If she were planning to shove someone over the side of the mountain, this would be a good spot…
The thought ricocheted through her mind. She could turn the tables on Martin. She found the idea horribly repugnant but knew she couldn’t wholly reject it.
She had to do something. Was she strong enough, physically and emotionally, to take such a drastic step?
She had to save herself. That was the bottom line. She had to.
If she died here on this mountain, knowledge of Martin’s crimes would die with her. Wyatt might continue looking for answers, but chances were good he would find nothing. If she died, no one would ever know that her brother had been framed by his own defense counsel.
Hunter would wither away in prison, dying by inches in that hellish place—until his execution ended it.
She had to do this. She had no choice. If she didn’t, Martin would kill her and Hunter would be left with nothing.
Her mind raced furiously as her eyes did a careful sweep of her surroundings. She pretended to stumble with a ragged gasp. For a few heart-stopping seconds she slid on the loose shale a few feet closer to the edge, but as she had hoped, before she reached the point of no return she was able to wedge her foot under the looped root of a small clump of sagebrush. It wouldn’t hold her for long and certainly wouldn’t withstand extreme force, but she had to pray it would be enough.
“Too bad.” Martin stepped closer, shaking his head. “A few more yards and your death really would have been an accident.”
Her heart pounded in her ears with deafening force and she was trembling so much inside, she could hardly find words but she forced herself to speak. “I’m not going to make it easy for you,” she snapped.
“It’s not easy, Taylor.”
To her amazement, he looked genuinely hurt.
“You can’t believe that. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he said.
She drew deep inside herself for calm.
“If you want me to die on this mountain you’re going to have to push me yourself. I want you to spend the rest of your life remembering this moment—the smell of the air and the wind ruffling your hair and the sound of my screams as I go over. I want you to watch me tumble to my death, remembering how you were always kind to me during my father’s illness, how when I was a child you used to call me Strawberry Shortcake and always had a supply of English toffee in your pocket.”
She paused and met his gaze squarely. “I want you to look in my eyes as you kill me and know this was no accident—and that someday you will pay for it.”
“Very affecting closing argument, Counselor.” There was genuine regret in his voice. “You would have been a hell of a trial attorney, even if you were only in it for your brother’s sake. I’m almost sorry you won’t get that chance.”
He stepped closer, moving exactly where she needed him. “I don’t have a choice here. You have to see that,” he said.
“Neither do I,” she whispered. Then, with a deep breath and a prayer of gratitude to Kate for dragging her to kick-boxing classes all summer, she dug her toes tighter under the root and kicked her free leg out with all her might. Her boot connected to his chest with shuddering force.
It all happened in an instant but time seemed to slow, to drag on forever. He staggered backward, then started to slide on the loose shale. Martin raised the gun and for one heart-stopping moment Taylor stared at death, certain he would shoot her and end everything right here. And then his arms flew out and the gun landing harmlessly in the rocks as he tried to keep his balance.
He scrambled for purchase for what seemed like forever, but he was off balance and couldn’t hang on. As she watched, horrified, he tumbled backward over the lip of the trail with a hoarse scream.
For several agonizing moments as he fell, she could hear nothing but that terrible, echoing cry. Then his body landed far below with a jarring, sickening thud.
Taylor sank to her knees, heedless of the sharp rocks gouging through her pants. Her breath came in high gasps and she had to shove her fists against her stomach to keep from retching.
Dear God. She had just killed a man.
What had she done?
The nausea overwhelmed her—her stomach was empty but that didn’t stop her from dry-heaving into the rocks. She wiped her mouth and crouched there, dizzy and sick, until she heard a low, distant moan from far below.
He wasn’t dead! At least not yet.
She could just make out a terrible gurgle, and then his voice—that smooth, well-modulated voice that could so easily hypnotize a jury—called to her, raw with pain.
“Taylor? Don’t leave me here. Please don’t leave me here.”
She stared down into the darkness, all her medical training screaming at her to do something to ease his pain—the pain that she had caused.
If she tried to make it down that steep slope to him in the gathering darkness, she would die right along with him, she realized. She needed to call search-and-rescue.
If Martin died from his injuries, she realized, no one would believe her story that he had confessed to killing Dru and Mickie, that he had rigged the Valencia trial, that he had tried to kill her. It would sound like the wild imaginings of a desperate woman.
“Hang on,” she called down. “I’m going for help.”
Chapter 16
Something was wrong.
Wyatt stood on the front porch of the Bradshaws’ log and rock house in Little Cottonwood Canyon, not sure why his instincts hummed like juice through a bad power line.
Maybe he was imagining things. Maybe he was only upset that she had run away after the heat and tenderness they had shared. His heart still ached from coming out of the shower to find her gone.
He knew why she had left—it hadn’t taken much sleuthing, especially after he found that damn report from Dooley St. Clair on the kitchen table. Too impatient to wait for the DNA report, he had asked a private investigator friend to run a cursory check on Kate, just to find basic information to rule out that family of identical siblings Gage had warned him about.
Taylor must have seen it as it came through or else it still would have been sitting in the fax machine. What kind of conclusion had she jumped to when she found out he’d run a background check on her friend and roommate?
He thought he had a pretty good idea, and he grimaced again. He would have to explain—to Taylor at the least, and by now she most likely had told Kate. He was going to have to explain things to her too.
If he had his way, he would wait another day or two to talk to Kate after the DNA tests came back, but the unfortunate timing of that fax had taken that decision out of his hands.
He had even delayed coming here long enough to try to track down Gage and see how soon they might know something, but he hadn’t had any luck finding his brother.
Wyatt rang the doorbell again. He didn’t want to tell either woman yet about his suspicions, but that didn’t explain the unease he felt now.
Why wasn’t she answering her door? He could see Taylor’s car out front, though he was slightly relieved to see no sign of Kate’s little Honda. He supposed they could have gone somewhere together in Kate’s car, but something told him that wasn’t the case.
He could hear Belle barking inside somewhere, as hyper as she’d been the day of the fire.
The memory stopped him cold.
The dog didn’t bark much, Taylor had told him. So why was Belle in there howling as if every cat in the whole state was wandering through her territory?
He knocked one more time, then decided to try the door. To his further worry, it opened easily.
“Taylor?” he called out, only to be met by the sound of more frenzied barking. “Tay?”
He followed the sounds the dog was making and realized Belle was shut in a bathroom off the kitchen. The moment he opened the door, she raced to the outside door, snarling and barking.
What the hell?
He let her outside and the dog immediately took off through the moonlit night toward a steep trail that climbed the mountain through the evergreens behind the house.
His worry deepened. He thought about going back to check the house one more time, just to make sure Taylor wasn’t lying hurt somewhere, unable to answer him, but he quickly discarded that idea. Belle never would have left the house if Taylor was inside in jeopardy. She would have rushed to her mistress’s side—just as she was trying to do now.
No, Taylor was up there somewhere. He didn’t know why she had taken off in the dark for a hike without her dog, but he knew without a doubt he would find her.
Though everything in him urged haste, he decided to err on the side of caution. He went to his Tahoe to find a few emergency supplies—a flashlight, a knife and a shiny silver survival blanket, just in case she was hurt in some way.
He had to hope he could catch up to Belle on the trail, or that Taylor hadn’t strayed from it. With his heart pumping, he took off up the trail, moving as fast as he dared through a heavy darkness lit only by the pale moonlight and the beam of his flashlight.
He was just beginning to think he was crazy to be doing this when he thought he heard a dog’s snuffling and then a crash on the switchback above him. He picked up his pace until he reached the spot where the trail turned. There ahead of him, he saw movement on the trail, and an instant later his flashlight beam picked up Taylor, with Belle stuck to her side like a burr.
“Who’s there?” she called out, sounding panicked, and he realized the beam of the flashlight must be blinding her.
“It’s me,” he answered, moving quickly until he reached her. He pulled her into his arms. She was trembling, he realized, like a dry leaf about to fall. “What the hell are you doing up here?”
She sagged against him, her body going boneless. “Oh, Wyatt. You’re here!” she said, and the simple, heartfelt gratitude in her voice just about knocked him to his knees.
Her arms twined around his waist and she held tight, he
r face buried in his shirt. “I’m so glad to see you. I can’t even tell you how glad.”
She was breathing hard and she sounded like she was teetering on the brink of hysteria.
“What’s going on, Taylor? What are you doing up here?”
“I thought I was going to die, that I would never see you again. I hated thinking I would never see you again.”
“I’m right here,” he said. “Now tell me what’s happened.”
She stared at him in the moonlight, until Belle brushed against them, and then she seemed to blink back into awareness. She pulled away, that panic back in her eyes.
“Martin! I have to get help.”
He didn’t understand any of this. “Martin James? What is he doing up here?”
She didn’t answer him, just pulled out of his arms and rushed down the mountainside, Belle inches from her side.
Wyatt stared after her for just a moment before taking off behind her. Maybe she slipped up there somehow and conked her head. What else would explain her strange behavior?
“Taylor! Tell me what’s going on.”
“I will. Just not yet. I need to call for help,” she said.
Inside the house, she headed straight for the telephone. He followed her, growing more and more concerned. Her clothes were covered in dirt, the knees ripped, and she looked like she’d just been in a bar fight.
“I need to report a fall victim in Little Cottonwood Canyon, about a mile and a quarter up the Lupine Trail,” she said after she dialed the emergency number. The wild panic from the trail was gone, as if it had never existed, replaced by a calm professionalism.
“Fifty-eight-year-old male in generally good condition sustained massive injuries from a fall of possibly seventy-five to a hundred feet. Search-and-rescue will need to lift him out and he will need immediate medical attention, probably LifeFlight.”
She was silent for a moment, listening. “No, he was too far down the mountainside for me to assess his injuries personally, but from what I could see, he looked as if he had possible head injuries as well as multiple lacerations and broken bones. He was conscious when I left him, but that was fifteen to twenty minutes ago.”
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