“We’ll try, but you know: murder.” Amelia made a face.
As soon as Manny headed to bed, Amelia and I made for the door.
“I don’t like lying to him,” I said. “What if he finds out?”
“He won’t.” Amelia glanced back toward the house. The upstairs lights were on, but I had a feeling that wouldn’t last long. Manny had looked exhausted. “And besides, sometimes you have to lie to protect those you love. Would you really want to know what I was up to if I were to sneak out late at night?”
“Yes. Yes, I would.”
Amelia rolled her eyes as she got into her car. “Well, sometimes it’s necessary.”
“Are we going to need disguises?” I asked. “What are we doing, Amelia?”
She didn’t answer until we were well down the road. My heart was in my throat and my stomach was somewhere down around my feet. Sneaking around at night wasn’t the kind of thing I’d planned for my life, yet here I was.
“We’re going to look to see what kind of cars the good doctor drives,” she said.
“How are we going to do that?”
She glanced at me. “You’ll see.”
I subsided and sat back for the ride. That’s not to say I was relaxed or had a good feeling about what we were doing—not that I really knew—but at least I wasn’t asking a million questions like a ten-year-old on a road trip.
As we neared Martin’s house, Amelia slowed. All the downstairs lights were on, and as we crept by, I noted a shadow moving around inside.
“He’s home,” I said, needlessly. Amelia had seen the same thing I had, yet she didn’t seem perturbed by it.
“That’s fine. I planned for that.”
She drove us down the block, found a place to turn around, and then she snapped off her lights. She coasted back toward Martin’s house until she found a spot where the road widened. She pulled off onto the shoulder and turned off the engine.
“Okay,” I said. My skin was crawling. I scratched at my arm absently. “What now?”
Amelia pulled out a flip phone and dialed.
“Martin Castor?” Her voice was lower, deeper, to the point where I had to do a double take to make sure she was actually speaking. “I know about you and Harry Davis. I know what you’ve done. Meet me at your office in twenty minutes and we can talk a deal.” She clicked off.
My mouth was hanging open as she stuffed the phone back into a bag. “What are you doing?”
“We’ll want to dump this to be safe,” she said, tossing the bag into the back seat, before she settled back.
“Amelia?” My voice had risen a few octaves in my nervousness.
She sighed. “Just wait. Martin will be scrambling to figure out what I know, who I might be, and will likely take a few moments to worry.”
“And then?”
She nodded toward the driveway, which was now lit up by headlights.
“And then he’ll go see what I want.”
The gate opened and Martin’s white Lexus pulled out of the driveway. He turned down the road, thankfully facing the opposite direction from us, and then he sped away. The gate began to slowly close.
“Do we need to make a run for it?” I asked, hand on the car door, just in case. I seriously doubted I’d be able to make it in time, but perhaps Amelia could.
“No.” Amelia popped open the trunk and then got out of the car. I followed after her. “Carry this.” She plopped a thick blanket into my arms before she closed the trunk and started toward Martin’s property.
“Amelia!” I scurried after her.
Martin’s wrought-iron fence was short enough I could touch the spikes on top without having to stand on tiptoes. It was obviously meant for decoration more than to keep anyone out, yet its effect on me was the same as if it had razor wire strung across it. I wanted no part of it.
Amelia took the blanket out of my arms and draped it over the top of the fence, covering the spikes. “After you.” She grinned as she motioned toward the fence.
“I’m not climbing that thing,” I said. “This is illegal.”
“It’s only illegal if we get caught.”
“Is that what Chester teaches you?” I asked, before a new thought hit. “Did he show you how to do this? How many times have you broken into someone’s home, Amelia?”
She gave me a patented Amelia eyeroll. “This is my first time,” she said. “And no, we aren’t breaking into his house. We’re going to go to his garage, take a peek inside to see if he has any other cars, and then we’re going to go home.”
I still wasn’t convinced, but I really did want to see if the car Jack saw was in that garage. I’d have to figure out how to tell Detective Cavanaugh about it without telling him how I’d discovered it, but that was a problem for another day.
“Fine,” I said. “But only a peek. Then we never do or speak of this again.”
“I should have come alone,” Amelia muttered.
I considered the fence a moment before wedging my foot between two of the bars. It was a tight fit, which served my purposes just fine. I grabbed the top of the blanket, which wasn’t quite thick enough. One of the spikes poked painfully into my palm where I gripped it, but at least it didn’t break skin. I counted to three, and then I pulled myself up and over. I landed so hard on my hands and knees, my teeth rattled.
Amelia was up and over in one smooth motion, making me wonder if she’d lied to me and she did this sort of thing on a nightly basis now. She landed on her feet, before dropping into a crouch. She scanned the grounds briefly before she said, “All right, to the garage.” She kept low as she made for the building in question.
A light kicked on in the driveway as we neared, startling a scream from me. Under her breath, Amelia muttered, “Chill out, Mom, it’s a motion sensor.”
“You chill out,” I shot back. “What if he has security cameras? We didn’t wear masks.”
Amelia hesitated. “I don’t see a camera,” she said, but I noted she brushed her hair into her face with fingers that trembled ever so slightly.
A walkway connected the garage to the rest of the house. The garage doors themselves were closed, as expected, and when I gave one an experimental tug, it didn’t budge.
“How do we get in?” I asked Amelia while I wondered, Should I have worn gloves? Now that we were here, past the point of no return, I was regretting letting Amelia talk me into this. There were so many ways this could go wrong, and none of them were within my control.
“Side door,” Amelia said, and then she vanished around the corner, presumably to check to see if there even was a side entrance.
I used my shirt to wipe at the door where I’d touched it, and then followed after Amelia. When I rounded the corner, I found her standing in front of an open door.
“It was unlocked.”
I really wanted to believe her, but wasn’t so sure I did. I kept my concerns to myself, however, as we entered the gloom of the garage.
While Martin could fit five cars in the garage, there were only two vehicles currently sitting inside. One of them was covered with a white tarp. The other was a black SUV.
“Could that be it?” Amelia asked.
“It’s not a Mercedes,” I said, noting the Lexus logo. “But Jack wasn’t very specific, so I suppose it might be.” The SUV was dark and fancy, so it could very well be the one, though he’d said it was a car, not a bigger vehicle.
Amelia walked over to the covered vehicle. She lifted the tarp enough so she could peer under. “Red. Corvette. Definitely not a black Mercedes.”
“Now what?” I asked, frustrated. It looked like we’d hit a dead end.
Amelia glanced toward the door leading to the covered walkway that led to the house.
“No,” I said. “We came to check his cars.”
“What if there’s something inside?” she said. “Rich people like Martin often have home offices. If he had any connection to Christine or Joe, the proof might be in there.”
“He wo
uldn’t keep evidence of his crimes lying around where anyone could find it,” I said. “I bet he has cleaners come in every couple of days.”
“One quick look,” Amelia said. “We won’t touch anything we don’t need to. We won’t take anything. If we see something suspicious, I’ll have Maya call it in tomorrow as an anonymous tip.”
“I don’t like this,” I said in my latest understatement of the year. “Martin might not have cameras outside, but I can almost guarantee there’ll be some inside.”
“Maybe.” Amelia sounded thoughtful. “But what if he doesn’t?”
I closed my eyes. This is how it ends. “One quick look,” I said, knowing I was going to regret it.
“This is kind of exciting, isn’t it?” Before I could tell her that, no, this wasn’t exciting for me in the slightest, Amelia was at the door. She glanced at me once and then turned the knob. “It’s unlocked.” She opened the door and stepped inside.
I looked skyward and pressed my hands together. “Please forgive us.” And then I followed my daughter into Martin Castor’s house.
26
Amelia moved from room to room, quickly glancing inside each before moving on to the next. I trailed after her, anticipating the moment when the police would arrive and ship us to a maximum security prison. While Amelia was hurrying, I willed her to go faster. Every room she dismissed was one room closer to getting out of there.
Everything was high-end in Martin’s house. The floors were real hardwood, the appliances top-of-the-line. Televisions took up entire walls. Sound systems were displayed in every corner. The only thing missing was a library, though we still had quite a few more rooms to go where one could pop up.
At least an alarm hadn’t sounded. As far as I could tell, there were no cameras within plain sight. Maybe we had lucked out and Martin’s overconfidence would allow us to escape unnoticed.
“Here we are,” Amelia said, slipping into a room on the second floor.
“How do you know this is his office?” I closed the door part of the way. It wouldn’t help us if Martin were to come home, but it gave me a false sense of security anyway.
“The desk. The safe.” She rolled her eyes. “Geesh, Mom, it’s not hard to figure out.”
“Yeah, yeah.” My face was hot. I wasn’t used to being shown up by my daughter. “What are we looking for?”
“I’m not sure.” She moved to the desk and started scanning the things set atop it. There was a monitor, a date book, and a few files, but little else. “We’ll know it when we see it.”
I moved to the only bookshelf I’d seen in the entire house. It was full of medical texts that looked brand-new. Pulling one free, I noted the pages had that unbroken look to them, as if he’d never once opened the books. It’s all for show.
It didn’t surprise me. After seeing Nurse Uma, I had a feeling that image mattered more to Martin Castor than results. I reshelved the book, careful to make sure I put it back exactly where I’d found it.
As Amelia went through Martin’s desk, I moved slowly around the room, looking for anything that jumped out at me as a clue. Not that I knew what that looked like. I was so out of my depth here, I felt like I was drowning.
There were photographs on the wall. All of them were of Martin standing with important-looking people. I recognized a few, but most of them were unfamiliar to me. I was halfway through them when Amelia’s excited voice broke the silence.
“Got it!”
I spun to find Amelia holding a memo pad and grinning. “You’ve got what?”
“The dingbat keeps his safe combination in his desk.” She handed me the pad, and sure enough, it was there, scrawled across the top. He’d even written safe combination, at the top of the page.
“Are you sure it goes to this safe?” I mean, what’s the point of having a safe if you’re just going to leave the combination lying around?
“There’s only one way to find out.” Amelia turned and rested her hand on the dial. “Read off the numbers for me.”
Feeling even more like a criminal than I had before, I read off the combination, while Amelia spun the dial. I kind of expected a man like Martin to have a high-tech safe, one that required a numerical code that changed every day and you needed a descrambler to decode it.
Or maybe I just read too many books.
I had to admit, as Amelia spun the dial to the final number, a sense of excitement washed over me. Sure, what we were doing was illegal, but it was for a good cause. There was a chance Martin Castor was a murderer, and finding evidence of his crime was paramount. So what if I got into trouble? If it put him in jail, it would be worth it.
Of course, there was the tiny little problem of explaining how I’d come by the evidence if we did get out of there unnoticed, but I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.
Amelia glanced back at me as the safe made a click. She grabbed the handle, grinned like she was about to open a Christmas present, and then pulled.
The door swung open.
The bottom of the safe held a box of files. Amelia knelt and went straight for them, an eager gleam to her eye.
I, however, noted the single folder on the top shelf. I wouldn’t have seen it if it had been placed farther back, but as it was, it sat crooked on the shelf, as if it had recently been tossed inside without care, so I was able to see its corner. I gingerly pulled it free, fully expecting an alarm to go off as I did.
It didn’t, of course.
“These are patient records,” Amelia said. “I don’t see anything about Joe or Christine Danvers, and I don’t recognize any of these names.”
I opened my file, scanned the page. My heart did a hiccup and then started racing. “Amelia. Stop.”
She glanced up. “Did you find something? I don’t think any of this stuff will help us.” She shoved the file she was holding back into the box.
“I think so.” I scanned the page again, my head started to pound in time with my heart. “I think I know what happened to Christine.”
Amelia rose and snatched the folder out of my hand as my mind tried to process what I’d just read.
“Wait . . .” Amelia’s eyes widened. “These are DNA results.” She scanned the page. “Does this say what I think it says?”
I nodded. “Hue Hemingway wasn’t Christine’s father.”
Amelia met my eye. “Sterling Wright is.”
It made so much sense. I don’t know how it happened, but somehow, Sterling Wright and Joan Hemingway ended up together. I wasn’t sure if it was consensual or not, but the results were the same. Joan became pregnant with Sterling’s baby.
It wasn’t difficult to draw the line from that moment, all the way to Joe’s death. Something happened and Sterling killed Joan and Hue—or at least, had them killed. Maybe they wouldn’t let him see his daughter. Maybe he found out about the pregnancy and cover-up later and was angry about being left out.
Either way, they’re killed, Christine is sent out for adoption, and then, as an adult, she discovers who her real father is—and that he killed her parents.
It would explain why she ran, rather than turn him in. She might hate him for what he’d done to her parents, but Sterling was still her real father. She leaves town, changes her name so he can’t find her, but doesn’t take her husband for some reason. Maybe Sterling threatened his life or she simply didn’t have time.
Joe is blamed for her murder, he vanishes, changes his name as well. Then, when he comes back to Grey Falls and resumes looking for his wife, he discovers something that leads back to Sterling, who then kills Joe to cover his tracks.
“It explains why Sterling is keeping Detective Cavanaugh locked away in meetings,” I said, working it through. “Even Wayne Hastings said something about being distracted at the time of the original investigation.”
“We have to get this to the police somehow,” Amelia said. “They’ll know what to do with it.” She shook the file at me. “Martin is implicated in this too. He ran the tests. I bet he�
�s been covering for Wright this entire time.”
“What about Harry Davis?” I asked.
Amelia shook her head. “His name doesn’t come up, but I think it’s pretty obvious he’s involved somehow.”
“He did show up screaming at Chester about him poking around in his life and following him.”
“Yeah, but we weren’t following him,” Amelia said. “Someone else must know.”
“Or maybe Sterling is getting nervous,” I said. “Martin acted like someone was following him too. What if Sterling Wright was getting worried and had Martin and Harry watched to make sure they weren’t going to turn him in?”
“It makes sense,” Amelia said. “Perhaps Martin kept this file for blackmail purposes.” She held the file as if it might catch on fire at any moment.
“I bet you’re right.” It made me wonder if there was some way we could talk Martin into turning on Sterling. If he turned the file over to the cops himself, then there’d be no reason for Detective Cavanaugh to ever become aware of Amelia’s and my transgression.
The windows lit up, cutting our conversation short.
“Is that . . . ?” I asked, unable to finish the question. Some part of me hoped that if I left the question hanging, then it couldn’t possibly be true.
“He’s back!” Amelia rushed to the window and glanced outside. “There’s others with him.” She cursed. “I see Harry Davis. And Mr. Wright!”
Panic tried to blank my mind. “What are we going to do?”
Amelia was already moving. She shoved the box of files back into the safe, and then, after a moment’s hesitation, placed the file with Sterling and Christine’s DNA comparison back onto the top shelf. She closed the safe door, spun the dial, and then dropped the memo pad back into Martin’s desk.
Together we made for the door, but it was already far too late to escape. The office was on the second floor, which meant we had to go down the stairs, which spilled out into a large open area that could be seen from any number of rooms. All it would take is one glance and we’d be caught.
Still, Amelia made for the stairs. She’d just reached the top step when voices came from below.
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