She squeezed my arm. "I know you didn't mean to tell me, Liv, but I'm glad you did. This was another one of those secrets--we keep it to protect someone, and it just makes everything so much worse. If I had any idea--any--" Her breath caught. "I would never have agreed to have Seanna stay in Cainsville."
"But I did know, and I still supported her staying."
"For me. Because I wanted it, and you thought you could protect Gabriel from her, and I..." She nodded. "You're right. I wanted some form of reconciliation."
"I think that's possible," I said carefully, "maybe even necessary--for him--but not like this. He needs to be in a situation where no one gives a damn whether he chooses to see Seanna or not. Where it is entirely up to him. Where he doesn't feel he's pleasing--or displeasing--either of us by doing it. No guilt. No pressure. No judgment."
She nodded. "Yes. That's what I wanted, but it wouldn't matter how often I told him that I didn't care whether he came--he knew I did. I realized he might be uncomfortable. I just... I thought it was best. For her, yes, but mostly for him."
"The temporary discomfort of a scab before healing."
"Yes. But with her bringing up the playground and other memories, he was more than uncomfortable. He must have been."
"He hides it well." As I moved back to my chair, I said, "Is there any chance--?" Then I cut myself off with a shake of my head.
"What?"
I hesitated before saying, carefully, "It's entirely possible that Seanna only remembers taking him to playgrounds and presumes it was a good memory for him."
"But is there any chance she knows better?"
"Yes."
Rose was silent for a minute, and I was about to move on, just let the possibility sit there, no need to pursue it. Then she said, "I don't know, Liv. I want to say no, that given her demeanor, it seems only that she recalls a playground, and there's no chance she could be tormenting--"
She inhaled sharply. "What you've told me says that things in their life together were even worse than I imagined. In light of that, I don't even know how to interpret her behavior. She insists on seeing him. She's very affectionate. She brings up memories. It could be exactly what I hoped--that she's forgotten the worst and is finally acting like a mother, but... I don't know. We need more time to assess this."
"More time without Gabriel around her."
"Definitely."
Twenty-two
Olivia
After leaving Rose, I drove back to the city, and I thought. I thought a lot. Then I made a couple of stops and a phone call before heading to the office.
"Any sign of the boss?" I asked as I walked in.
No one answered. I looked at Lydia's empty desk and checked my watch. It was past six. I sent off a text to Gabriel, telling him where he could find me, and went into his office to work.
When I started at the firm, Gabriel assigned me the meeting room as an office--there wasn't a separate room for me to work in. Most times, though, he had preferred me in his office where he didn't have to get up to talk to me. When he got around to buying a second desk, he'd just had them put it in his office, and that was where I stayed.
Today, though, I sat at the big desk. His desk. I riffled through the stack of files on it until I found the police report from the accident that killed Johnson's wife.
Something wasn't fitting with the scenario I'd worked out--Alan Nansen killed Kathy Johnson in a hit-and-run, and then two years later, her husband initiated an elaborate scheme to get Heather to kill Alan.
Time to go back to the beginning of that solution and reanalyze the data. According to the report, it played out as I'd seen in the vision. Dark country road. Johnson was driving. His wife was in the passenger seat. It would have been her voice I heard, Johnson paying no attention to what she was saying. According to the report, they'd reached a curve, and the next thing Johnson knew, he saw a flash of headlights...and then impact.
The collision happened too fast for Johnson to even process what happened. Their car spun off the road and down an embankment. It struck a tree on the passenger side. Johnson had groggily looked around and spotted another vehicle with a woman climbing out, only to be pulled back inside. Johnson lost consciousness before he really understood what he was seeing.
When he woke up, he immediately checked on his wife. She wasn't breathing. He frantically dialed 911. Paramedics arrived within twenty minutes, but it was too late. His wife was dead.
The police had tried to find the person responsible. They tried even harder than usual, I suspected, not only because there was a death involved, but because, if someone in the other car had called 911, Kathy Johnson would still be alive. It was the delay that killed her. The car went off the road in a quiet area, and it spun down into an embankment at night, where any cars that passed continued by, oblivious.
I could now see why Johnson would definitely blame Alan Nansen. A hit-and-run causing death was bad enough. But in fleeing the scene, the Nansens let Kathy Johnson die. Even an anonymous 911 call from a pay phone would have saved her.
That scenario, however, made Johnson seem less accountable for Alan's death, which took it even farther out of the Cwn Annwn's realm.
I glanced at my silent cell phone. I really could use Gabriel's help on this. I needed someone to bounce ideas off, someone to see what I must be missing. But he wasn't returning my text, meaning he was busy, and I hated to interrupt for something that wasn't urgent. We could discuss it over dinner.
Thinking of dinner, I checked my watch. And then I stopped. I stared at my watch. Looked at my cell phone. Back at my watch.
I remembered Johnson's memories. A flash of a cell phone in his hand, his gaze going to it and then to his watch. I'd thought that was after the accident with Lloergan, but his airbags hadn't gone off then. So this was connected to his wife's accident.
Why had he remembered that exact moment?
Because that was when he'd realized it was too late. He'd regained consciousness and looked at his watch...
Somehow, even addle-brained, I couldn't imagine I'd wake up after an accident, see Gabriel unconscious and check my watch. If by some bizarre chance "Hey, how long have I been out?" was the next thing on my mind, I'd glance at the time while calling 911.
There had to be a reason why he'd remembered that moment, along with the accident and the Hunt and seeing the headline of Nansen's death. A connection that I wasn't making...
I pictured his watch again.
Oh, yes. Oh, hell yes.
I grabbed the report.
Johnson told the police he didn't know exactly when they'd gone off the road. They'd left the city just past midnight, but he hadn't checked the time since. The police knew, though. They got that data from the car's computer to help in their investigation.
The accident happened at 12:32 a.m. Johnson placed the 911 call at 1:59 a.m. And the time on his watch when he glanced at it?
Just past one in the morning.
I leafed through the pages for the paramedics' report. They arrived and immediately went to Kathy Johnson's aid. Once they'd determined they couldn't revive her, they wanted to check out Johnson's condition, but he was agitated and distraught and insisted on getting his wife to a hospital. He could be checked there if necessary, but he'd only suffered a crack on the head. Once at the hospital, he'd refused treatment.
Because you didn't crack your head, did you, Keith?
What would you crack it on? The airbags deployed. Your wife died from the impact of the tree on the passenger's side. You were cushioned by the airbags.
You were fine.
If Keith Johnson did pass out, it was only briefly. He'd been awake and alert just after one, midway between the time of the accident and calling 911. He'd checked his watch because he was waiting.
Waiting until it was too late to save her.
Keith Johnson killed his wife. It didn't matter if he hadn't caused the accident. He'd taken advantage of it, and that was even more coldhearted than what th
e Nansens did. He sat in that car and waited for his wife to die.
And then he went after the Nansens?
That didn't make any sense. Especially not if he waited two years to do it.
The only reason he would target the Nansens was if they were in danger of being arrested. That would reopen the case, and the lawyers would be all over it, analyzing details in a way the police hadn't needed to. But I saw absolutely no suggestion that the police had reopened the investigation.
What happened, Keith?
I turned my attention to his phone data and began excavating. Phone calls. Texts. Calendar appointments. E-mails.
And that's where I found it. A deleted e-mail, dated two weeks before the first break-in attempt, sent to Johnson from an anonymous account.
I sent a quick text to Gabriel and took off.
Twenty-three
Gabriel
On leaving Gwylio Consulting, Gabriel pulled out his phone. He'd left Olivia a message earlier, and she'd texted back, saying she'd been at Patrick's, using his books. Her research confirmed Ioan's claims--there was no evidence the solution they'd uncovered should warrant Cwn Annwn justice. But Gabriel was still certain they were on the right track. They were merely missing elements.
Gabriel had wanted to talk about that, but Olivia had been racing off in pursuit of another angle. Disappointing, yes, but it did give him the chance to do what he'd failed to manage earlier: surprise her with new data.
Before Olivia, Gabriel had acted as investigator for all his own cases. He'd considered contracting one for the more mundane work, such as surveilling witnesses, but that would have meant giving an outsider access to his defense strategy, and while other attorneys did so, his personal methods made that more complicated.
As for the not-so-mundane points of investigation, he'd never considered relinquishing those. He told himself it was even riskier to contract those out, but the truth was that he liked that part. He liked digging for clues, following the trail, solving the mystery. Only one thing proved better than investigating by himself--investigating with Olivia.
Ioan's office was close to Gabriel's condo, so he went there to think in peace and find that new data.
Ioan didn't like their solution. And there was one part that Olivia hadn't liked either, initially.
Heather Nansen.
As a defense lawyer, Gabriel knew there were many ways one could react to the death of a loved one. He could attribute Heather's reaction to shock. Yet given the fact that she was responsible for her husband's death, even Gabriel had expected a stronger response.
Their solution to the crime exonerated Heather Nansen as much as she could ever be exonerated. That is, it said that Keith Johnson had deliberately staged the break-ins in hopes of driving Heather to shoot her husband. Her guilt, then, was only that of a person who made a fatal and tragic mistake.
Or was it?
What if this case had been presented to Gabriel without the Cwn Annwn claiming another person was responsible? What if he removed Johnson from the equation?
He would have thought Heather guilty. Her story was simply too odd. Gabriel and Olivia had acknowledged that--repeatedly--yet knowing that Ioan blamed Johnson, those oddities had only seemed proof that a third party was indeed involved.
But if Gabriel removed Johnson from the game board, he would never have accepted the case. It contained far too many weak points.
Someone broke into our house. And then tried twice more, and no, he didn't succeed, but I was so terribly worried that I bought a gun.
You think I lured my husband home? Gracious, no. Didn't I tell you someone stole my phone? That person must have sent the texts.
Heather had believed that herself until Olivia corrected her, which showed a poor understanding of technology. Gabriel himself had a better one, but it still wasn't his forte. For that, he did reach out and get external expertise.
Gabriel placed a call to Lydia's grandson, a nineteen-year-old student at Caltech, who had absolutely no interest in the defense strategy of some Chicago lawyer, but a very vested interest in his bank account, which grew whenever he received phone calls from said lawyer.
"It's Gabriel Walsh," he said when Bryant answered.
"You do know that your name appears on the little screen when you call, right, Gabriel?" Bryant said. "If you don't want it to, I can fix that for you."
"I announce myself because I cannot presume everyone checks the screen first."
"They don't?"
"Oddly, no. I can't understand it myself."
Bryant chuckled. "Okay, so hit me with today's hypothetical tech question, unrelated to any cases you're working."
Gabriel explained the situation.
"Nah," Bryant said. "It doesn't work like that. Spoofing numbers is easy enough, but it doesn't take much to prove they're spoofed. I know you don't like the technical details, so here's an example. If I used your phone number to send nude pics to my girlfriend, those pics would never appear on your phone. And if I started texting your girlfriend while spoofing your phone number, my texts would certainly never appear midstream in your conversation thread with her."
"Nor in her thread with me. Is that correct?"
"Right. She'd get an entirely new conversation thread, seemingly from your number. Now, having said all that, I'll add the usual caveat--there's a chance I'm full of shit. Tech is always advancing, especially black-market tech. Right now, though, I don't know of any way someone could do what you've described. If anyone can, then they have serious skills. Or the cash to rent them."
Gabriel signed off with the usual "I'll wire a donation to your college fund," along with the usual promise to pass on Bryant's hello to his grandmother. Then he hung up, thought a bit, and pulled out his laptop to begin searching.
There were many reasons for one spouse to want the other dead. In fact, no other relationship seemed to end in murder quite so often. Putting aside domestic violence, the top reasons to kill one's spouse were sex and money. More accurately, infidelity and inheritance.
He had Heather Nansen's phone records, along with a program designed by Bryant to analyze those--cross-referencing calls received and made, noting length and attempting to match the numbers to ones found online. Once analyzed, he had to dissect that data, looking for outliers and patterns.
Here he found both: outliers and patterns. Namely, multiple instances of ten-to fifteen-minute calls to numbers Heather only ever dialed once, all within a brief period, all the numbers tracing to the same type of business. Private investigators.
Six months ago, she'd been trying to hire an investigator. That was what the pattern suggested. Contact one, explain the situation, and ultimately, decide against hiring. She had something in mind, something she wanted investigated. All those calls came before the break-ins, suggesting no link there.
In the end, his digging circled back to the restaurant. Eclipse. To its financial health. It didn't take long for Gabriel to form his own diagnosis: the patient was on life support, and really, the smart thing to do would be to pull the plug. No incentive would have convinced him to invest in the restaurant. Despite its popularity, it leaked money like a sieve, which suggested someone was siphoning off profits.
He continued digging, through both public records and not-so-public ones. He was playing a hunch, and it didn't take long to confirm it.
When opening a business like a restaurant, one needs investment capital. Those initial investors are the ones with the most to lose, arguably even more than Alan Nansen, who could ride his reputation to a new venture. The investors were also the ones directly affected by any misappropriation of funds.
There were a minor and a major investor in Eclipse. The minor one? Heather's parents. And the major? Heather herself, who had funded the venture almost singlehandedly.
Heather Nansen's degree was in business, which she used working for both Eclipse and her mother's firm. That led to a second call, to Ricky, with questions about his own MBA, and the role he
played in his father's business. The legal role, that is.
"Sure, I do handle the money," Ricky said when Gabriel asked about finances. "Dad began shifting that over to me when I started my degree. Now it's all mine. I control the piggy bank. Dad just signs your checks."
"Are you trained to find evidence of mismanagement? Questionable accounting?"
"An MBA is like a law degree. You can't be an expert in all law, and I'm not one in all aspects of running a business. But I happen to like number crunching--and Dad needs that more than he needs marketing and advertising--so I learned more about the financial side than other MBAs might. I don't do our accounting, but I oversee it. In a business like this, there's always someone looking to skim."
"If I send you some financial records for Nansen's business, can you tell me if anything looks suspicious?"
"Sure."
Twenty minutes later, Ricky called back with a yes. Or "Hell, yeah."
"Someone's raiding this piggy bank. Ricky said there's no way a restaurant that busy should see profit this low."
That suggested the person siphoning out money was Alan Nansen. Heather likely had the skills to spot discrepancies, and if she'd suspected someone other than her husband, she'd have been quick to inform on the culprit.
Gabriel could understand Nansen wanting a bigger share of the profit--he was the talent, the vision, and the one putting in the hours. But skimming would be more understandable if the investors were faceless corporate sponsors. When it was his wife's money? That was unacceptable.
Given the amount of the investment, Gabriel presumed that, like Olivia, Heather had received a trust fund. Wealthy parents wanting to make their only child's life easier at the time she needed it most--when she was young and establishing her own life, rather than waiting on an inheritance.
He suspected the lion's share of that trust had gone into Eclipse. What if Heather then discovered her husband was stealing from their nest egg, her birthright? And where was the money going? A mistress? Drugs? Gambling? Not back into their own bank accounts, that was sure.
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