by Debra Webb
“Stuart is dead,” Clint informed him. “She was murdered in her home last night. Where were you this morning between midnight and three?”
“I was with friends at the Rare Martini over on Seventh until midnight. Then I came home. Alone.”
“So you don’t have an alibi.” Clint wasn’t sure Farago had the guts to kill anyone, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t responsible for the woman’s death. If Rosen told him to get it done, Farago would have found a way.
“I’m afraid not and you don’t have a badge.” He turned his attention back to Natalie. “Really, Nat, you and your sidekick need to practice your good cop–bad cop routine. I’m not unsettled in the least.”
“I’m happy for you, Vince,” Natalie said, her voice empty. “Because I feel responsible for her death. If I hadn’t gone to see her yesterday, she would still be alive. She’s dead because of my actions.”
“I guess that’s one you’ll have to live with, huh?” Farago sipped his coffee. “Life is hard that way sometimes.”
Natalie smiled. “Oh, wait, there’s one other thing, I failed to mention. I have the evidence, Vince.”
Farago’s posture changed so subtly Clint would have missed it had he not been watching him so closely. Natalie had hit a nerve. Clint wanted to tell her to slow it down, but he had a feeling her intention was to bait Farago. Bad idea. Farago would go straight to Rosen.
“Like I said,” Vince tossed back, “take it to a judge.”
Natalie laughed. “You think I’m bluffing.”
Farago flattened his hands on the marble counter top. “I know you’re bluffing.”
And there it was. Fury charged through Clint. He wanted to beat the hell out of the guy. The bastard was somehow involved in what had happened to Natalie, there was no denying it. He couldn’t possibly know the evidence was missing unless he’d been a party to taking it.
“I thought you might,” Natalie said. “Thank you, Vince. That’s all I needed to know.”
His face paled as he realized his faux pas. “Wait a minute, I—”
“Goodbye, Vince.” Natalie turned and headed for the door.
Clint gave his old nemesis a nod and followed the same route.
“Natalie, wait!” Farago rushed to catch up with them. “You really need to think about this. You’re throwing away your career. What firm is going to want you after this?”
She stopped at the door and glared at him. “I think that’s already been done for me, wouldn’t you say?”
“You don’t know what they’re capable of,” Farago warned.
“Who?” Natalie demanded. “You and who else?”
“It’s Rosen,” Farago said quickly when Natalie reached for the door once more. “He’ll do anything to stay on top. Anything. If that woman is dead, he’ll be the one who ordered it.”
“Are you willing to help stop him?” Clint asked. “I’m confident a plea deal could be reached if you were involved in Beckett’s or Stuart’s murder. Maybe even immunity.”
Farago shook his head. “You don’t understand. None of us will live long enough to care.”
Chapter Fourteen
11:10 a.m.
“Did your sister say what she wanted to talk about?”
Natalie forced her fingers to relax before they cracked her cell phone. No sooner than they’d left Vince, April had returned Natalie’s call. She was waiting for Natalie at the house. “She didn’t tell me. She only said that it was urgent.”
Clint drove a little faster. Natalie’s heart seemed intent to do the same. Vince’s words were still ringing in her ears. How could she have worked at the firm all those years and not understood what Rosen and Vince were capable of? She was no neophyte. She was well aware of the ways of the world. Her law school professors had made it clear the kinds of evil their students would encounter in their future careers. Maybe she’d still worn the rose-colored glasses just the same. She had considered herself and Vince part of the good guys. Rosen had been her mentor. She’d thought he was the perfect example of an upstanding attorney.
She had been wrong.
April’s Mercedes waited in the driveway as Clint made the turn. He tapped the garage door opener they’d taken from Natalie’s crashed car and waited for the door to lift, and then he rolled into the space where her BMW usually sat. At some point she needed to get a new car. She wasn’t sure she would ever feel safe again in the old one. For now, she felt safest with Clint.
Don’t do this, Natalie.
Her last relationship had ended nearly two years ago. She hadn’t really had time to feel alone considering her entire focus had been on recovery. April had been at her side. Suzanna and Leonard had been with her every day after she came home.
Now the sting of loneliness burned deep. She was thirty-two years old, almost thirty-three, and she had no one except her sister and brother. Suzanna and Leonard had quit. Her colleagues wanted nothing else to do with her—the feeling was mutual. Clint turned off the engine and closed the overhead door.
The two of them were very similar except he had more friends. She suspected Clint’s single status was by choice. Had his early career ruined him for relationships? She imagined many of the women he had...attended to...had husbands who ignored them. Natalie’s only excuse was that she had always been too focused on work.
And just look where that has gotten you, Nat.
“There’s something you want to ask?”
His question startled her. She hadn’t realized she was staring at him. “Sorry. I was just thinking.”
“About?”
“It’s nothing.” She reached for the door. “April’s waiting.”
Clint stopped her with a hand on her arm. Her body reacted instantly to his touch, aching for far more. She dared to meet his eyes.
“You are an amazing woman, Natalie. You don’t need the firm or anyone else. Once this is over, put it all behind you and embrace the life you deserve with someone who deserves you.”
He let her go and emerged from the car. Natalie drew in a shaky breath and steadied herself. When this was done, she and Clint were going to have a long talk. He didn’t give himself enough credit.
April stood in the middle of the great room. Her face was red from crying. She glanced at Clint. “We have to talk privately, Nat.”
Natalie sat down on the sofa. “Whatever you have to say, you can say it in front of Clint. He’s here to help us.”
April collapsed into the closest chair. “Us?”
Clint drifted to the other side of the room, giving them space. Natalie appreciated his effort to make April more comfortable. She nodded in answer to her sister’s question. “He’ll help us figure out whatever has to be done.”
A frown furrowed April’s brow. “I don’t think you understand.”
“You were here the night I fell down the stairs. You said you and David had a fight.”
April’s eyes widened slightly. “We did.”
“You had a man here with you,” Natalie went on, “someone with whom you were having an affair.”
Her sister’s face paled. “I didn’t think you remembered.”
“I wasn’t completely sure the details were accurate until you confirmed them just now.” She drew in a deep breath. “You were laughing. I woke up. When I realized you were in your old room with someone who wasn’t David, I decided to go downstairs for coffee and to think.”
April’s face crumpled. Tears flowed down her cheeks. “I’m so sorry. I’m the reason you fell. If I hadn’t gotten involved with that bastard, you... Oh my God.” She buried her face in her hands.
Natalie held her emotions in check. She had to know everything before she allowed herself to feel. Whatever April had done or had allowed to happen, the truth had to come out. There was no more time for
games, too many people had suffered already. “Did you or your friend leave your room before you heard me scream?”
Scrubbing at her tears, April’s frown deepened. “What? No. We heard you scream. I jumped up and pulled on my gown. He was still dragging on his jeans when I ran out of the room.” Realization dawned and her expression turned guarded. “Why do you ask?”
“Someone may have pushed me, April.”
“You think I did that?” She shot to her feet, her arms going instinctively around her thin body. “I can’t believe you would think that. We’re sisters, Nat. I would never hurt you.”
“What about your friend?” Natalie refused to look away even when her sister’s trembling tore at her heart.
“I told you he was still in the room when I ran out. You were at the bottom of the stairs when I found you. He couldn’t have pushed you.” She dropped back into her chair. “Oh my God. This just gets worse.”
“Then someone else was in the house.”
April shook her head. “I never saw anyone else. The jerk took off while I was calling 9-1-1. There was no one else, Natalie. I swear. It was just the three of us until he took off and help arrived.”
For a moment Natalie started to doubt her theory. Had she tripped, rather than been pushed? Was the feeling in that one memory one that had been planted by all the deceit she had uncovered?
“I know he didn’t push you,” April said, drawing Natalie back to the present, “but he was the one who tampered with your air bag.”
“How do you know this?” Clint came up behind Natalie. He braced his hands on the sofa.
April swiped her eyes. “When you told the police the intruder had a scar, I knew it was him.” She touched her forehead between her eyebrows. “I couldn’t believe it. Other people could have scars there, too, but then I remembered the stuff he told me.”
“What stuff?” Clint pressed.
Natalie was glad Clint asked. Her mouth felt full of cotton, her chest so tight she couldn’t possibly hope to breathe.
“He worked for the dealership.” She dropped her gaze to the floor. “The one where you bought your car. Before your accident, David was looking at BMWs and this man who worked there was looking at me. He was everything David wasn’t. Drop dead gorgeous with lots of muscle. I was desperate for attention so we started seeing each other.” She pressed her fingers to her lips before going on. “At first it was just great sex, then he started telling me stories about how easy it was to cause brake failure and all sorts of other problems. He bragged about how he could control the people who hired him to do that kind of work. He said that once some low-level dirtbag hired him to do something to a brake line. Then when the guy didn’t pay up, he repaired it before the owner of the car even had a clue what had happened. He laughed and said people turned over their key rings when they had their cars serviced. The dealership has one of those machines that make copies of keys. He went on and on about how security systems are jokes.”
Natalie exchanged a look with Clint.
“His name,” Natalie said, her voice taut, “was Mike Beckett.”
April gasped. “How did you know?”
“The police lab found evidence of her brakes having been tampered with previously and then repaired,” Clint explained. “It wasn’t difficult to trace the activity back to the dealership.”
“He did that to you?” April’s face darkened to a deep shade of furious red. “I swear I didn’t know. Bastard.”
“Were you still involved with him after my injury?” Natalie felt numb now. Beckett had used April to get to her. Now the most important step was determining who hired him.
April shook her head. “Not after that night.” Her watery gaze settled on Natalie. “After you were hurt. I never even thought of him again until you crashed your car. It was easy to put together the intruder with the air bag tampering.” Her voice sounded so hollow, her gaze distant. “The scar was too much of a coincidence considering what he had told me before.”
Suddenly Natalie understood. The bottom dropped from her stomach. “What did you do, April?”
April glanced at Clint briefly and then settled her gaze on Natalie. “I went to his house and demanded to know if he was the one who broke into your house and messed with your car.”
She fell silent for a long moment before she continued. “He said he didn’t have to break in. He’d made a copy of your key the last time you had your car serviced. I slapped him and he tried to push me away. He said he would have killed you when you caught him in your house, but you shot him first.”
Silence lapsed again while Natalie’s heart continued to break.
“Then he told me to leave. He said if I told anyone they would kill you and Heath. I tried my best to get him to tell me who paid him to do this and he wouldn’t say.”
“April,” Natalie began but her sister held up a hand to stop her.
“That’s when I saw the gun.”
Natalie’s heart surged into her throat. “April, don’t say anything else.”
Her sister shook her head, tears flowing down her cheeks. “I killed him.”
Natalie’s hand went to her mouth to hold back a sob.
“I grabbed the gun and pointed it at him. I told him he’d better stay away from my family and he just laughed.” She shrugged. “He said he would put a bullet in my head and make it look as if you shot me. He tried to take the gun from me and somehow during the struggle it went off.”
“You came here and changed,” Clint suggested.
April nodded. “I was in your closet getting something to put on when Suzanna came into the room. I hid the clothes and the gun in a trash bag in your clothes hamper so Suzanna wouldn’t see.”
“You came back for...them.” Natalie was so relieved that she hadn’t imagined the whole thing that she felt lightheaded.
“Yes. I put them in a trash bin downtown.”
“Where exactly?” Clint demanded.
April looked taken aback.
“It’s all right,” Natalie assured her. “It was self-defense. Beckett threatened you. But we have to let the police know what happened.”
“Oh God. David doesn’t know. If he finds out... I’m so sorry, Nat. I wasn’t thinking of anything except how it was my fault. I had to try and make him stop.”
Natalie refused to let her emotions get the better of her. “David is a smart man. He’ll forgive you and stand by you if he wants to be governor one day.” Maybe if he hadn’t been so interested in running for office he wouldn’t have left April vulnerable to an affair. Perhaps that was a stretch but blood was thicker than water. “I know you were trying to help and that means a great deal to me, but a man is dead and we have to do this by the book.”
April reluctantly gave Clint the address and he called his friends in the BPD.
Natalie and April hugged. Her sister had been there for Natalie through her darkest days; Natalie had to be here for her now. They needed each other.
One thing nagged at her though. Suzanna had known April was in Natalie’s closet. What else did Suzanna know that she hadn’t told Natalie?
3:15 p.m.
NATALIE SAT ON the sofa on one side of April and her husband, David, sat on the other while Lieutenant Harper took her statement. Detective Cook had recovered the trash bag from the trash bin and called the BPD’s evidence collection team.
“Will she be arrested?” David asked, his somber tone uncharacteristically quiet.
“Not at this time, sir,” Harper explained. “When we sort this all out, we’ll see how it stacks up. For now, it certainly sounds as if Mrs. Keating felt her life was in danger and acted in self-defense.”
“I hope we can keep this out of the media,” David urged.
“I can’t promise that.” Harper put his notepad and handheld recorder away.
“But the department has no reason to talk to the media regarding the details we’ve just learned.” He stood. “I have everything I need for now.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant.” Natalie was grateful Clint’s friends in SPU had the case considering it was now a homicide investigation. She felt confident Harper would do all he could to protect April.
Clint showed the detective to the door.
David stood and held out his hand to his wife. “I think we should go home now.” He smiled at Natalie, but the expression fell short of his eyes. “I’m certain you’re exhausted. This has been a harrowing week for you.”
Natalie rose. “I love my sister, David. I hope you’re not holding back on my account. She’s suffered enough over this. I would hate to hear that you caused her any additional distress.”
He nodded his understanding as he drew April into the shelter of his arms. “You’re a good sister, Natalie, even after you’ve been through so much yourself. You have my word that April and I are fine. She’s the love of my life. We’ve both made mistakes. It’s where we go from here that matters.”
Though her brother-in-law’s speech sounded less than passionate, Natalie nodded. “We’ll all get through this.”
Clint had just closed the front door as they moved into the entry hall.
“Until we know,” he said to David, “who hired Beckett to hurt your family, I would advise you to keep April close. Watch each other’s backs.”
“With the election coming up next year, competition is heating up,” David explained. “I’ve already contacted a security service about around-the-clock protection for both of us.” David looked from Clint to Natalie. “I can have my contact there meet with you if you’re interested in hiring someone, Nat.” He glanced at Clint. “It might not be a bad idea moving forward.”
“Thank you, David. I’ll let you know.” Natalie and April shared another hug before the couple left.
“Well, that went better than I expected,” Clint said, echoing her thoughts.
Natalie watched through the leaded glass of the front door as her brother-in-law opened the car door for her sister. “David is a politician through and through. If it’s best for his campaign, then he’s on board. I just wish I knew what was in his heart.”
