GRAY WOLF SECURITY, Texas: The Complete 6-Books Series

by Glenna Sinclair

  “Harley,” I said, gesturing for her to come to me. She hesitated as her eyes moved over all the people sitting around the room, some studying their phones, some looking at the stacks of research David brought along with him.

  To be honest, I was a little overwhelmed by their presence, too. I hadn’t expected them to show up, let alone bring with them information we hadn’t been able to gather yet. It was going to be a godsend, all this information. But I hadn’t asked for their help.

  She came over and squatted down next to my chair.

  “Does this look right to you?”

  She took the written confession and began to read through it, something of a bored look on her face. But she quickly became interested as she slowed down and read it carefully.

  “There’s less detail in this. And this doesn’t say anything about Grace.”

  “It was clearly written by someone who either didn’t want the patsy to go to jail, or who didn’t know the details of the crime.”

  “But where did Mickey get the details?”

  “That’s my question.”

  “I have the confession he made to the prosecutor.” She got up and raced out of the room before I could say anything. She was back a few minutes later, that damned accordion file in her arms. She searched through it, pulling out a file that she proudly handed to me.

  “That’s a transcript of the confession he made on the nineteenth. There’s also a transcript of the confession he made to the prosecutor a few days later.”

  David came over and read over my shoulder, picking up the typed story we’d gotten from Jaime. He compared the two, frowning as he read more and more of it.

  “This doesn’t mention Grace. It doesn’t mention any weapons. It doesn’t even tell how the perpetrator got into the house.”

  “But this does.”

  David shook his head. “Who did he confess to the first time?”

  “An assistant district attorney. Paul Rutledge.”

  I looked up as the name rang a bell. “Isn’t he district attorney now?”

  Harley nodded. “He ran two years ago and won.”

  “He was just a newbie back then, fresh out of law school,” I said, the memory slowly coming back to me. “But the district attorney at the time was quite impressed with his ability to get Connors to talk. I remember that. He pointed it out to me, telling me that it was a real coup in a case like this.”

  David seemed puzzled. “But why the difference? Who fed him the extra information? And why didn’t the guys who put him up to it in the first place give him more information? Were they just trying to distract the cops or did they really not have the details?”

  That was a good question. If they simply didn’t have the details, then that meant that the men who wrote this confession weren’t in the know. And that didn’t make sense. Why set up someone for a crime if you didn’t know the full details?

  And why had Connors been caught breaking into a house before he confessed? Why didn’t he go straight to the cops?

  “There’s a lot about this that doesn’t make sense.”

  “Then let’s make it make sense,” David said. “Let’s go talk to this man.”

  “It’s a holiday weekend.”

  “I bet he’ll be willing to talk to us when he finds out what it’s about.”

  I was willing. Ash stood, too, and Donovan. We headed for the door, a uniquely determined foursome. I touched Harley’s hip as I passed her.

  “Coming?”

  “I think I’ll sit this one out.”

  I frowned, studying her face closely. “We might break this thing wide open pretty soon. Don’t you want to be a part of that?”

  “I think I’m better off here, sharing the rest of what I know about the case.”

  I didn’t like the tone of her voice; I didn’t like the distance that was suddenly solidly in place between us. I knew she was upset at me, but that didn’t warrant this sudden change of attitude.

  “Harley…”

  “Let’s go, Kipling.”

  I glanced at David where he was waiting for me in the doorway. Harley pushed against my hand.

  “Go,” she said softly. “Let’s end this.”

  I could have taken that sentence two different ways. I chose to take it as her suggesting the quicker we met with the prosecutor, the quicker we’d have the answers we needed. I walked away, glancing back at her as I stepped through the doorway. She was already pulling the papers out of her accordion file, laying them out on the coffee table where everyone could find them.

  “Too bad Nolan isn’t here,” David said behind me. “He would be able to figure this out in a snap.”

  “Too bad.”

  ***

  Paul Rutledge lived in a neighborhood not far from Abigail Grant’s house. The four of us imposing male figures knocked on the front door and scared the crap out of the ten-year-old girl who answered the door. She took one look at the four of us and went running the other direction.

  “Sorry,” Rutledge said as he came to the door, barefoot and looking completely relaxed in sweats and a t-shirt. He looked vaguely familiar to me, but I think I only spoke to him a few times early in legal process of Mickey Connors’ incarceration. He had a charming smile that became a little wearing when he set eyes on me. Clearly he remembered me.

  “We were hoping we could speak to you for a few minutes, Mr. Rutledge,” David said in his most diplomatic voice.

  “What is this about?”

  “The Jesse and Grace McKay murder case.”

  Rutledge’s eyes jumped to my face again. He hesitated, his hand balling into a fist at his side. But then he seemed to resign himself to the situation. He stepped back and gestured for us to come inside.

  “Please, let’s go to my study where we’ll have some privacy.”

  We followed him down a long hallway. His house was much less complicated than Mrs. Grant’s, but just as luxurious. There were paintings on the wall that I was pretty sure were worth millions.

  “You want to know about the confession, don’t you?” Rutledge announced as soon as the five us were behind the closed door of his study.

  “We do.” David set the scripts from Hernandez beside the confession Rutledge recorded on Rutledge’s death. “We’re curious why these two things are so different.”

  “What is this?”

  Rutledge picked up the script and read through it, his eyes flicking to my face again before he read it a second time.

  “I’ve never seen this before.”

  “You wouldn’t have. That’s a script given to Connors by the man who hired him to make a false confession in this case.”

  Rutledge looked up. “What do you mean, a false confession?”

  “We have reason to believe that Mickey Connors was not the perpetrator of this crime. And we believe that you knew it on the night he was arrested. We think you coached him to make a better confession.”

  Rutledge shook his head. “I believed him to be guilty. But he was so out of it, high as a kite and nearly incoherent. He was babbling about a Harley and these men who threated to destroy it.”

  “You mean his sister, Harley?” I asked.

  “I thought he was talking about a motorcycle. I didn’t know he had a sister that night.”

  “Someone threatened her?”

  Rutledge sat down heavily in his office chair. He ran his fingers through his hair and sighed heavily.

  “Look, if I tell you everything I know, I could be disbarred. I only…I thought I was doing what was right.”

  “What did you do?” David demanded.

  Rutledge looked at me again, guilt written in every line of his face.

  “He was incoherent. When they found him in that house, he was confused and didn’t know where he was. We thought he was high on meth or something.” He shook his head slowly. “I went to talk to him after the cops had failed to get anything out of him. He babbled about Harley, said they made threats, but he wouldn’t tell me whom �
�they’ were. And then he told me they injected him with something. I didn’t believe him. He was a drug addict.”

  “His sister said he was fully coherent when she talked to him,” I pointed out.

  “That was later. He sobered up after a while.”

  “You just decided to feed him details of the crime while he was incoherent so that he could make a better confession later?”

  I was confused, unsure what this man was confessing to. I was afraid I was about to learn something about Mickey Connors I really didn’t want to know.

  “His mother…”

  And there it was.

  “She was a state senator then,” Rutledge said. “She came to the police station. I guess she heard about this arrest on the police band radio. She pulled me out of the room and asked me what the charges were. When I told her that he’d told the cops he wanted to confess to the murders of Jesse and Grace McKay, she told me to make sure that if he did, he said enough to make it stick. She told me she wanted him to confess, to plead guilty, and to silently disappear. She didn’t want any of it to hit the press.”

  “But the case was headline news then,” I said.

  “It was. But the press gets bored when nothing exciting happens after a few days. She simply didn’t want anyone to connect him to her. We did the best we could to keep her name out of the papers and to get his case expedited for her.”

  Silence fell in the room as this man who was the leading voice in justice in this city confessed to misconduct. I was shocked. They’d told me they had the man who killed my family and he was off the street. They’d told me that they were sure he was the mastermind behind the crime, that he was the leader. They’d said there was likely another person involved, but that that person’s involvement was inconsequential. They swore that Connors was the real menace.

  Was it all just a lie?

  I think until that moment, I was holding onto the belief that Connors was in my house the night of the murders, that he took part in it all. Otherwise I’d have to admit to myself that I was partially responsible for the ten-year incarceration of an innocent man.

  “They said he was on PCP that night. That the drug explained his odd behavior and the strange time line.”

  “I never heard that. That must have been something they came up with later.”

  I felt sick. What was Harley going to do when she heard this?

  “Was he innocent?”

  Rutledge looked at the ratty piece of paper with the script written on it. He sighed, the sound one of a man who knew his career was over.

  “I would have sworn he was there that night until I saw this.”

  “What did she offer you?” David asked.

  Rutledge looked up. “Grant? She offered to make me district attorney.”

  “At least she keeps her word,” I said.

  I walked out of that room in disgust. Ash followed, standing beside me silently as I leaned against the SUV, taking deep breaths of the cool afternoon air.

  “I know what you’re doing, brother,” he said. “You’re beating yourself up, thinking that you were a part of something corrupt. But you can’t blame yourself. You couldn’t have known.”

  I looked up at the house, at the little girl peeking at us through an upstairs window. I thought about my own daughter and wondered what she would have looked like at that age. Would she have been frightened of my friends, too? I doubted it. She’d be tall and beautiful, just like her mother. And she’d have my strength. She wouldn’t be afraid of anything.

  “Harley insisted he was innocent from the very beginning. She showed up at every court date and pushed for every step in the appeals process. She fought for every little victory he got. And I ridiculed her; I told the press she was misguided. I hated her for being so loyal to him. I hated that she was always there, always trying something new. And now?” I leaned back against the SUV’s windows, pulling my hair as a frustrated grunt slipped from my lips. “I was so convinced that she was wrong. And now…if we tell her this, it’ll break her.”

  “That her brother’s likely innocent?”

  “No. That her mother framed him.”

  Ash seemed a little startled by my words, but he nodded. He knew I was right.

  “How did they manage to keep the press from figuring out that Mickey Connors was her son?”

  “I don’t know. She must have had a hell of a public relations person on her payroll.”

  “Maybe. My dad had one, but he wasn’t nearly that good.”

  “Abigail Grant clearly has more money.”

  It was Ash’s turn to snort. “Never did like the woman. She always made me feel like my brother, my mom and I were less significant to my dad’s life and career than she was. Self-important bitch.”

  I laughed. “That you can tell Harley.”

  Chapter 10

  Harley

  I watched then rifle through my papers, the papers I had so carefully gathered these last ten years. It was most uncomfortable to watch. No one else had ever touched those papers but the investigator who wrote most of them and me. I didn’t like this.

  “How did you gather so much information?” Knox asked.

  I shrugged. “Hired investigators.”

  “Weren’t you in school?” Ingram asked. “I heard you were a doctor.”

  “I am. Most of this I did during the first two or three years Mickey was in prison. I hired investigators and did a little searching on my own between classes and on the weekends. By the time I got to medical school, there wasn’t much more to do but hire lawyers and wait for the appeals process to move through the courts.”

  “I have to say, you’re pretty impressive.”

  That was from the pregnant one. Joss I thought I heard someone call her.

  “Not really. Just stubborn.”

  I got up and moved to the windows, looking out on the garden and wondering what Kipling was finding out at the prosecutor’s. The man himself walked through the door a moment later, the four of them looking like a small army ready for battle. There was a mild amount of fanfare as they came through the door.

  Kipling came up behind me and touched my hip again.

  “We need to talk.”

  He led the way down a random corridor, clearly just looking for a quiet place to go. I pulled him into my mother’s gift-wrapping room—why she needed a gift wrapping room when she rarely gave gifts, I will never know—pressing the door closed behind us.

  “What did he say?”

  “That he coached Mickey. That he gave him details and helped him along because he was incoherent.”

  “He wasn’t. Not when I talked to him.”

  Kipling pushed me up against the door, one hand holding my wrist against my side, the other pushing a few loose strands of hair away from my face.

  “The prosecutor thought that Mickey was concerned for you that night because someone had made a threat against you. Did anyone ever tell you that?”

  “No. Mickey said I should back away, that it was dangerous, but he never said anyone made threats.”

  “Do you think it’s possible that someone did? Do you know where Mickey was before he broke into that house?”

  I closed my eyes, thinking back. I’d run that day over and over in my mind a million times, trying to remember every little detail in case it proved to be important. But none of it ever had.

  “He came to the house, snuck in through the back and into my bedroom window. He said that he was ready to get clean, that he’d found this great rehab in San Antonio. He said he was leaving in a few hours—and that he just needed to pack up some stuff.” I rubbed my hands together, remembering the feel of his rough, callused hands between mine. He’d worked construction off and on since leaving home, making his hands rough. But I liked it. I liked the feel of his hands between mine. “He told me he wanted me out of Mom’s house, that he was going to get clean, and then he was going to rent a place we could share. He said I’d go to school and he’d work.” I opened my eyes an
d looked at Kipling. “But he was always saying things like that.”

  “And then?”

  “Then he kissed my cheek and left, promising to be in touch. I didn’t hear from him again until he called from jail.”

  “When was that?”

  “Late evening. Seven or eight.”

  Kipling stepped back slightly. “I didn’t get the call until eleven.”

  “Are you sure? It was a long time ago.”

  His blues eyes grew deeply expressive. “I know.”

  “But if he called me at eight, but the cops didn’t call you until eleven…”

  “That’s three hour’s difference. I think he called you before he confessed.”

  “But why would he do that?”

  Kipling ran his hand over my jaw. “I want you to stay close to the house. Don’t go anywhere without telling someone.”

  “Even if they made threats against me then, they have no reason to come after me now.”

  “They killed your brother.”

  He was right, of course. I knew I should be touched by his concern, but I was so weary of all this. I had no idea if his concern was genuine or motivated by something else. And I felt like I needed to know that before I could trust his sincerity.

  “Promise me,” he said.

  I looked up at him. “I promise.”

  He ran his thumb over my bottom lip. For a moment, I wanted to give in. I wanted to lie with him again. I wanted to be possessed by him. But when he leaned in to kiss me, my heart just kind of shriveled up, becoming something less than it had been before.

  “I need to go meet with Patsy, see if she was able to prepare rooms for everyone.”

  I slipped out of the room before he could respond to me. I really didn’t need to talk to Patsy. I just needed to breathe.

  I went back to the sitting room through a roundabout way, avoiding the corridor I knew that Kipling would take. My route took me to the right side of the room, lost in shadows until the moment I would step in front of the French doors. But I heard my mother’s name and I had to stop and listen to what was being said.