I didn’t believe, as Maggie did, that David Abrams loved her. I knew better. A thirty-something father of four did not take the virginity of a fourteen-year-old girl he cared about.
I was not going to allow that man to sway my sweet girl a second time. I wasn’t mercenary as Maggie’s biological mother had been. Nor was I desperate. I wasn’t afraid to take him on. I didn’t care who he knew, or where he had friends.
I did care that I couldn’t be everywhere at once. I couldn’t shadow Maggie at school, couldn’t follow her every time she stepped foot outside our home. Even if I could make the physical arrangements—and I’d been tempted to try—I couldn’t do that to the girl. I couldn’t make her a prisoner in her own life or take away a trust she hadn’t abused.
Camy, my doubly spoiled toy poodle now that Maggie had joined us, sat on the chair opposite me at our kitchen table, watching intently as I finished my tuna salad. I didn’t always get home for lunch, but when I did, Camy liked to make me believe she should eat, as well.
I thought of her little heart, which would be overtaxed if she was overweight—and of the fact that poodles were prone to heart disease—and gained strength to withstand the pressure.
And was relieved when my phone rang. I grabbed it, eager when I saw the name reflected on the screen.
“Hello?” I didn’t trust caller ID enough to offer a familiar greeting. There was always that off chance that someone else was using my contact’s phone. The cops, maybe.
“It’s Erin Morgan. Are you busy?”
Funny how the woman had called while I was talking myself into circles.
“I’m thankful for the rescue,” I told her. “I’m in the middle of counseling myself.”
Her burst of laughter made me smile, too.
“I take it you aren’t a cooperative client?”
“I’m getting dizzy keeping track of who’s talking.”
“Sounds like you need a mediator.”
“Or a rule book on the differences between counseling and parenting.”
“Tell me about it.” She groaned.
I picked up a pen from the middle of the table. Scribbled Erin’s name on my napkin. “You’ve got parenting problems?” I asked. Erin had never been married. And as far as I knew, had never had a child, either.
But then, neither had I.
“I’ve got a question for you,” the other woman said instead of responding. “But before I ask it, I want you to let me hire you….”
“You want me to hang up on you? Is that what you said?”
She sighed, and I understood. For some people asking for help was too easy. And for some of us it was pretty much like walking barefoot through fire.
I waited, hoping Erin would just ask her question.
“What did your counselor have to say to you this morning?” And the question gave real meaning to the cliché Be careful what you hope for.
“I’m not sure I was listening well enough to really notice,” I said.
“What did you talk to her about?”
I thought for a second. I didn’t confide in anyone. Never had.
But I was in over my head. If it were just me, I’d tough it out. But it wasn’t just me anymore. I had a hurting and confused fourteen-year-old girl relying on me for…everything.
“Remember that lawyer I told you about?”
“The one your policewoman friend suspects is a drug lord?”
“Yeah. He…” There really were some things I couldn’t say. “I saw him during the weekend. At a store. I’m…afraid he wants Maggie.”
“Does Maggie know?”
“I hope not.”
“Did you warn her about him?”
“Not this time. She knows how I feel about him.”
“And she knows to stay away from him, right?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean she will.”
“You don’t trust her.”
“I do.” As I said the words, I recognized that they were true. “It’s just that she really thinks she’s in love with this man. She believes in him and thinks we’re all lying about him because he’s older than she is.”
“And at fourteen, when you know everything, concern about the age difference appears grossly overblown.”
Erin handled a lot of juvenile cases. And I remembered she’d had at least one case involving statutory rape. She’d told me about it the year before.
“Right,” I said, glad to have my own thoughts reaffirmed. “But she definitely knows how I feel about him. And she knows I’ve forbidden her to see him.”
“House rules.”
“Uh-huh. But if I don’t trust her, I’m sending her the message that she’s not trustworthy,” I said. “As a counselor, I’m supposed to question. As a parent, I need to give her my trust. Unless she proves otherwise…”
“I might be out of line here, but didn’t you stop being her counselor when you became her parent?”
I dropped my pen. Could it really be that simple?
And that difficult, too. Because it meant I had to keep a vigilant watch over my young charge, but let her live her life, too.
“It would all be much easier if I could just live her life for her,” I grumbled.
“Would it?” Erin’s question had a serious tone. I picked up the pen. “It’s one thing to make wrong decisions for your own life. Think how hard it would be to live with yourself if you made wrong choices for someone else.”
“But can we ever really make choices for someone else if they won’t let us?” I asked her. “I can tell Maggie what I want her to do. I can threaten. I can punish. But in the end, personal choice will always prevail. We each make our own choices—even the choice to let someone else make our choices for us.”
The chuckle on the other end of the line made me smile again, too. I was still caught in my circles.
And then Erin said, “I have a question.”
And I remembered she’d had a specific reason for calling. “What’s that?”
Don’t let friendship cloud your judgment, I jotted down.
“When is it selfish to go after what you want at the cost of others, as opposed to standing up for yourself and what you want and need?”
Ah. The fine line between emotional and moral health. And the inescapable fact that sometimes there was no line.
“My immediate, and not professional, answer would be that each situation has to be assessed independently.”
“I gave you a simple answer to your dilemma,” my new friend replied, half teasing.
“I know. But then you were familiar with some of the details. So…give me details.”
After another brief pause Erin launched into a rundown of Noah’s family situation.
Is Erin happy with the status quo? I wrote. And then Erin said, “Caylee is coming to me for advice. And her father just told me on Sunday that Caylee has started trusting me in place of Noah, and that he’s okay with it. He’s expecting me to convince Caylee to give up the scholarship.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “Is it best for the child to pursue her own personal desires or to serve her family? Which benefits her more in the long run?”
I wasn’t Erin’s therapist. And as with Maggie, I realized I had no idea how not to be one.
“If this was your decision, if you had to choose for yourself between the scholarship and your mother’s possible well-being, what would you do?”
“I’d find a way to do both.”
We talked about Caylee, about her options. And I wondered about Erin. After four years, her only life outside work was still as a member of Noah’s family. Was that because of love or habit? Survivor’s guilt or fear? Or some combination of all those emotions.
“How’s work?” I asked when we’d agreed that life was damned hard and got stuck there.
“Fine,” Erin said quickly. After a moment she added, “I’ve decided to keep that case I was talking to you about.”
“Have they charged him, then?”
“What made you decide to defend him?” I asked.
“There wasn’t any one thing.” Erin’s hesitation struck a chord in me. I was learning just how cruel self-doubt could be. “I hope to God it’s not his eyes.”
“Well, as the cliché has it, sometimes a person speaks through his eyes.”
“Yeah, and sometimes those eyes can lie very convincingly.”
“If you think he’s lying, why not turn him over to someone else?”
“Because I don’t think he’s lying.”
“But you’re not sure?”
“How can I be? What I’m really not sure about is why I’m suddenly not confident in my own judgment.”
“Like I told you last week, questioning yourself isn’t a bad thing. It’s healthy. And wise. Just make sure you listen when you answer yourself.”
A piece of advice I knew I needed as much as Erin.
Rick still had a job, but not because the agents working at the Temple EMA office wanted him there. If he had to guess, he figured his continued presence at the murder scene was a result of the red tape required to relieve him—a man who hadn’t been charged with any crime—from his job. As he torched copper pipes, slathered them with plumber’s putty and soldered their joints, Rick watched his back. And kept Charles’s temporary replacement, a guy who’d introduced himself as Robbie Greene, under surveillance—by sight or sound—at all times. He didn’t want another dead guy on his hands. And he didn’t plan to be one, either.
Greene was easy to watch. He constantly asked what Rick was doing and Rick suspected the unsmiling man was guarding him on orders.
So he finished the bathroom plumbing. Turned on the water supply, satisfied when there were no leaks. And then he caulked. Spackled the drywall that would eventually be painted—by him, or so he liked to think. After lunch, a peanut butter sandwich he’d brought from home, he started cutting two-by-fours to frame the wall that would divide the rest of the space into two offices.
And he thought about the matchbook, considering it from every conceivable angle. Brady wanted Rick to get a message from that innocuous little package.
Brady’s prints, like Rick’s, wouldn’t be there—because they didn’t exist. If Janet Meadows’s were there, that would tell Rick something about the woman.
And what would she think if she’d looked inside the bag? Would she tell someone? More importantly, who would she tell?
What message could anyone get from a half-used book of matches?
The matchbook could be construed as a memento.
A couple of years earlier, during a rare few days filled with pleasures of the flesh—good food, good booze and a woman—he and Brady had taken a cruise on a luxury yacht provided for them through Sarge. It wasn’t unusual for opportunities like that to appear for the use of the covert ops team members. While the government couldn’t formally or openly acknowledge them, it did take care of them. A lot of the time through highly positioned businessmen who donated liberally and who sometimes pulled seemingly impossible strings so a job of critical importance could be done.
Men who, Rick figured, also had a lot of say in what governmental decisions were made.
He and Brady had assumed that yacht trip had been one such donation. Rick had just finished a two-month undercover expedition that had almost cost him his life. Brady had also completed a particularly grueling job involving Mexico’s largest drug cartel.
During that one brief respite in fifteen years of service, he and Brady—as Tom and Jack to the world, Rick and Brady to each other—had pulled into a harbor in the Bahamas one night and smoked a pack of cigarettes between them at the beach bar named on the matchbook—The Resting Place. At the end of the night, they’d tried to pay their tab, but were told it had been taken care of. Though they’d pressed the bartender, he’d never told them who their benefactor had been.
Brady was a man who, by necessity, had to travel lightly, a man of few possessions; he could have pocketed the half-used matchbook, a small memento, out of fondness for the good time. He could have passed it on to Rick for that reason—a reminder that there were enjoyable moments in life.
Or a reminder of the brotherhood the two loners had shared.
To Janet Meadows and anyone else who might know that Brady had given it to Rick, that parting gift could simply be a memento.
It was one.
But it was something else, as well.
Something Rick had yet to identify. What was its significance? As a code of some kind? A warning? A clue?
Metal joists were in place and drywall was up before Rick left that afternoon. Earlier than he’d planned. And not of his own accord.
Without being allowed to clean up his tools, he was escorted out just after three by a grim-faced sheriff with fully armed deputies flanking both sides.
11
“Who’s Steve?” Erin was pissed off. She paced in front of her client as he sat slouched in one of two maroon upholstered chairs opposite the desk in her office. His worn jeans and untucked flannel shirt, his long hair and lazy posture, should have made the man look more like the criminal he might be. Or at least lazy and uncaring.
Instead, Erin felt as though she was facing a snake that could whip out and strike at any moment.
“I asked a question, Mr. Thomas.”
His silent stare was a pretty unmistakable answer. And at eight o’clock on Monday evening, after a sleepless Sunday night, Erin was out of patience.
So she took a deep breath. Leaned against the edge of her desk and softened her tone.
“Rick, you had to know that when you gave me the information to post your bail, I’d find out that someone else’s name was on that account.”
“I’m paying you well to clear my name,” he said.
Erin’s feet hurt. Still in the suit and pumps she’d worn that morning when she’d met Rick to take delivery of the evidence he found in his home, she had yet to have dinner.
She hadn’t eaten lunch, either. Unless granola bars counted.
But Clyde was home—all charges against him dropped. He wasn’t allowed within five hundred feet of his wife, under the temporary restraining order that had to wait a week before it could become a permanent order. But Laura Jane wasn’t allowed near him, either.
Caylee had called. And Ron, too. Both were upset and expecting her to call back. She understood. Luckily Caylee was a late-night person.
“I can’t clear your name when you’re withholding information from me,” Erin explained. She would not get a headache. Not tonight.
“I’m withholding nothing that matters to you. Nothing that could possibly be tied to Charles’s murder.”
“How can you be sure of that? Until we know what happened, we don’t know what’s pertinent.”
“Agreed. But the money I used to post bail has been sitting in an account that has existed for fifteen years. There is no connection.”
She wanted to help this man. And had to assume that he had no idea how difficult he was making her task.
“You’re going to have to trust me, Rick.”
He blinked. “I do.”
Uh-huh. “Then tell me who Steve is. Trust me to figure out what’s pertinent and to leave the rest alone.”
“You will leave Steve alone. Period.”
“His last name is different from yours. Is he family?”
She got what appeared to be Rick Thomas’s standard answer. A silent stare that made her feel smaller than she was.
“Sometimes the less said, the better,” Erin said, crossing her ankles. “Like when you’re talking to anyone but me. But right now saying less could very well get you convicted.”
“I have no motive.”
“They’ll find one.”
“There isn’t one to find.”
“Then they’ll make one up.”
Erin halted that thought. Filed it away for later. Maybe.
“I’m going to do a search on a secure database I have access to.”
“Not on my dime, you aren’t. There’ll be hundreds of Steve Millers.”
“Then save me the time. Because I can guarantee you the other side will want to know who paid your bail. They’ll want to know everyone you’re connected to. Which leaves me ill-prepared and unable to defend whatever suppositions they present.”
The man must be a masochist. He must want to shell out thousands of dollars to Erin for a long-drawn-out trip to life in prison.
“They’ll subpoena the bank records of the account the bail was drawn from.”
“It’s not in my name.”
“It’s an account you just used. Your name is on a debit card attached to it. Remember, they’re going to be looking for motive. Money is a good one. Could be someone paid you to make the hit on Charles.”
“I did not kill Charles.”
“But a warrant to access records to search for a large deposit will be granted.”
Chin raised, he peered at her. “Let them search. There’s nothing for them to find.”
Sitting forward, Rick reached around her, tore the top sheet off a notepad on the edge of her desk, his arm almost touching her hip as he grabbed the pen in the note holder. He sat back and wrote a few lines on the paper.
“Here,” he said, handing her the note. “There’s my banking information. Bank. Online user ID and password. You go ahead and have a look. You’ll see every deposit I’ve made, every bill I’ve paid, how much I have in savings, and how often and where I use my debit card. Plus how much I’ve withdrawn. It’s all there. Have at it.”
Finally. Information she needed. Given freely. So why did Erin feel as though she’d somehow violated this taciturn man as she took the paper with the full intention of visiting the site before she slept again.
And still he was hiding something. She had to know what. And why. And to assume that the prosecution was going to find out whatever it was.
The Third Secret Page 8
