The Third Secret

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  “I saw it on the way in from the living room.”

  The door had only been slightly open. And the light was dim.

  “You have two bedrooms between here and there, too. One with a white eyelet spread and the other done up in pale green. One has a rocking chair. The other an antique phone table with a seat.”

  Erin stared.

  “Being observant’s kept me alive for years,” Rick said. “It’s a hard habit to break.”

  She had a feeling she was only beginning to crack the surface of what there was to know about this man.

  She opened the bathroom door. “If you knew about the study, why choose the bathroom?” she asked.

  “The study’s an obvious place to hide a bug. And I had a feeling you weren’t going to give me much time.”

  “You had a gun on me.”

  “Yeah.”

  Erin decided he’d just confirmed that he would never have used that gun, although she’d pretty much figured that when he’d pulled it out.

  So why had she complied with his wishes? To remove her sweater, her blouse…

  “I should be going,” he said when they reached the living room.

  She agreed. He should.

  Her phone rang. Grabbing the cell off the coffee table, Erin recognized Sheriff Johnson’s number.

  “I have to take this,” she said. And remembered Kelly. “But there’s something else I need to talk to you about. Can you wait a second?”

  “This is Erin,” she was saying as Rick nodded.

  “Erin? Sheriff Johnson here. You okay?”

  “Fine, why?”

  “No reason. Halloway called in fifteen minutes ago and said everything was quiet.”

  “It is.” Ron Fitzgerald had probably urged the older man to call. Rick really didn’t need to worry about her safety. Not with the Fitzgerald family at her back.

  “I’ve got some news, Erin. They found Paul Wagner.”

  Thank God. If they could clear Rick of Charles’s murder tonight, he’d be free to travel legally in the morning.

  If Paul Wagner had killed Charles Cook as part of a lovers’ triangle, then the man’s death wasn’t a part of some bigger plot. “Is he in custody?” she asked. “Did you get a confession?”

  “He’s dead, Erin.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yeah. His throat was slit. Sometime within the past hour. Blood didn’t even have time to clot.”

  Before Erin even looked at Rick, she picked up the two-way radio. “Halloway, you there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I feel like a sitting duck. I’m closing the back curtains.” The ones facing the road. She never covered the windows overlooking the lake. The house was on the edge of a cliff with a seventy-degree drop-off. Not much traffic out that way.

  “You okay, ma’am?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fine. All other plans remain in place.”

  She pulled the drapes. “Okay.”

  “Have a good evening, ma’am.”

  Turning off the radio, Erin dropped it on the coffee table and curled up in a corner of the sectional, facing the lake.

  “It helps,” she said, breathing in deeply, craving the peace the lake brought her even in darkness.

  “What helps?” Rick stood, hands in the pockets of his jeans, between the living room and the kitchen.

  “Knowing the lake’s right there. With me.”

  “Who’s dead?”

  “Paul Wagner.”

  She’d expected Rick to swear. Or at least express frustration. He didn’t even nod.

  “Guess he had more enemies than just Charles,” she murmured.

  “Do they know what happened? Did anyone see anything?”

  Erin shook her head. “He was found upstate. Dead inside his truck on the side of the road.”

  “He’d pulled over, then.”

  “Apparently.”

  “Why would someone stop on the side of a road in upstate Michigan at night?”

  “Who knows?” Erin was staring out into the darkness.

  The sound of the waves bothered him. Set him on edge. He was listening. But he couldn’t hear.

  The smallest crack of a twig. The faint creak of a floor-board. A tap. A breath.

  “Could be he stopped to make a call,” she said. “The sheriff said they’d found an open cell phone on the seat beside him, but no call had been made.”

  “What, someone got to him in his truck before he had time to punch in the numbers?”

  “They think whoever killed him was already in the truck. Maybe they were arguing. Maybe it was a woman and they’d pulled over to make out.”

  More likely, it was someone who lived in Tom’s world, someone who, like Rick, could do despicable things and leave no evidence behind. Just like he’d done with the break-in at Erin’s office.

  Someone who wanted Rick under the eye of the law. Someone who wanted to make sure Paul Wagner couldn’t free Rick to travel, to leave the state or the country. Someone who wanted to make sure the court didn’t return Rick’s passport to him.

  “Sit.” Erin patted the couch. “Please?”

  He wanted to, more than she could possibly realize. “I have to go.”

  “Just for a minute,” she said. “I need to ask you something.”

  Erin didn’t play games. And she had his back.

  Rick sat. Not too close. Not close enough to touch her. But not on the other end of the couch nor in the chair across the room, as he should have.

  He was leaving in the morning. Going back to the world he knew. Walking face-first into danger.

  The complete antithesis of Erin’s softly muted living room.

  “I need you to do something for me,” she said.

  “If I can.”

  “Tomorrow morning, before you get on with your day, I need you to talk to a friend of mine.”

  He’d checked the room for bugs while she was on the phone, found it clean, but he didn’t want to take unnecessary risks. The less he and Erin spoke, the better.

  “I thought we’d been through this,” he said. What he’d told her that night had to stay between him and her.

  “I know.” She held up a hand as she answered. “I’m not asking you to confide in anyone.”

  “What, then?”

  “Kelly’s an expert witness.”

  So this was only about the murder charge?

  “What kind of expert witness is going to help us prove I’ve been framed?”

  “She’s a psychologist.”

  “You think I’m delusional.” He didn’t blame her. But he was disappointed. And he was going to bring Tom back to life, anyway, even if she called the sheriff the second he left her house or called Halloway to stop him.

  They just didn’t get it. These small-town lawmen posed no real threat to Rick. If he’d wanted to disappear forever, he knew how to do it. He was there because he wanted his life back. At the very least, he had to protect Steve. And now Erin.

  He had to do what was right. Because he chose to. Not because he was afraid of anything Sheriff Johnson could do.

  “No, I don’t think you’re delusional. I’m afraid I might be.” He had to strain to hear her.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Do you mind if I pour a glass of wine?”

  Didn’t sound like something she’d do if she didn’t trust the company in her home. And she’d closed the curtains. Turned off the radio. “No.”

  “Would you like one?”

  “You got a beer?”

  “No.”

  He wasn’t a wine drinker. Didn’t see the sense in sipping fruit from a fine glass. A shot of whiskey was much more efficient.

  “Then, yes, I’ll have wine, thank you.”

  Yes. Thank you? Who did he think he was? Some kind of parlor date? A guy with enough class to look at a woman like Erin Morgan and actually think about kissing her?

  He’d never climb that high.

  Which was fine with him, he rem
inded himself as his hostess went to pour their drinks. If he got himself up to the pretty lawyer’s level, he’d risk falling back down.

  And he had a long way to fall.

  28

  He’d been honest with her. Or at least she thought he had. And if she was right, Rick Thomas had just given Erin something he’d given almost no one else. His trust.

  He’d confided in her.

  Aside from his sergeant, he didn’t—couldn’t—trust anyone. And now he trusted her. If she could believe him…

  With the fancy opener she’d received from one of Noah’s brothers for Christmas the year before, Erin opened a bottle from the case of Riesling she’d ordered from her favorite winery in Napa, and poured the sweet wine into crystal glasses.

  This might be a huge mistake—the biggest of her life—but something was compelling her to make a choice she didn’t fully understand. To trust deeply. A life that had been comfortably the same for four peaceful years was changing faster than she could grasp. She was changing.

  “If you don’t like it, I’ve got a merlot,” she said, joining her guest in her living room. He commanded the room with his presence, his back to her as he gazed out into the darkness of the lake. His blue jeans and black boots, the black corduroy shirt, seemed fittingly somber for the setting, the situation, the time of night.

  Turning slowly, Rick took the glass. Downed a quarter of it. And set it on the coffee table before taking a seat in the chair he’d originally chosen.

  He was regretting his earlier openness with her. She could read the signs—and she didn’t want him to take back what he’d given her. What she hoped he’d given her.

  In the corner of the couch closest to him, Erin took a deep breath. “You asked me why I wanted you to speak with Kelly Chapman.”

  His fingers steepled in front of him, he appeared relaxed.

  As relaxed as a jaguar might be just before slipping away into the forest.

  “You said you were afraid you were delusional,” he said. “Which makes me wonder why I’m the one you’re referring to your psychologist friend.”

  She wanted to trust him. Plain and simple. There it was. She needed this…something…with him.

  Erin sipped. Focused on the sweet, distinctive and comfortingly familiar flavor on her tongue.

  “I need you to speak with her for two reasons,” she said, looking at her client, seeking the lawyer she was used to being while she she wrestled with the woman who was trying to emerge. “First, because if Christa Hart finds Tom Watkins, and we don’t have evidence that Paul Wagner killed Charles, we’re going to end up going to trial. We’re going to need Kelly’s testimony regarding your state of mind, your demeanor, your capabilities. You’re agreeing to a psychological evaluation. I’m going to ask you to take a lie detector test, too. I want it as an offensive move, not a defensive one after the prosecution attacks your character.”

  “And the second reason?”

  Kelly had told her to listen to herself. But she hadn’t explained how to decipher the message. “I want another opinion regarding my opinion of you.”

  When she said nothing more, he picked up his glass. Downed another beer-size swallow, assessing her all the while. “I assume you’re going to explain yourself.”

  She thought she just had.

  “From everything I’ve seen, including yesterday’s break-in, you’re a strong, confident woman, Erin. You don’t seem the type to second-guess yourself. Or to need validation from others.”

  Exactly. Which was why her current self-doubt was so completely unacceptable to her.

  “Everyone has a weak point.”

  “Implying that I’m yours?”

  No. She hadn’t been implying that. But…God help her if it was true.

  “Believe it or not, I’m struggling with trusting myself as much as I am with trusting you.”

  He frowned and Erin sat forward, setting her glass on the table and folding her hands together. She’d started this. Was she going to continue exactly as she had been for the rest of her life? Mostly numb? Or was she going to open herself up to all the emotional risks inherent in really living?

  “I didn’t choose law by chance,” she said, as if from a distance. “I knew going in that I’d practice defense law. And I also knew I would never defend someone I believed to be guilty, which is why I’m in private practice instead of working for the defender’s office.”

  Rick took another drink. She thought about retrieving the bottle.

  “A month ago, I defended a young man who’d been charged with three counts of vehicular homicide. He was not only guilty, but felt no remorse whatsoever for having taken three lives. He only cared about his driver’s license.”

  “But you defended him, anyway.”

  “Because I believed he was innocent. I believed his parents. And…I knew that the cop on duty had prejudged the kid based on his age and expensive car and that he hadn’t preserved the kids’ rights. I knew I could win.”

  “And winning’s important.”

  There it was again. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “More important than innocence and guilt?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Of course not. But with that case, I saw the win, and missed the signs of guilt.”

  “You’re questioning yourself because of one case?” He sounded doubtful.

  Erin wasn’t really surprised. The man was astute. Perceptive.

  Rick Thomas was not a man to try and fool.

  “No, not really. I think the case was my wake-up call.” Clarity came in the most unexpected moments.

  “Waking you up to what?”

  “To why I entered law in the first place.”

  “And your friend, Kelly—this psychologist you want me to meet—she knows why you got into law?”

  “No.” Erin finished off her wine. And looked him straight in the eye. “No one knows. No one has ever known.” Not even Noah.

  He didn’t ask. But his stillness spoke to her. As had his honesty that evening. He’d told her secrets he’d kept for fifteen years. Told her and no one else.

  “Like you, I was raised by my father,” she said, struggling with every word, every breath. That much he already knew. But how did one begin the telling of a secret so deeply held?

  “He worked in a factory. In Detroit…”

  She was obviously having a hard time with this. Confiding didn’t seem to come easily to her, either.

  Rick could have stopped Erin’s confession. Should have. He had preparations to make. Plans to devise.

  His old man had been in manufacturing, too. At a distillation plant that turned a blind eye when assembly workers helped themselves to company product—beer—on break. And didn’t realize or care that some of them, Rick’s dad, at least, had gone right on helping themselves when their shift was over.

  He’d brought the stuff home to keep him company. All night long…

  “My mother died when I was born,” Erin said. And that was where their stories differed. His had run off.

  “Dad and I didn’t have a traditional life, by any means. I’m sure if Child Services had visited they’d have gotten involved, but we did okay,” she said, her smile distant—and filled with a warmth Rick had never felt himself. Not toward his father.

  “You loved him.”

  “Yes. I did. He and my mom were too young to get married, barely out of high school. But I was on the way and they were in love and…”

  She stopped. Rick had no idea why he was still there. He’d talk to her friend. If for no other reason than to buy Erin’s continued trust.

  “And suddenly, there he was, eighteen, disowned by his parents for going against his parents’ wishes and getting married and with a newborn girl to raise. My mom’s parents helped that first year but they were older and retired to Florida and we didn’t see them much after that. They died within a year of each other when I was in junior high. I might not have had pretty little cards to pass around at school on Valentine’s
Day, or bows in my hair, or clothes that matched, but I was clean and healthy and I never doubted for one second that I was loved.”

  Lucky girl.

  Lucky dad. In another life, Rick would’ve been curious to meet the guy who’d single-handedly pulled off something like Erin.

  “When I was sixteen, Dad was accused of killing a man for the two thousand dollars the guy had on him. Unbeknownst to me, we’d been about to lose our home and the prosecutor dug up enough other debt to give Dad plenty of motive. Dad was the last person to see the guy alive. A witness had seen them arguing. Dad said the guy had been trying to get him to look the other way on a union vote. Dad swore he didn’t touch the guy. I was the only one who believed him. And the only time I ever saw him again after that was when I visited him in prison.”

  Shit. Rick hadn’t seen that one coming.

  “Somehow I passed under Child Services’ radar. I quit school. Got a couple of jobs. Made enough to save the house until I turned eighteen and was able to sell it. I’d earned my GED by then and used the money from the house, along with government loans, to go to college. And then law school.”

  “Your father must have been proud as hell.”

  “He didn’t know,” she said, the lack of emotion in her voice grabbing his attention. “He was killed by a fellow inmate over a pack of cigarettes when I was twenty. He was thirty-eight. Had a whole life yet to live.

  “Two years after he died, the year I graduated from college, new DNA evidence came forth that proved my father wasn’t the one who’d robbed and killed the victim in his case. He’d died in prison, an innocent man.”

  She’d heard before that once you spoke about something that had been buried inside you, you felt better. Erin didn’t feel better.

  She felt like she was going to cry.

  Which was ridiculous. She’d cried any tears she had for her father long ago. And had moved on to live a life that honored him. That prevented other innocents from having their lives stolen from them. From dying behind bars.

  But the pressure in her chest grew. As though, once she’d released the ties that bound her secrets, she’d released the ones that bound her heart as well. To inexplicably intense levels. Her vision blurred. And before she could stop them, tears filled her eyes.