Sasha McCandless 03 - Irretrievably Broken (29 page)

The trip through the dark room reminded her, as it always did, of her run-in with an undercover agent in the space when it had been vacant. She wondered fleetingly whether Agent Stock would have put in a good word for Connelly, if he’d asked. Seeing as how she and Connelly had helped Stock with an investigation that had led to a promotion, he likely would have supported Connelly. Had Connelly even tried to save his job?

She dumped the dirty dishes in the tray beside the sink and stretched onto her toes to pull two clean mugs down from the stainless steel rack on the wall. Then she grabbed the plastic white coffee carafe that Jake filled with fresh coffee for her each night before he locked up.

She took the coffee into her office and waited for Naya to finish her call. While she waited, she poured Naya’s coffee. As she was stirring in sugar and cream, Naya burst into the room.

“Here.” She handed the cup to Naya and poured her own. “Well?” she asked.

Naya’s eyes shone. “We caught a break. Sort of.”

They sat at the conference table.

Naya put down her coffee and flipped back to the first page of her notes, while Sasha waited. She took a long drink of coffee. It was still hot. In another hour or so, the carafe would be providing warm coffee, at best. But lukewarm coffee was better than cold coffee, and cold coffee was better than no coffee.

“Okay, that was the booking manager for Three Rivers Models and Actors. She was working late, catching up on paperwork, and she opened my e-mail with the girl’s picture,” Naya said.

“She recognized her?”

“Yep. She had been one of their models. But, about a few weeks ago—this lady was fuzzy on the exact date—she called in and said not to book her on any more jobs because she was moving to New York.”

“Does she have a name and contact information?” Sasha asked, trying to keep her excitement under control until the story checked out.

“Her stage name is Tawny Truitt. The booking manager, Amanda, said she doesn’t know her real name because she hadn’t been modeling with them very long. The agency only files tax forms when their talent hits a reporting threshold, which Tawny had not. And she didn’t have a forwarding address. She told Amanda she’d call when she was settled to give her the address for her last check, but no one’s heard from her yet.”  Naya shrugged.

“Did this move to New York come out of the blue?” Sasha asked, moving on for now. They could figure out how to track down Tawny later.

Naya nodded, looking down at her papers. “Yeah, Tawny said she’d gotten a job on her own, freelance, that had paid well enough that she could move up to the big leagues and take her shot.”

“Did she mention what the job was?”  The timing worked, Sasha thought.

“I’m getting there,” Naya told her. “Amanda said she didn’t ask. She assumed the girl had turned a few tricks or stripped at a fraternity party or something. She said it’s not an unusual occurrence in their line of work. But, Tawny volunteered that she’d been approached at the laundromat by someone who offered her a PG-rated acting gig and an enormous sum of money for about an hour’s work. Amanda said she’d warned Tawny that was a dangerous way to live, but the girl insisted she had been smart about it. The work was all done in public. The guy who hired her met her back at the laundromat when she was done to pay her in cash. He didn’t know where she lived or her real name and she didn’t ask his.”

Sasha forgot about her coffee. “So, we think our killer saw Tawny at the laundromat, realized Nick wouldn’t be able to resist her, and set him up. Then used the pictures to create marital discord for the Costopolouses and a motive for murder?”

Naya looked at her for a long time.

“What?” Sasha asked.

“The killer. Or someone at Prescott. They stink to high heaven in this.”

Sasha looked back at her. “Or someone at Prescott is the killer.”

“Or that,” Naya agreed.

“We need to talk to Martine Landry,” Sasha said.

Talking to Martine proved to be easier said than done.

It had started out well enough. Although Martine had left Prescott & Talbott before Sasha had started, she knew Sasha’s name. On the basis of their shared lineage, Martine had been inclined to talk to Sasha, even though she was calling her at home at close to eleven p.m. on a Saturday.

Once Sasha got past the condolences on Ellen and Clarissa’s deaths and mentioned that she was representing their husbands, Martine’s goodwill had evaporated.

Martine’s last words, before she slammed the phone down in Sasha’s ear had been both cutting and strangely familiar.

“I hope you can sleep at night, Sasha, doing what you do. I know as well as anyone that everyone’s entitled to a defense, but that doesn’t mean
you
have to provide it. And, I’m certainly not going to help you. Do what you have to do, and may God have mercy on your soul,” Martine had hissed.

Afterward, Sasha had rubbed her forehead and waited for it to come to her. Martine’s rant had echoed the letter Malcolm Vickers had sent to her and her dead friends fifteen years previously.

Sasha told Naya to go home and get some sleep. Then she fired up her laptop and started the outline for her argument at the preliminary hearing.

The good thing about being crushed with work, she thought, was that when she hit a brick wall on one front, there were plenty of other equally pressing tasks waiting for her.

SUNDAY

CHAPTER 48

Cinco turned away, but it was too late. Marco had already seen him.

It irritated him to no end that Marco, who was neither Episcopalian nor a resident of Fox Chapel, crossed two bridges every Sunday morning to worship at St. Peter’s. Couldn’t he have one day a week when he didn’t have to deal with anyone from the firm?

But every time Cinco complained to Greta, looking for just a smidgeon of understanding from his spouse, she shushed him. Marco’s wife, Lidia, was a Daughter of the American Revolution and a dyed-in-the-wool WASP. Her pedigree trumped her Italian-American husband’s Catholicism as far as Cinco’s wife was concerned.

“Cinco,” Marco bellowed now, hurrying across the narthex to give him a hearty handshake, which Cinco returned without enthusiasm. “Greta,” Marco said, “you look lovely. Wasn’t Pastor Mark’s sermon particularly inspiring and thought-provoking today?”

“It was,” she agreed, offering her cheek for a kiss.

Cinco wondered if either of them had listened to it. He knew he hadn’t. He’d passed the time the way he did every week, marveling at the craftsmanship in the elaborate stained glass windows that gleamed like jewels when the sunlight hit them, imagining the painstaking care that the artists had used to highlight the gold-leaf halo around Christ’s head in the painting over the altar, and admiring the detail work apparent in the marble baptismal font. If there was a God, Cinco often thought, his glory and majesty were in the careful acts that had created such beauty.

Lidia extracted herself from her conversation and moved their way, the picture of old money in her pale pink suit and skirt and perfect blond helmet of hair. After their squealed greetings, Lidia and Greta wandered away, babbling about the upcoming ladies’ auxiliary luncheon.

Marco pounced immediately.

“What’s the status?” he asked in a low voice.

Cinco ignored the flare of disgust that filled him. It was Sunday morning, for chrissakes.

“Sam Davis had found Vickers’s son. But, other than that, nothing,” he said.

“That’s something,” Marco said. “What are you going to do about it?”

“Nothing right now,” Cinco answered. He supposed it was too much to hope that Marco would drop the subject.

He was right. Marco grabbed his arm just below his elbow and squeezed it hard.

“What do you mean, nothing?  This implicates your old man as much as anyone else, Cinco. Go see the kid and offer him money. Jesus.”

Cinco wrested his arm away. “Get your hands off me. And watch your language. Have you forgotten where you are?”

Marco dropped his hand, chastened, for the moment. Cinco continued, “First of all, I’m not going to make an offer. How many settlements have you negotiated? If the kid’s behind this, and money’s what he wants, he’ll make a demand. I’m not bidding against myself.”

“Of course he wants money,” Marco exploded, “what else would he want?”

“Keep your voice down,” Cinco warned him. “Believe it or not, not everyone is motivated by filthy lucre. And second, don’t bring up my father’s name again. Are we clear?”

Marco rolled his eyes but held his tongue as their wives drifted back toward them.

Cinco gave the women a wide smile and offered up a silent prayer that this ugliness would just vanish, somehow. Before Marco cracked.

CHAPTER 49

Sasha didn’t believe in ghosts—or zombies, for that matter. If she had, she’d have been certain that Malcolm Vickers had killed Ellen and Clarissa.

She’d woken before dawn and had turned on her laptop before she’d even poured her first cup of coffee. She’d spent the morning working at her dining room table in her pajamas. Her Googling had revealed that after losing his son, Vickers had turned to advocacy. He’d been a pioneer in the fathers’ rights movement and in various male-bonding fads that had long since faded from public view. His early posts in online forums and chat rooms made it clear his anger hadn’t dissipated over time but, instead, had hardened into a steel rage.

For years, he’d urged fathers to use “any means necessary” to keep their children in their lives. But, he seemed to have stopped posting and organizing rallies after a widely publicized kidnapping by one of his followers had ended in tragedy. The father, fleeing the police with his fourteen-month-old daughter in the backseat of his Taurus, had crossed the median at an estimated eighty-seven miles an hour, smashed into an eighteen-wheeler, and flipped the car. Father and child were both declared dead at the scene, and Vickers fell off the map.

The next mention of his name that she’d been able to find was his obituary. After detailing his advocacy on behalf of fathers and his battle with cancer, the piece ended on the plaintive note that “he is believed to be survived by his only son, born Richard John Vickers, current name and whereabouts unknown, but held in his father’s heart every day of his life.”

Sasha ran several searches on Richard John Vickers, but he had no electronic footprint. She made a note to have Naya try the databases used by private investigators and debt collectors and closed her browser. She couldn’t spend her entire day going down Internet rabbit holes; she still needed to work on her opposition to the district attorney’s motion to have Greg’s bail revoked. Once she had her argument roughed out, she planned to shower and then head to her parents’ house.

Her family would gather there after attending Mass together at Saint Theresa’s, where, as Martine Landry would have been glad to know, they would all have prayed for Sasha’s soul. Given that she was the only lapsed Catholic in a large family, her soul likely garnered more than its fair share of prayers.

Ordinarily, she would skip the McCandless family Sunday dinner on a day before not one, but two, court appearances. Not today. Despite her long to do list, she’d decided to make the time. She recognized her motivation was, at least in part, to prove she wasn’t emotionally stunted and she did value her family, despite what Leo Connelly might think.

She exhaled. She didn’t have time for this distraction. She pushed thoughts of Connelly and his cutting words from her mind and padded barefoot to the kitchen to refill her coffee.

She watched as the face painted on the side of the mug turned from black and sleeping to white and wide awake as the heat from the coffee activated the paint. Connelly had surprised her with the mug one random weekday morning over the summer. He said he’d seen it and had immediately thought of the way she switched from sleepy to alert with her first sip of morning coffee. Hot tears pricked her eyes at the memory.
Damn him.

She abandoned the mug on the counter, coffee untouched, and went into the bathroom to turn on the shower. The opposition would be there later.

CHAPTER 50

Rich turned the hammer over in his palm. It was cold and hard. He needed to be the hammer. Cold, hard, and impervious to outside forces.

The Clarissa situation was still eating at him. He tried not to blame himself. How could he have known she was pregnant when he’d plotted her death? Of course, he wouldn’t have wanted to harm an innocent baby—a fact he’d readily conceded to her.

When he’d popped up from the backseat of her car after she’d parked in her office garage, her screams had pleased him at first. But, when she’d broken into sobs and told him she was carrying a baby, his satisfaction had vanished. Gone in an instant. Replaced by uncertainty.

A baby.

He hadn’t wanted to believe her, had wanted her to be lying. But, she’d fumbled through her purse with shaking hands and pulled out one of those pictures of the fetus. A sonogram. The thin filmy paper had curled up into a scroll, and the grainy gray blob had looked like, well, a blob, but the computer-generated information at the top of the picture confirmed that this was a blob living in Clarissa’s womb.

Clarissa had looked up at him through wet, black eyes and had pleaded with him to spare her baby. He’d smacked Nick’s hammer against his palm, deliberating while she’d begged.

He smacked it again now, remembering.

He’d had to make a snap decision about this unforeseen circumstance. He’d done the best he could, he told himself. He’d handled it the right way.

And after that hiccup, he’d simply continued on with the rest of his steps as predetermined. He had already dropped off the envelope with the photograph at Prescott & Talbott the night before, because he’d thought it would be too risky to venture into the offices after her body had been found in the garage.