The Chesapeake Diaries Series 7-Book Bundle: Coming HOme, Home Again, Almost Home, Hometown Girl, Home for the Summer, The Long Way Home, At the River's Edge (113 page)

“The easiest three and a half million I ever made—plus what I got from Robin—but who’s counting.” Hugh laughed.

Grady and Beck came out of the back room.

Pointing to Grady, Beck said, “He’s counting.”

“Who the hell are you?” Hugh demanded.

“Some interested friends.” Beck sat on one side of Hugh. “Interested in that three and a half million dollars
you stole from Wade’s company. Plus the money from Robin’s personal account.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Hugh shook his head.

“You got that little recorder I gave you?” Grady asked as he sat on Hugh’s other side.

Wade nodded and took it from his pocket, sat it on the table, and pushed play.

“
You stole what, two million dollars from KenneMac? Plus whatever you stole from Robin.
”

“
The easiest three and a half million I ever made—plus what I got from Robin—but who’s counting.
”

“You think blackmail is going to work?” Hugh turned to Wade. “Like I said, you can send me to prison for that one job in Texas; first offense, I won’t spend much time there. I don’t really care how many people know that Austin is my son, but I’d have thought you’d have wanted to keep it quiet.” He looked first at Beck, then at Grady. “And I’m not impressed with your posse.”

“Maybe you’ll be impressed with this.” Grady opened his briefcase, took out a folder, and began to read. “ ‘Hugh Weston. Aka Henry Willis. Aka Harry West. Wanted in four states—’ ” Grady looked across the table at Wade. “I guess that’s five now—for embezzlement. He’s made a career of ingratiating himself with women who have come into large sums of money and finding ways to separate them from their cash.” Grady turned to Hugh. “That ‘first offense’ was long ago and far away, my friend.” He went back to his file. “All those nasty little embezzlement charges pile up, you know? Enough to put you away
for a good long time. But you know what’s going to do you in, Hugh?”

Grady slid a piece of paper from the bottom of the pile.

“There’s this assault case up in Maine that’s been hanging around for the past five years. You picked up a woman in a bar—Christine Davenport; let’s not be cavalier and forget who she was. You smacked her around in the parking lot, drove her to New Hampshire, where you kept her in a motel for three days. I don’t suppose there’s any doubt as to what you were doing with her for those three days, right?”

Hugh sat back in the chair, his arms folded over his chest, his expression lethal.

“Now, here’s the thing. You take someone anywhere against their will and hold them—again, against their will—and that’s pretty much the definition of kidnapping. You take them across state lines, and it becomes a federal case. Add in the fact that she was coerced at gunpoint, and we’re looking at … well, shall we add it all up?”

“Who is this guy?” Hugh pointed to Grady and tried to look amused.

“Sorry. I forgot my manners. Meet former FBI Special Agent Grady Shields,” Wade told him, then pointed to Beck. “Our chief of police here in St. Dennis, Gabriel Beck.”

Hugh tried to look indifferent, but Wade knew the exact moment that he began to realize that the sand might be shifting.

Grady took his iPhone out of his pocket. “I love these gadgets that multitask, don’t you?”

He whistled. “Wow, that many?” He turned the
iPhone in his hand to show Hugh the number on the screen.

“I don’t know what kind of a clever game you guys are playing here, but I’m done with it.” Hugh looked across the table. “You know what the deal was.”

“The deal’s changed, Hugh,” Wade told him. “It might be different if embezzling from KenneMac had really been your first offense. Nice bluff there, by the way. But we all know that KenneMac wasn’t anywhere near being the first, and we know—thanks to Grady’s family and friends at the FBI—that it wasn’t your last. You may have been slick about getting out of town, but you always left prints behind.”

“You can leave now—just walk away and don’t look back. Or you can keep going with this and I can guarantee you won’t live long enough to serve out all your time,” Beck told him.

“You’re forgetting something real important here, MacGregor.” Hugh’s bravado was beginning to wear thin. “I can prove that boy is mine. I can go to court and get an order for DNA testing that will prove he’s my son. I can still—”

“You can still save your ass,” Beck told him. “Or I can take you into custody right now, hold you till the FBI gets here.” He turned to Grady. “What time did your brother say he’d be here?”

Grady turned his wrist to look at his watch. “He said he’d be here in time for dessert. So any time now.”

Hugh looked from one face to the next, trying to decide, Wade figured, whether or not they were bluffing.

“No five million dollars, Hugh,” Wade said. “Just
one long prison sentence. Oh, sure, it would just about kill me not to know where Austin is; you’re right on the money there. But just how much satisfaction will that give you when you’re spending every day in a five-by-eight cell with some guy who calls you ‘Peaches’?”

Grady took one last sheet of paper from the folder. Wade reached across the table to pick it up.

“Now here’s the only deal you’re going to get, and I’m only going to say it once, so listen up. You sign this and then you walk out of here. These”—Grady held up the reports he’d been reading from—“will go back into those cold-case files they’ve been sitting in for the past couple of years, and as far as I’m concerned, I never heard your name.”

“If you think I’m going to sign a confession …” Hugh scoffed.

“It isn’t a confession.” Wade handed him the paper.

Hugh scanned it, then glanced at the faces of the other three men at the table. He appeared to think for a long while before finally asking, “Got a pen?”

Grady signed as witness, then tossed the pen on the table. “As someone who spent a good part of my life in law enforcement, it makes me sick to say this, but go ahead and leave.”

Steffie, silent throughout the entire scene, got up and unlocked the door, held it for him. Hugh left without a backward glance and Stef closed the door behind him.

“Guys, I don’t know how to begin to thank you.” Wade looked from one man to the other, both his friends. “I know it has to go against everything you believe in to let him walk out of here.”

“I’m not gonna lie, Wade,” Beck told him. “I can’t believe I let him leave. The only consolation I have is in knowing that Austin is staying where he belongs.”

Grady nodded, then added, “And the fact that every move he ever makes from here on will be very carefully watched. The next time—and there will be a next time—he won’t go free.”

“I feel terribly conflicted about that woman from Maine, though.” Steffie sat next to Wade. “She deserves justice for what he did to her. Not that the others don’t, but there’s a difference between what he did to the others—the money he took—and what he did to her. I would have liked to have seen him pay for that.”

“He will, but not in this lifetime, I’m afraid,” Grady told her. “Christine Davenport died in a car accident two years ago. I wouldn’t have let him go on that if she was still alive.” He looked at Wade apologetically. “I don’t know how we would have handled it, but I couldn’t have let him walk.”

“I understand.” Wade nodded.

“And I feel confident that he’s going to pay for it all anyway,” Beck said. “All those notes that Grady has were compiled by a friend of his at the FBI.”

“My father always told me to never burn a bridge behind me when I left a job,” Grady said.

“Who are you kidding?” Beck laughed. “You called your brother who’s an active agent.”

“No, I didn’t. I called a friend of mine who is the best computer geek the Bureau has. He called the police department in Texas that investigated Wade’s case. They had Hugh’s prints and they’d gotten them into the system. By the time I called my buddy, all
these other matches had popped up, all cases similar to Wade’s. Then we found the case in Maine, and I knew we had a guy who is a serial offender. He’s going to steal again. It’s his nature. He’s slick, I’ll give him that, but next time, he’ll be caught.”

“And when that time comes, and he points back to tonight?” Steffie frowned. “How are you going to explain your part in this when he talks about how you two law enforcement types went along with this deal?”

“What deal?” Grady got up and stretched his legs. “I just came in to witness Hugh’s signing away his parental rights to Austin.”

“I just came in for ice cream.” Beck walked to the counter. “Stef, you got any of that stuff left over from Dallas’s party …?”

“What just happened here?” Steffie sank into the chair next to Wade. She’d stayed quiet through the entire ordeal, but now she was starting to shake. “Seriously? Did those two just …?”

“Yeah. They did.” Wade nodded, his face still unreadable.

“Has it occurred to you that you might not have heard the last of him?” Even her voice was shaking. “What if he comes back and threatens you all over again? Then what? Aren’t you worried?”

“It has occurred to me, but Grady feels pretty sure they’ll have him in custody for something else by the time he decides to try again. He studied behavior when he was in the FBI and I believe he knows what he’s talking about, but it doesn’t take an FBI profiler to see that this guy has made a living off of conning people out of their money one way or another. Given his history, it isn’t likely that he’s going to go into some legitimate business now. Both Beck and Grady think he’ll go on from here to extort money from someone else. The difference now is that he’s being watched but doesn’t know it.”

“But what if he comes back and says that he was coerced at gunpoint or something into signing that waiver of his rights?” Stef bit a fingernail, something she hadn’t done since she was in her early teens.

“I think he’d be hard-pressed to prove that with four witnesses who’d testify to the contrary, one a police chief, the other a former FBI agent.” Wade shook his head. “I’m all right with this for now. I have to be all right with it.”

“How can you be sure Hugh really left?”

“Beck was going to have a couple of cruisers follow him all the way to Route 50. I think just seeing a cop car next to you and another one in your rearview would be enough to keep you going for a while.”

“I still don’t trust him.”

“Neither do I, but I’d have agreed to anything to keep Austin safe. The thought of my boy being raised by that bastard makes me sick. I’d never have handed him over, you know that, right? Not even by court order. I would have taken him and run. That was Robin’s biggest fear, but I never believed she had anything to worry about. I never really thought he’d come back.”

Stef shifted uncomfortably in her seat. At one point over the past week, she’d thought that maybe Hugh—or Greg—had been drawn to St. Dennis because of the spell Vanessa had cast—or thought she’d cast—to find Stef’s soul mate.

Note to self: Remind Vanessa to be careful when she tosses that net out into the universe: you never know what might get caught in it.

He reached over to take her hand. “Stef, I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to thank you for being
here for me through this. Not to mention the fact that you did what I should have done.”

“All I did was tell Vanessa.”

“Knowing she’d pick up the phone and call Beck. I should have done that the minute Hugh walked out of here this morning.”

“I imagine having him show up like that must have been a bit of a shock.”

“For a moment, when he first walked in, I thought I was hallucinating. A couple of times over the past few months I wondered what I’d do if somehow he found out about Austin and came for him, but like I said, I never really thought it would happen.”

“It was just one of those really bad coincidences: the photographers following us around the day after the party, the photos all over everywhere, Hugh seeing them, and seeing himself in Austin.” She averted her eyes. “I hate to say it, but there really is a strong resemblance between Hugh and Austin that’s pretty hard to miss.”

“That, and knowing what happened to Robin, and given Austin’s age, I guess it was inevitable that Hugh would put two and two and two together and figure out that this was …” Wade grimaced. “I can’t bring myself to say ‘his son.’ ”

“What are you supposed to do with that paper Hugh signed?” she asked.

“Jesse said under ordinary circumstances, you’d use it in adoption proceedings. But he thinks we should just sit on it for now and only go that route if we ever have to. In the meantime, my name is on Austin’s birth certificate and I was married to his mother. We’re going to leave it like that.” He ran a
hand through his hair. “God, Stef, I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to tell Austin that I’m not his father. That his real father is a criminal who used his mother—”

“Wade, Hugh is not Austin’s ‘real’ father.” She took his face in her hands. “You are his father. Someday, when he’s old enough to understand, you’ll tell him the truth, but do not ever refer to that man as Austin’s real father, because he isn’t. He hasn’t done a damn thing to deserve that honor.”

“I wonder if Austin will ever be able to understand what happened.”