McQuaid's Justice Read online

  “These charges have been found unfounded, unreasoning,and insupportable at every level of the Department of Justice. Case—” The President looked around the room, seeming to connect and command all pairs of eyes, “closed.”

  “Is that true, Cy? It’s over?” Susan asked.

  Surprised that she might have followed the case at all, he didn’t know how to answer that question, either. Certainly it wasn’t over where Zach Hollingsworth was concerned. “The President saying so doesn’t mean the media will lay off, Sus.”

  “Oh. Well. You’ll want to hear the rest.” She looked back up at the television while the President gave an abridged description of the extortion threat and murder allegations against Amy’s father.

  “We now know,” he stated unequivocally, “by forensic testing unavailable a generation ago, that Julia Reeves did in fact die of oxygen starvation. Her son, whom Judge Reeves adopted at an early age, has now confessed to keeping from his mother the simple remedy of an asthma inhaler that would have saved her life. He is being charged as we speak with manslaughter.

  “Two nights ago, this deeply troubled young man made an attempt on the life of his half sister, Judge Reeves’s daughter, Amy, as we//—”

  “Oh, my God—that was Amy? The explosion in Denver?”

  Cy nodded. Susan must have seen something in him he’d rather she hadn’t. Her eyes lingered on him rather than returning to the set.

  “—out of some terribly misguided fear,” the speech went on, “that she could and would expose him as the murderer of their mother. Amy had already suffered at his hands. At the age of five, and on the day of her mother’s demise the night of February 15, twenty-four years ago, Amy lost her hearing in an accident her brother caused.”

  Cy swore softly. The President’s spiel had Perry Reeves’s spin written all over it. “Son of a bitch didn’t miss a trick—Susan, what’s wrong?”

  She had gone stark white.

  “I—what...the date.”

  The President was laying on the kudos now, formally placing Byron Reeves’s name into nomination for the Supreme Court, but Cy wasn’t paying much attention. He got up and took the mug from Susan and helped her into the chair.

  He sank to his haunches in front of her. “Sus. What is it?”

  “I don’t...something about the date stuck in my mind. I think...I heard somewhere his birthday is February thirteenth. The day before Valentine’s Day. Didn’t they say his wife died... Amy Reeves lost her hearing the... the, um...the fifteenth?”

  He didn’t get it, didn’t see what Susan was getting at or why she was obsessing about the date. “It was the anchor, Sus, in the introduction. Remember? Before the President came on, the anchorman was giving the judge’s vital statistics. ‘Born February 13, educated’—blah blah blah. Is that what you mean?”

  Her head moved awkwardly, half agreeing, half not. “It must be.” Her hands fluttered near her face. If she’d been another woman he was questioning on a case, a woman he didn’t know, he’d have thought she was feeling threatened. Trapped. “I just can’t imagine how awful it must have been for them all. For his little girl. For Amy. She’s deaf. You didn’t tell me.”

  She’d gotten none of her color back. She touched his face and stunned him again. “You’re in love with her.”

  Slam dunk. All that, he thought, because Susan had seen he was heart-staggered over Amy, even before she heard the part about Amy’s being deaf.

  Nothing got by Susan. Nothing much ever had. He shouldn’t have been surprised she’d made the connection in time to Reeves’s birthday, either. It was her twenty-first birthday, the luckiest day of her life, the way she told it, when she woke up to find Jake and his sons watching over her.

  With Susan, ever since, all their birthdays had been week-long events when everything good was supposed to happen, and nothing bad. One of the reasons, at least, that the barbecue she was planning for Jake’s seventieth was so important to her.

  “Cy?”

  He looked up at her, and realized he wasn’t going to get off this hook with her, recognizing maybe he didn’t want to be off the hook. That he needed to tell her.

  He gulped. How often was a man obliged to tell the woman who had raised him that he was in love?

  Or that he’d screwed it up royally.

  “Yeah. I’m in love with her.” He took a deep breath and stood because his leg couldn’t take the deep bend anymore.

  She took his hand and looked up at him. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  He squeezed her hand. “I screwed up, Sus. I don’t think it’s going to happen.”

  “Is it that she’s deaf that...” she trailed off, unwilling to put in words a thing so shallow.

  He could see she was going to be sorely disappointed in him if Amy’s being deaf was his problem. Susan was the only person he knew who hadn’t thought he was completely addle-brained for going after guardianship of Seth. “You don’t know what it’s like, Sus. I love Amy, but apparently it’s not enough.” His jaw up and locked. He had to pry the words out of himself. “I didn’t think it was enough for me, but it turns out to be the other way around. It’s not enough for her.”

  Susan let go of his hand and stood up, going around Cy to get closer to Jake. Cy moved to the other side of the bed. She stroked his dad’s head, running her hand gently over his thinning, gunmetal-gray hair.

  “Did you know I came close to leaving your father once?”

  He shook his head. He hadn’t known.

  “Your dad and I weren’t seeing things the same way.” Her eyes roamed over Jake’s rugged face. “He wanted to take care of me. Fix things for me. Set everything right when I couldn’t even tell him what was wrong.”

  “He did take care of you.” He felt surly and didn’t care. Disingenuous, because his beef with Jake was always about what he had and hadn’t done for Susan, but he didn’t care about that either. “What the hell else was he supposed to do?”

  “Just love me.” She looked at him. Looked trapped again. In some fundamental way, he wasn’t getting it, wasn’t seeing what she was trying to tell him. He didn’t get what was bringing that half desperate, half resigned look to her eyes. “Don’t let her get away, Cy, because you think love isn’t enough.”

  HE STAYED TILL Jake woke around two o’clock. Cy took it as a measure of how out of it his father still was that he failed to pick up on the lingering tension between him and Susan.

  Since that wasn’t anything that would escape his father if he were a well man, Cy thought he’d better stay till the doctors had a chance to confirm that Jake was out of the woods.

  Susan shooed him away.

  She said what mattered was that his father knew Cy had come, when what she meant was a whole other thing in the vein of, if Cy was going to have a chance with Amy, he’d better do what his father had done when Susan was prepared to walk away—which was to get off his high horse and make an amend or two.

  He got into his pickup at three o’clock, figuring to be in back in Denver by seven if the weather held. His mood couldn’t have been worse. He didn’t know what amends to make. Amy had made it pretty clear she didn’t need or want him to take care of her, order her around, tell her what to do or forbid her to do for him what he would do for her.

  She’d asked for his help, but he’d crossed some line he didn’t even recognize. If Susan was right, it was his hardheaded lawman cow-punching take-charge savior complex getting in the way, but he was damned if he could see it, and damned if he couldn’t.

  A heartache the size of all Chaparral County filled his chest. “Sorry” wasn’t going to cut it, even if he could dredge it up.

  Nothing with Amy was simple, nothing easy. Loving her was like reaching for the primrose at the heart of a thorny bush. And still, loving, being loved by the judge’s beautiful hard-core-independent daughter was all he wanted.

  He filled his gas tank at the convenience store by the entrance to I-70, bought himself a couple of prepackaged roast b
eef sandwiches and headed east toward the mountain passes between Cedar Bluffs and Denver.

  He thought about her listening to her uncle’s spin on the events of her life as told the nation by the President. One more blow to the truth? One more insult, one more chorus of Amy must be wrong.

  He was haunted by the sound of her voice in those few moments when she had been taken back to the hours before she went deaf.

  He flipped on the radio and forced himself to concentrate on the drive, but the simple physical memory of sound, of a voice out of Amy’s mouth, brought his thoughts full circle back to Susan, and he didn’t know why, and not knowing made him wary.

  He went over every reason he could think of. His mind came around to the superficial resemblance between them that even Cam didn’t see, then to the stricken, ghastly shade of pale Susan turned when she learned Amy was deaf...even before that, when she heard the date of Julia Reeves’s death and matched it up in her mind to Byron Reeves’s date of birth.

  He didn’t get it. It struck him that her reaction was on par with out-and-out guilt, as if she were in some way responsible for—

  His blood began to roar in his ears, his mind to stagger. He jerked the wheel hard right to pull off the highway before he caused a terrible accident. He sat there staring at the walls of the Glenwood Canyon, his hands made into fists over the steering wheel, telling himself it wasn’t possible.

  But as his granddad always said, wishin’ a thing didn’t make it so. He got out into the dog-ass cold of arctic winds whipping through the canyon, slammed the door shut behind him and dialed his father’s hospital room.

  A BURST OF APPLAUSE went up in the lovely old room that served as a living area for the residents and staff in Granny Fee’s wing. Amy had taped the President announcing her father’s nomination. Everyone at Chamberlain House knew and loved him. Everyone here had an emotional stake in Fee’s son reaching the Supreme Court.

  No one knew how deeply upset he was. Even Amy didn’t entirely understand his reservations. They’d sat, thousands of miles separated, writing back and forth over the Internet this morning after the announcement was made.

  She knew he felt as if the nomination were the fruit of ill-gotten gains, and that before it came to a vote in the Senate, he might yet withdraw, even retire. She didn’t understand why. Nothing her uncle had done, even in her father’s name, changed Byron Reeves’s suitability for the nomination. She felt as if there were things he wasn’t telling her, reasons maybe too private or personal, to offer her. But if there were, he gave no hint of what they might be.

  Was he ill? No, nothing like that.

  Amidst the congratulations of her friends, Fiona seemed more dazed than pleased. Her head moved in tiny, birdlike gestures, searching for Amy, so befuddled that when Amy knelt right in front of her, it took Fee long seconds to make the connection between the face before her and her granddaughter.

  She got unsteadily to her feet. Amy walked with her down the long gracious hallway back to her room. She sat in her rocking chair and seemed for a moment to doze off. Amy sat watching her, longing to sit at her grandmother’s feet and rest her head in Fee’s lap, to be able to pour out her heart and be heard by a woman who loved her.

  With the failure of her last-ditch effort, all her hope of any possibility of ever learning what lay locked away in her mind had died. In her uncle’s game of winner take all, she had lost. For the President to have made any statement at all regarding the death of her mother, he had to have bought into her uncle’s deft lies.

  They could have left it alone, reiterated that her death was accidental. Instead, Perry must have taken Ted Wilms’s crime lab results and cried foul. Confronted with the proof, Brent had confessed. End of tragic tale, end of any chance of nasty exposure.

  But Perry was also Fee’s son, and even if Amy could tell her grandmother what he’d done, how ruthless he was in the pursuit of his ambitions for her father, she wouldn’t have had the heart.

  But about Cy...it would have been so precious to have Fee mentally there to tell, to share. To have the benefit of a wise old granny’s advice.

  “Sweetling?”

  Amy drew near and knelt before Fee. “What?” She mimed scribbling, asking should she get out paper and a pen. Fee shook her head. She seemed less lucid, more confused than ever now, and only waved in the direction of her music boxes. Amy rose and selected one at random, the smallest, a miniature pipe organ that, according to the label, played Pachelbel’s Canon in D.

  But Fee shook her head, unhappy with Amy’s choice. Her hand stretched higher, pointing. “The Strauss, sweetling,” she cried, though Amy had only Fee’s distressed expression to rely upon.

  She knew the one. The antique box, at least eight inches deep, was carved from white ebony, and the Strauss waltz was the one tune she could dimly recall. She turned away and picked up the pad of paper and pen, and wrote, G. Fee, the Strauss has been broken for years. You remember, don’t you?

  Fee’s head began to tremble as if she were palsied. She took the pen from Amy and bent over the pad. Her spidery writing took several long moments. Open the Strauss, sweetling.

  HE REACHED SUSAN on the first ring. “Sus—”

  “Cy? Is that you? Are you—”

  He lowered the phone. The pain inside him was fearsome, worse than when his leg was nearly blown away.

  “—what’s wrong? Cy!”

  He cleared his throat and spat. “Sus. Take it easy. I was just thinking...couldn’t think what it was you used to—”

  “Used to what?” came her voice. “Cy, are you drunk? Hurt? What? I can barely hear you.” .

  His days of calling home drunk were long since over. But hurt? Yeah. “I’m on the highway. Glenwood.” God help him, he had to know. He jerked his hat down tighter on his head to keep the wind from tearing it off. “I was just trying to think what it was you told me once. What your nickname was when you were a kid?”

  “My nickname? Pidge, you mean?”

  Pidge. As in, I encouraged Pidge to go to the authorities anyway.

  As in, March Hare and Pigeon too. Amy’s new imaginary friend. The one she’d asked again and again to come in, with only her mother to hear, to grow enraged. Heartsick, his gut heaving, Cy finally got it. Somehow he managed to hang up with Susan, but his head wouldn’t stop spinning the disc, the image of Byron Reeves on the phone with Susan.

  She must have called him on his birthday, and set in motion the disastrous events that led to Julia Reeves catching Amy innocently repeating the words she must have overheard her father using. A nickname, Pidge, and words Julia would not have mistaken for idle chatter.

  Susan.

  Dear God. It was Susan who had been kidnapped. Susan who had endured her captors long enough to be caught up in the Salt Lake City heist. Susan who had escaped the federal dragnet, run to Texas, come to be the only real mother he and Cam and certainly Matty ever really knew.

  Susan was Pamela Jessup. The girl whom Phillip Gould had brutally raped.

  DEEP INSIDE the white ebony music box, Amy found her mother’s inhaler, jammed somehow between the antique mechanism and the side of the box. For one brief horrifying moment, she imagined it had been Fiona playing keep-away with Julia’s life, but no.

  Between that errant thought and her next, between what was true and what was the truth, between hearing and then, not hearing, Amy knew what the last damning, hideous sounds she would ever hear had been.

  Her uncle’s taunts.

  Her mother’s futile, gasping, dying pleas.

  Fiona’s music boxes cranked up, every one, to drown out the sounds of her son Perry letting Julia’s life slip away.

  Afterward, when Perry must have carried the lifeless body outside and dropped her hard enough that a blow to her head could be mistaken for the cause of her death, Fee had stashed the light green plastic holder with its canister of steroids in the only place she knew to hide it.

  But Granny had begun to sing to herself, now, and Amy k
new she would never learn whether Granny Fee had concealed the inhaler to protect her son, or to preserve the evidence of a murder.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Amy drove like a bat out of hell down the table mesa roads, through the switchbacks, up the canyon, around the winding curves that led home.

  She let herself into the guest house, half expecting to find her uncle there, making himself at home in her space, sipping sherry in the dark, ready with some utterly reasonable, gloating proposition for letting bygones be bygones between them. He would believe she had no other choice.

  He would be wrong. He was the one with the audacity, the sheer arrogant effrontery, the brass, to have taken Wilms’s evidence and with it, called her mother’s death a murder. His spin de grâce. With it, he had nailed himself, for it wouldn’t be Brent’s fingerprints on the inhaler, but Perry’s.

  He just didn’t know it yet.

  She tossed her keys and bag into an easy chair, then turned down the hallway to the bedroom she had converted to a study of her own. She flipped on her computer and summoned up her E-mail program on the nineteen-inch screen her computer-assisted-design software demanded. Her fingers flew over the keys, addressing the urgent electronic missive to Cy. She hadn’t the heart or the patience to sit still, typing in the details, how, when and where she had discovered the inhaler, only that she had found it.

  She changed from her black silk skirt and blouse to warm-ups and a tank top, then threw on a winter parka and walked in the dark, frigid night up the path to Takamura’s converted barn. He was not at home, and would not be for several days, but she had her own keys, and a desperate need to ground herself.