McQuaid's Justice Read online

  “The mountain rescue team showed up along with a couple dozen locals. They had to dig and reinforce every few feet. The threat of a collapse was there every minute. Amy would have been buried alive.

  “My brother,” he went on, “didn’t get there till hours after the sun went down. Minutes before we finally pulled Amy out. Julia was panicked. Hysterical. Hyperventilating all day long. She was asthmatic. Hell, if there hadn’t been oxygen tanks right there with the rescue equipment, I’m not sure she would have made it through the day.”

  “Was she on medication?”

  “Yes. The oxygen merely made her more comfortable.”

  “All right. So now, who takes Amy,” Cy asked, “when she’s pulled out of the hole?”

  “Julia tried. Byron shoved her out of the way. Amy reached for him, clinging to him and her stuffed rabbit like she would never let go. It was eerie as hell.” He looked at Amy, his eyes seeming to tear up. “Not a peep, not a whimper out of you. Your little legs and arms and hands were scraped up pretty bad. Your face was all dirty, and we saw tearstains, but you just put your head down on your daddy’s shoulder and tuned out.

  “Christ.” He rubbed his eyes.

  His recital was emotional. Other than his instinctive dislike for the man, Cy had no reason to doubt its veracity. “So Judge Reeves carried Amy back to the house?”

  “Yes.”

  “How far?”

  “A good half hour in the dark.”

  “The kids got that far away.” Cy shook his head. He posed the question. “Was Julia that neglectful?”

  Perry shrugged. “Apparently, since it happened that way.”

  Amy interrupted. “She was packing to leave when she sent us out to play.”

  “Do you know where your sister-in-law intended to go?” Cy asked, following up on Amy’s beliefs.

  “My understanding was that she had intended to join my brother in Denver for the weekend.”

  Amy shivered, her signing pensive, her motions crabbed and clumsy. “I thought she was running away.” She rose swiftly out of her chair. “I’m going to go get my jacket.”

  She departed, leaving the door open. Dropping his hands, relieved to be spared signing for her, Cy watched her uncle watching her leave.

  He knew all about mothers dying, mothers leaving. Susan was the only exception in his life. “Was she running away, Mr. Reeves?”

  Startled, Perry jerked his attention back to Cy. “Julia, you mean. Running... I thought you meant Amy for a second.” He paused. “I can’t answer that. Julia was...erratic at the best of times.”

  Amy returned clad in her jacket and sank back into the leather wing chair. Cy asked how long it had taken anyone to worry about her loss of hearing.

  Reeves answered. “Amy was in shock, McQuaid, as you might imagine. We didn’t have any idea for a couple of days, maybe as long as a week. When it became evident that she wasn’t hearing us, we took her to every specialist this side of the Atlantic. No one could find a physiological reason that Amy couldn’t hear, but she tested profoundly deaf over and over again.”

  Cy dropped his head into his hands. The tragedies that night had just kept raining down till hell wouldn’t have it. He scrubbed his face with his hands, then looked up at Amy. “It’s traumatic then, your deafness.”

  “‘Strangulated affect,’ they call it,” she replied, spelling the words, miming “strangled.” “Or just ‘hysterical.’”

  Watching her delicate, amethyst-tipped fingers going through the drill of repeating the diagnosis, Cy felt as if one of her arrows had found its mark in his guts. Shadows haunted her eyes, leaving him no stomach for the task at hand.

  He turned to her uncle, because if he didn’t move past the visceral revulsion over what had happened to Amy Reeves, he’d lose it. “Judge Reeves was upstairs alone with Amy. What happened then?”

  “An argument broke out, downstairs in the parlor. Julia was furious that Byron had sent her away, and she took it out on Mother.”

  “On Fiona?” Cy clarified.

  Perry nodded. “Fiona retaliated. Lit into Julia like a cyclone for having let anything happen to Amy. Brent became defensive, but Julia already had it in her head that Brent had stuffed Amy down the ventilation shaft on purpose.”

  Cy cut him off, told him to wait. “Amy.” The color had drained from her face. “Is it true? Did Brent push you down that shaft?”

  She shook her head. “Cy, I don’t remember. Everything happened so fast, and then nothing happened for hours and hours. But no. I don’t think he did. He was so angry with me that for the most part I couldn’t even keep up with him.”

  “Why angry?” he signed anger, for emphasis. “I didn’t get that yesterday.”

  Amy shrugged, confused. “She had sent us out. And it is true that nothing bad had ever happened to me with Brent. He did like to taunt me, blame me when he got into trouble, but no more than any older brother might. He could also be wonderful, though, Cy. He made up all these magical voices for my stuffed animals.”

  “Like the rabbit you were holding when they pulled you up?”

  “Yes,” she signed, smiling. “My March Hare.”

  “Do you remember why he was mad at you that day?”

  “He was just scared, Cy. She was packing, and he didn’t want her to go. He never wanted her to go, even for a weekend.”

  Cy knew well enough about anger and resentment and being scared in a twelve-year-old kid. If he hadn’t displayed enough of it in his own misbegotten adolescence, he’d gotten it again with Seth, in spades.

  Amy might not believe the kid could have meant to stuff her anywhere she would be out of his face. Cy knew better.

  He turned back to her uncle who had sat silently by, listening to Cy interpreting Amy. “What happened when Julia accused Brent of pushing Amy down?”

  “She slapped the kid.” He straightened, then leaned back. “Brent knocked her down. Maybe she fell. I don’t know. I don’t remember now, but she—”

  “That’s a rather important detail to be missing from your otherwise remarkable recall, don’t you think?” Cy interrupted.

  Reeves glared, his eyes narrowed. “She was still alert, although she started the wheezing and gasping again. Brent threw her inhalant atomizer at her and ran out. By the time Byron came down—Amy, you must have been asleep or he wouldn’t have left you—but by then Julia was terrified that something would happen to Brent outside in the dark, alone. Byron threw on a coat and went out to look for the kid.”

  “Julia didn’t go with him?”

  “She must have slipped out a few minutes later... when I had to put Amy back to bed.”

  “I thought Amy was already asleep upstairs.”

  Reeves frowned. “So had I. But I thought I heard her talking to herself outside the parlor.”

  Repeating for her in sign, Cy looked from Amy back to her uncle. “Was that unusual for Amy, to get up like that?”

  “No.” Perry exhaled sharply through his nose. “She was up at all hours. I found her huddled in her little nightgown on the landing of the stairs.”

  Amy nodded. “I remember that.” She swallowed. “There was this flocked wallpaper along the wall by the stairs.”

  Her hands flattened, the fingers of one searching, seeking, stroking the palm of the other in describing the way she touched the velvety wall while she sat trying desperately to hear what was happening. “I must have been—” She hesitated, searching for a word. “Sleepwalking.”

  Her hands went still, her body tense, her gaze soft and unfocused, or focused inward. Cy edged forward on the sofa. Her uncle demanded to know what was going on. Cy ignored him.

  He was willing to wait for her to find her way through whatever dark maze she had come upon in her mind. Wait till hell itself froze over if that’s what it took.

  His mind seized on the image of a tiny little girl, bruised and exhausted, huddled in her nightgown, listening too hard for what she shouldn’t hear. Comforting herself against
perils she didn’t understand by the touch of her hands to the downy soft textures she found against the wall.

  Chapter Five

  He sat through the long silent moments, his body language alone warning her uncle not to interfere.

  What Amy Reeves had seen or heard, somehow witnessed in her sleepwalking that night, was key. He knew it, trusted the instinct as he trusted the sun was going to come up tomorrow.

  But when she looked up again, he saw that she’d lost it.

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry. Something...I don’t know what. Something happened before Perry saw me, before he took me back up to bed.”

  “It’s all right, Amy. It’ll come back.”

  “I was afraid.” She couldn’t let it go. “I was so scared. I didn’t know what was happening.” She looked up at him for the first time since the fragment of memory had taken hold of her. “Cy, I’m not sure, not at all, that it will come back. Or if it does, that I’ll know what it means.”

  Her uncle interrupted, agitated by his exclusion. Cy took the time, first, to reassure her. “If it matters, Amy, you’ll remember it.” He sat back and spoke aloud. “She remembers sleepwalking, being scared, not knowing what was happening. Go ahead. You took Amy back to bed, and Julia left?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you went after her?”

  He nodded, his handsome face clouded. “I was ready to kill her myself. She was in no condition, emotionally or physically, to be chasing after that kid. That’s why Byron went out in the first place.”

  He gave a small shake of his head and went on. “I found her lying on the ground. She hadn’t gotten more than fifty yards from the house. She had tripped or stumbled, twisting her ankle so that she fell backward and hit her head on an outcropping of granite. As I understand it, the impact would have paralyzed her autonomic functions, killing her almost instantaneously.”

  Stumbling over the technical language, Cy resorted to spelling out “autonomic.” Amy nodded that she understood, giving him a thumbs-up for making the attempt.

  He stood to stretch his leg, pace off the numbness, shake out the tension in his hands from the near ceaseless signing he had done. Reeves’s account of the events leading to Julia’s death painted a plausible scenario. He made no attempt to hide or even minimize the tension riddling the family—or to spare himself.

  Cy hadn’t seen firsthand either the original autopsy report or whatever evidence of foul play the extortion attempt purported to have. Julia Reeves might have been dead or already dying before her head struck the protruding rock. Her fall could well have been as a result of a physical altercation.

  Cy checked in with Amy. “How are you holding up?”

  “I’m fine, McQuaid. You’re looking a little the worse for wear.”

  He knew she understood exactly how challenging, how draining it was to do the work of talking for all parties in a complex language that wasn’t his own and never would be.

  “You’re doing fine,” she told him. “You give a damn. I appreciate it. Are you nearly done?”

  He nodded, considering his next question.

  Nothing in Reeves’s polished, emotional recitation of the events had yet ruled out the possibility that Judge Reeves, one way or another, was there when his wife died. Cy just didn’t see it happening. It wasn’t impossible to imagine a man of Byron Reeves’s caliber lying in wait to kill his wife, or even argue with her in the frozen night out of earshot of his family. It was simply unlikely.

  Cy respected the odds. He just didn’t trust them.

  “Mr. Reeves, I understand the events around your sister-in-law’s death came at the end of a long, trying day. But sir, the question remains. How can you be certain Judge Reeves—or her son Brent, for that matter—had nothing to do with her fall?”

  Reeves sighed impatiently. “I know because I called the police immediately. The state patrol was already headed up to the house with both of them in the vehicle. It would have been physically impossible to lie in wait for her, shove her to her death, and then get five or six miles down the road and into the police cruiser headed back to the house before I could even report the accident.”

  “Not even if you didn’t make the call for, say, fifteen or twenty minutes after you found her?”

  “You could make that case,” Reeves returned, his flinty look at odds with the complete absence of any sarcasm in his tone of voice.

  At some deep, inexplicable level Cy felt toyed with. “If there is another case to be made, sir, I suggest you spit it out.”

  “All right,” Reeves snapped. “Here it is. The unvarnished truth.” He directed his words to Amy. “Many years ago, after my own brilliant law school career, a stint on the Harvard Law Review, a clerkship with the federal district court judge in northern California—in short, with a rather rosy future secured, I was disbarred for life. An unfortunate drug bust. Possession, intent to sell.”

  Amy stared at him. Cy could feel her disbelief in the way her hands clasped together. Her uncle having done something so stupid, so self-destructive, when he had so much going for him clearly stunned her.

  She might have felt sorry for him, Cy thought, except that what he had done he’d brought on himself.

  She signed to him, depending on Cy to translate. “It must have been hard, all these years, to watch my father getting everything you dreamed of for yourself.”

  He nodded, musing. “As it turned out, I have lived my life vicariously. I stood by your father in all things, all ways. At every turn I was there making sure he didn’t stumble because if I couldn’t have it all—the judgeships, the respect and admiration of my peers on the bench, the appointments, then, I swore by all that’s holy, by God, my brother would have it.”

  “Uncle Perry,” Amy signed, “this is unnecessary.”

  He fell silent. “Long story short, then, sweetheart. I have done whatever was necessary to guide and protect your father’s career. I am a realist. I am practical. I do what is expedient because I don’t care where the chips fall, so long as they do not litter your father’s path or mar the reflected glory I enjoy.

  “But it would have been quite pointless to postpone making that call to the police. Julia was dead. There would have been nothing I could do to salvage the situation, however inclined I might have been. We may all have it in us, somewhere, to take another life. But for your father to then lie to protect himself? No.

  “Had he tried, he would have gone as crazy as your grandmother. Crazier.”

  ZACH HOLLINGSWORTH jackknifed the pencil in his hand over the stacks of documents littering his desk, and jerked his aged Underwood nearer the edge of his desk. Cramming a piece of fresh white paper into the roller, he cut loose both his forefingers to hammer away at the keys.

  No matter which way he came at the decades-old case, he couldn’t ditch the slant. Byron Reeves should have taken himself off the investigation before the dragnet of Pamela Jessup’s accomplices ever went down.

  So how did a man like Reeves justify hanging in? Zach wanted to know. That was the question, the sticking point, since all he could come up with in his research was that Reeves held himself to such an unbelievably high set of standards that he’d drop the dime on his dear, crazy old mother if she got herself crosswise of the law.

  Gould claimed to have informed the Justice Department. Zach now doubted that the slimeball senator had done or said anything to the attorney general. Too many people had too much to lose if Gould had ever leaked so much as one word of Reeves’s family connections to the press.

  What turned Zach’s crank was the murky possibility of a nastier, deeper sensibility about Byron Reeves. If he had never intended to prosecute Pamela Jessup, or the kidnappers, then in his own mind at least, he could assure himself there was no impropriety in his role. But if you had to walk a mile to turn that crank, Zach thought, you might as well have walked the mile in the first place.

  He sat back thinking about getting his protégée, Frani Landon, in on this story too
. He didn’t believe Reeves capable of such tortured logic, but he’d have liked to run it by her. Frani had a mind on her that wouldn’t quit, and the talent to take her smarts and her instincts right up there with the best of them, and he didn’t only mean the females in international news, either.

  He would call her, he decided. He didn’t need Frani’s take on the possibility that Reeves let Pamela Jessup escape the feds’ dragnet though. Unlike Gould, the photographs in the case files could not shade the truth under an umbrella of innuendo. At least, there was no possibility of digitally altered photographs twenty-five years ago. The photos were gruesome, sickening. Pamela Jessup had clawed her fingers to the bloody bone trying to escape the closet where David Eisman kept her locked up.

  The cops and forensics boys had concurred and still did. At some point, several hours at least ahead of the operation that had netted Eisman, Jessup had finally managed to kick a hole through drywall, and crawled from there, her hands bleeding and raw, through several hundred feet of dead space to daylight she could only have dreamt she’d ever see again.

  Reeves probably did have something to do with the decision not to indict Jessup. He had sources lined up to work over that angle, but it hardly seemed worth his time. The poor little rich girl who gave her family the metaphorical finger was dead anyway. Within a year and a half of her escape, she’d drowned in the pool of some seedy backwoods motel. Drunk, destitute and very much alone. A worse fate by far than what befell her so-called kidnappers.

  Zach knew now where the story wasn’t leading. Gould had fed him a line the senator had to know wouldn’t hold, which left only one possibility—he believed Zach would sort through the dross until he hit pay dirt.

  Although no evidence ever surfaced, he typed, that Reeves actively aided and abetted the flight of the Jessup heiress, we are left to wonder why an up-and-coming young prosecutor would fail to reveal his ties to the family—unless the stakes were personal...or higher than we knew.