She cleared her throat, pushing aside her worries. She was usually the calm agent, the unemotional agent, the agent whodidn’t snap or yell or demand when things got tough. And she certainly didn’t cry.
She called the first number on the list. A woman answered and, when Catherine introduced herself, said she would bring the phone to Mrs. Dolan.
It took several minutes before Piper picked up the line. “This is Piper Dolan. To whom am I speaking?”
“Dr. Catherine Jones, FBI Special Agent.”
“Doctor?”
“Forensic psychiatrist,” Catherine said.
“And you wish to speak to me?”
“Yes, ma’am. It’s about your daughter.”
A faint sigh in the background. Then Catherine heard Piper speak to someone else. “Marissa, please contact Mrs. Brockway and tell her I’ll need to reschedule lunch.” A moment later, she said, “I assume you have bad news for me.”
Her tone reminded Catherine of her own mother. Charlotte Harrison thought she was superior to most everyone, and Catherine had been a distinct failure in every way—from who she married (into a middle-class family, not the fact that Chris was a surgeon); to Catherine’s career choice (that she had “wasted” her medical school education to work in law enforcement); to the worst sin of all: that Catherine had brought violence into the family that got her sister Beth—the child who was perfect in every way—killed.
“Your daughter, who has most recently been using the name Hope Davidson, is wanted for questioning in the kidnapping of a federal agent and police detective.”
“Hmm,” Piper said shortly. “I see. I can tell you two things. First, I haven’t spoken to or heard from Clara in nearly eight years. Second, Clara is capable of hiring her own lawyer, so I shall not be helping her in that way.”
“It would help if I understood Clara’s background andwhether she has ever been in trouble with the law, or shown any tendency toward violence.”
“I do not know my daughter. I barely knew her as a child as we had nothing in common. She had no interest in school, books, history, art. Frankly, she showed no interest in anything except herself. She was a beautiful child from the minute she was born, and she knew it. She wanted for nothing. Gerald and I worked hard to educate Clara, to give her a solid foundation on which to do something productive with her life. She threw it all away.”
“Have you disowned her?”
“I wouldn’t say something so common as disowning a child. She received her trust fund when she was twenty-five, and we wrote her out of our will. The Dolan estate will be split in quarters between my niece, nephew, the Getty Museum, and UCLA, where I am a tenured professor.”
“What do you teach?”
“I have doctorates in sixteenth-century English literature, European art history, and Russian literature. I’m currently teaching a graduate class in sixteenth-century English literature.”
“Your husband was also a professor?”
“Yes, though I don’t see the relevance. Gerald passed five years ago.”
“What is Clara’s trust fund worth?”
“I only know what it was when she was given full access to it. Ten million dollars. It was established by her grandparents. I would not have been that generous with a child who showed apathy in everything except seducing men.”
Ten million dollars was a tidy sum. It explained the house and resources that Clara had. It could have grown quite substantially over the last ten years.
“Who manages her trust?” Catherine asked.
“I will text you the law firm who established it. I wouldn’t know if Clara still uses them. I doubt it. She wanted to cut ties with us, and that suited my husband and me just fine.”
“Do you care at all that she’s wanted for multiple felonies?”
“No,” Piper said bluntly. “Clara was a beautiful child, as I said. On the outside, you have never seen such an exquisite beauty. I assure you, the cliché ‘beauty is only skin deep’ could have been coined to describe my daughter.”
There had to be more here than a mother who hadn’t seen or spoken to her daughter in years and showed absolutely no interest in what she has done since.
“Do you know a man named Garrett Reid?”
“No. Dr. Jones, I may have canceled my lunch, but I am a busy woman.”
