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At the office building, he unlocked the back door, as he’d told Styles he would, then took the elevator to his private office. He’d just poured himself a stiff shot of brandy and loosened his tie when Denver Styles, dressed in black, strode in.
Weston motioned to the bar, but Styles shook his head and declined. Instead he leaned against the wall of glass and stared outside.
“What have you found out?”
Styles lifted a shoulder. “Not much.”
Anger spurted through Weston’s veins. “Surely in a week, you’ve dug up something.”
Styles turned to face him. “A few things. Nothing substantial. Nothing about the night your brother was killed, even though that’s what Dutch is most concerned about.”
Weston tried to be patient, he knew that it was in his best interest to let Styles give him the information in his own way and time, yet he wanted to strangle the man and shake answers from him. “You think one of his girls killed Harley?”
“Don’t know.” He paused. “Yet.”
“What do you know?” Weston asked, and couldn’t hide the nasty little tone in his words.
“That Dutch is nervous, that he’s worried someone will find out that one of his kids is a murderer, though he’s got no evidence to support his theory, and that when Claire Holland left Chinook sixteen years ago, she was pregnant.”
Weston was stunned. “Pregnant? Claire?” But Miranda had been the sister who was knocked up. He did a few quick mental calculations. “You mean with her son?”
“Yes. Sean Harlan St. John. He wasn’t born in July as she claimed but in April, which meant she was pregnant before she met her husband.”
“The baby was Harley’s?” Weston’s legs were suddenly unable to hold him, and he had to sit down. This was impossible. There couldn’t be another Taggert . . . Harley couldn’t have fathered a boy and yet . . . His mind turned back to another birth certificate, one he’d burned years before, proof that his father hadn?
??t been faithful to Mikki. Bile rose in his throat, and his gut squeezed painfully. There was another heir to the Taggert fortune? His fists clenched. He’d worked so hard to inherit everything and now this kid, this interloper . . . oh shit!
He felt the nervous beads of sweat form on his upper lip and his ribs seemed suddenly to crush the air out of his lungs. No! No! No! Not now. Not when he’d been certain to inherit everything but a small percentage of his father’s estate. It was already mapped out in the will. Even Paige knew that as a daughter and one who didn’t work at the company, she would only inherit the old house where they’d grown up, but now . . . with Harley’s son . . . no, it couldn’t happen. “Who knows about this?”
“Just Claire St. John, although Moran’s sure to pick up on it.”
“Damn it all to hell!”
“The boy has no idea, and the kid’s supposed father, Paul St. John, has enough problems of his own that he won’t give a plugged nickel about the fact when the truth comes out.”
“You think Moran will publish this?” The wheels in Weston’s mind were turning, faster and faster, to the inevitable ending, that Sean St. John would be proven to be a Taggert. His father would be thrilled, even though the kid’s mother was a Holland. One of Neal’s biggest disappointments in life was that he had no male heirs to carry on the Taggert name. Kendall had refused to have more children, had gone so far as to have surgery to ensure that she was sterile. Her pregnancy with Stephanie had been miserable, and she wasn’t about to go through the pain, bloat, or emotional roller coaster ride that carrying a baby for nine months had given her. Stephanie had been worth it, but Kendall wasn’t interested in another child.
So now this problem.
“I assume Moran will publish anything to smear Dutch,” Styles said. “He hates the guy and with good reason. His father was crippled in a logging accident, never completely compensated for his injuries and the father was abusive, if not physically, then emotionally. Moran’s mother, Alice, left him and the dad at an early age. As it turns out, she ended up living in Portland as Dutch’s mistress, and never had any contact with the kid all the time he was growing up with a drunk bully of a dad.”
“Son of a bitch,” Weston muttered and thought about his own experience with Dutch Holland. In his mind’s eye he could still see Dutch’s freckled back as he humped on the antique quilt, Mikki’s legs wrapped around him while they fucked like two damned animals. The image had haunted him and he’d had dreams about it . . . disturbing dreams where he’d killed Dutch, then mounted his whore of a mother, but when he’d looked down it wasn’t Mikki Taggert he was screwing but one of the Holland daughters, Miranda or Claire or Tessa.
“Other than that, I don’t have anything,” Styles was saying, snapping Weston from his hideous reverie.
“Keep looking,” Weston said, still reeling from the information. At least Styles didn’t appear to be holding out on him.
“I will. Especially into the night Harley died.” He turned and faced Weston for the first time, and those harsh flinty eyes thinned with a personal vengeance. Weston’s heart nearly stopped. “I’m with Moran. Something about that night doesn’t add up.”
This was dangerous turf. As far as Weston was concerned, the less anyone cared about the night Harley bought it, the better. Styles reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a piece of paper—a copy of a report and a picture of a gun. “Moran seems obsessed with this bit of evidence,” he said, holding out the pages for Weston to take. “What do you make of it?”
Weston stared down at the copies. “Couldn’t guess.”
“The gun was found not far from the body.”
“I know, but the police didn’t connect it to the crime.”
“But it’s odd, don’t you think?”
