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He flipped through a few pages of notes, then positioned the computer in front of him. Fingers moving deftly, he typed out the first page:
Power Play:
The Murder of Harley Taggert
by
Kane Moran
He took another swig from his bottle and started writing. Even though his investigation into all the skeletons tucked discreetly away in the Holland family closets was just beginning, he realized that before he was finished, Harley’s murderer would face charges on a sixteen-year-old crime. Dutch Holland, the bastard, would have no chance of becoming governor of Oregon, and every single member of the Holland family, including Claire, would despise Kane Moran.
So be it. Life wasn’t easy, and it sure as hell wasn’t fair. He’d learned that painful lesson years ago, and Claire had been one of his teachers. Besides, this, his exposé of the Holland family, was to be his revenge and catharsis.
A new start.
He tipped the bottle back again. A swallow of whiskey burned a fiery path to his stomach, and Kane wondered why, instead of a sense of elation, he felt a premonition of dread, as if he’d unwittingly taken his first step into hell.
“I don’t care if you have to kiss Moran’s ugly ass or tie him up in lawsuits for the rest of his life. Find out something that we can use against him. Bribe him or kill the stupid bastard with your bare hands, Murdock! Just find a way to squelch the damned book!” Dutch slammed the car phone into its cradle. “Spineless cretin,” he growled, though in truth, Ralph Murdock, his attorney and campaign manager, was one of the few people in this world whom Benedict Holland trusted.
Clamping down on the cigar jammed between his teeth, he floored the accelerator and his Cadillac shot forward, tires skimming on the narrow road winding through this stretch of old growth timber. The speedometer inched past sixty and mossy-barked fir trees swept by in a blur.
Who would have thought that the ghost of Harley Taggert would rise now at this critical point in his life? And who the hell did Kane Moran, the man penning the story surrounding Harley’s death, think he was? The last time Dutch had seen him, years ago, Moran had been a mean-tempered kid with a chip on his shoulder the size of Nebraska, a hoodlum always in trouble with the law. Somehow he’d scrounged his way through college and he’d become a risk-taking fool of a journalist who, because of some damned wound, had decided to settle down back home in Oregon to write a book about Harley Taggert’s death.
As his car shot over the summit, Dutch experienced the tightening in his chest again, that same old sense of panic that squeezed him whenever he thought of the night the Taggert kid died. Deep in the darkest reaches of his heart he suspected that one of his daughters had bashed in the boy’s skull.
Which one? Which one of his girls had done it? His firstborn, Miranda, a lawyer working for the district attorney’s office, was ambitious to a fault, her pride unbending. She looked so much like her mother it was spooky. Randa had inherited Dominique’s thick dark hair and sultry blue eyes. He’d heard comments that Miranda was haughty, that she had ice water running through her veins, but she certainly wasn’t cold enough or stupid enough to have murdered the Taggert kid. No, Dutch wouldn’t believe it; Randa had been too self-possessed, a woman who knew what she wanted out of life.
Claire, his secondborn, had been the quiet one, a romantic by nature. As a kid she’d been gawky, plain in comparison with her sisters, but she’d grown into her looks, and he suspected that she would be the kind of woman who, as the years passed, would look better and better. At the time of Harley’s death she’d been a soft-spoken athletic girl, the middle sister, one to whom he hadn’t paid much attention. She never gave him any trouble except that she’d fallen in love with Harley Taggert. Then there was Tessa. The baby. And the rebel. There was no reason she would have wanted Harley Taggert dead. At least no reason Dutch knew about. And even now that thought settled like a stone in his gut.
Until recently, Dutch hadn’t lost much sleep
over the Taggert boy’s demise.
Now, his fingers grew sweaty around the steering wheel. Claire, with her haunted eyes and smattering of freckles, wasn’t a killer. She couldn’t be. Christ, there wasn’t a mean bone in her body. Or was there? What of Miranda? Maybe he didn’t know his eldest as well as he thought he did.
The sun was hanging low over the western hills, blinding him with its bright rays. He flipped down the visor. The road split and he turned toward the small town of Chinook and the old lodge he’d bought for a song.
The Caddy shimmied as Dutch took the corner too fast, but he barely noticed as he slid over the center line. A pickup going the opposite direction blasted its horn and skidded on the gravel shoulder to avoid collision.
“Bastard,” Dutch growled, still lost in thought. His youngest daughter, Tessa, was and always had been the maverick in the family. Blond and blue-eyed with a figure that, at twelve, had been obscenely curvaceous, Tessa had forever been the wild card in the deck that was the Holland family. Whereas Miranda had tried to please, and Claire had faded into the woodwork, Tessa had brazenly and willfully defied Dutch whenever she could. Knowing she was his favorite, she’d rebelled at every turn. Trouble—that’s what Tessa had been, but Dutch couldn’t believe, wouldn’t, that she was a killer.
“Damn it all to hell,” he muttered as he chewed on the end of his cigar. If only he’d been fortunate enough to have sired sons. Things would have been different. Far different. God had played a cruel trick on him with these girls.
Daughters always gave a man grief.
Easing off the accelerator at the crooked pine tree, the one he’d planted a lifetime ago, when he’d bought this place for Dominique, he guided the car into the private lane leading to the estate. He’d been a lovesick fool at the time he’d set that little pine into the ground, but the years had changed him, worn that love so thin it had shattered like crystal hurled against stone.
He unlocked the gates and drove along the cracked asphalt of the once-tended drive. The silvery waters of the lake winked seductively through the trees. How he’d loved this place.
Nostalgia tugged at his heart as he rounded a final bend and saw the house, a rambling old hunting lodge that, nestled in a stand of oak and fir, rose three stories to look upon the lake.
Home.
A place of triumph and heartache.
Thinking his wife would love it as much as he did, he’d bought the vast tree-covered acres for Dominique. From the moment she saw the rough timbers and open beams, she’d hated everything there was about their new home. Her appraising eyes had studied the steep angle of the roof, the cedar walls, plank floors, and pitched ceiling. She touched the wooden railing of the stairs, with its hand-carved banister and posts decorated with handcrafted Northwest creatures, and her nostrils had flared as if she’d suddenly come across a bad smell. “You bought this for me?” she’d asked, incredulous and bitterly disappointed. Her voice had echoed through the cavernous foyer. “This . . . this monstrosity?”
Miranda, barely four, the spitting image of her mother, had eyed the old house solemnly as if she’d expected all manner of ghosts, goblins, and monsters to appear at any given second.
