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“Want to know the kicker?” Clay said, pulling Nick from his thoughts.
Nick looked at him. “There’s more?”
“Leland’s been in rehab twice,” Clay said. “That I know of.”
“Do I want to know how you found that out?” HIPAA laws made it next to impossible to obtain someone’s medical records, to say nothing of the privacy concern. It was a violation even MIS used only in the rarest of cases.
“Probably not,” Clay said. “And you might not want to know how I found out about the assault charges either.”
“Assault charges?”
Clay nodded. “Five years ago our friend Leland was charged with assault by a woman he was dating. The charges were eventually dropped and I couldn’t find any mention of it in the news archives online.”
Nick rubbed the whiskers on his cheeks. “It’s thin.”
“A bit,” Clay admitted. “But a little much to be a coincidence.”
The picture was incomplete, but the one that was developing nagged at him. Leland Walker wouldn’t be the only rich alcoholic or addict in Boston with a violent streak, but he was the only one who’d struck up an alliance with the detective on Alexa’s case right after it had been closed.
Nick closed the folder with a sigh. “What a mess.”
“You thinking dirty cop?” Clay asked.
“There aren’t as many of them as people think,” Nick said, “but it wouldn’t be the first time.”
“It would have been one hell of a cleanup operation,” Clay said.
He was right: the disappearing CCTV footage, the absence of witnesses, the fact that a car had never turned up after the accident.
“If he runs, Leland Walker’s a shoe-in to take that Senate seat,” Nick said. “And that’s probably just the beginning of his political ambition.”
“That’s some powerful motivation,” Clay said.
Nick tried to imagine it: the man who’d killed Samantha Hancock, who’d left Alexa on the verge of death on a dark stretch of highway, becoming a Senator, maybe even sitting in the White House one day.
Fury washed over him. He couldn’t know yet if Leland was involved in Alexa’s accident, but if he was, Nick wouldn’t be able to let it stand, wouldn’t be able to look the other way while the man preened for cameras all the way to Pennsylvania Avenue.
“I take it you’ve got contact info on the woman? The one who filed the assault charges?” Nick asked.
Clay sighed. “In the folder.”
20
Alexa was standing in the contemporary fiction aisle when the hair rose on the back of her neck. She paused with a book in her hand and turned, expecting to see her mom waiting for her, but no one was there.
It wasn’t the first time. Over the past several days she’d often been struck by the feeling that she was being watched. She might be walking through the parking garage on her way to work or making her way through the grocery store, marking stuff off her list, only to feel a cold finger run up her spine.
She shook her head and put the book back on the shelf. She was being ridiculous, her paranoia over the call she’d made to Dave Kelly, one of her buddies at BPD, getting the best of her — and not just the call but the things she’d discovered when he’d given her the file on her accident.
She walked down the row of books, picking one up now and then when it caught her eye, but her mind was on the file and the words Dave had said when he’d handed it to her.
This thing’s on fire lately.
What do you mean?she’d asked.
Log says it’s been checked out three times in the past two months.
A coil of dread had unwound in her stomach. That Nick had friends at BPD who could get him a file was no surprise, but who else had been looking into a ten-year-old hit-and-run?
