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She looked at him as he ramped down his speech. She’d thought she might have some kind of trauma response to seeing him in person, but as she watched his eyes scan the crowd, making contact with the people staring up at him, she felt nothing.
He was just a man, unrecognizable to her except for the times she’d seen him on TV. It was hard to reconcile him with the person Nick had told her about, the man who was a drunk and an addict, who abused and hurt people and then let daddy wipe it all away with the stroke of a pen in his checkbook.
She shook her head and started making her way out of the crowd. She was being stupid, allowing Leland Walker’s charm to whitewash what he’d done, to make it seem distant and unimportant when it was anything but.
She thought of the ten-month-old baby who’d lost its mother when Leland crashed into them. The woman’s husband or family must have taken Frederick’s payoff out of necessity, because wasn’t that always how it was? People with money and power doing whatever they wanted at the expense of everyone else and then making it right with cold hard cash that victims didn’t have the luxury of declining?
How old was the baby now? Would he or she ever know that the man who’d killed its mother had paid his way out of truly paying for the crime?
Her stomach turned as she worked her way to the edge of the crowd. She was an Assistant Attorney General for the State of Massachusetts. She believed in the law. She had to believe in it. Otherwise what was the point in going to work every day? To sending cases through the system?
Behind her, the music started up again, signaling the end of the rally. She hurried to her car, thinking about work, about how to find a way forward both with what she knew about Leland Walker and what she needed to find out about Nick.
She’d taken off the last few days after returning from Havana. Imani had been nothing but supportive, knowing Alexa was reeling from the break-in at her apartment, but Monday was the moment of truth. She had to call the investigator on the Murphy case. She had to give Imani answers, and that meant finding answers for herself — whether she really wanted them or not.
15
Nick was sitting on the patio nursing a beer when Elise stepped out of the kitchen.
She sat next to him and held up a beer of her own, then clinked it against Nick’s. “To John Thomas.”
“To John Thomas,” Nick said. “May he have a long and happy life.”
It was well after midnight, the streets quiet except for the occasional rush of a car passing on the street beyond the courtyard.
“Pretty wild, huh?” Elise asked.
“That’s one way of putting it,” Nick said.
Ronan had been surprisingly calm when Nick told him Julia was in labor, his expression turning almost stony as he’d helped Julia up from the beach chair and across the sand to the car.
He’d been gentle with her, but Nick had seen the determined light in Ronan's eyes, knew that behind his love for his wife was the cold determination of a soldier committed to making sure nothing went wrong.
Julia had instructed them all to stay at the house, telling them it could be hours before the baby came, but Elise didn’t even pretend to listen. She and Nick and Dec had followed Ronan to the hospital, camping out in the maternity wing’s waiting room, drinking bad coffee and raiding the vending machine until Ronan finally emerged to tell them it was a boy.
Julia’s mother, Lisa, had been there by then, along with Thomas Murphy, the patriarch of the Murphy clan. Nick’s dad had passed out cigars, then tried to light one before one of the nurses shut him down in no uncertain terms.
Lisa had covered her hand with her mouth as tears streamed down her face, then wrapped Ronan in an embrace, and they’d all gone to the nursery, exclaiming on the other side of the glass a half hour later when the nurses wheeled in the bassinet holding John Thomas Murphy.
“I wish my gramps was here,” Elise said softly.
Nick reached for her hand. “I wish that too.”
It was only because of John Taylor, Elise and Julia’s grandfather, that the baby had been born at all. John had been the one to hire MIS to find Elise and punish the men who took her.
Nick had been there when Manifest, the international trafficking ring that had taken Elise, had sent a group of mercenaries to John’s house. He’d gone down fighting, but watching such a good man die protecting his granddaughters remained one of the worst days of Nick’s life.
“Now we have another John,” she said.
“I’m sure he’ll be every bit as wonderful as your gramps,” Nick said.
“And your dad,” Elise added.
Nick nodded. Ronan and Julia had kept their choice of names a secret, and Nick had been as surprised as anyone when they’d given the baby a name to honor both John Taylor and Thomas Murphy. Ronan’s relationship with his father had been complicated and had only recently begun to mend after Ronan’s marriage to Julia.
Nick didn’t think he’d been imagining the tears that shimmered in their father’s eyes when Ronan announced the baby’s name.
“Are you okay?” Elise asked. “You’ve seemed weird all night. I mean, it was a weird night, but I have a feeling there’s more to it than the baby.”
