AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“He wasn’t, Grant,” she said.
“Bullshit, Regan. You can’t be so blind as to have missed the signs.” He paused. “Or maybe you did. You certainly missed all the signs that our marriage was dead in the water.”
Though what he said was partly true, it still hurt.
“Our marriage is over. I’m not talking about it.” She’d missed a lot of things in their marriage, but she couldn’t go back there, allow Grant to drag her into an argument. He always wanted to argue. He always wanted her to admit that she was in the wrong.
She waited for Grant. He had to drive this conversation; if she started asking questions, she’d go back into marshal-interviewing-a-fugitive mode, and he’d clam up or pick a fight. He was already starting with his snide comment. He hated that she could remain impartial in the face of high emotion. What was she supposed to do? Fall apart? She’d already done that after the murder of her son; she did not intend to do it again.
There was no one on the planet she loved more than her son.
“I tried to avoid Tom,” said Grant, “but he kept texting me. Said that Peter Grey was hired to kill Hannigan by Brock Marsh Security. It wasn’t in any records, nothing Tom or anyone could prove. I thought he was making it up. He had to have known that my law firm used Brock Marsh as legal investigators and negotiators. But Grey said the evidence was the fact that his daughter won the lottery.”
“Won the lottery?”
“Not literally. But Grey killed Hannigan and his daughter received a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar trust from a private partnership, ostensibly for college. She doesn’t know it was payment for murder, but I don’t know if she asked too many questions. Her daddy is in prison for life, and he was happy to do it. That’s what Tom said.”
She ran that through her head. Nothing in Tommy’s notes pointed to Grey’s daughter, so she hadn’t asked those questions. But if Tommy had learned it...if that information was with him when he was killed...it stood to reason it had jumpstarted Tommy’s investigation.
“Explain,” she said.
“Brock Marsh arranged the trust for his daughter. And as soon as Tom told me, I knew exactly how it happened. Franklin and I have done the same thing many times for our clients. You need to pay off a mistress, you arrange a trust, something that on the surface raises no flags. The firm puts it all together—our accountants create the trust, we take care of the legal paperwork, and Brock Marsh is in the field working with the beneficiary. Their team convinces the subject to sign on the dotted line, take the money, abort the baby, leave town, whatever it is that’s needed. And—according to Tom—pay for murder.”
“Accountants,” she murmured. “Let me guess: Legacy CPA.”
“Yeah. So you put it together, too. Just like Tom.”
“Partly.”
“It was a nasty part of our business, a gray area, but not overtly illegal. I mean—I’m not talking about Brock Marsh contracting to kill anyone, that I didn’t even suspect until Tom came to me—but all the rest. No one had to agree to the terms, they were free to pursue lawsuits or go to the press, but everyone took the money.” He said it wearily, like he had no faith in human nature. “Everyone,” he repeated. “Mistresses. Whistleblowers. Victims. Didn’t matter who, with enough money, our firm could make problems go away. And all our clients had enough money to make it happen.”
“Who hired Adam Hannigan to kill you?”
“I didn’t believe it,” he said.
“Answer the question, Grant! We don’t have the time for you to wallow in self-pity or guilt. I don’t know how safe this place is, I don’t know if Madeline’s killer tracked you here. What I do know is that a marshal is dead, a woman you loved is dead, and someone tried to kill me last night.”
That brought Grant out of his stupor. “What? Where? How?”
“Three men broke into Tommy’s while I was sleeping. Would have killed me in my sleep if I hadn’t woken up. I killed one, shot another, but he and his two partners escaped. They’re not going to be able to hide for long. We finally have the FBI on our side with this, and the FBI knows they have a mole. Between Arlington PD, the sheriff’s office, the FBI, and the Marshals—we’re going to stop this insanity. But I need you to start talking. Now, Grant.”
He looked her in the eye for the first time. Not her hair, not her shoulder, but directly in her eyes when he said, “I didn’t know, Regan. I swear to you on our son’s grave, I didn’t know I was the target. I didn’t know that Hannigan was hired to kill me. Not until Tom Granger told me. Then... I didn’t want to believe it...but I helped him. I had doubts when he laid it out, and I desperately wanted to prove him wrong. But I helped him.”
“Okay,” she said. Maybe that was the truth. Sounded true.
When he didn’t say anything else, she gave him a bone. He needed it, she realized. He needed her faith in him. She might not have much—but she could at least give him what she had. “I believe you.”
His eyes watered. He looked down at his coffee, picked up the mug, sipped. Grimaced. “You always loved your coffee strong.”
“I love the caffeine that comes with strong coffee.”
She waited. He was ready to talk; he had to do it at his own pace. She couldn’t yell at him, browbeat him into speeding things up...though the longer they sat here, the antsier she became.
“Brock Marsh gets the job done,” Grant said after a minute. “That’s what Franklin always said. We come up with the plan, Brock Marsh implements it. Generally to pay people off, a mistress or a disgruntled employee. But this time—it was one of our clients. Tom didn’t know which one—he only had some pieces; I had some pieces; a girl Tom was working with, Jenna Johns, had some pieces. But we didn’t know who was behind it. That’s why Tom needed me—to go deep into Archer Warwick files and find out who might have wanted me dead then, but not now. I went back to what I was working on at the time Chase was killed, to try and figure out what I might have known that made one of my clients nervous. Nervous enough to put a hit out on me.”
“And they hired Hannigan because of me,” she said flatly. “So that investigators would look at my job, my actions instead of your law firm.”
Grant nodded his head once. “That was Tom’s theory.”
