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“All of this,” Finley said, when he continued to hesitate, “coalesces with Winthrop. Nora Duncan died, and Winthrop promised Duncan’s mother that she would find the culprit and make him pay. A fewmonths later she marries Jarrod Grady, a.k.a. Alex Wilensky, a.k.a. Ned Beale. A couple months after that, Grady is dead. Coincidence?” Finley shrugged. “I’m having trouble with that one, Jack. If Ventura finds Marsh and connects her to Duncan, our defense is screwed. On top of that, we’ve got this wild card in Lauder.”
Jack held up his hands stop sign fashion. “All right. You’re thinking Winthrop set up this Grady/Wilensky/Beale/whatever to achieve a proper revenge for what he did to her friend Nora Duncan?”
Finley nodded. “She wanted him to know what it felt like. A real eye-for-an-eye revenge. But something went wrong. I haven’t figured that part out just yet, but the plan went awry somewhere along the way. Maybe there was an actual affair with Lauder, and that turned everything upside down. Like I said, she’s our wild card.”
“The real question is,” Jack countered, “can Ventura prove any of this if push comes to shove?”
“It wouldn’t be easy.” Finley considered their one, elderly witness—Rantz. Could her testimony sway a jury? Maybe. Maybe not. “As long as Marsh is gone for good, Winthrop is probably in the clear. Ventura has Marsh’s prints on the murder weapon. The fact that she has taken off lends credibility to the theory. Case closed.”
Winthrop would be cleared of suspicion, and that would be that.
Were they protecting a murderer? Finley didn’t really believe that to be the case. Was she wrong? Maybe.
Jack shook his head. “Why marry the guy? Why not have her revenge on their first date? Why go through the whole wedding fiasco?”
“The goal,” Finley reasoned, “I’m sure, was to take Grady down all the way. Though he was the target, Winthrop must have believed there was a partner. She wanted to get them both. This was personal. This was payback.” God, did she understand the need for payback. Just look at what Finley had been doing for months now. Two men were dead. She hadn’t killed them, but she had wanted it to happen so badly. Thenthere was the collateral damage like Whitney Lemm. And Houser. The thought made her sick with regret.
“Maybe the murder wasn’t supposed to happen,” Finley allowed, “but somehow it did, and for that they needed a fall guy. Who better than his partner to take that fall? Marsh’s prints were planted on the murder weapon, and that was that.”
“Marsh figured it out,” Jack continued, “realized she was being set up, so she tossed us that lead before disappearing. Makes a certain kind of sense.”
“I have to hand it to Winthrop,” Finley confessed, not wanting to be impressed but impressed anyway. “Ifthis theory is even close to right, she went to great lengths to cover every possible scenario. Whatever part she and her partners played, I’m guessing they’re going to get away with it. The whole scenario played out like a well-rehearsed scene.”
Was the idea a travesty of justice? Or was it simply justice? Finley examined the idea for a moment. Grady’s death was not a travesty when weighed against the cost of what he and Marsh had done—maybe many times over. Against the law, yes; unconscionable, sort of; but she could see how someone like Winthrop could be pushed over that edge. Finley had been there.
Wasthere still—to some degree.
“You’re thinking this might not be their first time avenging a wrong against women,” Jack suggested.
Finley shrugged. She thought of the way every potential issue had been accounted for—covered. “Maybe I am. Look at the research that went into who Grady was and what he had done. Winthrop and her team tracked his activities back five years. Are we really going to believe work that thorough happened in the past four days? They had to know this already. Grady was maybe the latest of a long line of targets.”
“That’s a pretty big leap, kid,” Jack pointed out.
Something Nora Duncan’s mother, Norine, had said popped out at Finley. “Wait.” She mulled over the conversation. “Maybe not. Duncan’s mother mentioned Winthrop’s father being a devil. She said he abused hislittle girl—our client. He finally got his, Duncan mentioned. She called it a lucky break for Winthrop. When I searched Winthrop’s father, the only thing about his death I found was that it had been a bizarre accident.” A final, big fat piece of the puzzle clicked into place, and a smile tugged at Finley’s lips. “Really bizarre. His own truck rolled over him.”
Jack shifted slightly in his chair as if wrestling with her ideas. “Now you’re suggesting Winthrop—as a child—killed her own father and made it look like an accident?”
“I’m suggesting,” Finley objected, “that she had help. Duncan said that Pettit took Ellen in after that. Raised her like her own daughter.”
Something in Jack’s expression changed. “Now you’re giving me something to work with. Pettit was there to take care of Winthrop. After what Grady—or whoever the hell he was—did to Nora Duncan, Winthrop was there for Pettit.”
“Yes. It was the least Winthrop could do,” Finley said, the idea solidifying, “after what Pettit had done for her.”
Jack leaned forward, braced his elbows on his desk, and stroked his chin. “Bottom line, what woman wouldn’t want a man like Grady to get what was coming to him?” He shrugged. “To that end, Winthrop and her partners may have formed a sort of secret society like inThe Star Chamber.”
The Star Chamber.The decades-old film based on the centuries-old English court had still been late-night fodder when Finley was in law school. “You’re suggesting they would ferret out these leeches and take them out of play rather than allow them to escape justice.”
Jack grimaced. “The crack in that theory is that surely someone would have noticed large numbers of thieving Casanovas suddenly being found toes up?”
“Or maybe murder was never involved until this time—Winthrop’s father notwithstanding.” The idea was catching on fire with Finley now. “Once he was outed, what guy was going to involve the police, particularly if the group had something on him? Maybe the threat to publicly out him was enough to keep him on the straight and narrow.”
“Professor Della Michaels,” Jack announced, grinning as he leaned back in his chair.
“First-year criminal law,” Finley said, frowning since she didn’t see the connection. “She was my professor. Everyone wanted to take her class. Only a select few had the honor.”
Jack explained, “I went to law school with her.”
Finley held up a hand. “I don’t want to hear about whatever the two of you had going.”
