I thought about it. The thing I didn’t understand was what kept Britt and Abby together. If I’d been with a woman who had gotten pregnant by another man—any man, never mind her father—I would have hightailed it outta there at the first opportunity.

  “It didn’t have to be Carlton,” Laura said, and now her voice was very soft. “What about Ralph?”

  “Oh my God,” Abby said, and buried her face in her hands again. “You know about that. Jesus fucking Christ would you please drop this? Can’t you leave me some dignity?”

  Laura knelt beside Abby and patted her gently on the shoulder.

  “It’s too late for that,” she said. “Things have gone too far. We have to know everything if we’re going to find out who killed Britt. You want that, don’t you? Look at me, Abby. You want whoever killed your fiancé to pay for it, right?”

  Abby nodded. Her eyes were dull with hurt and confusion. D’Agostino fixed me with a look, and after a moment I understood. It was my turn to step in. Laura’s role from here on out would be to sympathize, to show concern without judgment or hesitation. I took a deep breath and proceeded.

  “Why couldn’t it have been Ralph?”

  Laura slipped from the floor up to the couch beside Abby. She had her arm around the girl now, seeming to hold her up by sheer force of will. Abby looked like she wanted to be anywhere but trapped between the two of us.

  “The timing wasn’t right,” Abby said finally. “I tried to blame him, but Britt wouldn’t believe me. He kept after me, trying to make me tell. And one night I just had enough, you know? So I just blurted it out.”

  I scrubbed a palm over the scruff of stubble on my chin.

  “Where did the medical records come from?”

  Abby’s shoulders shook, and Laura squeezed her a little tighter.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “One day he just had them. Told me that my Dad wasn’t going to bother me, ever again. You see how well that worked out. I went to the clinic and, you know.”

  She spread her palms open as if to say “there you go.”

  I felt sick to my stomach. If I weren’t so goddamned tough, I might have cried. As it was, I held myself to a sniffle or two. D’Agostino kept her arm around Abby and rocked her back and forth gently. The alcohol and the emotional outbursts had drained the young woman, and she eventually closed her eyes. D’Agostino stayed where she was, like the Rock of Gibraltar that would always be there, holding Abby as though she were a small child until her chin tilted down into the hollow of Laura’s shoulder. I got a couple of pillows from the guest room and put them on the couch, and D’Agostino leaned Abby sideways until her head was on them. Then I took a throw blanket off of the back of the other couch and covered the girl.

  D’Agostino and I padded silently back to her bedroom, where I closed and locked the door. Laura stepped toward me, slipping her arms around my waist, and I held onto her tightly.

  “I need another shower,” she said. “That was the worst thing I’ve ever heard. That poor girl.”

  “I don’t understand why Britt stayed,” I said. “I would have run for the fucking hills if my girlfriend had wound up pregnant by another man.”

  “Right? Anyone would have.”

  “So what made him stay? Do you think he really loved her?”

  D’Agostino shot me the kind of look that Eve must have saved for Adam after the Fall, full of knowledge and cynicism I would never be able to understand. I felt withered and slightly ashamed under the weight of that gaze, and I took my arms from around her.

  “Hey,” she said. “Come back here. Maybe you’re right. Maybe he really did love her.”

  I came back willingly enough, and when we were fitted together again like pieces of a puzzle made for one another, I kissed her forehead.

  “You don’t buy it, though.”

  D’Agostino grinned up at me and stroked the stubble of my half-grown beard.

  “Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it, and not because she was probably right. I was able to look at the male and female relationship we were talking about and see it in softer, romantic terms. D’Agostino was a cop—and a woman—so she didn’t have that luxury. In my experience, men tended to believe themselves more rational and less emotional than women, but we all lie to ourselves. When it came down to it, women were far more practical. They didn’t have the luxury of looking at themselves in romantic terms like we did.

  “So why else would he stay? What does he get out of it?”

  D’Agostino thought for a little while, and I watched the adorable little furrow in her brow while she did it.

  “Access,” she said. “That’s all I can think of.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But access to what?”

  D’Agostino kissed me long and hard, her hands gliding up under my tee-shirt and tracing the wide, thick muscles along either side of my spine. I responded, slipping my hands inside her shorts to cup her firm backside.

  “We’ll ask her when we wake up,” D’Agostino said, and began busying herself again with my belt buckle.

  Twenty Four

  It’s an odd thing to wake up in a bed with one woman while knowing that there’s another one waiting, lurking out in the living space with judgmental eyes and a potential grudge against you. But there I was for the second straight morning, and I’ve got to be honest: waking up next to Laura D’Agostino was worth whatever acid expression Abby Doyle could muster.

  I opened my eyes to find D’Agostino already awake, head on the pillow next to mine. She was watching me carefully, a half-smile playing over her face. I covered my mouth and yawned.

  “What?” I said.

  “Nothing,” she said, and waited a beat. “Only … I never expected this. Did you?”

  I shook my head and, in the process, nestled further into the soft down pillow. D’Agostino slid in against me underneath the covers, her naked thigh warm and inviting against my legs. She propped herself up on one elbow in order to see me better in the soft light of morning that streamed weakly around the blinds in her bedroom, and the sheet fell away from her breasts. We both smiled when I couldn’t manage to maintain eye contact with her for more than a few seconds.

  “Men,” she said, and leaned forward to kiss me. I responded, and for a little while there were no words exchanged, just slow and rhythmic movements punctuated by soft moans were short by hungry mouths. When we were done, we lay on our backs, gasping for breath. Other than our hands, which were twined together between our bodies, we didn’t touch at all. A thin sheen of sweat covered us. I could taste the salt of her perspiration on my tongue, smell the sweet musk of our sex, feel the ghost of her arms as they had squeezed tightly around my neck and pulled me me ever forward, as we both climaxed.

  “Holy God,” I said, my voice hushed in awe, as though I had just discovered prayer. And maybe in some sense I had. I had never experienced the kind of physical chemistry that I had with D’Agostino.

  She rose from the bed and went into the bathroom. After a few minutes, I heard the toilet flush, and she came out with a towel. I took it from her and dried myself. Then we each hunted up our clothes and got dressed.

  This time Abby wasn’t waiting for us. The guest room door was closed, and the apartment was quiet. I set about finding something new to make for breakfast, mixing up some heavy cream and eggs, adding a dash of cinnamon and some sugar. Then I heated a pan to medium and dipped some thickly sliced bread in the egg mixture and let the slices cook on one side while D’Agostino made coffee.

  I flipped the bread, and the smell of French toast and coffee filled the apartment. The aroma was enough to wake Abby, who wandered out of the guest room in boy shorts and a white shirt so thin it was see-through. I tried not to look—at least when D’Agostino was watching—but I don’t think I had much success.

  “Oink,” she said, banging one hip into me when my glance rested on Abby’s chest for too long. “If I wanted a male chauvinist pig, I work with a couple thousand.”

  Admonished, I turned back to my French toast, using a plastic spatula to flip the slices from the pan to a plate. Soon the stack was high and my egg wash was depleted. D’Agostino watched me plate for everyone, and then she pulled a small earthenware jug of maple syrup from the pantry and broke the seal on it.

  “I’ve been waiting for an excuse to open this,” she said, and poured some syrup on her toast. “Come to mama.”

  We dug in. Abby hadn’t said much since she’d come out of the bedroom. Her hair was still a mess, mostly covering her eyes and giving her face a darker, more shadowy cast than usual. I was worried about her mental state. She’d had to face some awful truths about herself and her father in a very short amount of time. But she ate her food and drank her coffee, and after a little while D’Agostino took out her cell phone.

  “I took some photos of Britt’s office,” she said to Abby. “Do you think you could look at them with us?”

  Abby nodded, and D’Agostino shifted over so that they could both get a good look at the photos on her phone. Laura went through the images slowly, looking from my phone back to Abby’s face to see if anything registered. I was sitting across the table from them, so I couldn’t see the images. Instead I looked for tells on Abby’s face. But mostly she just looked puzzled.

  “Can I see them again?” She said, her voice sounding remarkably like a little girl’s.

  Shock, I thought. She’s in shock. I didn’t blame her. I would be, too. The last few days had thrown nothing at her except one disaster after another, and I had to wonder how long she could hold up under this kind of mental and emotional strain.

  Once she went through the pictures again, Abby looked at D’Agostino. “Where’s his laptop?”

  I stared at them. Britt had a laptop, and I knew it. I could remember seeing it sitting atop his desk the first time I made my way into that office. It was password protected, I remembered that, too. There was no way I could access the information on it, so I’d dismissed it. Apparently, someone else hadn’t.

  “There was a laptop in his office?” D’Agostino said.

  “Yes,” Abby said. “He usually kept it on the desk there, on top of the blotter, when he was charging it.”

  “Shit,” I said. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  D’Agostino glanced at me, her eyes round.

  “I saw it,” I said. “When we were in the house the first time. I didn’t even think about it yesterday.”

  D’Agostino’s lips clamped together in a hard line, and I saw her start to say something, then she closed her mouth and changed tactics. She wanted to ream me out, I could tell. And I didn’t blame her. But it wouldn’t have done any good, so she closed that thought off and pushed on. She turned back to Abby.

  “What did Britt keep on his laptop?”

  Abby shrugged.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess work stuff. I was never involved in his business, so I didn’t have access to his work computer, you know. And didn’t want to, either. I can’t think of anything more boring than accounting. God, and I was going to marry him. Can you imagine?”

  I couldn’t, but that answer wouldn’t get us anywhere. Instead I tried to think. Who would want Britt’s computer? And the answer to that depended on what kind of information he kept on there. He hadn’t kept the records of Abby’s pregnancies and subsequent abortions on his computer, but that may have been because the reports didn’t originate with him. He probably got hold of hard copies through a crooked hospital official so there wouldn’t be any kind of digital trail.

  Laura touched a button on the side of her phone, and the screen went black. I refilled our coffee cups and sat back down across from her at the dining table.

  “Here’s what I keep thinking,” she said. “You’ve got Doyle on one side, and you’ve got Martin James on the other.”

  “Yes,” I said. “And don’t forget about Becks. He’s out there, too.”

  She nodded. “Sure, sure. But I think he may be secondary. I think the real players here are Doyle and James. You get two rich guys together in a land deal, and what do you have?”

  “A lot of money,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Laura said. “And you know the kind of guy Doyle is. Do you think all of his money is clean?”

  “Of course not.”

  D’Agostino grinned that wolfish hungry grin that she wore sometimes, like an apex predator on the prowl for its next meal.

  “So Doyle’s dirty money goes into the land deal,” she said.

  “And Martin James’s clean money comes out the other side,” I finished for her. “It’s so clean you could fold it and put it away in your bureau.”

  Abby’s jaw had dropped open. She looked back and forth from D’Agostino to me.

  “Are you saying that’s why Britt stayed with me?”

  I didn’t want to look at her. Abby was already feeling shattered. I didn’t know how much more she could take.

  “Maybe,” Laura said. “But maybe it’s more than one thing. Maybe he had feelings for you. But when he found out about the Carraway deal between your father and Martin, I think he used those records to cut himself in.”

  “And he could be helpful to them,” I said. “He was an accountant. He’d know how to hide money. It makes sense.”

  “But he loved me,” Abby said. “Britt would have stood on his head for me.”

  D’Agostino patted Abby’s thigh.

  “I’m sure he cared about you,” she said, trying to soothe Abby. She put her arm around the young woman and pulled her into a tight hug. “People aren’t just one thing, you know. Maybe we’re making it more simple than it was.”

  Laura shot me a warning glance while Abby wasn’t looking, so I didn’t say what I was thinking.

  The Carraway property was potentially worth hundreds of millions. Seeing it developed would be a boon to the local economy, and it would also create hundreds—maybe thousands—of ways for Doyle to launder money. I thought our logic was sound. Unfortunately, we lacked any hard proof. Maybe if we could find Britt’s laptop, the proof for the whole scheme would come out and we’d find out who had actually killed him.

  Abby sat up straight then, and D’Agostino released her.

  “I think I want to be by myself for a little while,” she said, and without another word, she went back into the guest room and closed the door. In a little while, we heard the shower begin to run. D’Agostino and I cleared breakfast plates and pre-washed dishes, finally loading everything into the dishwasher. We didn’t talk. I think we were afraid to. We went back into the bedroom and closed the door so that we could talk in private.

  “So which one of them benefits from Britt being dead?” I asked.

  “Carlton, for sure. The blackmail about Abby never gets out. It’s the only handle I can think of that anyone’s ever had on him.”

  I kind of agreed, but the fact was that I didn’t like Martin James, and a murder of opportunity seemed his style. Maybe I was projecting. Did I fear Carlton Doyle? Absolutely. But I also respected the viciousness and violence in the man. Going near him was like getting into a cage with a King Cobra: things could go south at any moment.

  “I think it’s Martin,” I said. “Britt and Abby have been together for more than a year, right? Carlton’s used to having that handle on his back by now. But Martin, I mean, what if he saw an opportunity to take out someone who had muscled in on his deal?

  D’Agostino nodded slowly. I don’t know if she bought my logic entirely, but she could see that it was certainly possible.

  “We’ve got to talk to them both anyway,” she said. “Martin first, then Carlton.”

  We knocked on Abby’s door. She didn’t open it, just called through the door to let us know that she was all right. So D’Agostino told her that we would be out for a while, and to help herself to anything she wanted, but not to venture out.

  “Got it,” came Abby’s muffled reply. “House arrest.”

  “There goes my wine collection,” Laura said when we were safely out in the hall. We hustled down to her Charger, and then she rocketed away from her building before I could get my seat belt fastened.

  At the Tower building, everything seemed normal until we got out of the elevator. When the door opened onto the fifth floor, I could smell it: Someone had fired a gun in here, and recently. D’Agostino caught the whiff of it, too, and her weapon was in her hand before I could even draw mine. We went down the hallway cautiously and found the door of Martin James’ office suite ajar. I eased the door open more fully, and D’Agostino went in high while I followed low. The smell of gunfire was thicker in here.

  Jenna, Martin’s secretary, would never take dictation again. Two rounds had done her in: one in the throat and one, probably fired when she was on the floor, in the center of her forehead. I looked away. D’Agostino moved through the room, looking everywhere, even in the kneehole of the desk where Jenna had late sat.

  “Clear,” she said, her voice low.

  Martin James’ inner office door hadn’t been fixed since my previous visit. Going into the room, D’Agostino and I changed tactics: I went in standing, and she slipped in beside me in a scrabbling crouch to go low.

  Martin James leaned back in his big leather captain’s chair, a look of surprise forever frozen on his face. His white shirt had been ruined by three shots to the center of his mass, and his hands were cast wide open as if he had welcomed the embrace of death. His mouth was open, and blood had run from the corners. In death, he had soiled his gabardine slacks, and the smell was thick and clotted in the small space. Beside me, D’Agostino had holstered her weapon and drew her phone out, calling in a double homicide to the Homewood PD. We were about to be really popular.

  D’Agostino was already slated to be suspended. We’d been shot at on Friday, and here on a Saturday before noon, we’d found two bodies.

  And the blood wasn’t even sticky yet.

  “I don’t understand,” D’Agostino said after killing the call. “If James is supposed to launder your cash, why would you kill him? It doesn’t make sense.”

 

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