They Sought Vengeance, page 21
Garcia nodded slowly. She leaned on one of the chairs but still didn’t sit down. Zachary suspected that she preferred the power position. “So you didn’t know that he was a loan shark.”
Logan’s eyes widened. He scowled at this and shook his head. “No. A loan shark? He was in finance. Yes, he invested in companies, but that’s not the same as a loan shark.”
“Loaning money to individuals and companies at usurious rates where they can barely afford the interest payments, if that? That’s what you call a loan shark,” Garcia told him.
“That’s not what he did. You just don’t understand the business.”
“Your sister didn’t give us many of his business papers to draw conclusions from. But from what we can see, yes, that’s exactly what he did. Why do you think he got these complaints and threats? Why do you think someone was stalking him?”
“No one was stalking him.”
“You know that he was concerned that night. That he was watching the windows and acting as if he expected someone.”
“Stalking,” Logan repeated, shaking his head as if the idea itself were ridiculous.
“There were threats made against his life. And then he died. And then there were threats made against your lives. Don’t you think there might be something to that? I want you to think back to what you know of his business—what you know firsthand to be true—and tell me that I’m wrong.”
Logan didn’t even consider it. “No. That’s nonsense. We have old money. He had a respectable job. He didn’t do anything criminal or immoral. He was an upright citizen, and if I hear you slandering him in the press or blaming him for his own death, you will hear from our lawyers.”
“No one is talking to the press here. No one is slandering anyone. I’m talking to you. Asking you to think about what you know about his business.”
“I know he wasn’t a loan shark,” Logan said stubbornly. “And now, I would like you to leave my house. I don’t need this from you.”
“I thought you wanted to hear what I had discovered.”
Logan stopped, his glass halfway to his mouth. “I thought that was your news.”
Garcia shook her head.
“Well, will you get on with it, then?” he said in exasperation. “Explain this amazing news you needed to share with me.”
44
John Godfrey was not your father.”
Logan just sat there, looking as if he hadn’t heard what Garcia said.
Zachary supposed it was so shocking that Logan didn’t know what to think about the news. He was processing it, parsing it out, trying to figure out what it meant to him. Whether it was potentially true.
That, or he was shutting down, unable to believe it.
Garcia sat down, pulling one of the other club chairs closer to Logan’s. She gazed at him, their eyes now level.
“Logan. Did you hear what I said? John Godfrey was not your father. Not your biological relative.”
Logan shook his head slowly. He drained his glass, but didn’t seem able to get up and get himself a refill.
“We have compared your DNA with your siblings’ and your father’s, and you are not John Godfrey’s child.”
“I didn’t give you permission to do that.”
“You gave us your DNA. And when it turned out that the note writer was biologically related to you but not your siblings, we had to dig down deeper and investigate why.”
“That’s not possible. He might have threatened to disown me, but I know he was my father. My real father. My biological father. I don’t know whose samples you’ve mixed up with mine, but there’s been a mistake. You’re not even supposed to be investigating me. That DNA was for elimination purposes. That’s what you said. And you’ve obviously made some kind of mistake. You need to get it straightened out.”
“We’ve double-checked our results. We will be doing more extensive testing, but we are confident about the initial results. John Godfrey was not your biological father.”
“And the others? Was he theirs?”
“We haven’t reviewed the others’ results since they were unrelated to the letter writer. But I can tell you they do not share the same biological father as you.”
“Are you telling me he was their father but not mine?” Logan demanded, his voice rising in outrage. He seemed even more upset at the thought that his siblings were John Godfrey’s offspring than that he wasn’t. Zachary supposed that if he knew that his siblings were not John’s children, it would at least put the four of them back on the footing. As things stood, Logan was the odd man out. The illegitimate child, who they could now challenge for his portion of the estate.
“I’m not telling you anything about their parentage. Only yours. You never knew?”
“Of course not.” Logan shook his head. His mouth twisted into a bitter expression. “Though I suppose it would explain a few things.”
Garcia nodded encouragingly. “Like what?”
“Why I’m so much younger than the others. Why he had no interest in me. Why I didn’t inherit any of his interests or abilities. I thought maybe my learning disabilities were because he was so old when I was conceived. I know with older mothers, you get kids with Down Syndrome and other stuff. Maybe with an older father, you get other disabilities. But if he wasn’t my father, it would explain why I didn’t inherit anything from him.”
“But you never guessed that he wasn’t your father. And he and your mother never said anything that might have indicated that they were aware of it.”
“No. They never said anything around me.”
“We’ll need to take a look at your birth certificate. And find out whether she may have used a sperm donor. She might have if she still wanted more children and your father… wasn’t able.”
Logan looked at his glass, clenched between white fingers as if he were considering throwing it. But he didn’t. “Do you really think that my parents would put another man’s name on my birth certificate? Do you know the kind of scandal that would cause? And no, my mother did not use a sperm donor. She made it quite clear that they had thought they were finished having children and my coming along was a surprise.”
“That might not have been true. That might have just been to protect your father’s reputation.’’
“No. It wasn’t.”
Garcia didn’t say anything else. Logan sat there brooding.
“What did you mean…?” Logan said finally. “You said that I was related to the letter writer. What letter writer? The threat? The second and third generation thing?”
“Yes,” Garcia agreed. “You’re related to the person who wrote that threat. And who wrote a previous threat against your father.”
“Related how?”
“They are telling me that from the DNA you share with the letter writer, it would appear that you are siblings. Half siblings.”
“Sharing a father.”
“Yes.”
“So somewhere out there, I have a half-sibling who just killed my father.”
“The father who raised you. Maybe. We don’t know yet whether he killed John Godfrey or for sure that he was, in fact, murdered. We are still trying to find signs of the kind of poison that might have been used or how it was administered. If it was poisoning.”
“He? So it was a brother?”
“Yes. The Y-chromosome confirms that the letter writer was a male.”
“And I’ve never met him before,” Logan mused. “You have no idea what a strange feeling that is.”
Having just met his first set of DNA half-siblings recently, Zachary could relate. It was a bizarre feeling to know that he had brothers and sisters out there who he had never met. And there were still more. Several that had been signed up with the DNA registry, and who knew how many others Berk Goldman had fathered who had not had their DNA tested and had no idea that Zachary and the others were out there?
“You can’t tell any of this to the others,” Logan said. “This is private medical information. You have to keep that confidential by law. I know that. You can’t tell the others what you found out.”
“I think it will probably get out whether we say anything or not,” Garcia said. “These things have a way of coming to the surface. Especially with all of the ancestral DNA stuff available now.”
“You can’t repeat it to anyone.”
“Unfortunately, I can’t promise you that no one will be told. We need to pursue this investigation. We’ll try to give you your privacy, but you need to understand that this is a key piece of information you can’t keep to yourself. It may be one of the only leads we have on the identity of the letter writer. Who may, in turn, be the killer.”
“I’ll take you to court. You’d better not think you can get away with slandering my mother in this ‘investigation’ of yours.”
“That is not my intention.”
Logan shook his head, not sure what to say to this. He wanted assurances, but Garcia wasn’t giving them to him.
45
Do you have any of your mother’s old papers around?” Garcia asked. “Any personal correspondence, journals, photos…”
“You think I would give them to you? Knowing what you are going to be looking for? You’re trying to smear her reputation. Speculate about who she might have been having an affair with. Who my biological father is.”
Garcia nodded her agreement. “We need to learn everything we can about her life around the time you were conceived. Who lived here and was on the staff. Who she spent her time with when Mr. Godfrey was out of the house. I’m sorry if it sounds sordid. We’re not looking for dirt. Just facts.”
“My mother did not sleep with someone on the staff,” Logan insisted, wrinkling his nose. “She was a lady! I can’t believe you would even suggest such a thing.”
“I didn’t exactly say that. If anyone who was on the staff then is still around or you know how to reach them, they would be a very good source of information.”
“Mrs. Kennedy was here then, wasn’t she?” Zachary suggested, remembering the previous discussions. The kids had grown up with Mrs. Kennedy and she could probably tell them a thing or two about how the household had been run and who Mrs. Godfrey might have been seeing when the master of the house was away.
Logan sent a scowl in Zachary’s direction. “I don’t want you talking to Mrs. Kennedy. You shouldn’t be bothering her with something like this. It’s not right. You’re sullying my mother’s reputation.”
“I had nothing to do with who she decided to sleep with,” Garcia said firmly. “That was solely her decision, and with DNA technology as omnipresent as it is now, it would come out sooner or later. Someone doing DNA genealogy is going to figure it out. All kinds of family secrets that were safe, even ones that happened two or three generations ago, are being outed now.”
“How could we have gotten ourselves into this kind of a mess? You can’t control a technology like that.” Logan shook his head. “It could disrupt everything.”
Zachary hadn’t thought about it that way. He had been interested in connecting with his siblings, that was all. And they had used DNA on Heather’s case to figure out the identity of the man who had assaulted her. But other than that, Zachary didn’t see it as any different from any other technology that allowed him to make connections between people.
But to Logan, it was different. Something that could prevent him from getting the money he was expecting. Maybe something that could set the whole structure of high society on its head when people made discoveries about infidelities that had been going on undiscovered for generations.
“I gotta hit the head,” Logan said abruptly. He set his heavy glass down on a table with a thunk and got to his feet. “I’d ask you to show yourselves out, but I have a feeling you’re not going to do that.”
“I’m hoping you’ll be able to provide us with some papers,” Garcia said. “Maybe I should ask Karen. She seems to be the one who was saddled with looking after the paperwork in the wake of your parents’ deaths.”
“You are not going to talk to Karen about my mother’s papers,” Logan said firmly. He shook his head as he walked away from them to visit a nearby bathroom. Garcia waited until Logan’s footsteps had faded and they heard the click of a shutting door before speaking.
“This is a situation that needs to be managed with some delicacy,” Garcia told Zachary unnecessarily. “The police department has to deal with frivolous lawsuits all the time. We don’t want to have to defend against one from such a prominent family.”
“Well, as you said, you’re not smearing them. You’re just trying to find out the truth. To catch a murderer. The killer of their father. They can’t exactly complain about that.”
“Oh, they can complain about anything they like, believe me,” Garcia said with a chuckle. “But I’m going to have to dig deeper despite any objections. If we are going to figure out who this half-sibling is, then we need to have some idea of who Mrs. Godfrey was spending time with at that time.”
“Do you want me to talk to Mrs. Kennedy while you talk to Logan? I can get some names from her.”
“You will not!” Logan said sharply, returning to the study through another door. “I told you; the staff won’t know anything about this. If either of my parents had affairs, they would have been very discreet about it. They didn’t go around flaunting their outside relationships.”
“If it was with a staff member, then Mrs. Kennedy might have become aware of it,” Garcia pointed out.
“Members of this family do not go around having affairs with the servants,” Logan said primly.
He pressed his lips closed and proceeded to turn very pink. Zachary watched him change color, trying to read his expression and body language. Even though Logan’s words had been angry and aggressive, his blush and body language suggested something else. Embarrassment over his mother’s affair? Something that he had said that was not true? Maybe he knew that the blanket statement that no one in the family had affairs with the servants was false. If he didn’t know about his mother’s affair, then what? Was he thinking about an affair that John Godfrey or one of his siblings had indulged in?
Somehow, Zachary didn’t think so. He had not acted that concerned about what his father or siblings might have done before. He was remote and unconcerned. The information about his mother had made an impact, but this was something different.
“Are you talking about your affair?” Zachary asked, keeping his voice level and neutral.
Garcia turned around and looked at him, her expression surprised. Then she looked back at Logan and the two of them watched his face get even redder. Logan spluttered and couldn’t find coherent words at first.
“Which one was it with?” Zachary asked, mentally reviewing the staff members he had met or seen at work. There was no way to tell exactly who someone would be attracted to. While the default was someone attractive, reasonably close in age, of the opposite gender, that was by no means the only possibility.
But he had found that most people had types. Logan’s girlfriend was nice-looking, blond, and close to his age. There was a good chance that if he’d had an affair with a staff member, she had been similar in most respects.
“Would that have been Charlotte?”
Logan’s mouth hung open. He took off his glasses and smudged them with his shirt, putting them back on eventually and looking at Zachary with anxious, glistening eyes.
“There was no affair,” he said flatly.
“Are you talking about your mother or you? Because I think you’ve pretty clearly answered the question about whether you had an affair with the staff,” Garcia said, enunciating her words clearly, as if they were all separate instead of part of a sentence.
“I did not have an affair with Charlotte.” Logan choked the words out, barely able to get them past his lips. It was clear that his body rebelled against such a blatant lie. He was fine with small social lies. But his relationship with Charlotte was much too important to him to be lied away.
All three of them knew that he hadn’t managed to convince anyone of the veracity of his story.
“Is this affair ongoing, or was it only temporary?” Garcia asked.
“I told you there was no affair.”
“And there clearly was. Or is. Which is it?”
Logan shook his head. “It isn’t like that. I know she’s staff, but… it wasn’t about looks, or about me having power over the staff. It’s not ‘lord of the manor’ stuff; she was attracted to me too. It wouldn’t have mattered where we met or that we were on two different social levels.”
“Was attracted or is attracted,” Garcia persisted.
“Is, I guess.”
“You still have a relationship with her?”
“Yeah. I guess so.” Logan looked down at his feet, properly ashamed to admit it. He took his tumbler over to the drink station and poured another drink.
Zachary could see Garcia recalculating, seeing how this affected their case. He, too, was thinking about the various permutations. Logan’s opportunities to poison his father had doubled, if another person might have dosed his drinks or dinner. Charlotte was the one who had served him at dinner time. She had been in the kitchen when Karen had been preparing John Godfrey’s nightcap. But did they suspect a woman now? It had been proven that the threats had been penned by a man.
And yet the threats might not have come from Godfrey’s killer. Someone might have just taken advantage of what had happened, or been trying to throw the whole thing into confusion.
“Did you ask Charlotte to take your father a drink?”
Logan’s head snapped in Zachary’s direction as if a switch had been thrown. “What are you talking about?”
“She didn’t have any motive that we are aware of, but she did have access to him. You could have persuaded her to give him a drink. You might have told her that it contained something that would help him to sleep or be good for his heart. She wouldn’t know the difference until he died. And then you could hold it over her head, prevent her from talking because you could point to her as the actual poisoner.”
