Chapter Seven
KNOX
Lily didn't invite me to dinner. She showed up at my door at six carrying a tray loaded with a steaming bowl of pot roast, crusty white bread, a folded cloth napkin, and a blueberry muffin.
Her eyes flitting to mine and back to the tray, she mumbled, “I brought you dinner,” shoved the tray into my hands and took flight down the path back to the house, reminding me again of a skittish fawn.
Either I made her nervous, or she had a reason to keep me out of the house. Maybe both.
Lily's pot roast wasn't good. It was amazing. I'm a sucker for pot roast, it's true, but Lily's was out of this world. Tender and juicy in a rich gravy that coated chunks of potatoes and carrots. The bread was delicious. She must have bought it in town.
I watched over the cameras as Lily and Adam ate dinner at the dining room table off of the kitchen, Adam telling his mother the details of his morning in preschool.
She listened with rapt attention to stories of the Lego tower he'd built, engaging in the debate over what was more fun, construction or destruction.
I remembered those days myself. The joy of seeing how tall you could build a tower.
The teeter when it reached its maximum height and the gorgeous explosion of colored bricks when it toppled to the floor.
If Lily was bored by the minutia of five-year-old life, it didn't show. From what I'd seen, she gave her son attention without smothering, and he soaked it up.
It could be hard to tell with kids, but he hadn't seemed particularly broken up about his father's death.
He could be shoving his emotions deep, not ready to process such a loss at a young age.
Or—and this was my guess—Lily was his primary source of love, comfort, and care.
Losing his father may have been difficult, but losing his mother would be devastating.
Lily would do anything to protect her boy. It was written in her eyes, in her stance when she was beside him. Whatever was going on with the dead husband's connection to my father, if Adam was wrapped up in it, then getting through to Lily would be that much harder.
I intended to have my answers. If the money was proof, Trey Spencer had been up to his neck in my father's bullshit. Lily loved her son. Would she have put him at risk for the promise of easy cash?
Watching them together, my head reminded me that people justified fucked up choices all the time, but my gut refused to accept that Lily would risk her child's life over money.
My gut remembered that my older brother Cooper had read me bedtime stories, not my mother. The housekeeper had packed my lunch and baked me cookies.
My mother had been too busy with her social life and her endless supply of martinis. My father had been a shitty husband, something I understood with new depth now that his secrets were coming to light.
Seeing Lily with Adam, I was reminded that a shitty husband didn't have to mean a checked-out mom. I was getting the picture that Trey Spencer hadn't been all that interested in his son, but Lily seemed determined that Adam have all the love and attention he needed.
Being a good mom doesn't make her a good person, I reminded myself.
But didn't it?
No. It didn't. Working security and investigations had taught me that people were complicated. A career criminal might give buckets of money to charity. A pastor could beat his wife.
I'd seen it all, enough to know that a woman who loved her son could be guilty of anything. And if she'd made her choices thinking she was protecting Adam? In that case, Lily Spencer was capable of anything.
They disappeared into the bathroom and emerged half an hour later, Lily's clothes flecked with water, Adam in a pair of superhero pajamas, his blonde curls combed straight and plastered to his forehead.
She tucked him into bed and read him story after story until his eyelids drooped and he fell asleep.
Just as she had described, she walked the house before settling in, checking every door and window.
When all was secure, she set the alarm. I expected her to get into bed and go to sleep, but she tossed and turned for hours.
It wasn't until three am that she dropped off, her body finally still beneath the covers.
Once she was out, I got to work.
It didn't take long to deactivate the alarm from my laptop and let myself in the back door. I moved in near silence through the mudroom, down the hall to the office. Closing and locking the door behind me, I reset the alarm in case Lily woke. If she checked the panel, she’d see the comforting red light and go back to bed.
Trey’s laptop was exactly where she’d left it in the top drawer of his desk.
I opened it and quickly determined that Lily had been trying to access a dummy account.
No wonder she’d been frustrated. There was just enough here to make it look like he regularly used the computer, but it was no more than a front.
Logging out, I pulled a thumb drive from my pocket and connected it to the USB port.
Lucas Jackson led our division of computer experts, and his team had come up with this little gem of an app.
It should reveal all the accounts on the computer and break the encryption, letting me into everything on the hard drive.
If Trey Spencer had been a hacker on Lucas' level, the thumb drive wouldn't have done the job. In that case, I would have been on the phone dragging Lucas' ass up to Maine. But Trey Spencer wasn't a hacker, and Lucas' app looked like it did the trick.
A minute later I was in, and Trey Spencer's life was spread before me.
The banking information was the same that Lily had access to through the dummy account. Ditto for their insurance and household bills.
But the files were completely different. Where Lily found empty folders, I uncovered a treasure trove of data. Flicking through, opening, scanning, and closing documents, Trey's laptop painted a damning picture.
Everything was in Lily's name.
Everything.
The house, the cars, the investment accounts. Insurance policies for artwork and jewelry. From what I could see, it had been this way for years before Trey Spencer died.
When his car drove off that bridge, Lily became a very wealthy woman.
That sure as hell didn't make her look innocent. If Trey Spencer had been murdered, the information on his laptop provided a ton of motive.
If Lily had killed her husband, why was I here?
If she was responsible for his death, she'd gotten away with it. There was no murder investigation. The insurance paid out with only the standard delay.
Why bring me to Maine unless she absolutely had to?
Trey's involvement with my father was the wildcard.
Lily could have killed her husband and then discovered he left loose ends that threatened her and Adam. As much as I wanted to believe Lily was innocent, I didn't have a shred of proof.
Interestingly, what I didn't find was information about Adam Spencer. No birth certificate. No adoption papers. No medical bills. I didn't have to ask to know that Lily hadn't given birth to Adam.
I suspected Trey was his biological father. From the pictures I'd seen, Adam's blue eyes and white-blonde curls were a perfect match to childhood photographs of Trey Spencer. Echoes of Trey's adult face showed in Adam's childish one. They were absolutely father and son.
There wasn't a trace of Lily in him. Adam's skin was a pure ivory without a hint of her caramel tones. His hair was his father's shining white-blonde, nothing like his mother's soft cloud of spiraling, dark curls.
If Adam was the product of an agreement with a surrogate, there should have been a contract. At the very least, there should have been a birth certificate somewhere. Trey Spencer had scanned other documents on the laptop. Why not the birth certificate?
I scrolled through the files again and checked to make sure Lucas' drive was still plugged in. The hidden account on the laptop had been packed with personal data, excepting anything about Adam Spencer, but nothing here was connected with Trey's business.
Was there a second laptop? Had it been with him when he'd died? The police report hadn't mentioned a laptop in the car, but if Trey had been forced off that bridge, his killer would have taken anything of use, including a computer.
I'd have to find a way to press Lily for more information.
Trey Spencer had worked from home. It would have been hard to hide a second laptop.
From our reports, he'd been driving back from dinner at his club in Bangor, a long trip in the wilds of Maine, but not one he'd make with his business computer.
Had Lucas' app missed a second hidden account? Without Lucas himself, I couldn't tell.
I pulled a discrete portable hard drive from my pocket, plugged it into the laptop, and started the process of copying the files to the drive. While that was working, I installed a keystroke tracker Lily wouldn't be able to see. In the time it would take to copy the laptop, I'd check the closet.
Much like Lily, I found nothing. Bills for heating oil. Invoices for vehicle repairs. Years of utility bills. Hospital bills.
There were a handful related to Lily. I didn't need a medical degree to see that she'd been pregnant and miscarried twice.
The file ended there. There weren't any bills for fertility treatments, consultations, or testing.
Less than a year after Lily's second miscarriage I found a record of Adam's infant vaccinations.
Adam. Was he a key to the mystery of Lily Spencer or a distraction? It was too soon to say.
The more I discovered, the more questions I had.
If Adam hadn't looked so much like his father, I might have suspected my Dad's hand in his sudden appearance.
Private, possibly illegal adoptions were just one of the sordid things we'd uncovered about our father.
Even Adam's resemblance to Trey didn't chase the connection from my mind.
I turned off the light in the closet and closed the door, removing my drives from the laptop and shutting it down, leaving the office exactly how I'd found it. I crept down the hall to the mudroom where I deactivated the alarm, exited the house, and reactivated it behind me.
Unlike Lily, I dropped off to sleep immediately, sliding into the darkness, my mind free to drift and dream. Untethered, my thoughts went straight for Lily.
Her soft curls. The full curve of her lower lip. The view down her T-shirt when she was in the closet. Those round, ripe breasts, the way they shifted and swayed as she'd reached for basket after basket.
In dreams I cupped them in my hands, thumbing the hard points of her nipples. I ducked my head into the curve of her neck, inhaling vanilla and spice, tasting her. I spread her out beneath me on crisp, white sheets and devoured every inch of her body until she cried my name.
I woke to find myself rolling my hips into the mattress, fucking her in my sleep, my hard cock grinding uncomfortably into the soft sheets.
I stood under a cold shower in the gray of dawn, pumping my cock with my fist, trying to think of anything but Lily, and failing miserably.