Chapter 39
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Present Day
Palm Springs, California
Mission Day Three
Mick left the bathroom wearing the shorts and T-shirt that Rod, the larger of the two men, had lent him since Kevin, the smaller man, had put Mick’s blood-soaked shirt and jeans into the wash.
Emily was sitting on the living room sofa, legs curled up beneath her, hair down around her shoulders, dressed in a pair of comfortable-looking sky-blue pajamas that could’ve come out of her very own dresser drawer.
She was reading a book that she’d no doubt pulled from one of Rod’s many bookshelves—or maybe they were the dead wife’s shelves.
Connie. Lotta romance novels, Mick noticed as he passed them.
As well as histories and autobiographies.
Emily had chosen Michelle Obama’s memoir, but as he came into the room, she closed it with one finger between the pages to keep her place. It was a short-term, temporary bookmark—a signal that she hoped to go back to her reading ASAP.
That she hoped whatever Mick was approaching to say would be brief.
As he sat down in the easy chair across from her, the pile of blankets on the other end of the sofa stirred, and he realized it was just one blanket over there—almost completely covering Kevin, the cheerful nurse.
Who yawned hugely. “Sorry. Yesterday’s shift included a little forced overtime, which is always so much fun. I was there for twenty hours and I’m still catching up.” He yawned again, and told Mick, “There’s a grilled cheese with your name on it in the kitchen.”
“I’m good,” Mick said. In truth his stomach was still churning. When he thought about how close Emily had come to being killed, he got lightheaded. More than once, as Kevin was cleaning out his wound, he’d had to put his head down between his knees.
Kevin had made noise about blood loss taking a physical toll, but Mick knew that his dizziness was from his pure, unbridled terror that Emily had nearly died.
“You want to split it with me?” Kevin asked Em, but she shook her head, too. “You... want me to give you some privacy?”
“Yes, please,” Mick said, as Emily said, “No!”
“Sorry, I was asking Emily,” Kevin told Mick without a hint of apology in his tone despite his words.
It was clear Kevin wasn’t budging, so Mick just jumped in. “As soon as we get home, I’ll get you those files,” he told Em. “It’s everything I found out after I got out of prison. It’s pretty comprehensive.”
“I know I said I wanted to see it,” Emily said quietly. “The video and everything, but... I don’t think I do.”
“Okay,” Mick said, although it was a struggle to get the word out.
He’d promised himself that he would say that—okay—to everything and anything Emily wanted from him or of him—at least until the threat to her life was over.
But if she never looked at those files..
. Okay. Okay. He took a breath in, exhaled.
Okay. He tried to make it okay. “Do you...” he started.
Tried again. “Do you have any questions for me?”
“I do not,” she said. But then she looked down at the book in her lap, opened it, no doubt to memorize the page number, and then set it aside. “Actually I do. You really met with my grandfather?”
Mick nodded. “I went to see him a couple of times. One of them was... Well, you were there. Shooting baskets in your driveway. Singing along with your boombox.”
Something shifted in her eyes. “That was you?”
He nodded again. “You asked me if I worked for your grandfather.”
“You had really long hair,” she said.
“Yeah. You did, too. You were so beautiful—”
“Don’t,” she said.
So he stopped. “Okay.”
“I’m amazed that he didn’t kill you,” she said. “Just right there, on the spot. I’m assuming Carlotta wasn’t home.”
“No,” he said. “She wasn’t.” Because yeah. Carlotta would’ve ended him. No doubt about that. “I was a little surprised you didn’t recognize me.”
“I think it was the long hair,” she said. “And, you know, the jeans and T-shirt. I think I just imagined you always wore a bowtie, like you did in court, for the arraignment.”
Mick laughed a little. “Yeah, that was... not by choice.”
Emily was quiet for a moment, but then she asked, “What was your plan? You really wanted my grandfather to sue your father, and presumably you, too, to get all of his money—your money?”
“When I found all the evidence that proved I wasn’t in town on the night of your mother’s death—”
“Murder,” she said.
“Your mother’s murder,” he corrected himself, “I wanted you—your family—to know the truth.”
“You said you wanted to clear your name,” she said.
“I did. But I also wanted you to be compensated for your loss.”
“My mother’s life is worth way more than twenty million dollars,” Emily countered heatedly.
“I know that,” he said. “There’s no dollar amount that can replace her. I lost my mother, too, Em. You can’t fix dead—I know that, on a very personal level, I do.”
“Why go to my grandfather?” Emily asked. “Why not take the evidence you found and go to the police? If you hated your father so much, why not get his ugly ass arrested?”
“I didn’t trust the police,” Mick admitted.
“I still don’t. My father and Harper, both, were so well connected.
I’m pretty sure someone in the LAPD—a police detective—helped my father frame me.
Between the cop and Harper, they knew the justice system inside out.
They knew exactly how to set it up so I’d do the time.
Frankly, I was a little afraid that if they knew I’d found evidence that cleared me, they might kill me. ”
Emily was silent, so Mick kept talking. “Four years earlier, back before I went to prison, after I made the decision to plead guilty—there was so much pressure from my father and Harper, too—someone wrote up a confession and I signed it. I was still at home. I don’t know why I wasn’t in custody, but I wasn’t yet.
I remember going into my father’s office—the estate library—and he wasn’t in there but there was a gun, a handgun.
It was just there on his desk. Right on a pile of scripts.
Just out. Lying there. I remember thinking, like, where did that come from?
My father didn’t own a gun. But I think he borrowed it, probably from some cop, who left it there, loaded, like an invitation.
An option B. In case I didn’t want to go to prison. ”
Emily was horrified.
“It would’ve been a much tidier end to the story,” Mick said quietly. He’d thought about that often while he was going through counseling before his release from prison. He still thought about it a lot.
“Do you know the name of the cop?”
Mick looked up, surprised to see Rod standing in the living room archway, leaning against the frame. How long had he been there, listening? Not that it mattered.
“I don’t,” Mick said. “And believe me, I’ve searched through all kinds of records, but whoever he was, he was careful not to leave a paper trail.”
Rod nodded, then asked, “What kind of handgun was it?”
“Hmm,” Mick said. “You’re asking the wrong guy.
It was... bigger than I’d imagined that kind of gun would be.
Definitely not a revolver, you know, a six-shooter cowboy gun.
Not one of those. It was kind of dull metal and.
.. I didn’t touch it. I didn’t get near it.
But I remember there was a case—like a metal case with heavy duty locks, off to the side, on the floor next to my father’s desk.
It had initials monogrammed on it, which I thought was really.
.. so weird. Like it was a case for a bowling ball or a briefcase.
Except it was for this... death machine.
Why would you want your initials on that? ”
“People who love their firearms often really love them,” Kevin said from beneath his blanket.
“My father had an arsenal. I was lucky—he was good about keeping them locked up. But yeah, he’d put some kind of identifier on the case so it didn’t get mixed up with Uncle Bob’s when he tossed it in the trunk on the way to the firing range. ”
“That is... very much not my world,” Mick admitted.
“It’s not mine either,” Kevin said, “but I grew up in it.”
“Do you remember the monogram?” Rod asked.
“Oh yeah,” Mick said. “It was burned into my brain. Cos. C. O. S.”
Rod nodded again. Cleared his throat. “Does the name Clayton Spencer mean anything to you?”
“Well, damn,” Mick said. “Is his middle name Oliver? Or maybe Owen?”
“Be interesting if it is,” Rod said. “According to Cassidy, he was head of security at Devonshire Place, hired by the lawyer, Harper, after your father’s stroke three years ago. Former LAPD. I don’t know the date he left the force, but I bet Cassidy does.”
Emily wanted her life back.
This entire awful evening was badly reminiscent of the way she’d felt in the first few years after her mother’s death.
Her entire world had been upended—and here it was upended again, thanks to the Devonshires.
Mick’s attention was on Rod while the former DEA agent made phone contact with the two investigators—Cassidy and Starrett. And yup, apparently Clayton Spencer’s middle name was Owen, which Mick took as some kind of victory.
But was it?
A monogram on a gun case that he saw when he was seventeen didn’t mean this man was now connected to the gunmen in the black SUV who’d both tried to kill her here in Palm Springs and damaged her house in Van Nuys.
Emily had no idea how this awfulness was ever going to end—aside from the fact that should she survive this, she’d have twenty million dollars in some bank account somewhere.
But that didn’t make up for the loss of her mother, and it didn’t make up for the loss of Mick. Her Mick. The Mick she’d thought she knew. The Mick she’d fallen in love with.
He was as gone as if Milton Devonshire the Senior had run him over with his car, too.
So yes, she believed it was possible—that the horrible father had framed his innocent son.
And that awful story Mick had told about the gun on his father’s desk...