Thirty
Dalton Crane was unsettled. Someone had talked. There were only so many people it could be. And at first, Crane was pretty
sure who it was.
Catherine Chartwell, standing in that hotel parking lot, had told him she’d received, in the last few weeks, several calls
to her cell phone from a blocked ID.
They’d been short and to the point, these calls. As best as Catherine could recall—not easy, because she was dumbstruck when
she received them—they went something like this:
“You think you got away with it, but the chickens are coming home to roost.”
“You’re gonna pay for what you did, you miserable cunt.”
“You better keep looking over your shoulder because we’re coming for you.”
Catherine told Crane she hadn’t said a word when she received the first call. She was too stunned, and besides, the caller
didn’t stay on the line. On the second call, Catherine demanded to know who she was—the caller’s voice was definitely female—and
what she wanted.
But again, the call ended.
The third call went pretty much the same way. Catherine pleading with her tormentor, asking what she wanted, why she was doing
this to her. But her anonymous caller had nothing more to say.
What was there to do, really? Maybe the threats would fall off.
The caller would have her fun and move on.
After all, if she really had something, some proof, why wasn’t she going to the police with it?
Plenty of nutcases out there made threats, but they never followed through.
The news was full of them. Politicians, other public figures, got death threats all the time but almost nothing ever came of them.
Catherine couldn’t call the police. She couldn’t talk to Brent about it. It would dredge up so much old baggage. Was her caller
someone who really knew something, or was she only guessing? Trying to rattle her? Well, with everything that had happened
over the past few days, she was rattled all right.
“I should think it’s fairly obvious,” Crane said.
“Really?”
“Leah Kennard made those calls. Your husband confessed to her what the two of you had done and—”
“The three of us,” Catherine reminded him.
Crane sighed. “Brent told her everything. But unbeknownst to him, she started harassing you. Who knows what her plan was,
exactly. What she hoped to achieve. Maybe she was looking for leverage, blackmail. A way to force you out so she could have
Brent for herself. And then Brent found out what she had done, how she could expose both of you, and he killed her. And then
himself.”
Catherine said, “No.”
“And why not?”
“I’ve had another call since it happened.”
It had come Friday night, when she was getting ready for bed at the hotel. Short and sweet.
“You were lucky. Next time we’ll get it right.”
“Oh,” Crane said.
Catherine’s theory as she explained it to Crane: The killings were payback. Her caller had entered their home, found Brent
and Leah, assumed Leah was Catherine, and shot them. Staged it to look like a murder-suicide.
“At a glance, she looked like me. And even if she hadn’t, whoever shot her would have just assumed it was me.”
“Staging a suicide is not as easy at it sounds,” Crane said, sounding as though he spoke from experience.
“Even if we accept that it’s what it appears to be, there’s still someone out there who knows, or is pretending to know, what happened to Corby.
Perhaps your husband confided in someone other than Leah, or he told her and she told someone else. ”
“I just . . . I just don’t think he would have told.”
“Maybe he loved her. Wanted to confess all.”
Catherine looked pained. “I still don’t think he’d have said anything.”
“And it wasn’t you.”
She shook her head vehemently. “Of course not.”
“That leaves one person.”
Catherine paled. “It wasn’t him.”
“Perhaps you should ask him.”
“I did. I asked him if he’d kept his promise and he said he had.”
A slow nod. “And tell me about young Holden. What kind of a man has he grown up to be?”
Catherine looked away. “He’s had his troubles.”
“Troubles. Perhaps you could elaborate.”
“He’s had a rough time. In and out of rehab and—”
Crane’s eyebrows went up like two rockets. “So, a drug addict? They have a reputation for always telling the truth.”
Catherine pointed a finger. “Stay away from him.”
Crane’s lips pursed with regret, as though thinking of something he should have done on that night long ago.
“And even if it’s him,” Catherine said, “and I’m not saying it is, what’s done is done.”
Crane was thinking differently. Maybe it was time to correct his earlier mistake. If Holden had told one person, he could
tell another.
“We can ask him again whom he might have told, or we can hope your caller gets in touch again. And when she does, we dangle
some bait.”
“Bait?”
“If we can’t figure out how to get to her, we have to make her come to us. If and when she calls, and I’m betting she will,
before she hangs up, you say ‘I’ll pay.’ Simple as that. If she doesn’t hang up, you’ve set the hook. Tell her to name her
price.”
“What if she asks for, I don’t know, a million dollars?”
“You agree.”
He nodded.
“I don’t know . . . I don’t know if I can pull together a million. And she’ll want it in cash, won’t she? I mean, we had investments,
but now there’ll be an estate to settle. It could take time before I can get to the money. And there’ll be questions if I
start converting that kind of money to cash and—”
Crane waved a hand to silence her. “Don’t worry about that. Arrange a time and place to make a drop. Then call me.”
“But if I can’t pull together the money in time—”
Crane, wearying, closed his eyes for a moment. Catherine finally clued in.
“Oh,” she said.
And here he thought he was done with this kind of work.
The last fifteen years or so had been pretty mundane for Crane. He’d stayed with Wiffel-Smith almost to the end. Evelyn Corby
would have been pleased with how things eventually turned out. Her Pentagon Papers weren’t necessary. Wiffel’s addiction to profits was its undoing. The lawsuits mounted. Federal investigations on both sides
of the border were launched. Charges filed. Like hanging out in the bunker with Hitler, Crane continued to work for Graham
Wiffel right up until the day he went up to the roof of the corporate headquarters and jumped off.
At least, that was how it looked.
Stoking Wiffel’s fears that his office might be bugged, Crane had invited him to the roof to bring him up to speed on his
latest adventures in fixing and intimidation. Crane knew the authorities were closing in on Wiffel, and when they did, would
he reveal the things Crane had done at his behest?
That wasn’t a chance worth taking.
It couldn’t have been simpler. Crane got Wiffel close to the edge and tossed him off. And on his way back down, he’d left
a short note on the man’s desk.
Forgive me.
Crane did a good enough job replicating his boss’s handwriting that the veracity of the note was never questioned.
In his experience, fear was a great motivator. You generally didn’t have to kill people. You just had to scare them. Make
them understand there were consequences to not going along. But sometimes, fear wasn’t enough. And when it was your own future
on the line, options were limited.
This was looking like one of those times. Crane’s fate was very much tied to Catherine’s.
When and if she got another call, Catherine would see if she could set the hook, then have Crane reel in the culprit.
She got back to him sooner than he’d expected. But it wasn’t about the money drop.