Torrid - Book Three Read online

  “Reed,” I said. “I think I might need to give you another twenty.”

  ***

  Tora

  They brought me shackled at the wrist into a cold, gray room with concrete walls. I sat at a long steel table, my handcuffs threaded by a chain through two metal loops at the center of it. I wasn’t afraid. Not then. I’d been in rooms like this dozens of times before. For the past thirteen years, my relationship with my father happened in them. I knew I’d done nothing wrong. Just like he did. I supposed he wasn’t afraid either, not at first.

  The first detective walked into the room holding a thin manila folder. He was older, maybe sixty with thinning gray hair and a pudgy middle. He wore a dark blue suit that strained him through the shoulders. He sat down across from me, leafing through the paperwork before he finally looked up at me and smiled.

  “You wanna start by telling me who Tora Blake is?”

  I had split personalities in that moment. There was the part of me that wanted to come clean about everything, to be polite. I knew there were no real victims here. I’d falsified some documents to get my marriage license with Seth but nothing more. This wasn’t ultimately a jailable offense. I knew this going in. I’d stolen no credit cards, defrauded no one other than the Cook County vital records clerk. But the other part of me was even smarter and knew enough to keep my mouth shut tight. They thought I killed Miranda.

  “May I ask your name?” I said as politely as I could.

  The detective smiled, showing nicotine-stained teeth. “I’m Detective Brewer, Len Brewer.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Detective Brewer, I’d like to exercise my right to have an attorney present during questioning.”

  Detective Brewer grimaced and closed the file. “We’re going to book you, Mrs. Manning. You understand how serious this is?”

  I nodded. “And I’d like a lawyer.”

  “Who would you like to call?” he said.

  I kept my face as neutral as I could. I’d grown good at masking my true feelings. The truth was, I was completely alone here. My perfect plan to get close to Seth now left me feeling untethered to anything solid while I drifted through deep space. I couldn’t rely on Jack. His cold eyes still hovered in my memory. Charlie was the closest thing I had to family and he was on the other side of the country and completely unaware of where I was. On a more practical front, I didn’t have access to money just at the moment.

  “I’d like a court-appointed lawyer,” I said, though it was really the last thing in the world I wanted. But they couldn’t all be bad and I wasn’t clueless myself. It would have to do.

  “You sure you wanna go that way?” Brewer said. He had a casualness about him that infuriated me. Like we could just be sitting across from each other at a greasy spoon instead of where we really were.

  “All right.” Brewer stood up. “You may be in here for a bit. They’re backed up in booking. But you’ll be processed and taken to a holding cell. As soon as they send someone up from the Cook County P.D. we’ll put them through to talk to you.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I stiffened my back and looked straight ahead as Brewer got up and left the room.

  I waited. An hour went by. More? I startled when the door finally opened and a female officer came into the room. She wore her hair in a tight brown bun and regarded me with steely gray eyes.

  “I’m here to take you through processing,” she said. “I’m Officer Murphy.” She stepped forward and unhooked the chain from my handcuffs. She had me stand and gripped my arm as she led me out of the room and down the hall.

  We ended up in a locker room. “We can get you out of those cuffs, Mrs. Manning,” she said. “But I need to search you.”

  And she did. I went somewhere else in my head as Murphy gave the commands and she searched me in every place I might have concealed something. I changed into tan jail scrubs and slid into the hideous orange plastic shower shoes. Then we left.

  I startled when the flash snapped as I lined up for my mug shot. The officer who fingerprinted me was rough and I shook my fingers out from where she twisted them.

  “You’re going to holding until your lawyer gets here, Mrs. Manning.” Officer Murphy was back at my side. She led me back down the hallway past the interrogation room where they first brought me. I’d tried to block out the sights and smells of this place but as each hour wore on, it permeated everything. I smelled metal and urine and something else rank I couldn’t place. If desperation had a scent this place reeked of it.

  There was one small blessing as Murphy took me down the narrow corridor to the holding cells. As backed up as Brewer told me booking was, the holding cells were mostly empty today. And Murphy did me a kindness I didn’t appreciate until later when I had time to think about it. She put me in a square cell at the very end of the hall so I had a wall at one side and an empty cell on the other. I walked into it. I had a metal bench on one side and a sink along the wall.

  When the cell door swung shut, it went through me like gunfire. I turned and sank down to the bench and I was alone. Completely alone. Whatever mess I’d gotten myself into, I’d need to claw out of it that way too.

  Chapter Three

  Jack

  I sat cross-legged on the floor of Reed Burnett’s living room with my father’s journals splayed out in front of me. He sat in his leather recliner resting his hands across his knees. The middle finger on his left hand twitched as he thumbed through one of Dad’s journals. He’d read through the same page about a dozen times, just like I had.

  “This isn’t enough by itself,” Reed said. “It could be a list of random numbers. Anyone could have wrote them.”

  I nodded. “That’s what I think too.”

  “I mean, there’d have to be a handwriting expert, but do you have a sense of whether you think your dad wrote these?”

  “Do you?”

  Reed sighed. Margie walked in and out of the living room asking if we needed refills on our tea. I’d said yes so many times I could probably float out of here. Reed gave a gentle smile then waited until she left the room again before answering.

  “I knew he kept diaries. He carried one with him pretty much all the time. When we would meet on legal matters, he always had a list of questions or issues he wanted to bring up.” Reed thumbed through the journal, landing on a page near the front of it.

  “Here,” he said, jabbing his finger on the page. “Yep. He’s got some notes in here about the company bylaws. A year or two before Miranda took over as his guardian, I remember we had some discussions about issuing a new class of stock. He wrote in a kind of shorthand but I remember this. I’ll be damned. Yeah.”

  “So you don’t have any real doubt these were his journals,” I said. I didn’t know how to feel about that. On the one hand, these were a piece of my father I’d never had access to before. It was as close as I’d ever get to having that one last conversation with him. They were precious. But if any part of what Seth had said was true, they could also take him away from me all over again.

  “I think they’re legit,” Reed said. “That’s not the same thing as saying they prove your dad had anything to do with hacking into this McLain fella’s bank accounts.”

  “Do you think he could have?” The question came out of me without conscious thought. I wanted to take it back the moment I uttered it.

  Reed closed the journal. “That’s two questions. Do I think he had the talent to do it? The real answer is I have no idea. I don’t have a clue as to what’s involved in hacking into that kind of system. And we’re talking thirteen, fourteen years ago. I’m guessing it would have been easier to do back then. I’d have to believe nowadays there are more sophisticated anti-hacker safeguards in place.”

  “He had the talent to do it,” I said, the words tasting bitter in my mouth. “But that’s not what I’m asking you.”

  “Right,” Reed said. “Your father was an honorable man, Jackie. He made bad personal decisions out of desperation and grief after yo
ur mom and Jenny died. No one can fault him for that. Miranda and Seth could have done this, of that I’m sure. The Jackson I knew? No way.”

  “But he wasn’t the Jackson you knew toward the end, was he?”

  Anger rose in my chest like bile. In the five years before my dad died in 2008, our visits were sporadic and stressful. At first he’d struggled to find the words he wanted or to remember things he had to do. Later, he struggled to remember who I was. Each time I came to see him, he slipped away a little more. And Miranda hovered like a gargoyle. I remembered moments when I felt like we connected and then she’d swoop in and he would retreat into a shell of confusion.

  “He didn’t confide in you about anything like this?” I said. “Assume for a second that he did do these things. He would have had remorse. That’s the picture Tora’s trying to paint with that newspaper clipping she said she found in that journal. The one reporting on her dad’s sentencing.”

  “He definitely got more and more agitated in that last year before the mental competency hearings. That would have been what, 2004? Late 2003?”

  I nodded.

  “But we’d be making a pretty big leap to assume he was feeling deep guilt over Dex McLain. I don’t know.”

  “Is there someone who would?” I looked up and locked eyes with Reed. “He shut me out in those last years, Reed. Miranda tried to convince me that seeing me caused him too much pain because he knew he was supposed to remember who I was but just couldn’t.”

  “I know,” Reed answered. “That was the line she fed me too. But there is one other person who might have a useful opinion on the matter.”

  “Who?”

  “Bev Bradley kept working for him through at least 2004, I think. Or up until whenever the guardianship order was entered. After that, Miranda kicked her to the curb too.”

  Beverly Bradley had been my father’s secretary all through his days as a software engineer working for IBM. She came to work for his company after that. I smiled, remembering going to my dad’s office when I was little. Bev kept pillow mints in a jar on her desk and she used to sneak them to Jenny and me when my dad had to work late and my mother wasn’t home.

  “I’d like to see her again,” I said. “I don’t think I have since Dad’s funeral.”

  Reed smiled. “She’d like that. I still talk to her from time to time and she and Margie have gone out to lunch over the years. Let me reach out to her and see what she thinks about all of this.”

  I closed the journal at my feet and stacked the rest of them.

  “So how much trouble am I in for having this stuff?” I asked. Tora’s suitcase was still out in my trunk.

  “Well,” Reed said, slapping his hands to his knees and standing up, his bones creaking. “The warrant was for Seth’s house, not your car. So there’s that. I’m still gonna make a phone call to a criminal lawyer I know. I don’t want to risk any claim that you impeded an ongoing murder investigation.”

  Reed put his arm around me when I rose. I stuffed the journals back into Tora’s messenger bag.

  “But for the time being, Jackie, I think it’s best if you leave this stuff with me. If we need to turn it over to the police let me be the one to do it.”

  When I opened my mouth to answer, I realized how hard I’d clenched my jaw and I brought a hand up to rub the sore muscles there. “Reed,” I said. “I’m still asking. Do you think he did this?”

  Reed squared his shoulders and looked me straight in the eye. “I don’t know, Jackie. I really don’t.”

  ***

  Tora

  It turns out it’s easier to fall asleep in a jail cell than you might expect, at least in my experience. By the time the afternoon turned into early evening, sleep became a welcome respite from my churning thoughts. I didn’t say it was comfortable, however.

  I woke to a sharp clang on the cell bars and nearly toppled off the metal bench. Each muscle had stiffened from resting on the unforgiving surface. Pins and needles shot through my fingers and toes as I stood. Officer Murphy was back.

  “Your lawyer wants to meet with you,” she said. “You’re going back to the interview room.”

  I squinted and nodded, disoriented from the passage of time. My stomach rumbled and I realized I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. This was probably some sort of major civil rights violation but, at the moment, I didn’t want to do anything that might stall my chances of talking to someone who was constitutionally required to be on my side.

  After mercifully giving me a second to relieve my bladder, Murphy led me back down the hallway to the same interview room where I’d met Detective Brewer. I was grateful not to have the added accessory of handcuffs this time around.

  My public defender looked straight out of law school. She was shorter than I was—probably under five feet—round, and wore stylish purple glasses perched on the end of her nose. She stood up and extended a hand to shake mine while tucking her chin-length, straight brown hair behind her ear.

  “Adeline Moscowitz,” she said. “You can call me Addie.”

  Her grip was firm and full of purpose as she shook my hand. This simple act did wonders to restore some of my confidence and I sat across from her.

  “I’m gonna be talking to my client for a while, Murphy,” Addie said over my head. “I’ll let you know when she’s ready for you again.”

  Addie’s thin lips arced into a smirk as she reacted to something Officer Murphy must have either mouthed or gestured over my head. She heaved a large, weathered, brown briefcase onto the table next to her and pulled out a yellow notepad and pen.

  “What’s your legal name?” she asked.

  “Victoria Maeve McLain,” I said, grateful to drop the lie, it was what got me into this mess in the first place.

  Addie raised a thick, dark brow as she wrote but nodded. She capped her pen and sat back in her seat. “So, first-degree murder. We’ll get to that but let’s start out with the smaller stuff first. Tell me about this secret identity.”

  I chewed my bottom lip. This woman was my only lifeline at the moment. I spent a lifetime learning not to trust anyone. I forgot that lesson and let Jack into my life and my heart. I felt a stab of grief in place of the swell of emotion that usually went along with my thoughts of him. Could I trust Addie? Maybe I didn’t have to. Maybe our attorney-client privilege would be enough.

  “I used a false name when I applied for a marriage license with Seth Manning,” I said.

  She nodded. “Right. And you had to present ID when you did that. Driver’s license? Social security card?”

  I shook my head. “No to the social security card. They asked me for a number and I gave them my real one. The license wasn’t real, that’s true.”

  “Well.” Addie shoved her purple glasses back up her nose and leaned forward. “So, at least we’re not looking at potentially federal fraud charges. So there’s a bright spot. One way to go is to get out in front of this with some cooperation. Any chance you want to tell me who helped you with setting up the phony ID?”

  I kept my voice even. I wasn’t a member of my father’s M.C., but they had taken care of me when he went away. I was raised with club rules. You don’t rat. A close friend of Charlie’s made the ID for me and I wouldn’t turn him over for anything.

  “I just got it,” I said. “I’m not saying any more than that. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have anything else to bring to the table.”

  Addie cocked her head and lifted the corners of her mouth into the same smirk she’d given Officer Murphy.

  “Are you any good?” I asked. We didn’t have unlimited time together and so far Addie hadn’t struck me as dumb. What I really needed to know was how much of a backbone she had.

  “I’m fair,” she said. “And I’m older than I look. I’m in this job because I want to be, not because I couldn’t get anything better.”

  It was a good answer. “Everyone thinks I’m a gold digger. They think that’s what I’ve been after with Seth. That’s probabl
y where the police are going to start as far as a motive regarding Miranda Manning’s death. They’re dead wrong.”

  “I’m listening.”

  As succinctly as I could, I laid out the events of the past few months for Addie. I told her about my father, the case against him, and what Seth had told me about framing him. I left out the part about my relationship with Jack, George Pagano and Jack’s father. Addie regarded me with cool, keen eyes and I knew she sensed I was holding things back. On the other hand, people like her had to be used to it from criminal defense clients.

  “Will it help?” I finally said after a few moments of silence went by.

  She raised that dark brow again but not the smirk. She’d written nothing down as I talked and it unsettled me. I had the sense that I wasn’t the only one in the room holding things back.

  “I’ve talked to the assistant prosecutor,” she said, deflecting my question. “Your case is being handled by Collin Ramsey. He’s considered the best and brightest over there. And that got me worried on the down stroke. This is a high profile case. Miranda Manning was a sitting federal judge. Right now, things are bleak.”

  “Okay?” Icy tendrils of fear snaked their way through my core. I hadn’t been scared. Not yet. Confronting Seth had been the worst of it, I thought. Until now. My mouth went dry as sandpaper. I thought of my father and the haunted look he had in his eyes the last time I saw him. He was here, not in this specific room or this specific building. But he had been right here. Someone—maybe Miranda—had sat across from him at a table like this and shattered his world apart.

  “The evidence they are building looks pretty damning,” she said. “They think you poisoned Miranda Manning.”

  “I haven’t … I don’t … what?” My heart slammed into my chest and I concentrated on breathing. Black spots swam in front of my eyes.

  Addie opened her thick briefcase back up and pulled out a manila file folder. She thumbed through it and pulled out a single page document. “Are they going to find anything on your phone, Tora?” she asked, sliding the paper in front of me. It was another search warrant for my phone and computers.