The Chesapeake Diaries Series (113 page)

“That sums it up.” Wade nodded.

“Is there any chance that he is not Austin’s father?”

Wade shook his head. “None.”

“This is a really tough place to be in,” Jesse told him. “I’m assuming he never signed away his parental rights.”

“He didn’t know about Austin, never knew that Robin was pregnant. He still wouldn’t have known if it hadn’t been for those damned photographs.” Wade ran an anxious hand through his hair. “Doesn’t it matter that he robbed Austin’s mother blind, destroyed her company, and then bolted out of town without looking back?”

“Not as far as establishing paternity is concerned. There’s no way anyone could predict the outcome of a case like this. A lot will depend on the judge.” Jesse was clearly giving the problem some thought. “Though I’m not sure if the law is more favorable in Maryland or in Texas. I’m going to have to research that in case we need to file some quick motions. Unfortunately, he didn’t give us much time.”

Jesse opened his laptop. “I’ll see if I can get my sister, Sophie, to work on that.” He typed for a moment, then turned back to Wade. He was about to speak when his intercom buzzed.

“Jesse, Chief Beck and Mr. Shields are here to see you and Mr. MacGregor.”

Jesse looked across the desk at Wade. “Were you expecting …?”

Wade shook his head no.

“Send them in, Liz.” Jesse shrugged. “Let’s see what’s up.”

Beck and Grady Shields came through the door as it opened, and immediately pulled up chairs to join the conversation.

“How can we help?” Grady asked.

“Officially or unofficially, whatever it takes, Wade,” Beck assured him.

“How did you …?”

“I called Vanessa while you were dropping off Austin at Berry’s,” Stef admitted. “I knew she’d call Beck, and when we were talking, Grady walked into Bling. We thought it was a sign.” She paused. “Well, Ness thought it was a sign.”

“It was the right thing to do, Wade,” Beck told him. “From the little my sister told me—damn, but that woman can talk fast when she’s revved up—there’s a lot at stake here, and you’re only going to get one chance with this guy. Once he goes for the DNA test, that part is over. If he can prove he’s Austin’s father, things are going to get real complicated real fast. Let us help you.”

“I appreciate the thought, guys, but I don’t know what either of you can do.”

“Start by filling in some blanks for me,” Grady said. “When I was in the Bureau, I was real good at working my way around tough situations. Let’s see if I’ve lost my touch …”

“I feel like we’re in a remake of
High Noon
,” Steffie told Wade as she watched out the window. “Like we’re waiting for the gunslinger to show up.”

Moments later, the doorknob turned and Steffie
cleared her throat, then stepped back as the bell rang and Hugh entered. When he smiled at Stef, she pretended not to have seen him. She turned the
OPEN
sign to
CLOSED
and locked the door.

“Maybe you should leave,” Wade said to her.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she replied.

“Well, suit yourself.” Hugh sat opposite Wade and smirked. “Hey, maybe I’ll walk out of here with your girl and the five million.”

“What makes you so sure I’m going to pay up?” Wade asked.

“Well”—Hugh looked around the shop—“I don’t see the kid.”

“You don’t have any interest in Austin and you know it.”

“Not beyond the pleasure I’ll take in knowing how much it’s going to hurt you every day for the rest of your life not to know where he is. How he is. Is he still alive, even. You never know what can happen to a kid these days. I don’t live in the best of neighborhoods.”

“I’d think you’d be able to afford a great neighborhood. You stole what, two million dollars from KenneMac? Plus whatever you stole from Robin.”

“The easiest three and a half million I ever made—plus what I got from Robin—but who’s counting.” Hugh laughed.

Grady and Beck came out of the back room.

Pointing to Grady, Beck said, “He’s counting.”

“Who the hell are you?” Hugh demanded.

“Some interested friends.” Beck sat on one side of Hugh. “Interested in that three and a half million dollars
you stole from Wade’s company. Plus the money from Robin’s personal account.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Hugh shook his head.

“You got that little recorder I gave you?” Grady asked as he sat on Hugh’s other side.

Wade nodded and took it from his pocket, sat it on the table, and pushed play.

“
You stole what, two million dollars from KenneMac? Plus whatever you stole from Robin.
”

“
The easiest three and a half million I ever made—plus what I got from Robin—but who’s counting.
”

“You think blackmail is going to work?” Hugh turned to Wade. “Like I said, you can send me to prison for that one job in Texas; first offense, I won’t spend much time there. I don’t really care how many people know that Austin is my son, but I’d have thought you’d have wanted to keep it quiet.” He looked first at Beck, then at Grady. “And I’m not impressed with your posse.”

“Maybe you’ll be impressed with this.” Grady opened his briefcase, took out a folder, and began to read. “ ‘Hugh Weston. Aka Henry Willis. Aka Harry West. Wanted in four states—’ ” Grady looked across the table at Wade. “I guess that’s five now—for embezzlement. He’s made a career of ingratiating himself with women who have come into large sums of money and finding ways to separate them from their cash.” Grady turned to Hugh. “That ‘first offense’ was long ago and far away, my friend.” He went back to his file. “All those nasty little embezzlement charges pile up, you know? Enough to put you away
for a good long time. But you know what’s going to do you in, Hugh?”

Grady slid a piece of paper from the bottom of the pile.

“There’s this assault case up in Maine that’s been hanging around for the past five years. You picked up a woman in a bar—Christine Davenport; let’s not be cavalier and forget who she was. You smacked her around in the parking lot, drove her to New Hampshire, where you kept her in a motel for three days. I don’t suppose there’s any doubt as to what you were doing with her for those three days, right?”

Hugh sat back in the chair, his arms folded over his chest, his expression lethal.

“Now, here’s the thing. You take someone anywhere against their will and hold them—again, against their will—and that’s pretty much the definition of kidnapping. You take them across state lines, and it becomes a federal case. Add in the fact that she was coerced at gunpoint, and we’re looking at … well, shall we add it all up?”

“Who is this guy?” Hugh pointed to Grady and tried to look amused.

“Sorry. I forgot my manners. Meet former FBI Special Agent Grady Shields,” Wade told him, then pointed to Beck. “Our chief of police here in St. Dennis, Gabriel Beck.”

Hugh tried to look indifferent, but Wade knew the exact moment that he began to realize that the sand might be shifting.

Grady took his iPhone out of his pocket. “I love these gadgets that multitask, don’t you?”

He whistled. “Wow, that many?” He turned the
iPhone in his hand to show Hugh the number on the screen.

“I don’t know what kind of a clever game you guys are playing here, but I’m done with it.” Hugh looked across the table. “You know what the deal was.”

“The deal’s changed, Hugh,” Wade told him. “It might be different if embezzling from KenneMac had really been your first offense. Nice bluff there, by the way. But we all know that KenneMac wasn’t anywhere near being the first, and we know—thanks to Grady’s family and friends at the FBI—that it wasn’t your last. You may have been slick about getting out of town, but you always left prints behind.”

“You can leave now—just walk away and don’t look back. Or you can keep going with this and I can guarantee you won’t live long enough to serve out all your time,” Beck told him.

“You’re forgetting something real important here, MacGregor.” Hugh’s bravado was beginning to wear thin. “I can prove that boy is mine. I can go to court and get an order for DNA testing that will prove he’s my son. I can still—”

“You can still save your ass,” Beck told him. “Or I can take you into custody right now, hold you till the FBI gets here.” He turned to Grady. “What time did your brother say he’d be here?”

Grady turned his wrist to look at his watch. “He said he’d be here in time for dessert. So any time now.”

Hugh looked from one face to the next, trying to decide, Wade figured, whether or not they were bluffing.

“No five million dollars, Hugh,” Wade said. “Just
one long prison sentence. Oh, sure, it would just about kill me not to know where Austin is; you’re right on the money there. But just how much satisfaction will that give you when you’re spending every day in a five-by-eight cell with some guy who calls you ‘Peaches’?”

Grady took one last sheet of paper from the folder. Wade reached across the table to pick it up.

“Now here’s the only deal you’re going to get, and I’m only going to say it once, so listen up. You sign this and then you walk out of here. These”—Grady held up the reports he’d been reading from—“will go back into those cold-case files they’ve been sitting in for the past couple of years, and as far as I’m concerned, I never heard your name.”

“If you think I’m going to sign a confession …” Hugh scoffed.

“It isn’t a confession.” Wade handed him the paper.

Hugh scanned it, then glanced at the faces of the other three men at the table. He appeared to think for a long while before finally asking, “Got a pen?”

Grady signed as witness, then tossed the pen on the table. “As someone who spent a good part of my life in law enforcement, it makes me sick to say this, but go ahead and leave.”

Steffie, silent throughout the entire scene, got up and unlocked the door, held it for him. Hugh left without a backward glance and Stef closed the door behind him.

“Guys, I don’t know how to begin to thank you.” Wade looked from one man to the other, both his friends. “I know it has to go against everything you believe in to let him walk out of here.”

“I’m not gonna lie, Wade,” Beck told him. “I can’t believe I let him leave. The only consolation I have is in knowing that Austin is staying where he belongs.”

Grady nodded, then added, “And the fact that every move he ever makes from here on will be very carefully watched. The next time—and there will be a next time—he won’t go free.”

“I feel terribly conflicted about that woman from Maine, though.” Steffie sat next to Wade. “She deserves justice for what he did to her. Not that the others don’t, but there’s a difference between what he did to the others—the money he took—and what he did to her. I would have liked to have seen him pay for that.”

“He will, but not in this lifetime, I’m afraid,” Grady told her. “Christine Davenport died in a car accident two years ago. I wouldn’t have let him go on that if she was still alive.” He looked at Wade apologetically. “I don’t know how we would have handled it, but I couldn’t have let him walk.”

“I understand.” Wade nodded.

“And I feel confident that he’s going to pay for it all anyway,” Beck said. “All those notes that Grady has were compiled by a friend of his at the FBI.”

“My father always told me to never burn a bridge behind me when I left a job,” Grady said.

“Who are you kidding?” Beck laughed. “You called your brother who’s an active agent.”

“No, I didn’t. I called a friend of mine who is the best computer geek the Bureau has. He called the police department in Texas that investigated Wade’s case. They had Hugh’s prints and they’d gotten them into the system. By the time I called my buddy, all
these other matches had popped up, all cases similar to Wade’s. Then we found the case in Maine, and I knew we had a guy who is a serial offender. He’s going to steal again. It’s his nature. He’s slick, I’ll give him that, but next time, he’ll be caught.”

“And when that time comes, and he points back to tonight?” Steffie frowned. “How are you going to explain your part in this when he talks about how you two law enforcement types went along with this deal?”

“What deal?” Grady got up and stretched his legs. “I just came in to witness Hugh’s signing away his parental rights to Austin.”

“I just came in for ice cream.” Beck walked to the counter. “Stef, you got any of that stuff left over from Dallas’s party …?”

“What just happened here?” Steffie sank into the chair next to Wade. She’d stayed quiet through the entire ordeal, but now she was starting to shake. “Seriously? Did those two just …?”

“Yeah. They did.” Wade nodded, his face still unreadable.

“Has it occurred to you that you might not have heard the last of him?” Even her voice was shaking. “What if he comes back and threatens you all over again? Then what? Aren’t you worried?”

“It has occurred to me, but Grady feels pretty sure they’ll have him in custody for something else by the time he decides to try again. He studied behavior when he was in the FBI and I believe he knows what he’s talking about, but it doesn’t take an FBI profiler to see that this guy has made a living off of conning people out of their money one way or another. Given his history, it isn’t likely that he’s going to go into some legitimate business now. Both Beck and Grady think he’ll go on from here to extort money from someone else. The difference now is that he’s being watched but doesn’t know it.”