Whose side were they on? The question haunted me all night and from the moment I pulled out of my driveway on Wednesday morning until I arrived in Charlottesville just before ten thirty. Why didn’t Elena and Garrett want me to pursue finding Rick? Who was he, anyway? Who were they trying to protect? Not Jamie … at least it didn’t seem like it.
The drive south to Charlottesville took less than two hours down Route 29, a pretty two-lane road that wound past farmland and pastures and through small towns, always with the hazy, layered Blue Ridge Mountains as a backdrop. Down here, though, the mountains were more substantial and imposing than they were back home, and spring was further along by a couple of weeks. This was Thomas Jefferson’s country; Monticello had always been the place he loved the most, where he had been the happiest. But over the years the neighboring town of Charlottesville, a pretty village founded in 1762, had gradually succumbed to urban sprawl—miles of strip malls and low-rise motels—that extended farther and farther up the highway each time I came here, just like Anyplace, USA. Route 29, in the middle of rush hour, could be as gridlocked as traffic in Washington, D.C., and that was crazy.
Vanessa Pensiero, Sasha’s mother, lived in the Lewis Mountain section of town, a neighborhood almost entirely surrounded by land belonging to the University of Virginia and whose residents were mostly UVA professors and administrators. It was an older, established community of mature shade trees and plants, meandering lanes, and eclectic architecture. I found the address with no trouble and parked on the street. A white picket fence wrapped around a redbrick Colonial with well-cared-for landscaped gardens and the flowering trees that made Virginia so beautiful at this time of year. I let myself in through the front gate.
A dog that sounded truly ferocious barked when I rang the doorbell, and a moment later, a woman in her early fifties wearing a large gray orthopedic boot on her left leg opened the door with one hand and held on to Bruiser, as he looked like he should be called, with the other.
“Down, George,” she said. “Hi, I’m Vanessa. You must be Lucie. His bark is really worse than his bite. He’s actually a lovable old guy.”
George? “Isn’t he a rottweiler?”
“He won’t hurt you, I promise. The worst he could do is jump up and try to give you a hug.” Her eyes strayed to my cane. “Though in your case, he might knock you over. You’re rather petite. I’ll put him in the basement. Do come in.”
Vanessa wrangled lover-boy George down the hall and opened a door. “Get down there, buddy. We’ll play later.” I heard what sounded like a small militia descending a flight of stairs and George vanished.
She came back and joined me in the entryway. We studied each other and she said, “I’ve heard a lot about you from Sasha. She seems quite smitten by your brother.”
“He seems equally smitten by her.”
“So it’s serious, then?” A mother asking questions. What are his intentions with my daughter?
“I think you’d have to ask her. As for Eli, we have a deal. He stays out of my love life and I stay out of his.”
She smiled. “Touché. What can I get you to drink? Coffee? Tea? Iced tea?” She arched an eyebrow. “A Bloody Mary?”
“Iced tea would be lovely, if you have it made.”
“I do,” she said. “I put mint and lavender from my garden in my tea. And the honey, if you want it, is from my hive.”
“Yes to everything, please.”
I had seen the greenhouse in the side yard. So Vanessa, like Elena, was a gardener. I wondered what other qualities they had in common, because they looked and seemed nothing alike. Elena was delicate and fragile as spun glass. Vanessa was sturdy, solid, an Earth Mother.
“Good,” she said. “We can fix our teas and then we can sit in the sunroom. It’s going to be warm enough today to open the windows. I hope you don’t have allergies. The pollen’s already terrible. Everything in the house has a fine coating of yellowish-green dust all over it.”
“Fortunately I don’t. Eli’s the one with allergies.” I followed her down a paneled hallway that was a shrine to Sasha as she grew up. Framed photographs covered the walls: school chorale concerts, honor society award ceremonies, swim meets, soccer team pictures, first Communion, ballet recitals, a Sweet 16 birthday party, prom night, graduation, and all the other growing-up moments parents record, capturing awkwardness and puberty, acne and orthodontics.
Vanessa must have realized I was lingering to look at the photos because she came back and said, “She’s the love of my life. I miss her every day.”
“She’s not that far away,” I said. “It’s only an hour and a half from here to Atoka.”
“I lost her to her father when she moved up your way.”
It sounded like a rebuke. “No, you didn’t. She talks about you all the time.”
“Jamie wasn’t part of her life at all when she was growing up,” Vanessa said. “I raised her by myself, a single mom with a little girl, until I finally married her stepfather when she was twelve. He died last year.”
“I’m so sorry.”
There was an ocean of bitterness welled up inside Vanessa Pensiero.
“Jamie had everything,” she went on. “He didn’t have to take my daughter, too. He charmed her, spoiled her with his money and everything he could offer her … Sasha wanted so badly for Jamie and me to make up and be friends.”
I followed her into the kitchen. She took a pitcher of iced tea out of the refrigerator and got two tall glasses from a cabinet with jerky, automated movements.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. “Divorce is never easy, especially when there are children involved.”
“Divorce?” She spun around and gave me an incredulous look. “We were barely married. Jamie did the honorable thing when he found out I was pregnant our senior year of college. Me, a nice Catholic girl, unmarried and expecting a baby. My parents practically disowned me. He married me the day after graduation, with just our immediate families as witnesses, and even before Sasha was born we both knew it was over. He’d already been bewitched by Elena and I lost him.”
“That must have been rough.”
“It was devastating. I loved him. Once.”
Our eyes met, hers anguished. She still loved him, in spite of everything she’d just said. Jamie’s death had been a devastating blow for her, too. She took a small ceramic pot that looked like a beehive out of a cabinet and pushed it toward me.
“I didn’t mean to burden you with my problems or old grudges,” she said, and I had the feeling she was suddenly embarrassed by her outburst. “Please, help yourself to some honey.”
I used a wooden honey dipper to add a dollop of her honey to my tea and followed her to a cheery glassed-in room filled with comfortable well-worn furniture that said this was the heart of the home. A bird feeder hung on the branch of a still-bare oak tree in front of one of the open windows where a male and a female cardinal gorged themselves on sunflower seeds. A rectangular coffee table in front of the sofa had the battle scars and drink rings of dozens of board games that had been played and puzzles that had been assembled over the years, maybe over popcorn or hot chocolate or a glass of wine.
Vanessa sat on the chintz-covered sofa and indicated that I should join her. “Sasha told me Jamie said something to you before he died,” she said. “And he gave you a MedicAlert bracelet.”
“He didn’t exactly give me the bracelet,” I said. “It slipped out of his hand and I picked it up off the ground.”
“May I see it?”
I took it out of the pocket of my jeans and handed it to her. She turned it over and sucked in her breath, running her thumb over the words written on the back.
“Oh, my God.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “You shouldn’t have this. Really. You have no idea…”
She knew whose bracelet this was. I pounced on her words. “No idea about what? Tell me.”
She set the bracelet on the coffee table as if it were glowing from some kind of otherworldly radiation. “First tell me what Jamie said to you.”
“He asked me to tell someone named Rick that he was sorry. He said he wanted Rick to forgive him.”
“No.” Her voice was sharp. “Tell me exactly what he said to you. His exact words.”
I thought for a moment. “He said, ‘I’m sorry. Tell him I’m sorry.’ So I asked him what he was talking about and he said, ‘Tell Rick. Tell Rick I need him to forgive me.’ And then he said he was sorry again. ‘So very sorry,’ he said. And he made me promise to tell him. He insisted.”
Vanessa sat back on the sofa and propped her orthopedic boot on the coffee table as if she were dealing with the super-heavy gravity of Jupiter. For a long time she said nothing, just ran her thumb up and down the side of her iced tea glass, an unfocused look in her eyes.
“Vanessa,” I said. “Who’s Rick?”
She turned her head. Not only did she know who he was, but the answer scared her.
“Not Rick. Taurique. Tell-Rick. Tau-rique. Could he have said the name ‘Taurique’ to you? Could you have misheard what he said as ‘Tell Rick’?”
I sounded it out. “Yes, I suppose he could have said Taurique. Who is he?”
“Taurique Youngblood. Age … by now, he’s probably in his late fifties, maybe a bit younger. He’s in jail. On death row, actually, though his execution keeps getting postponed. Charged with the murder of a UVA student named Webster Landau. Webb.” She paused. “You’re too young to know about this … it happened my senior year.”
Jamie wanted forgiveness from a murderer on death row. Dear God. “Sorry. It doesn’t ring a bell. Who was Webster Landau?”
“A doctoral student in the biochemistry department. A brilliant student. The kind every professor dreams of working with but almost never does. Webb was incredibly gifted, IQ off the charts … an amazing person. Unfortunately, he had an ego to match, but we all knew he was going places. A Nobel Prize someday wouldn’t have been out of the question. Elena was his TA … teaching assistant. Of course, she was brilliant, too.” She gave me a significant look. “She was also Webb’s girlfriend.”
“Oh.”
“In those days, we were all friends. Jamie and me, Elena and Webb, and Mick Dunne, who’d usually bring along some freshman as his latest conquest. Mick’s girlfriends never lasted. He had a wandering eye.”
“He still does,” I said. “You know he’s my next-door neighbor?”
She nodded. “Why do you think he moved to Atoka after he sold his pharmaceutical business in Florida? Elena worked for him, you know. She was the director of development for Dunne Pharmaceutical’s two most successful drugs. When we were in school, Elena and Webb—and Jamie—were always as thick as thieves. And Mick’s still not married. Never will be. I think deep down he always carried a bit of a torch for Elena, but he just didn’t want to get tied down.”
I wasn’t ready to tell Vanessa that Quinn, too, thought Mick still had feelings for Elena, or that I had been one of Mick’s many conquests so I knew firsthand what he could be like. For that matter, I wasn’t ready to tell her that I thought Jamie had intentionally driven into my wall and Mick hadn’t tried to rescue him before his car caught fire.
“How were Jamie and Mick involved with Webb?” I asked.
“Jamie was a biology major and Mick was studying biochemistry, like Elena. I was the odd one out, the English major. Jamie wanted to be a doctor, a surgeon like his father. His family was really pushing him to go to med school.”
“I didn’t know that.”
She sipped her iced tea. “After Webb died, the fire went out of Jamie. Plus all of a sudden he had a wife and child to support. So he gave up the idea of medical school and got a job in the construction business. Found out he was good at it, so he kept going, eventually bought the company he worked for, and on and on.” She shrugged. “Mick went into the pharmaceutical business, started out in sales. And you know how that ended up.”
I did. He renamed the mom-and-pop company he bought “Dunne Pharmaceutical” and took it from a little start-up to a major player. “So Jamie and Mick knew Webb because of Elena?”
“Yes, but they also volunteered to help Webb with his research. A lot of students did that for extra credit. Plus they ended up in the little club known as ‘Dori’s Darlings.’ That’s what the other students called them. It bred a lot of jealousy and ill will among those who were left out.”
Before I could ask who Dori was, she said, “Professor Theodora Upshur. Webb’s thesis adviser. She’s the reason he came to UVA, to work with her. Another brilliant mind. Dori—as we called her—owned a farm a couple of miles from the school. It was a wonderful rambling old house with a lot of land that had been in her family for generations. Dori used to invite a select group of students for dinner on a regular basis—we all helped cook, of course. A lot of drinking went on, so usually we’d stay over, spend the night in one of the bedrooms or else sleep out in the barn since nobody wanted to walk back to their dormitory drunk. The discussions on those evenings were incredible … it made me think this was what the seventeenth-century European literary salons must have been like, where brilliant, educated people with great minds were passionate about ideas, saving the world, changing it. My God, we thought we were invincible. Those evenings were magical.”
There was a dreamy, faraway wistfulness in her voice. I waited for her to go on because the story obviously didn’t have a happy ending. “Until,” she said, “they weren’t. And things got out of control really fast.”
“What happened?”
She raised an eyebrow again and propped her elbow on the arm of the sofa, leaning her head on her hand. “The perfect storm. Webb was working on a study that took him out to Cal—UC–Berkeley, that is. He’d gotten involved in a project to develop a drug that could … I don’t remember exactly what it was … but it had something to do with multiple sclerosis. But I do remember that he hadn’t told Dori he was taking on an additional research project—especially one that didn’t involve UVA—which really upset her. Webb was her protégé. She didn’t want someone in California poaching him, and she definitely didn’t want him going rogue, and then maybe using her lab to conduct research on some potentially groundbreaking drug without her involvement, either. Credit where credit was due—with her.”
Vanessa rattled the ice cubes in her glass. “So,” she said, “by this time Elena was getting fed up with covering for him in Charlottesville, plus she felt she wasn’t getting any recognition or acknowledgment of the extra work she’d taken on for him. And while Webb was gone—” She gave me a false, brittle smile. “Jamie and Elena slept together. Webb found out and went … oh, God, he just went absolutely nuts. It didn’t do much for my relationship with Jamie, either. I’d just learned I was pregnant. He was in love with someone else.”
She stood up and her boot hit the floor with a dull thud. “Would you like a splash of bourbon in your iced tea?”
“No, thanks. I’ve got to drive back to Atoka. You go ahead, though.”
“I think I will. Otherwise I’ll probably never get through telling you all this.”
She clumped across the room to a long, low cabinet with an enormous flat-screen television sitting on top and opened one of the doors. The bottle of bourbon was about a third full. Vanessa poured a liberal amount into her iced tea and I knew this wasn’t the first time she’d done this.
She came back and joined me on the sofa. “Where was I?”
“Jamie slept with Elena.”
“Right.” She took a swig of her bourbon-laced tea. “It got worse. Webb accused Mick and Jamie of fudging some of their results in the data they’d been compiling for him. It was extra work, outside of their classwork, but UVA has an incredibly strict honor code. No cheating, lying, or stealing. A violation of any one of those—it’s called a single-sanction rule—is an automatic expulsion. You’re tried before a board of your peers. It’s one of the oldest university honor codes in the country and, believe me, you don’t want to go up in front of that board.”
“Were they cheating? Had they faked their results?”
Vanessa squirmed and looked like she wanted to ask if she could take the Fifth. “Jamie was working flat out. He, Mick, and Elena were all Lawnies. It was their senior year. The three of them had so much going on. Lawnies were the elite; they were expected to take part in campus activities, be community leaders, set examples by their behavior. One of the conditions for accepting a room on the Lawn is that you agree to leave your door open as often as possible because of all the historic interest in Thomas Jefferson’s original ‘Academical Village.’ The place is a UNESCO World Heritage site, for God’s sake. Loads of people come to visit.”
Though I hadn’t attended UVA, I’d been there often enough to visit friends to know that the private rooms on the redbrick colonnaded Lawn were awarded only to students who had outstanding academic records and were considered by the faculty and staff to be leaders and individuals of high moral character. A charge of cheating would be a devastating blow to any student at the university. For a Lawnie, it was a death sentence. You were letting down centuries of tradition.
“So is that a yes, they did cheat?” I asked. “You didn’t really say.” Actually, it sounded like she was trying to make excuses for them.
She drank more iced tea and made a face as if it had turned bitter. “They ran out of time, so yes, they faked some of the results, extrapolating from what they already knew to be true. If Webb turned them over to the Honor Board, they’d both be expelled right before graduation.”
“But he didn’t turn them in.”
“No.”
“Because…?”
“Because he disappeared that night and no one ever saw him again. Ever saw him alive, that is.”
I set my glass on the ring-scarred coffee table and folded my hands in my lap. “What happened?”
She looked at me as though I’d just opened the box that let trouble out into the world.
“We were at Dori’s for dinner. The usual Friday night drinking began. That night, though, Dori was pissed off with all of us and said we were squabbling like a bunch of kindergartners. She was so upset she left the house and drove off. After she was gone, things really went downhill. Webb and Elena were in the kitchen shouting at each other, and when Jamie stepped in to try to calm Webb down, Webb picked up a knife and went for Jamie.” Her eyes grew wide at the memory. “It was crazy. Fortunately he was so drunk he missed, and by then Mick showed up and managed to get the knife away from Webb, although he ended up getting cut himself. It was a mess, blood everywhere. I bandaged his hand with the red bandanna Elena was wearing in her hair.” Vanessa finished her iced tea and sat there, staring into her empty glass as though telling me this story had exhausted her.
I suspected this was the first time in a very long time that she had recounted what happened that night in so much detail. But I was also fairly certain that it lived in her head like a worm that had bored into her memory and hadn’t ever given her a day’s peace of mind. I wondered if Sasha knew this grisly tale about her father and guessed she might not.
“I know this must be hard for you, but I’d like to hear all of it,” I said.
“I’ve told you this much so…” Vanessa shrugged. “Webb left … on foot. He just went crashing out of the house. Everyone disappeared after that. We all went our own ways—no one was talking to anyone else, the atmosphere was so volatile, like we were all ready to explode—sleeping on our own in different bedrooms. Jamie and I were barely speaking since I’d just found out about Elena. The next morning I had terrible morning sickness, and when I came downstairs to the kitchen, the only person there was Elena. Mick was upstairs sleeping, but Jamie had left sometime during the night. We had no idea where Dori was. Elena and I were on dreadful terms by that point. Somehow we managed to clean up without killing each other, and then Elena woke up Mick and she drove his car back to Grounds—campus, that is—because his hand was bothering him. He’d put another bandage on it to replace Elena’s scarf, but you could still see where the cut had bled through.”
“Then what?”
Vanessa shrugged. When she spoke, I could tell it was an effort to finish the story. “Webb didn’t show up all day. He lived in the Range, the graduate student rooms on the other side of the Lawn. You have to compete for those rooms as well—be an exceptional student, a leader, involved in the university, that sort of thing. Anyway, Mick and Jamie went and checked out his room and Elena checked the lab, but it looked like he hadn’t been to either place. By Sunday morning, everyone started getting really worried so Elena went to the head of security, who called the Charlottesville police.” She stood up so abruptly that her boot whacked the coffee table and my drink glass rattled.
I reached out and grabbed it.
“Wait here,” Vanessa said. “Would you like more iced tea?”
I wasn’t going anywhere. Not now. “Yes, please.”
She left the room and returned a moment later with a file folder, which she handed to me. “You may as well read these. It’ll save a lot of time explaining everything. I’ll get our iced teas.”
I picked up the folder. The top article was a fragile, yellowed story from the Charlottesville Daily Progress with the headline “Massive Manhunt for Missing UVA Student.” I skimmed it. After an intensive three-day search involving hundreds of volunteers including his fellow students, Webster Landau’s body had been discovered in a shallow grave in a wooded area on the farm of Dr. Theodora Upshur, the chair of the biochemistry department at UVA and Landau’s dissertation adviser. Cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head. The last time he’d been seen … etc., etc., etc.
The next article said that twenty-five-year-old Taurique Youngblood, an African-American resident of the nearby town of Ivy, who had done yard work for Professor Upshur, had been arrested after he tried to use a credit card belonging to Webster Landau to buy cigarettes and Twinkies at a 7-Eleven. Webb Landau’s bloodstained backpack was also discovered in a trash can in Youngblood’s backyard. Youngblood claimed he had no idea how the backpack got there, but he had an arrest record for two instances of robbery and assault. Later, the police found Webb’s car and Taurique’s fingerprints on a jack in the trunk—possibly the murder weapon—which Taurique claimed were there because he’d helped Webb change a tire a few days earlier.
The rest of the articles followed the logical progression of Taurique Youngblood being charged with the murder of Webb Landau. The case had attracted national attention because of its sensational nature—white PhD student with a brilliant career ahead of him in science brutally murdered by a local black man who’d been so audacious and heartless as to use his victim’s credit card to buy snacks and cigarettes.
It didn’t take a jury long to find Taurique Youngblood guilty and even less time for the sentence to be handed down: death by lethal injection. A lot of people think of Texas or Oklahoma when they think of states that still execute their worst convicts, but the Commonwealth of Virginia is right up there—we’re third in the number of prisoners we’ve put to death. Plus we got an early start: The first execution in the future United States took place in Virginia in 1608 at the Jamestown Settlement, a hanging for treason.
I went through the articles one more time, stopping to look at the photos. A candid of Elena, Mick, and Jamie, all so much younger, standing on the edge of a forest as they got ready to participate in the search for a friend who’d gone missing the night of an alcohol-fueled party that they’d all attended. It was hard to read their expressions in the grainy black-and-white photo. Scared? Guilty? Did one of them—or all of them—already know where to find Webb’s body? I couldn’t tell. The photo of Dori—Dr. Theodora A. Upshur—was her university head shot. Serious, studious, unsmiling, with shoulder-length dark hair, horn-rimmed glasses, and a distinctive beauty mark above her upper lip. The surprise was Webb’s picture. After what Vanessa had told me about him, I’d pictured a short, slightly doughy guy with pale, soft skin and glasses with thick Coke-bottle lenses who spent all his time indoors in a laboratory. Webb looked nothing like that. Instead he was handsome and clean cut, with a mesmerizing smile, intelligent eyes, and the lean, well-muscled body of an athlete. Someone who stared at the camera with the cocky self-confidence that showed he knew that when the gods handed out the gifts and talents, he’d been abundantly blessed.
The police booking photo of Taurique Youngblood, looking disheveled and wild haired, with a bug-eyed, confused stare as if he didn’t understand why he was being photographed, was disturbing. It was the kind of picture that screamed guilty every time you saw it in the newspaper. Get this guy off the street. He’s dangerous.
I closed the folder and set it on the coffee table, haunted by the photo of Taurique. By then Vanessa had returned with our teas and was seated on the sofa watching me read.
“You said Jamie left Dori’s house the night Webb disappeared,” I said. “Where did he go? He was the only one—except Webb—who wasn’t there the next morning. And Dori, too, of course.”
“Jamie said he walked back to town and had a couple of beers in one of the bars on the Corner,” she said. I knew the Corner. It was a stretch of bars, nightclubs, restaurants, and shops directly across from the main campus, a big student hangout. “Then he went back to his room on the Lawn and slept off the booze.” Before I could ask, she said, “A couple of people said they saw him. So he had witnesses.”
Now we were getting to the come-to-Jesus part of our conversation. The MedicAlert bracelet wasn’t Jamie’s, and Vanessa had been shocked and upset to see it, telling me I shouldn’t have it. As far as I was concerned, that whittled down the list to just one person.
“Whose MedicAlert bracelet is this?” I asked. “It’s Webb’s, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“How did Jamie get hold of it?”
“I have no idea.”
“Do you have any idea who killed Webb Landau?” I asked. “Assuming it wasn’t Taurique Youngblood, that is.”
“No.” She gave me a defiant look. “I know I didn’t.”
“That’s a big endorsement for the others who were with him that last night,” I said. “Jamie, Mick, Elena. Even Dr. Upshur, Dori.”
“Don’t judge me. You have no idea what those three days were like while we were looking for him.” Her anger flashed unexpectedly. “My God, we were all so tense we were barely eating and sleeping. I was sure I was going to lose the baby from all the stress. I kept throwing up … in fact I wished I would lose it because it would have solved so many problems. It was April, nearly the end of term, and everyone had papers due, exams to study for … graduation coming up.” She clapped a hand over her mouth and looked horrified. “Oh, my God, I can’t believe I told you that. Sasha can’t ever know what I said about wishing I’d lose my baby. I love her more than anything in the world. I’d do anything for her.”
I figured Sasha wasn’t aware of this turbulent part of her parents’ history. “I won’t say anything,” I said, “but I’m confused. I thought Taurique was sentenced to die by lethal injection thirty years ago. Why would Jamie want me to find him and ask his forgiveness now?”
“Because he’s still alive. His lawyer keeps filing appeals, so his case has gone through the entire Virginia courts system. Now it’s in some federal court and that could drag on for years. His lawyer claims Taurique’s Sixth Amendment rights were violated, that he never got a fair trial with an impartial jury.”
Vanessa had given me a long answer to the obvious question. What I wanted to know was something different. So I asked it.
“Do you think Jamie killed Webb? He certainly had a motive. Webb was going to turn him in for cheating, and that could have gotten him expelled just weeks before he graduated.”
“Mick was as guilty as Jamie was,” she said, avoiding my eyes.
Once again she hadn’t answered the question. “What happened to Professor Upshur? Dori.”
Vanessa shrugged. “She quit her job, left the university, and no one ever heard from her again. Eventually the farm was sold to a young couple, who turned it into a vineyard. You probably know it—Skyline Winery.”
“I do,” I said. “I know the owners, but I had no idea about its history.”
“I always thought…” Vanessa began and then stopped herself.
“What?”
“That Dori was a little in love with Webb. I mean, there was a big age difference between them and she was his dissertation adviser, but…”
“You said she disappeared that night because she was so upset with all of you. Do you think she could have murdered Webb?”
“No one knew her farm as well as she did. He was buried in the middle of the woods. You’d really have to know your way around to find the place.”
That sounded like a yes. “So maybe Jamie knew who really killed Webb. Dori Upshur.”
“It’s possible. Good Lord, anything’s possible. You’re talking thirty years ago. Memories get fuzzy after all that time.”
I’d bet no memory got fuzzy for Taurique Youngblood on death row. My money would be on him reliving those days over and over and over again so that he could tell the story backward if he needed to.
“Why would Elena and Garrett Bateman tell me ‘Rick’ was a donor who gave a lot of money to Jamie’s presidential campaign?” I asked. “Do you think they knew Jamie was talking about Taurique Youngblood?”
“You’d have to ask them. Maybe there was someone named Rick and he and Jamie did have a falling-out … though it does seem hard to believe the two of them wouldn’t have reached the same conclusion I did. And now they’re trying to protect Jamie. Keep you from asking questions about things they’d prefer not to have come up.” She shook her head. “Garrett Bateman. I’d nearly forgotten about him.”
“You know him?”
“Of course I do. Garrett and Jamie were fraternity brothers. Jamie was Garrett’s big brother. Garrett worshipped the ground Jamie walked on. He would have done anything for Jamie.”
“Would he cover up for Jamie now if he thought he was guilty of murder?”
She gave me a steely look that unnerved me. “He wouldn’t think twice about it. He’s Jamie’s right-hand business partner, you know. Or was.”
The MedicAlert bracelet lay on the coffee table where Vanessa had set it down. “I’m surprised neither Elena nor Garrett said anything when you showed them that bracelet,” she went on. “They must have known it was Webb’s, the same as I did.”
“I didn’t show it to them,” I said. “I didn’t have it with me when I stopped by Elena’s place and I forgot to mention it.”
“Are you saying they don’t know you have it?”
“That’s right. I gave it to Sasha figuring she’d give it to Elena, but she gave it back to me. Instead she called you and here I am.”
Vanessa sat back on the sofa and folded her arms across her chest. “Well, well, well. You do realize you’ve got a key piece of missing evidence that’s part of a murder investigation that put a man on death row? Anybody who cares about Jamie Vaughn would sure hate to have that bracelet resurface after all this time because it’s only going to make Jamie look like he had something to do with Webb Landau’s murder.”
“I can see that.”
She gave me a conspiratorial look. “Right now you and I are the only two people who know who it really belongs to. You could just toss it in a Dumpster somewhere or get rid of it some other way and that would be the end of it. Or leave it with me. I’d dispose of it.”
“I suppose I could, couldn’t I?”
She leaned forward, and before she could do anything, I picked up the bracelet and slipped it in my pocket.
“But you’re not going to do that, are you?” she said.
“I don’t think so.”
“Why? Why make trouble after all these years? Taurique Youngblood had already been arrested for robbery and assault. He was no Boy Scout.”
She had turned the tables and now suddenly I was a troublemaker. I gave her a clear-eyed look and she flinched.
“Taurique is on death row for murder,” I said. “He says he’s not guilty and obviously there are judges who believe him enough to keep postponing his execution.”
“Don’t do this,” she said. “You don’t have to. You’ll destroy Sasha if you do. No one will thank you for it.”
“I made your daughter’s father a promise before he died that I would ask Taurique Youngblood to forgive him.”
“You don’t know what you’re getting into.” Her voice turned sharp with anger and frustration.
“No, I don’t. But now I know there are two people I can’t let down. Jamie Vaughn.” I looked her in the eye. “And Taurique Youngblood.”