At least the rain had stopped.
The surrounding darkness would have bothered anyone else, but Ash welcomed it. A darkened road was ideal, with its canopy of trees barely revealing the moonlight through the clouds that had gathered a few days earlier. He heard footsteps in the gravel, and a light popped on inside his car as the passenger door opened and Tolly Shephard climbed in with a swoosh of the leather seat.
He pulled the door closed. “So who’s watching your kids?”
Not what Ash had been expecting Tolly to ask. He’d told the former police chief where to meet him at the end of Anderson, an unpaved private road that went nowhere and backed onto a hundred acres of parkland. The only cars that ever came out there were filled with teenagers looking for a place to hang out, party, drink, and do the typical teenage stuff that parents on the island had no idea their kids were doing.
“The nanny I hired,” Ash replied.
Suzette was over from Australia on a student visa, but her papers had expired, and she’d been looking for a job at his hotel. She said she’d come from a big family, a redhead with a sweet smile, short and boxy, twenty-three. Ash lifted the thick envelope on the centre console between the seats and handed it to Tolly, who hesitated only a second before taking it.
“Includes a bonus,” Ash said. He knew Tolly wouldn’t count it, one hundred thousand that would never be traced.
“You kill her?” Tolly said as he thumbed through the stacks of cash in the envelope.
He’d known Tolly Shephard a long time, enough to know he was a very smart man. “You know why you kept your job as long as you did?” he said.
Tolly never smiled. He dragged his gaze over to Ash in the darkness, but Ash could still see something in his expression though it was pitch black. “Figured it was because I didn’t look too hard into what you were doing.”
“Oh, come on, Tolly. You know this would be political suicide for you. I’m too close with the people who pay your salary…”
“I’m very well aware of everything you do, Ash, so let’s not dance around it. I know you were the guy in the background of the last state governor election. You worked the scene and had the ear of every news correspondent. They were in your pocket. You told them where to focus their stories, which headlines to use, and when it went sideways because the governor didn’t do what you told him and the media was getting wind, you send in a decoy, some nutjob bussed in to discredit the angry protestors with legitimate concerns. You worked it well, encouraging the journalists to take photos of every protestor there, and then what happened? Those angry citizens became a problem and found themselves in a database of people likely to cause civil unrest. This island has to be a sideshow for you, because handling the council is not on the scale of projects you usually manage.”
The way Tolly said it, Ash heard the edge in his voice. He wondered when too much would happen and Tolly would do something he shouldn’t, just like the moms and pops who had shown up at protests only to find his decoys planted right beside them, screaming louder and changing the narrative. He knew exactly how to turn legitimate outrage over government abuse into annoyance at just another nutjob.
“You’re right that this island is small,” Ash said, “but it requires the same handholding, and whether you believe it or not, I do believe in the separation of state and media.”
Tolly shook his head. “That’s an odd thing for you to say, considering what you do.”
What was he supposed to say? Business was business. He handled problems. Freedom was something he’d believed in when he was young and idealistic, until the unforgettable day he learned otherwise.
“Not so odd,” he said. “I learned a valuable lesson one day when I was twenty and stupid, when a corporate giant took my mother’s house and the bank allowed it to happen. The DA and the police were all contacted about the fraud, as the documents were backdated and the signatures forged, but the DA said he wouldn’t prosecute because it wasn’t in the public interest to prosecute someone that powerful. I demanded the evidence, the paper trail, and I was denied. But I’m not being denied anymore.”
And Olgar Rheinsmith, the head of the corporate giant, was now facing a human rights tribunal. Not what he’d planned, but he’d take the payback.
Tolly pulled in a breath, still sitting in the car. “You didn’t answer me on whether you killed her. You know Gail disabled the GPS, and Sunday turned off the cameras in the house, but the new identity Amy Holt set up for her was left in the garbage at a train station in Chicago. You knew she’d show up in California?”
He stared out the window, thinking of how he’d once saved the ass of the big Hollywood producer Sunday had left him for. He’d helped Mel Atwood out of a jam that would have ended his career, with him in his fifties, liking young girls—and then there was his wife.
“Mel Atwood was a dog,” he said. “He hired me once, and I investigated the allegations against him and made them go away. He had a thing for Sunday, and she was always looking for the better catch.”
He’d have forgiven anything except betrayal. Sunday had known too many of his secrets. She’d even made a call to the Feds. At least she couldn’t talk anymore.
“She was only sixteen, Ash…”
“You know she was the type of woman who feeds off the mental, physical, and material means of a man and then leaves him for dead. You think I didn’t know how dangerous she was? Her parents did, too, and that’s why they brought her to me, but sometimes you just can’t save someone. Nothing will come back on you, Tolly. Your hands are clean.”
Tolly let out a rude noise. “The mother of your children is dead. Of course I have blood on my hands. But now you’ll leave Mark alone.”
Ash inhaled as he thought of the redheaded chief. He didn’t like wildcards because they were unpredictable, and unpredictable could be a problem for him. “You know, Tolly, I never knew you had such a soft spot for the young detective, considering what a thorn in your side he was. When Sunday showed up at his house, I think that snippy little social worker being there foiled whatever plan she had. I think she really got off on it, showing up the way she did. To her, it was a game, as if she was daring me to do something.” He took in the headlights of a small car coming that way, then the loud thumping of music as it drove past.
“I mean it, Ash,” Tolly said. “I found the girl. It wasn’t hard. And Gail did her part, too. Now you leave Mark alone. You know you owe me, and it’s all I’m asking.”
He didn’t understand why Tolly was so fond of Mark Friessen, but he’d stopped wondering long ago why people did the things they did. “You keep him out of my business,” he said.
Tolly pulled on the door, and the inside light flicked on again. “Just don’t do anything here that will have him looking your way. Mark can’t be bought, and he doesn’t give in to blackmail or strong-arming. He’s not like who you’re used to dealing with. You keep it off the island, Ash, and I mean it: Mark stays off your radar.”
He just stared at Tolly, who was about to leave. “Then you make sure he stops looking into me. You know he is.”
Tolly said nothing, just nodded as he climbed out.
Ash started his car, thinking of the nanny at home, watching his kids, the mother they’d never know, and the fact that Tolly and Gail Shephard had a lot more to lose than he did.
What’s coming next in the Billy Jo McCabe Mystery? The Children
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