I stared at Freddie.
“What?” he said.
“You’re not sleeping here, are you?”
“What are you talkin’ about?”
“You’ve been in the office early every day for a week.”
“Naw, man. You’ve been late every day for a week. What’s your excuse t’day?”
“The St. Paul cops knocked on my door again.”
“What the hell, man? They’ve been t’ your place so often you should make ’em pay rent. You know what, though? That story’s not high on my reading list right now. Tell me what happened at the Library. Who’s Sean? Who’s Chad?”
I explained everything in gruesome detail.
“Jeezus, Taylor. Why them and not you? Or the girl? Why not just sweep the sidewalk?”
“I don’t know.”
I told Freddie that I had Hayley safely squirreled away in the Cities. I told him what she had told me about the hacks, with as many particulars as I could recall. When I finished, Freddie went to our bulletin board, pulled open the curtain, and started putting up index cards. He replaced HACKER with SEAN and CHAD and linked them to HAYLEY and SNIPER after first removing the card labeled THUGS. After I explained it to him, all five of the attorneys’ cases, including MURDER and RAPE, were linked to GUERNSEY as well. He nearly removed the card labeled NIMN but decided to let it be.
“You left her with the files,” Freddie said. “Why did you do that?”
“Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“The girl could still put ’em up on the web.”
“She promised me she wouldn’t.”
“Do you believe her?”
“Yes. Well, until something happens that makes her change her mind.”
“You mean like the wind blowing in a different direction? Where exactly is Hayley, anyway?”
“I’m not sure I should tell you.”
“Keeping secrets from your partner, what’s that about?”
I explained some more about my visit with the St. Paul detectives that morning.
“They gave you forty-eight hours?” Freddie repeated. “Who talks like that except movie cops? Forty-eight hours before the bomb goes off. Before the killer strikes again. Before the innocent man is sent to the electric chair. C’mon.”
“I think they’re serious, though, so if it all goes sideways, and it probably will, I don’t want to take you with me.”
“That’s awfully white of you, Taylor.”
“Besides, I’ll need someone to bail me out of jail.”
“Who do you think will knock on our door first, the St. Paul cops or Minneapolis?”
“Minneapolis. They’ve always been less forgiving. Freddie, let’s look at this logically.”
“That’ll be a change.”
I went to the bulletin board myself and started rearranging the index cards and connecting yarn. The cards labeled DIVORCE, CLASS ACTION, MURDER, BRIBE, and RAPE were stacked on top of each other. One length of red yarn connected them directly to the card labeled GUERNSEY, and one length of yarn connected them to another card marked HAYLEY. SIEGLE, O’NEILL, and COWGILL were linked to the stack with three separate lengths of yarn. SEAN and CHAD were joined to HAYLEY, and SNIPER was connected to all three. NIMN was left floating unattached. I removed all of the other cards from the board.
“Now,” I said. “What if…” I used yarn to link SIEGLE, O’NEILL, and COWGILL to GUERNSEY. “The Guernsey family knew exactly what was happening even before the lawyers, because Sean and Chad decided to blackmail them. Except—”
“Except Hayley stole their evidence and they had to put their plans on hold while they tried to get it back.”
“The lawyers used the extra time to contact us. What if the Guernseys decided to use the time to minimize the damage that the hacked intel might cause by eliminating loose ends. Cowgill, the blackmailer, is taken off the board, and so are his photos. This protects Todd Kendrick, the illegitimate son of Kurtis Guernsey. Siegle is killed so he can’t authenticate the memo that said Standout Investments was knowingly violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. This limits discovery by the plaintiffs that are suing Standout and helps hide wrongdoing by Minnesota River State Bank. O’Neill is killed because he’s in the wrong place at the right time.”
“Except it doesn’t explain who hired O’Neill and why he was surveilling Siegle in the first place,” Freddie said.
“No, it doesn’t. Set that aside for now. Shouldn’t we also link SNIPER to GUERNSEY, because he killed Sean and Chad, who were attempting to blackmail the Guernseys, and because he tried to kill Hayley, who wanted to hurt them in her own way?”
“Do you honestly think they tried to knock off one of their own? Disinherit her, I can see that. Toss her out on the street. Or go the other way and buy the girl off, put her on an island in the Caribbean where she can rail against ’em all she wants. Kill her, though?”
“I only know what Hayley told me.”
“Lots of contradictions between her and what the mother said.”
“More than you’d expect.”
“You get the feeling we’re being played?” Freddie said.
“Absolutely. The question is—by whom?”
“It’s getting to be a long list of possibilities. Oh, before I forget…”
Freddie went to his desk, opened a drawer, withdrew a fat envelope, and tossed it to me. I looked inside. It was filled with cash.
“This came over the threshold last night about the time you were dancing with Hayley and her pals,” Freddie said. “David Helin called. Doesn’t matter much now, but he said he couldn’t help us. He said none of the Guernseys would take his calls, much less ours. Ten minutes later the door was knocked on, maybe a coincidence, maybe not. When I opened it, I found the envelope on the welcome mat and no one around. Ten stacks. Apparently the lawyers took my little joke about wanting more money seriously, although why they couldn’t just hand it to me…”
“You get the feeling the boys are trying to keep us motivated?”
“Hmm.”
“Considering the many things they neglected to tell us, it’s clear we’re hanging out with the wrong crowd. Our mothers would be appalled.”
“On the other hand, this is startin’ to be one of our more lucrative jobs.”
“What are we up to? Thirty-five grand?”
Freddie held up a personal check written by Maura Guernsey.
“Thirty-seven five, nearly all of it untraceable. What I’m thinkin’, Steve is welcome to a third of the original twenty stacks the lawyers paid us—sixty-six hundred and change. The rest, though, that’s all ours. He don’t get a share of that. Maybe we don’t give the government a share, either.”
“I like the way you think, partner.”
“So, partner, what’s our next move?”
“Remember when this whole thing started, you said we should reveal ourselves and I said the bosses wanted us to keep it quiet.”
“Yeah, but my idea was about attractin’ the computer hacker and baitin’ ’im into hittin’ us so Sara could trap him. We don’t care about that anymore, do we?”
“What I’m concerned with”—I gestured at the bulletin board—“is Cowgill, Siegle, O’Neill, Sean, and Chad. They were killed because of what they knew. They were killed because someone wanted to keep them quiet.”
“Meaning?”
“Let’s make some noise.”
April Herron approached me in the corridor at Hannum, Hillsman, and Byers with an expression of wide-eyed terror on her face that nearly made me laugh. I also felt a stitch of guilt because I knew I was the one who put it there. As we passed, I startled her by reaching for her hand. The receptionist who was escorting me to Scott Mickelson’s office was three strides past us before she realized that I had stopped. She turned just as I said, “Good morning. It’s a pleasure to see you again.”
April gave me a reluctant smile. “Good morning,” she replied.
“I know that you’re a stenographer, but I can’t recall your name.”
“April. April Herron.”
“Of course. I hope everything is going your way since I saw you last.”
“So far, so good.”
“I’m sure your luck will continue. Have a nice day, April.”
“Thank you.”
I hoped April understood what I was trying to tell her, that she and her friends had nothing to fear from us. She did seem to have more of a spring in her step as she walked off, but maybe that was just me. I rejoined the receptionist, and together we found Mickelson’s office. He was sitting behind his desk and reading what looked to me like a brief. He did not stand up; he did not offer to shake my hand. I gestured at the brief.
“I thought we were becoming a paperless society,” I said.
“Electronic filing is now required in all eighty-seven counties in Minnesota, but some lawyers simply refuse to join the electronic age. They cling to hard copies the way children embrace security blankets. What did you come here to tell me, Taylor? If you had good news, you would have called.”
“When we were first brought us into this, you told Freddie and me that the notes stolen from your computer indicated that the mayor was taking bribes from Ryan-Reed Construction. What you didn’t tell us was that they implicated Robert Guernsey Jr. directly. You were holding out on us, Scott. Why? Don’t you trust us?”
“The information was on a need-to-know basis, and you didn’t need—” Mickelson’s head snapped up from the brief. There was tension in his body. He studied me for a few hard beats before he continued. “Have you seen them? Have you seen the stenographer’s notes?”
“No.”
Apparently my answer gave him reason to loosen up. Mickelson leaned back in his chair and looked across his desk at me.
“Then you can’t testify that you had,” he said.
“Why would I?”
“How are you aware of this matter?”
“The hacker told me.”
“Was it Hayley O’Brien as you suspected? Did you find her? Do you know where she is?”
“Yes, yes, and no.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I found her and we had a long conversation.”
“Where is she now?”
“That I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
I shrugged in reply.
“You found her and then you lost her, is that what you’re telling me?”
“Lost is such a harsh word. It implies carelessness.”
“What word would you use?”
“Misplaced?”
“Christ, Taylor. Tell me, is she still capable of uploading the stolen information on NIMN?”
“Yes.”
“The threat to my clients, then, is as real as it ever was.”
“Yes, but now you know it’s a family matter.”
“Mayor Feeney and the executives at Ryan-Reed will not agree. I doubt that Robert Guernsey Jr. will agree when the federal marshals come for him, either.”
“I just thought you ought to know.”
The fact that Scott Mickelson was upset when I left his office didn’t surprise me. What did shock me was that Cormac Puchner wasn’t. His attitude reminded me of the slogan passed around by Londoners living through the Blitz during World War II—Keep calm and carry on.
“Do you understand what I’m telling you?” I asked. “The reason that Standout Investments Worldwide agreed to the settlement is because the Guernsey family was anxious that a prolonged lawsuit would lead to the discovery of fraudulent consumer practices being conducted by Standout’s parent company, Minnesota River State Bank.”
“Yes, I got that.”
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Don’t you care?”
“Taylor, my law firm doesn’t represent Minnesota River State Bank. We represent Standout, and while I’m deeply concerned about how the computer hack might impact that company, I’m really not interested at all in what happens to the bank.”
“Even though they’re owned by the same people?”
“I’m not an in-house lawyer, Taylor. I don’t need to worry about the ethical ramifications. Listen. As a corporation’s family structure grows in complexity, an in-house lawyer will face an unprecedented array of potentially conflicting client interests. Take Standout, for example. It’s owned by Minnesota River, which is owned by RPG Holding Company, which is owned by Guernsey Financial, Inc., which also owns several other companies, including Ryan-Reed Construction, the Oak Tree Stores, and Minneapolis-Butler. Just figuring out who your client is at any given moment can be a daunting proposition. Fortunately, I don’t have that problem. My job is to represent Standout and only Standout.”
“The Guernseys might not see it that way.”
“You’re not listening, Taylor. I don’t work for the Guernseys. That little bitch can screw them like a light bulb for all I care, just as long as she doesn’t do it to Standout, too.”
“That has to be the most singularly self-centered attitude I’ve ever come across. Or the most practical.”
“Taylor, I have one job—protect the settlement, keep it from blowing up into something much bigger. You have one job—keep the intel the hacker stole from falling into the hands of NIMN. Let’s not complicate the matter by concerning ourselves with ancillary issues that neither of us is being paid to address.”
“Five dead men is not an ancillary issue.”
“If you want to find their murderer, do it on your own time. Just don’t bring my client into it.”
“Standout is your client. Not the Guernseys.”
“Now you’re catching on.”
Douglas Jernigan gnawed on the stem of his unlit pipe while he worked it out.
“You’re alleging that Todd Kendrick is Kurt Guernsey’s illegitimate son,” he said. “It was Guernsey who allegedly paid the boy’s legal fees. It was Guernsey who allegedly paid the blackmailer, James Cowgill, to suppress the so-called selfies that Kendrick allegedly took while he was raping Rachel Rozanski.”
“Allegedly,” I said.
“Don’t be annoying.”
“Sometimes I can’t help myself.”
“Taylor, I don’t know how this changes anything.”
“It suggests that Kurtis Guernsey had a motive for killing Cowgill.”
“If that’s true, why didn’t he kill Cowgill seven months ago when the blackmailing first began?”
“Maybe he was waiting for his kid to leave for college in Texas, making sure suspicion didn’t fall on him.”
“Yes, well, it has nothing to do with us.”
“You don’t think so?”
“Just as long as you keep the selfies that were stolen off my computer from falling into the hands of the authorities. That’s what you’re being paid to do, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Is there anything else?”
“What if it’s somebody else’s selfies?”
“I don’t understand.”
“The St. Paul detectives told me that someone stole Cowgill’s phone, camera, and computer. If they should surface—”
“You’ve been talking to the police? I thought we had an understanding.”
“They’ve been talking to me; I haven’t been talking to them. I think they might try to throw me in jail because I refuse to talk to them.”
“If they do, please make sure your one phone call is to me.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“As long as the selfies aren’t traced to me. Think of it as a line in the dirt. I can’t break attorney-client confidentiality; I can’t reveal the existence of the photos. But if someone else does using a different source of information, why should I care?”
John Kaushal circled his desk and went to his office door. He shut the door and leaned his back against it.
“You’re right,” he told me. “I was holding out on you. I don’t know why. I guess I didn’t want you to think worse of me than you already did.”
“I don’t think badly of you, John. I think you’re an honest man trapped in an impossible situation.”
“It’s unlikely that the rest of the world will agree with you. What young Ms. O’Brien told you is true. Clark Peterson confessed that he killed his wife and told me where he hid her body. Since he was in the mood, he also bragged about killing three other women and hiding their bodies over the past twenty years. ‘Bragged’ is the correct word. I checked the Minnesota Missing and Unidentified Persons Clearinghouse after he left my office. The women were never found; they’re still listed as missing persons. I’ve been left with the exact same dilemma that tortured Frank Armani and Francis Belge.”
“If the information about Peterson’s wife, Dawn, is revealed, you said it can’t be used against him.”
“The court will still consider it privileged information. As such, it’s inadmissible.”
“What about the information concerning his other victims?”
“That’s a different matter entirely. You’ve heard the term ‘fruit of the poisonous tree’? It was coined by Justice Felix Frankfurter. It holds that evidence gathered with the assistance of illegally obtained information must be excluded from trial. Since the source of the original evidence—the tree—is inadmissible, then all the additional evidence that it leads to—the fruit—is also inadmissible, whether it was obtained legally or not. However, there’s a provision called the attenuation rule. It holds that evidence may be admissible if the connection between the evidence and the illegal method it was obtained is sufficiently remote, or attenuated. What that means is that Peterson’s confession is inadmissible because it was obtained illegally. However, if the police, who have no connection whatsoever to the misconduct that obtained the confession, reinvestigate the missing persons cases after reading it and discover evidence directly linking Peterson to his victims, then yes, that can be used against him in court.”
“I understand now.”
“Understand what?”
“Why Peterson is oh-so-very subtly threatening to hurt people I care about unless I tell him the name of the hacker.”
“Why does he want to know the name of the hacker?”
“Why do you think?”
“My God. Taylor, he needs to be stopped.”
“I know.”
“I don’t know what I can do to help. Peterson is no longer my client, yet I remain legally obligated to protect his confidences.”
“Tell me about Melissa Guernsey.”
“You know about her, too? All right. Melissa and Peterson were having an affair. She was the friend of Dawn’s that Peterson was allegedly sleeping with when he killed his wife. I spoke with her. She claimed she knew nothing about Dawn’s disappearance. She was also desperate that her involvement with Peterson be kept confidential.”
“Which you did, kept it confidential.”
“Revealing her name in court would not have helped my client.”
“Do me a favor,” I said.
“If I can.”
Brooke St. Vincent and David Helin had been standing close together when I entered Helin’s office at Stanislav, Kennedy, Helin, and DuBois, yet quickly separated and moved in opposite directions. I pretended not to notice. Greetings were exchanged, and we all sat down.
“You lied to me,” I said.
Brooke smiled slightly. “I bet I didn’t,” she said.
Sean and Chad had attempted to blackmail the entire Guernsey family. I guessed that they had also attempted to blackmail Brooke, and I told her so.
“I didn’t lie about that,” she said. “I just didn’t mention it.”
“I stand corrected. Why didn’t you mention it?”
“What for? I wasn’t going to pay those creeps, and I already made it clear that if the world found out about the email and the prenup, I was prepared to deal with the consequences.”
“If you had told me, it would have made my life much easier.”
“Making your life easier isn’t my—” Brooke nearly said “job” and then thought better of it. “You’re right. I should have said something, if not to you then to David. I’m sorry.”
“You said that you don’t know where Hayley O’Brien is,” Helin reminded me. “Is she still intent on sending the email to NIMN?”
“I don’t know that, either.”
“She isn’t,” Brooke said.
“Are you sure?” Helin asked.
“I spoke to Hayley at the MIA before I introduced her to Taylor. She told me that she was responsible for the computer hacks. She also told me why she did it. I told her she was going to hurt a lot of people. She said that was the entire point. She also promised me that I wasn’t going to be among them. She said she never had any intention of uploading the email. She said we were friends and that I deserved better from Kurtis and her family. She said that she was sorry that Sean and Chad had attempted to blackmail David and me. Now that they’re no longer a concern, I guess we’re home free.”
“Hayley told me something about her relationship with the Guernseys, which you confirmed earlier,” I said. “But Maura told me that the Guernseys all adored Hayley, especially the old man.”
“The Guernseys aren’t very good at expressing affection,” Brooke said. “Maybe they do love her in their own way. All I know is that during the time I was at Axis Mundi they were sniping at each other constantly.”
“What do you think, Taylor?” Helin asked. “Do you think that Hayley will keep her promise?”
“My impression is that there is only one copy of the files that were hacked. Until Hayley willingly gives it up, I don’t know what to think.”
I called Freddie. He said, “Now what?”
I said, “Now we wait.”
“You’re sure about this?”
“I made it clear to the lawyers that we now know exactly what was stolen from their computers. If they haven’t figured out that we’re also in contact with Hayley, they soon will. One or more of them will contact their clients. I asked John Kaushal to do just that. Eventually someone will contact us and the negotiations will begin.”
“What are we negotiating again?”
“We’ll return the hacked files.”
“Which is what we were hired to do.”
“In exchange, whoever is trying to snuff Hayley backs off.”
“Which we weren’t hired to do, protect the girl. I got no problem with that, though. Should I tell you my problem?”
“Please do.”
“Instead of cuttin’ a deal, what if they send the sniper instead?”
“I’m just playing this by ear. If you have any suggestions…”
“No suggestions, just another problem.”
“My old man used to say, ‘Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions.’”
“Yeah? My old man used to say, ‘Shut up and listen.’”
“What, Freddie? What’s your problem?”
“O’Neill. I hated the racist mother, but someone’s got t’ pay for O’Neill. Siegle, too. I got no concern for those other dipshits. But like you said, O’Neill was one of us, and Siegle, he was probably the only innocent guy in the room.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“What are we going to do about it?”
“The best we can.”