31
Why don’t you let me drive?” Ryan grabbed Adam’s arm and pulled him toward his own vehicle.
“I can drive.”
“You can, but you shouldn’t. You’re tired and distracted and worried. All understandable under the circumstances. But all good reasons to let me drive. It doesn’t do you any good to try to swoop in and save the day if you wreck the car on the way.”
It annoyed Adam that Ryan was right. “Fine.” They climbed into Ryan’s truck. “While you drive, help me think this through. What are we dealing with here? Is she still in danger? Because if the guy from the dressing room was her brother—a brother she didn’t know had existed—and if he’s the one who tried to kill her at her house on Monday, then the attacks had nothing to do with our case. And Anissa killed the guy who was trying to kill Sabrina. So it’s possible the danger has passed.”
“True,” Ryan said, “but we don’t know why he was trying to kill her. So maybe the danger is still very real.”
“Drive faster.”
Sabrina lived twenty minutes away, and a lot could happen in twenty minutes.
A lot of very bad things.
He’d snuck around to the back of the house and come in through the kitchen in time to hear everything.
He’d always wondered how much Yvonne knew. Martin thought she’d been clueless.
Guess this proved how clueless Martin had been.
He’d been waiting for ten minutes for Sabrina to come back inside. Yvonne hadn’t moved from the sofa. She looked beaten. And weary.
Not surprising really.
The door opened and from his spot he saw Sabrina return to the den, where Yvonne was waiting.
“I’m going to need some time to process all of this,” she said to Yvonne.
Funny how she didn’t seem angry. She seemed sad.
He’d expected more rage.
Oh well.
“I left my phone at the house. Do you want to stay here and see if there’s anything you want, or do you want to come with me?”
What? No. She couldn’t go back to the house. He needed her to stay here.
“If I stay, will you come back?” Why did Yvonne even care?
“Yes.” Sabrina spoke in a measured voice. Like she was determined not to lose her temper or start crying. “I’m sure I’ll have more questions.”
He stepped into the den, gun drawn. “I’m sure you do,” he said. “But I’m afraid you won’t be going anywhere. Have a seat.”
“Mr. Kemp?”
“Ezekiel?”
Both women spoke with the same confused tone.
Sabrina turned to Yvonne. “How do you know Mr. Kemp?”
Yvonne glared at him. “Ezekiel is my fiancé.”
“You’re going to marry Dad’s lawyer?”
The shock on Yvonne’s face was worth the annoyance of letting these two thorns in his side chitchat. Way better than taking them out with the tear gas before shooting them. “His . . . what?”
“Mr. Kemp is Dad’s lawyer. The one he hired after he was diagnosed with dementia. The one who rewrote the wills and is the executor of my trust.” Sabrina was furious, and she turned on him now. “Dad trusted you.”
“Your father no more trusted me than he trusted Yvonne here to be fair to you after he died. I’ve known him since before you were born, and he never trusted anyone.”
“Before I was born? I thought he hired you a few years ago.”
“He hired me for the second time a few years ago.”
Yvonne’s hand was at her throat. “You handled the adoption.”
“Very good. I would clap, but my hands are full. Now, Sabrina, I’ve asked you to sit. Side by side on the sofa. That’s nice.”
She sat, But Sabrina—typical Sabrina—had more questions. “You handled the adoption? Then you knew Rosita. You knew the whole story. Was she really my mother? What happened to her?”
He should have shot her by now, but he was kind of enjoying the way their faces registered their surprise and then the moment when they understood. It was fascinating.
“Of course she was your mother. Yvonne’s no idiot. And yes, she was pregnant when Yvonne here kicked her out. She left out the part where she’d made Rosita believe she would hurt you”—he pointed at Sabrina—“if she didn’t leave. It was a very effective strategy. If Rosita took you with her, the police would eventually arrest her for kidnapping and no one was going to believe an illegal immigrant when she claimed you were her biological daughter.
“But if she stayed with you, Yvonne here promised her you would be a very sick child—a little something in your breakfast smoothie to make you vomit. A little shove down the stairs. Maybe a loose wheel on that bicycle you loved so much. Rosita couldn’t risk having you harmed.”
Sabrina looked at Yvonne with fresh shock. “How could you do that?”
Yvonne defended herself. Typical. “I would never have harmed you. It was a threat. And it worked.”
“Oh, it worked all right. She was terrified. Left town and never looked back.” Ezekiel was enjoying this far more than he’d expected.
“Do you know what happened to her?” Sabrina’s eyes darted around the room. He needed to speed this up before the little brainiac figured a way out of there.
“She moved to Wisconsin. Got a job working in housekeeping. Had the boy. His name was Juan.”
“Was?”
She didn’t know. This would be fun.
“Juan has been looking for you for the past five years,” he told Sabrina. “His mother told him everything—on her deathbed.”
“She died?”
He’d expected more emotion from Sabrina. Maybe she needed a few more details. “Cancer. No money for health care. I mean, you have to appreciate the irony. Your birth mother dies from a cancer people survive all the time when they go to the hospitals your adoptive mother manages. It’s sad, really.”
Sabrina didn’t acknowledge him. She barely seemed to be paying attention to him at all. Yvonne was paying attention though. “Why did it take Rosita’s son five years to find Sabrina?”
“It’s possible he got some misinformation that led him in the wrong direction.”
“You lied to the boy?”
“I was protecting my client from spurious claims.”
Yvonne was tracking with him. “You were protecting Martin’s money.”
“And that’s what this is all about.”
“Of course it is.”
“So what’s your plan? Kill us? That won’t help you.”
“You’d think that, wouldn’t you? But if you both die, the trust in Sabrina’s name remains under my execution. My plan was to let Juan do my dirty work for me with this one”—he pointed to Sabrina—“and then once I was married to you, my dear, well, what’s yours would be mine. And when you died, tragically, in a few months, well, it would all be mine.”
“You’d kill us over a few thousand dollars?” Sabrina still wasn’t looking at him, but she must have been listening more than he’d realized.
“No. Of course not. But I would kill you over several million.”
“Million?” Yvonne shook her head. “Martin never had millions.”
“Not when he was with you. But years ago Martin’s father sold some land to the town they lived in. And he was smart about it. He sold the center of the property but kept acres around the perimeter. The area has grown and that property is worth a fortune now. Martin negotiated the sale of a huge chunk of property before he lost his mind. The money is in a trust for Sabrina and Juan. Of course, now that Sabrina’s friend took care of her brother, I won’t have to worry about divvying up any of that cash.”
“My friend did what?” Sabrina asked.
“Your friend. The girl cop. She killed your brother.”
“He was my brother?”
Oh yes. The expressions on both of their faces. He would never forget them. So worth telling them.
“What? Wait. Was he the same one who attacked me?”
“Now you’re putting it together. He wanted to take care of you himself, and I was fine with that, but then he panicked at the first sound of a siren and didn’t finish the job. It made things much more complicated.”
“But why was he trying to kill me? What had I ever done to him?”
“The version he heard was that you knew about him and wanted nothing to do with him, and you’d convinced your father to cut him from his will. The only way he would be able to get anything from your father’s estate was to take you out of the picture.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Sabrina said. “If he’d come to me and told me he was my brother, even if I didn’t believe him, it wouldn’t have taken more than a simple blood test to prove paternity. And I had no interest in Dad’s money. I wouldn’t have minded sharing it.”
“True, but he didn’t know that. He blamed you for his mother’s death and his own poverty. You were the favored child and he was the castoff. He was more than willing to take you out.”